This week the big search news is that Google’s index now contains more than 8 billion pages, almost twice its previous size. Not a suprising annoucement given the growing murmers about Microsoft’s new search which was announced last night.

Neither announcement is particularly significant, but taken together, they show that there is, once again, a bit of competition in the web seach space. Bigger indexes are interesting, but evolutionary. Microsoft’s relevance may or may not be better, but its not the sort of thing thats immeditely obvious. Microsoft also allows one to adjust the way search results are weighted in three dimensions, allowing one to weight newness over relevance, for example. It seems like it could be cool for some searches, but sounds suspiciously like some cheap widget added to differentiate the offering without actually adding much real value.

What I found really interesting this week, search-engine wise, is A9.com, from Amazon. A9 has been around for a while, and I don’t think they made any real annoucements this week, but I finally gave them a closer look.

I’ve just started playing with it, but here are some of the cool features

• Search history — So you can easily rerun past searches to look for new items
• Diary — Lets you add notes on pages you find
• Bookmarks — lets you access bookmarks from any computer
• Discover — starts making reccomendation of pages based on your search and browsing history
• Lists — Automatically parses out lists on web pages, such as site specific search engines, topics in discussion forums, and lets you easily navigate through each link in sequence. You can also select a blob of text, and make a list from that, which you could use to visit all the links in a paragraph.

Most of these features are enabled by the A9 toolbar, which is available on Mac, Windows & Linux and supports Firefox.

This featureset starts treating searching the web not is some isolated atomic activity, but as part of a larger process of finding and processing information.

There are some downsides to A9. The toolbar has some real privacy issues that I’m not sure I’ll be comfortable with in the long run. But for now, I’m happy to experiment.

Urban Legends Reference Pages: Questionable Quotes (Hermann Goering)

Claim: Hermann Goering proclaimed that although “the people don’t want war,” they “can always be brought to the bidding of their leaders.”

Status: True.

We got around to the subject of war again and I said that, contrary to his attitude, I did not think that the common people are very thankful for leaders who bring them war and destruction.

“Why, of course, the people don’t want war,” Goering shrugged. “Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece. Naturally, the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship.”

“There is one difference,” I pointed out. “In a democracy the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars.”

“Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.”

“Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit upon his hands,
hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.”

-HL Mencken

Yuck yuck yuck yuck yuck.

Holy Zarqawi – Why Bush let Iraq’s top terrorist walk. By Daniel Benjamin

This article details yet another Bush failure in Iraq.

Specifically, the Bush administration justified its invasion of Iraq in part on the fact that a terrorist with likely ties to Bin Ladin was operating on Iraqi soil (though in territorry the Kurd’s controlled with the help of US airpower), but it made no plans to deal with him. In fact, it repeatedly ignored plans put forward by the CIA to neutralize him

That terrorist was Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the same terrorist claiming responsibility for attacks within Iraq ranging from the execution of 49 police recruits this last week, to scores of truck and car bombings, to the execution of multiple hostages.

Bush’s failure to dispatch al-Zarqawi, like his failure to deal with the tons and tons of high explosives that have gone missing since the invasion, are two more reasons why things are going so badly in Iraq.

The root cause is clear right now: Bush and his team are fuck-ups. Do not wait until after the election to figure that out. It’s time for some accountability. It’s time to throw Bush out.

One of the lies Bush supporters tell us is that Bush’s flip flopping on “no nation building” by invading Afghanistan and Iraq is actually a virtue, representing his willingness to respond to the new realities posed by 9/11.

This is a lie, because the record makes it clear that the administration started plotting an invasion of Iraq shortly after taking office. In fact, it is two lies, because pushing forward with the invasion of Iraq, and diverting resources from Afghanistan and hunting Bin Ladin, represents an unwillingness to respond to to the new realities posed by 9/11.

I’m not sure if they actually believe these lies themselves, but you shouldn’t believe them when they repeat it.