A Search Meme

David Ng of The World's Fair has been playing with viral marketing and Google bombing, and the experience has given him an idea for a nifty new meme. The way it works is this: Try to come up with 5 different search phrases for which, when entered into Google, your blog is the number one hit. The search phrase can be enclosed in quotes if necessary, but obviously it is even better if it works without the quotes. A commenter at David Ng's post (and by the way, read those comments at your own risk--some of them aren't pretty) suggests scoring the search phrases based on the number of hits. So, the ideal search phrase would have your blog being number one out of something like a million hits returned.

As it turns out, this is much easier to do than it might sound. Looking back at my previous post, Steven Pinker's formula gives an estimate of the number of distinct sentences one can utter, which comes out to be the enormous value of 10²⁰. Given that, it is perhaps not too surprising that we might have some catch phrases that appear more or less uniquely in our writing. (The key to getting the hit counts high at the same time is to have those catch phrases made up of a few words that individually are common.) So without further ado, here are some search phrases that (as of this writing) give this blog as the number one hit:

• intractable yet easy


• theory dilettante


• ultimate collector's ipod


• homage to procrastination


• decay unto death

Each of those searches returns more than 100,000 hits. I'll add one more search string for good measure, even though it only returned a few hundred hits, because it links to one of my favorite posts (and because at heart I'm a nasty person): Bringsjord parody.

So that's it. Consider yourself tagged if you're so inclined, and have fun playing with search strings!

What is your formula?

[Note: I goofed up in describing What is your formula? as an Edge annual question. It's not, and I've updated the post below to correct this.]

Edge Foundation does a yearly thing where they pose a question to an array of scientists and other intellectuals, and collect together all their answers. They have also had occasion to pose a question outside of the normal cycle, when after the 9/11 terrorist attacks they asked, What Now? Earlier this month, as part of a collaboration with the Serpentine Gallery in London, Edge posed another question to their collection of thinkers. The question was What is your formula? Your equation? Your algorithm? and browsing through the answers is a great way to waste an afternoon. Because the replies consisted mainly of diagrams and equations (many of which were hand-drawn), they are displayed as scanned images, which adds a personal touch to the results.

Unfortunately, the format of the question also limited the form the answers could take, most of which express some kind of heuristic relationship rather than a true formula. I did like this entry by psychology professor Danny Kahneman, which seems to explain a lot of popular culture.

As might be expected, the entries by mathematicians tended to have actual formulas in them. I can relate to the sentiment expressed by Nassim Taleb in his entry. Over a typeset page of equations on how to price stock derivatives, he hand-wrote, "I spent a large part of my life working on this equation. I am glad it is over."

Many of the entries were just plain silly. I'll single out this one by cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman, because of his abuse of mathematics. He has a nice diagram illustrating composition of functions that would make any algebra teacher proud, but follows it with a fallacious argument that shows he has not mastered basic logic.

Let me mention one more entry before I stop. Popular math writer Keith Devlin uses an analogy to speculate on how math will be taught in the future, and it looks like he would like to see virtual manipulatives taken to a whole new level.

Be sure to also check out the archive of annual answers to questions. Because they are not constrained by the "formula" format imposed on the current question, the answers are better developed and far more insightful.

SocialRank (and MathBloggers) is now live

A few weeks ago I wrote a post about SocialRank, which seems to be a new blog search engine that identifies which blogs entries are currently generating a lot of interest. These entries are categorized by subject matter and daily 'top 15' lists are created for the top blogs and top blog entries. The result for each category appears under its own domain name, and for math blogs the end product is MathBloggers.

At the time I last wrote about this, the SocialRank sites were all password protected while under development, but an anonymous commenter has pointed out that as of today SocialRank is now live. The first 30 blog categories are now open, and this includes MathBloggers.

So how good of a job did MathBloggers do on its first outing? Well, in addition to several blog entries that I had already read and might expect to see on a 'top 15' list, there were several entries (and blogs) listed that I was not familiar with. So MathBloggers succeeded in broadening my reading. The MathBloggers list also included a nice mix of pure math, math ed, mathematical physics, and theoretical computer science blogs. The blog Good Math, Bad Math, while being a very good blog, seemed to be over-represented on the list, so SocialRank may need to fine-tune their ranking system to keep very popular blogs from overwhelming the little ones. There was also one noticeable bug: blog URLs only contained the actual domain name and not any path info. As a result, Good Math, Bad Math shows up as ScienceBlogs, for example, and Jacques Distler's Musings appears simply as the host server name Golem. (This problem did not affect the URLs for individual blog entries, only for the blog home URLs.)

Overall, it seems like an interesting effort, and I'm going to keep checking MathBloggers on a regular basis to see how it develops.

Update

Hmmm, maybe I spoke a little too soon on this. There is definitely something a little "off" about the Top Blog Posts list. A couple of entries currently listed there are from Skrentablog, which is a tech blog with practically no math content. The other blogs represented on the list seemed to fit the category better, but some of the particular entries seemed like peculiar choices. Vlorbik wonders how his own blog got so highly rated. His particular entry that made the list was about the Excel number formatting error that was a big news item last week; maybe the overall blogosphere interest in the story somehow rubbed off indirectly on his post. In any event, the SocialRank ranking algorithm seems to be doing some weird things. It will be interesting to see how well it tracks blog interest later this week when the next Carnival of Mathematics comes out.