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2002 Google Programming Contest Winner
Google is celebrating its fourth year of connecting users to information worldwide by seeking out and rewarding exceptional programming skills. We're pleased to announce that the winner of Google's 2002 Programming Contest competition, and the recipient of the $10,000 cash prize is:
Daniel Egnor
Project title: Geographic Search
Daniel's project adds the ability to search for web pages within a particular geographic locale to traditional keyword searching. To accomplish this, Daniel converted street addresses found within a large corpus of documents to latitude-longitude-based coordinates using the freely available TIGER and FIPS data sources, and built a two-dimensional index of these coordinates. Daniel's system provides an interface that allows the user to augment a keyword search with the ability to restrict matches to within a certain radius of a specified address (useful for queries that are difficult to answer using just keyword searching, such as "find me all bookstores near my house"). We selected Daniel's project because it combined an interesting and useful idea with a clean and robust implementation.
Daniel received a bachelor's degree in Computer Science from Caltech in 1996. He has worked for Microsoft Corporation and XYZFind Corporation, and currently resides in New York City working for a large investment bank.
Honorable Mentions
We would also like to recognize with honorable mentions the following people
for their excellent project submissions:
Zhenlei Cai, for his project, Discovery and Grouping of Semantic Concepts from Web Pages with Applications. This effort processed a corpus of documents and found words and phrases that tend to co-occur within the same document, producing a list of pairs of terms that seem to be closely related (such as "federal law" and "supreme court", or "Bay Area" and "San Francisco").
Laird Breyer, for his project, Markovian Page Ranking Distributions: Some Theory and Simulations. This project examined various properties of the Markovian process behind Google's PageRank algorithm, and suggested some modifications to take into account the "age" of each link to reduce Pagerank's tendency to bias against newly-created pages.
Thomas Phelps and Robert Wilensky, for their project, Robust Hyperlinks. Traditional hyperlinks are very brittle, in that they are useless if the page later moves to a different URL. This project improves upon traditional hyperlinks by creating a signature of the target page, selecting a set of very rare words that uniquely identify the page, and relying on a search engine query for those rare words to find the page in the future. For example, the Google programming contest can be found using this link.
Aaron Peapell, for his project, Genetic Search Algorithm. This project used a genetic search algorithm to bias a Pagerank-like algorithm in a query-specific manner, by giving higher weight to links from pages containing all of the query terms.
Dan Blandford and Guy Blelloch, for their project, Index Compression Through Document Reordering. This project aims to reduce the space requirements of an inverted index by clustering together documents that are similar before assigning numerical identifiers to the documents (leading to locality in the document identifier sequences within the inverted posting lists for the words in the index, thereby making the sequences more compressible with various types of encoding techniques).
Finally, our thanks to everyone who participated in the Google programming contest. There were many interesting ideas in the submissions we received, and we appreciate the effort that went into creating all of them.