My Internet Notebook

Web 2.0 of the Consumer Internet

Monte Jade January Meeting

Date: January 18, 2006(Wednesday) 6:30pm
Place: Hong Fu Restaurant, Tel: (408) 252-2200
20588 Stevens Creek Blvd., Cupertino, CA
Speaker: Mr. Ram Shriram
Founding Board Member, Google Inc.
Founder, Sherpalo
Host: Mr. Chih-Kai Cheng
General Partner, Harbinger Venture Management Corp.blockquote

AJAX demistified in 30 seconds:

Rasmus’ 30 second AJAX Tutorial

In your JavaScript code, you create an request object (Microsoft.XMLHTTP for IE; XMLHttpRequest for FireFox); then using the http oject to make a get request which can then return some string (or XML file) for you to consume and display in a meaning manner.

Bnoopy: The long tail of software. Millions of Markets of Dozens. By Joe Krauss

You know the real reason Excite went out of business? We couldn’t figure out how to make money from 97% of our traffic. We couldn’t figure out how to make money from the long tail – from those queries asked only once a day.

Also Chris Anderson’s article on the Long Tail.

I have been wondering what sets Google apart from its competitors. Especially of interest to me is how Baidu stacks up against Google. There are obvisouly many aspects from which I can compare this two search engines. But reliability is going to be the first aspect I am going to comment on, in light of recent reports of all those Web 2.0 outages associated with del.icio.us and Moveable Type.

I was searching for some real estate definition in Chinese which both Google and Baidu gave me satisfactory results (more in another post). But when I clicked on one of Baidu’s sponsored links, I got a connection timeout on sf.baidu.com. Ouch! This may not indicate an outage with Baidu’s servers in the US, but it does mean Baidu probably just lost a revenue opportunity. Not good!

To be fair to Baidu, I am located in the US, which is not their major focus at this point. Further, I can’t do a similar research in China w.r.t. Google’s performance. But still, being listed on Nasdaq, there is just no execuse for Baidu to be a ‘slacker’ on its service’s reliability.

Below is the traceroute info for sf.baidu.com and google.com:

C:\>tracert sf.baidu.com

Tracing route to sf.a.shifen.com [202.108.22.189]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 4 ms 3 ms 3 ms homeportal.gateway.2wire.net [172.16.0.1]
2 21 ms 15 ms 17 ms 69.106.51.254
3 21 ms 17 ms 17 ms dist2-vlan50.pltn13.pbi.net [64.164.97.67]
4 53 ms 19 ms 17 ms bb2-g3-0.pltnca.sbcglobal.net [151.164.43.56]
5 51 ms 23 ms 27 ms bb1-p5-0.crscca.sbcglobal.net [151.164.240.137]
6 41 ms 15 ms 18 ms core1-p4-0.crscca.sbcglobal.net [151.164.40.57]
7 35 ms 31 ms 29 ms core1-p3-0.cranca.sbcglobal.net [151.164.242.186]
8 34 ms 30 ms 29 ms bb1-p8-0.cranca.sbcglobal.net [151.164.40.94]
9 37 ms 31 ms 58 ms ex1-p15-0.eqlaca.sbcglobal.net [151.164.41.29]
10 32 ms 29 ms 29 ms ex2-p9-0.eqlaca.sbcglobal.net [151.164.40.162]
11 49 ms 36 ms 43 ms 151.164.248.194
12 45 ms 39 ms 40 ms 217.239.40.22
13 366 ms 338 ms 329 ms 212.184.26.234
14 332 ms 334 ms 334 ms 219.158.25.117
15 336 ms 354 ms 332 ms 219.158.3.69
16 248 ms 242 ms 245 ms 219.158.4.49
17 * 240 ms 255 ms 202.96.12.14
18 243 ms 244 ms 275 ms 61.148.3.58
19 * 244 ms 250 ms xd-22-239-a8.bta.net.cn [202.108.22.239]
20 229 ms 252 ms 228 ms xd-22-189-a8.bta.net.cn [202.108.22.189]

Trace complete.

C:\>tracert google.com

Tracing route to google.com [64.233.187.99]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 4 ms 2 ms 3 ms homeportal.gateway.2wire.net [172.16.0.1]
2 16 ms 17 ms 15 ms 69.106.51.254
3 15 ms 15 ms 15 ms dist1-vlan50.pltn13.pbi.net [64.164.97.66]
4 20 ms 16 ms 17 ms bb1-g3-0.pltnca.sbcglobal.net [151.164.43.54]
5 21 ms 15 ms 19 ms bb1-p4-0.crsfca.sbcglobal.net [151.164.41.5]
6 17 ms 19 ms 19 ms ex1-p9-0.pxpaca.sbcglobal.net [151.164.240.17]
7 23 ms 19 ms 19 ms asn15169-google-2.pxpaca.sbcglobal.net [151.164.250.134]
8 23 ms 19 ms 17 ms 66.249.94.14
9 17 ms 17 ms 17 ms 66.249.94.227
10 25 ms 76 ms 21 ms 72.14.236.11
11 115 ms 76 ms 80 ms 66.249.95.125
12 204 ms 74 ms 80 ms 216.239.49.222
13 77 ms 78 ms 76 ms 72.14.236.15
14 82 ms 74 ms 82 ms 216.239.49.222
15 82 ms 78 ms 76 ms 64.233.187.99

Trace complete.

Mike Davidson: Make Your Site Mobile-Friendly in Two Minutes

By pulling out everything a mobile device can possibly choke on before it even gets to the mobile device, we can create a mobile version of our site which is not only viewable on more devices but is much quicker to download as well.