Google Programming Contest

[Erin McKean]

I think the Google concordance would be amazing, and would get a lot
of gee-whiz media attention. Not to mention be useful.

And I've been looking for an excuse to learn Python. When's the
deadline for this again?

Anyway, if you were looking for someone to say "count me in!" that's me.

--Erin McKean

>I'd like to bring this list's attention to the Google Programming Contest,
>in which people are asked to write code for new ways of processing the
>Google index. There's a $10,000 prize.
>
>http://www.google.com/programming-contest/
>
>Now, at first glance this doesn't seem appropriate here, but from my
>perspective, I see the Google index is the first resort for a lot of the
>word-related work going on. In addition, I suspect there are more than a few
>experts of computational linguistics among us who may have the skills to put
>the Google index to a lexicographical or linguistic use. It seems like a
>great opportunity.
>
>Some ideas, freely given, perhaps worth combining:
>
>-- A Google search that returns results for specific word or phrase in
>typical concordance fashion. The results would be lines of linked text,
>taken from the original document, and centered on the word or phrase
>searched for so that they line up down the middle. None of that other
>information now returned would appear in order to free the results of
>clutter.
>
>-- Exact phrase searches which are punctuation- and case-sensitive
>
>-- Soundex searches
>
>-- An estimated quality meter, in which certain rules for grammar, spelling,
>punctuation, clichés and rhetoric are applied against a search result,
>ranking it according to the absence of these red-flag items. The list of
>red-flag items is endless, but a good core of 500 or so rules shouldn't be
>difficult to create and could be useful.
>
>Anyone?
>
>PS: This contest is being discussed at length among the geek set:
>http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/02/06/2025229&mode=flat