In a sinus-induced haze, I have decided to base all future technical decisions on this site on which technology kills more kittens. Luckily for me, there is a service specifically designed to help enterprising young professionals make these sorts of informed choices: Googlefight.
Here’s how it works. Compare “keyword1 kills kittens” with “keyword2 kills kittens” and go with whichever keyword wins.
The results so far are disturbing. According to Kittenfight, I should prefer:
what a wise machine…
Comment by Don Ulrich — Monday, August 23, 2004 @ 5:37 pm
Sounds like a new Magic 8-Ball.
Have you tried asking it whether you should but yourself a cat?
Comment by Phil Boardman — Monday, August 23, 2004 @ 5:39 pm
That’s just too damn funny. *laughs*
Comment by Faruk Ates — Monday, August 23, 2004 @ 5:47 pm
It’s a battle of the comment spam!
Texas Holdem kills kittens vs. Cialis kills kittens
Comment by Mike Mariano — Monday, August 23, 2004 @ 6:00 pm
…and ASCII over Unicode… :-)
Comment by Hans — Monday, August 23, 2004 @ 6:01 pm
Vi over Emacs. Of course, I already knew that =]
Comment by Max — Monday, August 23, 2004 @ 6:13 pm
This system is really unfair since, you know, Atom and Python are actual words.
Anyway, a much better way is to use PageRank (instead of just popularity) and do queries like:
(atom kills kittens) OR (rss kills kittens)
(Answer: Bill Frist.)
Comment by Aaron Swartz — Monday, August 23, 2004 @ 7:01 pm
I hate to burst a (really neat) bubble, but there are two major problems here. First, you don’t search for phrases - so any page with “perl”, “kills”, and “kittens” will be a hit for perl. What you’d want instead (well, what *I* would want) is a search for “perl kills kittens” in quotes, so Google will only give hits for times people actually complain about the particular feline deaths you describe.
Then there’s a general statistical problem. For many (like XML vs. Atom), there are simply zero hits. So the first one wins, but that’s nothing to write home about. “Too little data spoils the broth.”
Comment by Asheesh Laroia — Monday, August 23, 2004 @ 9:20 pm
John Kerry vs. George Bush anyone?
Comment by Cameron Watters — Monday, August 23, 2004 @ 10:02 pm
I suggest you host your site on an automobile.
Comment by Naked Developer — Tuesday, August 24, 2004 @ 7:21 am
“…whether you should but yourself a cat?”
That is either a case of a simple typo (’but’ instead of ‘buy’) or is the most cryptic comment I’ve seen in quite a while.
Comment by r — Tuesday, August 24, 2004 @ 9:19 am
If you follow the link, the Python kills kittens score seems to consist mostly of Monty Python, not the Python language. Subtract monty and the score drops to 366 from 830.
Comment by Joshua Macy — Tuesday, August 24, 2004 @ 9:39 am
Asheesh, you assume that Mark wanted this to be logical.
Comment by Jeremy Dunck — Tuesday, August 24, 2004 @ 10:01 am
Interesting. I like it.
Comment by Pat — Tuesday, August 24, 2004 @ 11:54 am
Mark, don’t you have this system worked out backwards? After all, if the search “HTML kills kittens” returns more searches than “XHTML kills kittens”, doesn’t that mean that HTML kills more kittens than XHTML? And shouldn’t you prefer the option that DOESN’T kill more kittens?
(Can you tell I’m a cat lover?)
Comment by Dan Carlson — Tuesday, August 24, 2004 @ 4:08 pm
some other results:
piracy wins over legality
dos wins over windows xp
life wins over death
truth wins over fraud
coffee wins over tea
walking wins over sitting
driving wins over walking
running wins over driving
Comment by Phil Boardman — Tuesday, August 24, 2004 @ 5:31 pm
Why kill kittens when they can kill each other? The “kills” operator is not necessarily symmetric: “X kills Y” doesn’t return the same results as “Y kills X,” but oddly enough, they both return the same number of results (so far).
Comment by Eric — Wednesday, August 25, 2004 @ 12:10 pm
I find it disturbing that so many of the commenters here care less about the predictive power of the original technique, and more about finding more precise ways to kill kittens.
Comment by mpt — Thursday, August 26, 2004 @ 8:16 am
Awesome! When I launch my new web technology I can ensure that at least one influential developer uses it by making sure the website refers to killing kittens! Marketing genius!
Comment by Olly Hodgson — Thursday, August 26, 2004 @ 2:27 pm
I wonder if anyone knows what words or phrases that people who go to this site type in. For instance, to test the deal out (w/o understanding how it worked), I typed in “Cowboys” and “Indians.” Anybody know? Kinda like that show, that Louie Anderson (?) hosts. — Things people do during Thanksgiving: Eat Turkey (10 pts.) - Watch Football (5 pts.) - Think of the Native Americans (-5 pts).
Comment by Daily Texican — Thursday, August 26, 2004 @ 5:43 pm
it’s going to be hard to get python running and producing form-c normalized UTF-8 encoded atom and HTML on computers built with vaccum tubes and running on steam power.
Comment by scott reynen — Thursday, August 26, 2004 @ 9:42 pm
Apparently, france kills more kittens then eleven camels do.
http://www.googlefight.com/cgi-bin/compare.pl?q1=eleven+camels+kill+kittens&q2=france+kills+kittens&B1=Make+a+fight%21&compare=1&langue=us
Comment by Phil — Sunday, August 29, 2004 @ 3:28 pm
I understand it’s already possible to send Atom over RSS and REST over SOAP today!
Comment by Robert Sayre — Tuesday, August 31, 2004 @ 10:24 pm
Wait wait wait.
OSS kills MORE kittens than proprietary crap…so you choose OSS?
Comment by Steven Canfield — Wednesday, September 1, 2004 @ 12:18 am
i wanted to leave a comment, but i noticed asheesh has already said everything i would’ve said. so, well …. me too!
Comment by nex — Wednesday, September 1, 2004 @ 10:15 pm
I am currently in the middle of building some significant pieces of technology. Currently, the process of registering domain names is being improved, by the assumption that people made of brass will just automatically register all domains. Also, a technology to deliver high speed wireless broadband to people in the sticks, via wasps.
I’d love to talk about a technology desgned to kill kittens. It would be free software, Python, etc.
I am honestly not crazy.
Comment by mattl — Thursday, September 2, 2004 @ 8:43 am
That is great stuff…
got a good chuckle on this, had seen the googlefight before but never had really messed around with it..
Surprised they are not banned from google yet.
joel
http://historyagent.com/joeldg/
Comment by joeldg — Saturday, September 4, 2004 @ 7:37 pm
But is it Live or is it Dead?
Schrodinger’s Box
Comment by Null — Wednesday, September 8, 2004 @ 3:44 pm
Apparently, “my fatass” beats “Mark’s ass” (with kills kittens attached of course).
Better watch out Mark.
Comment by Derik — Thursday, September 9, 2004 @ 2:58 pm
I’m gonna name my next software project “Fox”. I bet it’s gonna come out at the top!
Comment by KV — Tuesday, September 14, 2004 @ 8:07 pm
Apparently Apple also kills more kittens than Microsoft. More reason to hate those Mac zealots (besides the zealotry)!
Comment by Foofy — Tuesday, September 14, 2004 @ 10:08 pm
Apparently guns don’t kill kittens, people kill kittens.
Comment by Daryl — Sunday, September 19, 2004 @ 3:47 pm