Interesting. It seems that Google is testing Related Searches on their site. That's so nice of them, copying something we launched on Yahoo Search about 6 months ago.

Of course, I'm biased. I wrote the first production version of the system that built the lists of related terms, fine tuned it, and whatnot. It was a pain in the ass for various reasons, but hey, it was innovative, right? :-)

Wow, and all this time later, the Search Easter Egg still lives.

Oh, another interesting tidbit. In roughly 6 months, the core code has gone from Perl to Java and is now C++. Heh.

Posted by jzawodn at September 11, 2003 08:45 PM

Reader Comments
# katie said:

Yeah, next thing you know Google might copy Yahoo's cool "!" shortcut with something dorky like "I'm Feeling Lucky". ;)

on September 11, 2003 09:02 PM
# Peter said:

Hmmm, I wonder if I could write a search engine in LOGO...

:)

on September 11, 2003 09:25 PM
# Tom said:

Yahoo! blogs? Copy-catter, dirty-ratter, baseball-batter.

on September 11, 2003 11:39 PM
# Gerald said:

In my eyes the screenshot looks suspect. The search box is missing, the row with the related entries overlaps the sponsored link text, no url address is shown and worst of all, the link behind the number 1 result is showing to pugetsystems, a customer of the company that presents the discovery. For me it's web promotion pure. I'm not sure whether the whole story is a real discovery or a fake.

on September 12, 2003 02:34 AM
# Antony Nguyen said:

Sorry to burst your bubble Jeremy, but related searches is not really new... I worked at Scour.Net before it got sued for $250 Billion (yes, that's a B!) by the RIAA/MPAA/NMPA. We had related searches in our media search engine in late 2000. It's interesting to see that Google is keeping their eye out in terms of feature steal^H^H^Himplementation though.

--ant

on September 12, 2003 10:42 AM
# Mark Moraes said:

Can/would you share any technical rationale on why it went from Perl -> Java -> C++? Pros/cons?

on September 12, 2003 09:45 PM
# Teny said:

:)

on September 19, 2003 05:33 PM
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