So, I couldn't make my program on time and got eliminated from
the contest to let Daniel Egnor win the conest with his 'Geographic Search'
idea which adds the ability to search for web pages within a
particular geographic locale to traditional keyword searching.
That's very similar to things we were planning to do, converting
street addresses to latitude-longitude based cooredinates through
publicly available
TIGER
and
FIPS
data sources.
Jen McGrath, a software engineer at Google, said Egnor's entry was chosen not just because he had developed a useful application but also because he had "clean" code and, importantly, because his code showed the possibility of "scaling" to work across the entire Web.
He got $10'000 in cash and a VIP visit to
Google's
office in Mountain View, CA.
But, who is the real winner of the contest? I would say: Google. They now have tons
and tons of fresh ideas and a bunch of pre-written, ready and clean code which they
legally can glue to their system (although they have said they're not planning
to use it for now) by spending approximately one month salary of one of their Phds.
List of Winners
Google's Search for Winner Ends,
Farhad Manjoo's article in
Wired
