Google Auto-Complete Game

The Google Auto-Complete game is fun to play. The game starts by picking a popular word. I picked Movies and then went down the list of letters in the alphabet. It was very interesting to see what pops up next.

I have heard and seen that people play this game when they are board. But I started to give it some rules so that it was easier to play.

First rule is eliminate locations or actually domain names. So for example for with the letter B, if Boston was first answer then it would be ignored. So the answer for Movies B, would be "Movies based on True Stories".  The second rule is that is ok not to have an answer that is also a correct answer. So if the partner playing the game guesses, "nothing" it would mean that Google suggests 10 locations. The second rule is, compound words are not excepted. There must be a complete second word following. The third rule is, prompt your partner with how many words the expression is. So for example on the letter "A", the question is, "Movies A, three words?". Here is the whole answer list for "Movies".

Movies about drugs
Movies based on true stories.
Movies coming soon.
Movies dvd.
Movies everyone should see.
Movies free online.
Movies google.
Movies h... nothing. (All Locations and no real answers)
Movies in theaters.
Movies just released on dvd.
Movies kristen stewart has been in.
Movies links.
Movies megaupload.
Movies new releases.
Movies online.
Movies quotes.
Movies released in 2009.
Movies showtimes.
Movies times.
Movies unlimited.
Moves v... nothing. (All Locations again)
Movies with a lot of sexuality.
Movies x... (No results at all)
Movies you must see.
Moves zip code.

You may also play the game with two category words at the same time. The partner say two answers and it can apply to both categories. The game gets much each when you do this. Choose things that are similar like "Soccer and Football", or "Build and Construct". Let's play again with the words, "Dog and Cat" at the same time. This will be fun to see the overlap and the differences.

Dog adoption. Cat allergies.
Dog breeds. Cat breeds.
Dog collars. Cat Cora. (first female American Iron Chef)
Dog diarrhea. Cat Deeley. (famous British person)
Dog ear infection. Cat emery board.
Dog food reviews. Cat furniture.
Dog games. Cat genie.
Dog houses. Cat health.
Dog insurance. Cat in the hat.
Dog jackets. Cat jokes.
Dog kennels. Cat kidney failure symptoms.
Dog leashes. Cat litter boxes.
Dog mange. Cat mario.
Dog names. Cat names.
Dog obedience training. Cat on a hot tin roof.
Dog piles. Cat power.
Dog quotes. Cat quotes.
Dog rescue. Cat repellent.
Dog sitter. Cat stevens.
Dog the bounty hunter. Cat toys.
Dog upset stomach. Cat urine odor remover.
Dog vomiting. Cat videos.
Dog walker. Cat worms.
Dog xanax. Cat x ray.
Dog years. Cat years.
Dog zodiac. Cat zodiac.

I hope you enjoy the game. Play with a partner or in a group. If you play often enough you will get the hang of it and it starts getting easier.

Google Buzz: First Reaction

I have been playing around with Google Buzz. And I thought I would write a blog post about it. It is only a few days old now but I have found a number of neat things using this service. First, It is not your dad's twitter, It is new and fresh and the location embedded messages are killer. This example to the left is a guy stuck on the bridge at 1am when the draw bridge went up. You just don't have anything this neat with Twitter. Google took foursquare and twitter and killed them.

Try browsing around the map which has the Buzz bubbles on them. To enable  this, go into your Google Map on your phone. Make sure you have version 4 or greater installed. Enable the Buzz Layer and then you should see all the blips appear. I browsed around Costco and I saw plenty of people talking about getting a hot dog. It give me a lot of good feelings to see actual speech bubbles coming from the places. It is like the map is alive and telling what is happening. This is far better reporting because you have so many spots. I could see something like this being used at sporting events or during a crisis.

Here is my bubble coming from my house. I took a picture out the window to show how good the geo-coding is. I am really looking forward to the API that Google releases, there are so many possible ways to use this application. I really do feel sorry for twitter. They should have sold last year when they were still sort of fresh and new.

I might be accused of being a Google Fan Boy, but I just like the products and culture that Google has.  They took their time to pick on Twitter, but when they did, they nailed it.

I can only imagine that Microsoft is going to try and copy this and twitter will have one last chance to sell. What are your thoughts on Google Buzz? If you currently Tweet, do you think you will Buzz? I think the answer is yes. If people are on the fence there is an option to pull your twitter stream into buzz as well. So Google has the perfect way to incorporate all the twitter messages from the people that are on the still using Twitter.

print "Hello World";

It seems fitting that my first blog post include a story about my beginning. And what better beginning then Hello World...

Hello World

It seems like CS101 was just yesterday, back in 1996 I took my first programming course at CWU and learned how to print that famous intro to programming line to the screen, "Hello World". I had of course programmed before but this was my first official introduction to programming. I really wish there had been a high school or middle school class on this. How was I ever to get my 10,000 hours in if our education system started me as a freshman in College...

I managed to figure out how to program really well over the years but to this day I would not consider myself a top notch programmer. I am famous for programming the first version of www.whois.sc, which now redirects to the more famous domaintools.com site I made a few years after that.

My real gift in life was not programming but figuring out how to make great systems work. I took many ideas and concepts and over the course of a few years I made them come into reality. I dreamed of a system to search all whois records, I wanted the ability to pull a report on every domain I or anyone else owned. It took several years to build that dream system and there were plenty of problems along the way which needed to be solved in order to build Name Intelligence.

Core Problems

The first and most valuable problem was how to search on substrings... How do you find the word "cat" inside MyBlackCat.com, the easy answer is a substring search across the entire table.... however the word Cat has no index in the database. That is the way databases are made, you can only index words that have spaces or breaks around them. Substrings have no natural way of being found in databases. So I invented a new system of searching and a new form of database the world had never seen before.

I created multiple files with different length words, the longer the word the faster the search would be. So for MyBlackCat and three character words the file looked like this...

^my myb ybl bla lac ack kca cat at$

For four character word file looked like this:

^myb mybl ybla blac lack ackc ckca kcat cat$

After indexing these files with normal mainstream indexes the process was very easy. Next I used integer index arrays to compare all the hits. The result was a speed increase from a non-indexed search of over an hour to less then a fraction of a second. Now I had a search engine that could search all substrings on all domains. Each domain name had a special integer assigned to it and then binary flags were added to indicate special things. I wouldn't go into all the boring detail but this year long process of designing and building this system resulted in a system that was unlike any other website in the world. It gave my company a huge advantage and a lot of linkbait to attract SEO love. Once a person saw a whois record on our system I cached the display record for 24 hours (until midnight) and the next day we would fetch a new one. This allowed the system to remember all whois records over time. And this allowed us a few years later to create a system that would one day search billions of cached whois records. That was the dream I had envisioned when I started the company. I was able to come full circle and complete my dream.

Cashing out

Then a few years later, I got an offer on my company that was attractive, $48 Million in cash and stock. We were making over $5M a year at the time but there was a lot of overhead as well so the offer seamed fabulous. I loved doing what I was doing but felt diversifying might be a wise move. I was company rich but cash poor so I took the offer.

This Blog's Purpose

I am going to pick up after the cash out. I have many struggles ahead, such as building a new company or working on something I love. I might reflect back a few times but this blog is about my new adventures.