TechnoCloud

Amid what Google describes as a potentially infinite web, the search engine has identified a landmark trillion meaningful URLs (unique URLs). This is quite some figure when you consider that they passed the billion mark only back in 2000.

The mind-boggling figure illustrates the challenge for search engines in trying to judge value among so many competitive sources of information and in an environment where there are both fair (white hat SEO) and foul (black hat SEO) means to present content.

Understandable is the emergence of social software to facilitate peer-review of content sources to better identify value. After all, value is in the eyes of the beholder, with part of that value derived from one’s own community.

The likes of Delicious and Friendfeed offer forms of community search both allowing you to apply search filters through your own network. From my experiments, I find these useful in finding quality content, but not for providing the comprehensive reach that the major search engines offer.

While Google uses your own search history data to improve search results, it does of course use the wider community through apportioning value to inbound links (what’s of value to the community is of value to you). That community is narrowed by attaching more value to links from related topic websites to better idenfity the kind of niche communities that you benefit from on social software.

As yet, neither offer the best combination of the personal and the comprehensive to find the ideal search mix for the individual. There remain challenges in key areas, such as privacy, simplicity, data portability and applying the right filters at the right times. Then we can start talking about finding that trillion-in-one URL.

As an update to my previous post, Google has announced the details on their blog and provided more details on the Lat Long blog, complete with some rather cloudy stills.

Note to Google: wait for a sunnier day, as it looks like there’s a stage in England after all…

Google’s Street View has crossed the pond and is winding its way down France’s streets.

Although the coverage is far from universal, they have taken the inspired decision to start withthe Tour de France route, including sections of Paris, Saint-Étienne and Brest. It certainly opens up the possibility of some excellent mashups of live Tour data to enhance coverage.

Fortunately, the route allows me to take my own tour down memory lane to re-enact my old walk to work down the Champs-Elysées and to revisit an old holiday destination by taking a tour inside the city walls of Saint-Malo. Picture quality is perfectly adequate. To protect privacy, but not perhaps vanity, faces and number plates are obscured.

You can view it here (make sure the Street View button is selected). It’s also available in Google Earth.