TailRank Overtaken By Spammers; Link Based Importance Algorithm suspect

October 12th, 2006 It is hiring time again! Srini has devised an algorithm for hiring at Taragana which I think very appropriately describes our hiring funnel: if (isClueless()) { goToIBM(); } else if (runOfTheMill()) { goToWipro(); } else if (thinkUMLIsDesign() && bigAmbitionToBeADesigner() && chooseVariableNamesLikeTheLengthOfThisOne()) { goToAccenture(); } else if ( appreciateDesign() && (knowJava() || knowPHP()) && isTrueDeveloper()) { welcome(); } If that looks like you and you are located in India (or willing to relocate) please send your resume to hiring[at]taragana[dot]com. Note: No animals or companies were harmed in the making of this algorithm.

April 20th, 2006 The US and China are competing for leadership as the top spam relaying countries. This is a leadership which I am sure US wouldn't mind relinquising and it is improving.

January 16th, 2007 Google AdSense is known for its uncanny relevance in serving context sensitive ads. Its competitors like Yahoo Publisher Network and Kontera aren't being able to make significant inroads to AdSense / AdWords customer based primarily due to relevance, perceived or otherwise.

August 26th, 2007 I have opened this blog for testing. Now any spammer can get to my moderation queue.

March 12th, 2005 A 'comprehensive' sweep of the net by 70 law enforcement organisations from 26 countries should help authorities combat phishers, spammers and scammers, says a leading consumer protection agency. It sounds too good to be true and effective.

August 13th, 2006 Update: LinkieWinkie merely leveraged the links to create yet another blog site. Nice bait and switch, but I expected better.

December 3rd, 2004 Lycos Europe as you probably know has created a screen-saver which allows a controlling lycos software to target the idle time of the machines which installed the screen-savers to flood the network of known spammers. Some people are getting concerned that it amounts to ddos attack.

February 6th, 2004 After some deliberation, and seeing others, I decided to leave the commenting section on my blog un-moderated. Today I was mildly surprised to find almost all my posts had a comment to it.

November 28th, 2005 Imagine a pickpocket leaving a note in the pocket they have picked informing the victim that they are very sorry about picking their pocket and what he can do to rectify the situation. Neil found ethical spammers in his wiki (read about wiki spamming) who left a note after they spammed: < !– We leave content intact.

July 24th, 2006 Many online blogging software and other products require some type of cron and / or asynchronous execution functionality. Spammers and web robots are an essential part of any website today.

October 4th, 2009 I was playing around with the twitter API and I found a way to find the exact number of Twitter users. Note: The number of twitter users is continuously increasing by dozens every second, however it will still be accurate at the time of this writing for the higher order digits.

August 21st, 2006 Times has compiled a list of 50 coolest websites for 2006 with some ridiculous entries like human clock, which shows a different photo for each minute of the day, being categorized under News & Information, instead of Time Wasters. The only information it provides is photos with specific time of the day.

August 28th, 2005 Four Spammers down, hundreds to go. James R. Schaffer, Jeffrey A.

July 14th, 2006 US Federal court judge, Jeremy Fogel, dismissed Kinderstart's, education website, lawsuit against Google. The lawsuit accused Google of ""pervasive monopolistic practices" that denied its free speech rights, destroyed competition, and led to predatory pricing conditions".

July 3rd, 2007 Google and other major search engines (Yahoo, MSN Search etc.) which use back-links for importance calculation of a web page suffers from a fundamental flaw. Back-links can be manipulated and even purchased.