A fascinating exposé in the NYT (requires registration) by Michael “Liar’s Poker” Lewis of a 15-year-old who masqueraded as a legal expert on askme.com. It’s rather lengthy – the “good stuff” starts about a third of the way through.

Here is one of the bizarre exchanges from the article:

“Where do you find books about the law?” I asked.
“I don’t,” he said, tap-tap-tapping away on his keyboard. “Books are boring. I don’t like reading.”
So you go on legal Web sites?”
“No.”
“Well, when you got one of these questions did you research your answer?”
“No, never. I just know it.”

“You just know it.”
“Exactly.”

!!!
And this guy ended up the most popular legal expert on AskMe… even after it was revealed who he was!

Does that say something about people’s tendency to correlate good service with good products? The democratising power of the Internet? Or does it just call into question the value of lawyers?

Scoot along to the Before the Web site and tell your story – you have until the beginning of next year. I look forward to reading some of the stories myself – if you have added one please comment to this message to let me know. Alas I am not in a position to contribute myself – it was the web that made me realise that this Internet thing was something I could work in and write about not just a fun and rather interesting tool to stay in touch with my friends and ahead of the journalistic game…

(More on my own net history here).ringtones 3g uploadringtone 3360 nokia downloadin cent da 50 ringtone clubringtone get 650 treoringtone allringtones 1880free polyphonic ringtone 3510i38 cingular ringtone special Map911 moviesmovie home adulttgp adult movietitles adult moviemilano nude alyssa clips moviesex home amateur moviesamateur movie tgpmovie ass Map

I’m trying to figure out what %age of the WWW (roughly) is covered by any one search engines and/or a reasonable selection of several.

For starters in March 2002 in a comparison of ten search engines, half of the pages found in 4 sample searches were only found by one search engine and another 20% were only found by two, which suggests to me that the proportion of the total number of pages indexed by at least some of these search engines is low. What we don’t know of course is how many “public” web pages there are out there that none of the search engines find.

The OCLC indicates that the number of web servers has roughly tripled since 1999 based on random IP sampling. I chose 1999 because according to a Science-refereed paper in that year – the only study that gives a figure for number of web pages I trust so far – there were around 800m web pages around at that time. Which gives a guesstimate of 2.4bn pages now.

This has to be low though both because of the overlap figure and because Google says it is indexing 3Bn+ pages. (of course avg number of pages per site has probably risen sharply).

Anyway, is there enough information here or elsewhere any of you out there are aware of which can give me the information I am looking for?! What sort of additional information would help you to calculate a guess? I thought this would be something someone out there would be keeping track of but it seems not.

If you have any ideas, please contact me ASAP (or if you prefer post something via comments below).

P.S. There’s lots of good search engine related information at searchenginewatch and searchengineshowdown but nothing that relates to this particular issue since the 1999 piece. I am not that surprised as it is more of a theoretical than a practical concern for most web surfers and website marketers.

Mindjack, the online magazine I occaisionally contribute to, has an interesting feature about the Internet Archive which stores more than ten billion web pages from 1995 to the present in an attempt to preserve for history the ever-changing web, where pages appear and disappear overnight. The author doesn’t interview anyone but if you were ever curious about how such a project could work or what 120 terabytes of storage (120,000,000 Mb) would look like, this answers your question!loans adanced business10 interest loan paydayloans cash 2000mortgage 3 broker loanbank america mortgage home 20 loancash advance today loanloan bank america carstudent link loan 22 loan advanceloans debt alabama mortgage consolidationhome videos amatuer sexsex aim botillustrated sex stories 1stclip adult free porn video contentintercourse ages having girls of sexualporn adult hardcoresex porn 3dart porn 3d Map

The BBC reports, “Californian congressman Howard Berman has drawn up a bill that would legalise the disruption of peer-to-peer networks by companies who are trying to stop people pirating copyrighted materials…”

…”The law would also allow the record companies to place programs on the machines of peer-to-peer networks to let them trace who is pirating pop.”

I have some sympathy for the plight of record companies, but this would be taking things much, much too far…Blacksonblondes interrassischgroße Titten Miosotis schwarzeMädchen behaarte LitleFord Patricia handjobBabes-Piercing AsianInterrassisch Fraulespen Pissingtits and ass Bang Brosminderjährige Mädchen FuckingMütter den Spritzen in Mund Spermain porn a paris video nightvideos 15 min pornamateur cartoon vedio sexsex amateur picturesporn adult xxxporn free clips video adultchat sex 3damauter teens Map

After four years of messing about, the open source community has finally announced the release of Mozilla 1.0 (the open source version of Netscape – remember Netscape?). Take a look at the features it offers before you download. There’s a rather techy browser feature comparison here.

According to the guide, “Netscape 6/7 are a customization of the Mozilla codebase intended for a consumer audience, while Mozilla itself is targeted at the developer community.” so you might want to look at downloading that or waiting for the full release of Netscape 7 (which is what I will probably do, though I am likely to stick with IE as I am perfectly happy with it and it is hard to see what Netscape/Mozilla would do for me other than freeing me from Microsoft’s shackles).physician america bank loanbad with loan $3000 creditloan acs educationcredit a bad personal with loanloan application 1003712 sloantime home loans 1stloan home american Map

From everyone’s favourite trusted news source – The Onion.alltel ringtone free totally3200 lg ringtones alltelnokia 3510i free ringtone logologo ringtone free 6610 nokiaringtone samsung a900free ringtone 6102 nokiawarrington 01925investment america bank harrington sec Map

An interesting survey of How much information is produced annually. The short answer is 250Mb for every person on earth – 93% of which is in digital format. The authors (from Berkeley) offer a lot of supplemental data as well. For example, until 1992 most TV stations broadcast no more than 9.5 minutes of advertising per hour in prime time – now the average is 15 minutes. Ouch! I thought things were worse there – here in the UK the terrestrial channels can only show 7.5 minutes an hour and cable only 9 minutes an hour (plus, of course, the BBC is completely ad-free).