While businesses spend time and money on Search Engine Optimization, Google is behind the scenes optimizing its search engine. For Google, it’s not so much about the results any given search yields but more about whether Googlers get the results they were searching for, and the ease of use of those results. Anyone who has spent time “Googling” over the past decade can see that search results have evolved. Along the way, they innovated the PageRank, where a search delivers the resulting pages, ranked according to those with the largest number of web pages linked to them. Google also created the “snippet.”
While a snippet may seem like a cute and fun thing, from Google’s viewpoint it is actually quite complicated. Whenever someone searches on a given topic, the “engine” searches through the pages in a web site to assemble a relevant snippet of how the search term appeared – in milliseconds. And it handles hundreds of millions of searches daily. If you’re in Minnesota and you Google “State Fair,” the top ranking result will your state’s fair site, plus a Google map showing the location. Other near top ranking results will be for other states fairs plus newsmaking events at your state fair. At the bottom of the page you’ll have the opportunity to refine your search in case you were looking for “State Fair,” the musical.
All of this in the interest of providing the best customer experience because the search feature brings in more than 90 percent of Google’s revenue. Consequently, engineers at Google may be working on their Android phones or Google News or improving Gmail, but they also track everything from the sorts of search terms users enter to the way the human eyes move across a web page. They’re also constantly tweaking, adding such options as clickable links for broad topics. Google a news media site, any news site, and you’ll instantly have the opportunity to click to Sports, Weather, Opinions and the like. It’s easy to take all those things for granted because the Google people make it seem so effortless.
However much we may claim to be self-deprecating, it seems that we humans don’t want to be portrayed in anything other than our best form. But somewhere in California, a group of officials neglected to attend to this basic fact of the human personality when they allocated money for a sculpture. The group in a town called, Cardiff by the Sea, aimed to honor the surfing passions of its locals by erecting an interpretive sculpture of a surfer. They commissioned an artist and possibly behind closed doors, approved the piece. But soon after the sculpture materialized, there arose a massive hue and cry from the townsfolk who felt they should have been consulted.
The artistic license resulted in a piece depicting a child learning to surf. But such limpness of wrists, such awfulness of form, such lack of a powerful wave being ridden, was soundly ridiculed. While many among the surfers may actually perform in this very inexpert pose, they did not wish to be publicized as such. They would have preferred a sculpted figure showing off top form, next to a powerful wave that was more in line with the stuff of their dreams rather than their reality.
And complaining was not enough. To date the innocent, inanimate sculpture continues to suffer much abuse at the hands of the town’s “artists.” They named it “The Kook,” much to the dismay of the artist who had named it, “Magic Carpet Ride.” They dressed it in clown’s clothing. Someone stuck a pumpkin atop its head. And possibly most insulting, someone created a paper mache whale that appears to be swallowing the sculpture. There are bumper sticker and e-mail campaigns to get rid of “The Kook.” No one knows where this will end but chances are the next sculptor, if there is one, won’t take quite so much artistic license.
It was discontinued in 1998 but by then it had been around for more than 14 years. And now those who are fans of source code can visit the original MacPaint program because Apple donated it to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. Nowadays there are numerous digital drawing tools but for many years MacPaint was the drawing program on Apple’s computers, allowing anyone to use the lasso or paintbrush or other tools to draw on a computer screen. For those interested in the actual code that made this possible, the MacPaint source code had 5,822 lines of code written in the Pascal programming language with another 3,583 lines of code in the Assembler language. That’s what was donated to the Computer History Museum. And rumors are that it’s easy to read.
But not everyone is into the programming details, which is why MacPaint and its relatives, MacSketch, Quickdraw and the like became so popular. The tools provided an easy way for non-programmers to pursue art on their computers. It also set the stage for Apple’s popularity with artists. And what of the guy who wrote the program? Bill Atkinson, one of the major figures in MacPaint programming, moved on to other things but most recently is pursuing nature photography in a big way – photographing the tiny details contained in polished stone. As a child he became fascinated with photographs in the Arizona Highways magazine. It isn’t yet clear whether he is a geek turned artist or the other way around. In any case, MacPaint once rocked, and paved the way for all the stuff we have today.