Just had to try this shiny new "blog this" thingie we added to Yedda. And what's better to blog then one of my favorites questions:
Upgrading an Omelet
Does anyone have interesting ways to upgrade an omelet? I'm bored with the usual cheese/onion/meat options I usually use, and since in most evenings I'm too tired too cook anything more interesting, I'd like to hear your suggestions.
Asked by gypsie on July 13, 2006
View the entire discussion on Yedda
Following the TechCrunch post on Yedda on Aug 14th, we've been covered some great folks around the globe. I wanted to list here some of the Israeli bloggers who covered Yedda (in Hebrew):
And while at it, don't miss the older post from Ami Ben Basat on his blog, which also appeared as an article in the Globes (hmm, that would be the other leading business magazine in Israel :))
BTW, the $10,000 (play money) I invested in Yedda on Alexadex about a month ago are now worth $56,942 (hmm... play money too...). Now how cool is that.
And now, after all this wonderful excitement, back to the drawing (key)board - we have so much more work to do in order to make Yedda live up to all these expectations!
I spent a few minutes, together with Eran, looking at the method that Google uses to track which links are clicked in the Google search results page. I figured they must be doing this, since it sounds like an essential bit of information, and of course they do that.
The mechanics are simple, and very well implemented - the generated links in the search results have a onmousedown JavaScript function (named clk) attached to them. When a link is clicked this JavaScript bit is run. Essentially what it does is use the JavaScript Image object (one of the oldest tricks in the JavaScript "book") to send a request to the Google web site, with the clicked link information:
function clk(url,oi,cad,ct,cd,sg) {
...
new Image().src="/url?sa=T"+oi_param+cad_param+"&ct="+e(ct)+"&cd="+e(cd)+u+"&ei=jwbkRLWWGYfa2wKN1uRj"+sg;
}
I was surprised though to find in that otherwise-sparkling-clean Google implementation a bunch of additional JavaScript functions which appears to be never used, like:
function ss(w,id){window.status=w;return true;}
function cs(){window.status='';} var bdg = 0;
function sb() {bdg = 1;}
function ga(o,e)
{
...
}
function anbc(id)
{
...
}
A quick count of the bits shows that the unused JavaScript code amounts to about 1K in size, per search results page. Assuming 91 million searches per day, this means unnecessary waste of 80-90 Gigabytes (depending on how you count MB - the right way or the Western Digital way :) ) of bandwidth, every day.
It's a good thing that bandwidth is so cheap. If Google was running on GoDaddy, they'd consumed their entire $10/month 500GB bandwidth limit in 6 days :)
And no, please don't count how much bandwidth we waste on unnecessary JS in the Yedda pages, I can tell you right away it's quite a bit. Functionality first, optimizations later!
Check it out:
In case you're wondering, this one was just a test question! I am not sure I understand why it became so popular, but the truth is that she's not spending any time with me because she's so addicted to answering questions on Yedda. Go figure...Here is the sad truth from Technorati:
Yup... it's true. 128 days since my last post to this blog.
I do have good excuses though. I've been busy coding, designing, specing, supporting, promoting, and not sleeping enough.
Initially I thought it's just a busy week, no biggie, I will post next week. It's not like the world is holding its breath waiting for my posts. But then the busy week became a busy month, and another, and... 128 days.
Creating Yedda.com is exciting. There is so much to do, and every day brings new challenges, making me wish there was away around that 24 hours/day limitation. Only 24 hours a day... this is so Web 1.0, don't you think so?
It's good to be writing code again. I almost forgot how satisfying it is, to write-compile-run-upload - and see how it changes the way people interact with each other. There is magic about it.
In any case. This post is meant to break the silence. I'm back :)
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