The AnswersThatWork Blog

The AnswersThatWork Blog

Saturday, 19th April 2008

Do you remember over 5 years ago before TUT ?

Do you remember over 5 years ago before TUT ? I do. And today I feel like talking about it.

We would be in places for hours finding out what these strange tasks were that seemed to be causing mayhem. Three hours working on one PC's problem, searching the Internet over 128K ISDN, or, worse, over 56K dialup lines, with the client asking every half hour : "Is everything OK ? Do you know how long you will be ?". Of course nothing was OK !!!

Boy, they were the old days. Every time one of us would find a new task that was causing major problems and that we should always terminate, we would email back to the office telling the whole team to remember that task. Then, there were so many, we started documenting the tasks because of all the different ones we were finding.

So that's how the Task List section on AnswersThatWork came about.

Now, you're asking how TUT started.

We were all complaining about how long it was taking to go through the Task List pages at our clients, sitting there for hours comparing the website to the client's Task Manager. I get all sweaty when I remember the stress of terminating things on Windows 98 and Windows ME !!

Then Ubergeek said : "Why don't we have a program to help us do this ?".

The Brains OK'd it and he and Ubergeek disappeared in the Tech Lab for a year. Occasionally we would bump into them if we came to the office early in the morning...

Almost exactly a year later The Brains asked us to test a program on all computers. We loved it. We suggested many many changes, we loved the colour coding and the descriptions which were the same as our Tasklist pages. At last we stopped worrying about being stuck at a client for hours working out which background task was causing all the problems. In fact, we started installing the program everywhere we went – it was such a life saver.

Then, one day, The Brains said : "We must sell this".

This is how TUT came about.

—— (KW) Wiz Kid

Friday, 11th April 2008

Search Results Relevance — the heart of Google's market leadership

The stats don't lie. According to our webstats 83% of users who come to our website via a search engine, come through Google.

83% of 7 billion people out there ! Some statistic this is. Imagine the technology that must be harnessed to cope with the volume of Google searches per hour, forget that, per minute, No, forget that too, per second !!! Did you know that, worldwide, Google handles in excess of 23,000 searches PER SECOND ! I can't even count to 1 in one second...

So, when you are Google and you are handling 23,000 searches per second, you need the best technology in every aspect of the network of computers, people, and things which make this possible. You need first class hardware, first class networking technology, first class technical knowledge, but, crucially, the results must also be accurate and relevant, more relevant than Yahoo, MSN, AOL, etc... And this last part, the relevance of results, is, as we all know, what propelled Google from nothing to its current superstar status.

So what makes Google's search results so accurate ? Well, after a month long investigation we are pleased to report that we have been privileged to be given an insight into Google's secret. It is a stunningly and luminously simple technical strategy, and it obviously works. Read it here from Google's own Technical Blueprint.

—— (TUT) SpaceMan