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Hype-filled article on CNN discusses Amazon's spinoff Search Engine company A9, and suggests that this new product will be a competitor to Google. It is not immediately clear how this is possible:
Google has spent years developing its PageRank technology that they call the "heart of our software". Given that Google has patented PageRank [google.com], it is hard to imagine how Amazon will be able to produce anything that will be of a competitive nature to Google.
Froogle hasn't been officially released (notice the little "Beta" in the corner of the logo), but I think that it will be a far more comprehensive online shopping service than anything that Amazon could create. The nature of Froogle is to get the customer the best price, whereas the nature of any Amazon service will be to get Amazon the best price or commission.
It seems likely to me that Google could use its place in the "Search Engine" market to expand into the "Search Engine for Specific Products/Services" market. It seems highly unlikely that Amazon will be able to use its place as an Online Retailer to springboard themselves into the search engine market.
This is my second blog posting ever (!)... I hope I'm not embarressing myself with the poor quality of my spelling, expression, and ideas! This eText software rocks, by the way.
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...but that appears to be wrong. Or am I going insane?
I've been receiving a couple of emails every week for the last 2 years asking “How do I make an application that shows which users are visiting my website right now, and what pages they have visited during their session?” Rather than removing my email address from my website or setting up an autoreply to these messages explaining how much this would slow down their web server, I have written an article at ASPAlliance explaining how to do it.
Adding a row to the database table when a session starts is no problem (except for the obvious performance issues), but adding a row to the VisitedURLs table when Application_PreRequestHandlerExecute is raised seems impossible because (despite MS documentary claims to the contrary) Session State is not available in that event. Source code available here if you want to have a look.
Astute readers will notice the new article management system at ASPAlliance. Still a few bugs in the process but Steve Smith has done a great job! The old server has been shitting itself for over12 months and our host Orcsweb has done a great job keeping it from dying. We are now moving the main site to a cluster and the author's sites to http://authors.aspalliance.com.