Month: June 2007

Google Keeps Tweaking Its Search Engine

Google's Algorithm now includes more than 200 components to its "secret sauce":

Mr. Singhal has developed a far more elaborate system for ranking pages, which involves more than 200 types of information, or what Google calls “signals.” PageRank is but one signal. Some signals are on Web pages — like words, links, images and so on. Some are drawn from the history of how pages have changed over time. Some signals are data patterns uncovered in the trillions of searches that Google has handled over the years.

“The data we have is pushing the state of the art,” Mr. Singhal says. “We see all the links going to a page, how the content is changing on the page over time.”

Read full article at the New York Times

4 Folders for Desktop Productivity

desktop-productivity.pngInspired by the excellent Five Steps to a Kinkless Desktop article (a must read if you have a cluttered desktop and folder system), I thought I'd share my own computer desktop organizational system. I have four main folders.

  • Inbox – All incoming items (downloaded files, temp documents that you’ll throw away immediately, files for email attachments, etc.). Items you save to the 'Inbox' must be things that don’t need to be saved to the long term archive. The 'Inbox' is for things you don’t have a chance to intercept and save into your archive or which will be deleted after use. You'll want to configure you Office software and Web Browser to automatically download files here, instead of the root of 'My Documents' or some other folder.
  • Archive -- Directory in your 'Home' directory or 'My Documents' folder with all your long term reference materials. It’s your permanent file cabinet.
  • Projects -- Files you access regularly during short term project work, organized into project folders. Mini-projects that take only hours or even minutes such as 'Quarterly Presentation' or 'Performance Review' also merit a project folder if they involve organizing multiple files.
  • To File -- This is a special folder in your 'Archive' where you can quickly drag files that are ready for Archiving but you haven't had a chance to organize yet. If you have Google Search or other indexing software for your hard drive, you can dispense with organizing files, and simply search for them when needed. If you go this search route, make sure you give your files meaningful names!

And don't forget the Trash Can / Recycle Bin! Use it as a 'To Toss?' folder -- if you think you don't need it, trash it, and when you empty the trash, empty only files > 30 days old.