This post is about two experiments.

(1) The Search Engine Experiment is a web page for comparing relevance of various search engines. Try it; you might be surprised.

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In a post last Friday I mentioned Thomas Friedman’s “The World is Flat”. This Monday, his book won the first Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award. (Apparently first reported in Pravda, of all places; how ironic.)

I finally finished reading it this morning. Interesting, and good work, but what a rambler. It’s as if he took speed and babbled into a microphone for three days, directly transcribing his soliloquy into print. I’d love to hear him talk sometime.

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In his book The World is Flat, Thomas Friedman explains how many IT businesses are shifting slices of their operations “offshore” to get work done for lower cost. For instance, the straightforward bits of your tax return might well be done overnight in Bangalore, India instead of Bangor, Maine. Cheap computing capability, cheap network bandwidth, and millions of well-educated people in developing countries are greasing the skids. (There, I just saved you a 469 page ramble.)

Amazon has put a new twist on this trend. They’ve just released a beta service called Mechanical Turk that acts as a job marketmaker for people willing to do bite-sized “human intelligence tasks” (HITs). You sign up, do a task, and get paid for it. InfoWorld’s David L. Margulius calls it “webshoring”. Here’s how Amazon describes it:

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