A Tech Joke: Google Caught in Dichotomy

Before I reveal the joke, let me explain a little bit about 'Web Scraping'. 

Web Scraping is a computer technology where a program is designed to crawl someone's website without any sort of permission. It is similar to a human browsing a publicly available website but it is more than that in the sense that a program can simulate human browsing in a much faster, efficient and structured manner. 

Many use web scraping for data mining or comparing prices of millions of products on large ecommerce sites. To that effect, even I have just completed writing my own (my first ever) search engine to search thousands of products in Amazon and flipkart and compare the prices using the same web scraping technology. 

Although web scrapping is a handy technology, many frown at it merely because it has a big gray area in terms of copyright violation, pirates, duplicating the content etc. In a way it is seen as stealing the content without permission from the owner. Google is one big organization that is committed  to seriously kill all web scrapers. 

There is one very famous guy at google called Matt Cutts. He is the guy who is responsible for making search engine results better. He is often seen as an evil by the bloggers because he punishes blogs and websites severely by ranking them low if they violate any kind of google's guidelines - such as duplicate content, less authority websites etc. In all, there are millions of bloggers who hate Matt Cutts because he does not allow their websites to show up in the google search.

Coming back to web scraping, even the biggest company Google, sometimes finds it hard to determine which content is original and which one is web-scraped. Such is the complexity of dealing with web scraping.

So one day Matt Cutts tweeted this:

If you see a scraper URL outranking the original source of content in Google, please tell us about it.

In response, one online entrepreneur Dan Barker (probably a supporter of web scraping) replied to his tweet. His reply went viral as it is one of the most hilarious. This is what he replied:

He nailed Matt Cutts by pointing that Google itself is the world's largest web scraper and it is, at the same time, strongly against web scraping. What a dichotomy he pointed out! 

Funniest Google Search - Why Modi Speaks in Hindi

This is the funniest google search I ever came across. I wanted to know "Why PM Modi speaks in Hindi while he is abroad". Somehow I stopped after enter the words "Why modi speaks in hindi" just to see the results and surprisingly I have the funniest result as shown in the above image. Feel free to enlarge the image.

First, it detects the words "why modi speaks" as english and then tries to translate into a rather funny translation in Hindi again. For those who do not understand Hindi, here is the meaning "This is the reason why modi speaks"

Oh dear Google, I've got you here! Lol.

Did you know that Mr Bean is more popular than Justin Bieber? See this

If you think Rowan Atkinson, a.k.a Mr Bean makes you laugh on the television sets, then think again. He is funny on twitter too. He mimicked a tweet of Justin Bieber and instantly he was more popular than Justin Bieber himself. See this funny tweet:

And here is the original "thanks" tweet by Justin Bieber.

Both of the above snapshots were shot today, i.e 26 July 2014. As of this date, Rowan Atkinson's tweet was retweeted 84,822 times. When Mr Bean wrote his tweet, Justin Bieber had 12,000 retweets already. And look at it now. Boy, Mr Bean is no doubt popular. Justin Bieber is just a kid...!

Below is the live embed of both these tweets for future comparison. The below numbers will automatically change whenever someone retweets these tweets. Lets see overtime how they are performing.

Justin Bieber gets 12,000 retweets for saying "thanks" so here is my attempt: thanks

— Rowan Atkinson (@OfficalMrBean) December 10, 2012

thanks

— Justin Bieber (@justinbieber) November 24, 2012