me + microsoft's new search

Microsoft launched a major update to "Live Search" so, being the vain techie I am, I did a little vanity search to see their results:


The first result for my name is for a term paper I wrote my senior year of undergrad, which is appears to be more important than my undergrad personal website. Also apparently you can find me on eBay, which certainly good news for those of you who've been dying to get your hands on me.

Taking a look at Google's results:


First result is this blog, second is my undergrad website, third is my master's thesis. No ads. Sadly neither search engine has picked up on my current homepage, so there's still work to be done for both... Akshay Patil, Akshay, Patil -- there, that should do it.

(To round out the coverage: Yahoo thinks my last name is a misspelling of "Patel" & Ask.com gets my undergrad website as result 1, but has a spam blog as result 3)

back to beta

I never could tell anyone what exactly I was working on at blogger.com, but now a year's worth of work is finally coming to fruition and beta.blogger.com has just launched (details) with this being the first public post ever made on the new system!

Excuse me while I go celebrate =)

watch a talk

I've been lucky to see a number of interesting talks and I figured I might as well point out a few they you can be lucky enough to see too:


How to survive a Robot Uprising -- hearing him talk was actually funnier than reading the book.

DNA and the Brain -- A talk about autism by James Watson of Watson & Crick.

An Inconvenient Truth -- Al Gore's talk about global warming (you'll have to go to a theater to see this one)

Does all this linking to Google video make me a company shill?

yahoogle

An interesting blog post on the evolution of Yahoo & Google's front pages - Maeda's SIMPLICITY: Yahoogle!