Currently working with Riley Patterson. We’re trying to create a project that uses natural language processing to extract keywords out of blog posts — say, what the tagaroo plugin does for WordPress right now. Well, we didn’t know it was already made before we started the project, but this does give us something to build off of.
Right before the Rankmaniac 2011 contest is about to draw a close, Google bumped us off the first page again! What a tragic turn of events!
This project has been so emotionally draining: the ups and downs of our emotions for the last three weeks were completely determined by the whims of two ranking algorithms. While I swore last night not to take a look again at our results before showtime at 12:30pm, I just couldn’t help it… and my curiosity got the best of me.
What I saw blew me away. Here’s to hoping that magic happens in the next 4 hours.
We here at Rankmaniac 2011 would like to offer our thanks to everyone who helped out! Thanks for visiting, thanks for spreading the word, and thanks for linking to us. We had a really fun (and stressful) time working on this competition. It was a lot of work, but in the end, I admit that it was an awesome experience. Sorry if some of our methods were a bit spammy; we tried to keep that to a minimum. We’ve got under 12 hours until the results are judged, so hang tight! We’ll be posting the results here as soon as they’re official.
Good luck to the other Rankmaniacs! Thanks again for all the help!
With only 12 hours left of the Rankmaniac 2011 contest, I think it would be interesting to contrast Watson with Google.
“The goal is to have computers start to interact in natural human terms across a range of applications and processes, understanding the questions that humans ask and providing answers that humans can understand and justify.” IBM: The DeepQA Project
First of all, let me just be the first to say that rumors of Watson being Skynet are greatly exaggerated. Also, Sarah Connors lives in Toronto, so this doesn’t matter anyway.
Ok, Watson may know who Sauron is, but it’s still far from being a mechanical Sauron. In the end, what IBM has demonstrated today is far less than a sentient being: it is, in the end, a glorified Google/Wolfram Alpha search engine with a very nice natural speech answering interface. The nightmarish “artificial intelligence” (a la singularity) from science fiction is still far off in the distance. For starters, we still need to give the machine some eyes and ears so it won’t repeat Ken’s wrong answer!
Happy Valentine’s Day or Singles’ Appreciation Day! Valentine’s Day has often been criticized as a marketing ploy, but we are a country that flourishes from consumerism! Continue reading →
Anyway, we’ve got about 2 days left until the Rankmaniac 2011 contest is over! We are currently 3rd for the term Rankmaniac 2011 on Google, but we have yet to show up on Bing! Not looking so good; hopefully we’ll get indexed by Bing soon.
2/15 Update:
Awww yeeeee debuted on Bing as 1st for search term Rankmaniac 2011. 5th for search term Rankmaniac. I was pretty worried there. Unfortunately, we’re dropping in Google ranks…
After an exhausting week with very little sleep, compounded with stress from Rankmaniac, watching this video has made everything so much better. Seriously, I feel really happy right now. If you had a bad week, check out this video. If you didn’t have a bad week, you should still check out this video. It’ll brighten up your day.
Oh, the ups and downs of a life determined by Mountain View, CA! We’ve dropped in the Rankmaniac 2011 rankings by an obscene amount! Help us out by linking to our site: just copy and paste the code below.
