For years, environmentalists and defense hawks alike have bemoaned our reliance on foreign oil, with good reason, I might add.  What to do, what to do?  Of course, when gasoline prices went way up this spring, we found out that the laws of supply and demand had not been repealed after all.  Today, on CNN.com, I saw Drivers cut commutes by 9.6B miles, which describes the impressive decline in miles driven, new records of mass transit riders, and many people finding many creative ways to reduce their use of gas.  The only downside, according to the article, was that gas tax receipts were way below what was needed to maintain the highways, not to even think about repairing the bridges.

So, having finally figured out (as if we didn't know) how to lower gas usage, but still having the issue of lower gas tax revenues, why is it so completely predictable what politicians would suggest?  That's right, lower the price of gas, both by increasing supplies and taking a "gas tax holiday". 

And what happens if they are successful?  The price of gas goes down, and people go back to using more, but we have even fewer gas tax receipts.  Sigh!

Copyright © 2008 Genii Software Ltd.

Tags: Oil Driving

It is interesting to see how good companies have gotten at "spin", learning perhaps from the politicians.  Google announced that they had indexed one trillion web pages.  Or did they?  If you believe Google's Index Reaches a Trillion URLs or any of a number of similar stories, you'll think they do.  Even if you see Google's official blog, there is a post titled "We knew the web was big..." which seems to imply this, with the cleverly worded quote:

The first Google index in 1998 already had 26 million pages, and by 2000 the Google index reached the one billion mark. ,,, Recently, even our search engineers stopped in awe about just how big the web is these days -- when our systems that process links on the web to find new content hit a milestone: 1 trillion (as in 1,000,000,000,000) unique URLs on the web at once!

But look at that carefully again.  They are talking apples and oranges.  The first two statistics talk about how many pages are in their index.  The latter quote is about how many unique URLs are on the web.  Later in the article, they even 'fess up, once they are comfortable that most people won't keep reading:

We don't index every one of those trillion pages -- many of them are similar to each other, or represent auto-generated content similar to the calendar example that isn't very useful to searchers.

Well, you might ask yourself, what difference does that make?  The clue is found in the CNN story, Ex-Googlers launch rival search engine, which talks about Cuil (pronounced "cool"), which is a new search engine which boasts that its index "spans 120 billion Web pages".

So, which index is bigger?  The court of public opinion will now say "Google has a trillion pages, while Cull only has a tenth of that", but we have absolutely no way of knowing.  Cull may well have more, which its owners imply, but they are constrained by confidentiality agreements to not say what they know, and even they don't know for certain since they left Google a while ago.  But Google has managed to start a meme that will be hard to beat.

OK, maybe they didn't learn from politicians.  Perhaps they learned from the "seat wars" between Microsoft and IBM.  

Copyright © 2008 Genii Software Ltd.

Tags: Google