Omgili blog

The last of the Pack

This week (21st October) saw the passing away of the last of the famous “Rat Pack”.
Joey Bishop, one of the all time best comedians in the world, died on Sunday at the age of 89. Although these guys were at the hight of their celebrity before I was born (Mid 50’s to mid 60’s), I’ve heard so much about them that this buzz item got me looking up more info about Joey Bishop and his friends.
The gang that’s usually referred to as “The Rat Pack” included Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis, Jr., Joey Bishop and Peter Lawford. It’s said that these guys didn’t refer to themselves as The Rat Pack.
The name was used by the media and the industry but actually belonged to a wider group of people that was formed around Humphrey Bogart in the beginning of the 50’s. The later Rat Pack, included these five comedians and a few female comedians like, Angie Dickinson, Shirley MacLaine and Juliet Prowse. For younger people these names have no meaning. They might have heard about Frank Sinatra and maybe Sammy Davis, Jr., but don’t really know the significance of the Rat Pack. I won’t go over the complete history (You can read about it here), but here’s one piece of information you may find interesting: You know “Ocean’s Eleven”? Well, this film was originally done by the Rat Pack and the original Danny Ocean was none other than Frank Sinatra.

The Truth About 9/11

I was in New York last week for work, met a lot of interesting people and, as usual, learned many important new things about the business and the industry. But the most astounding revelation I experienced had nothing to do with my work. We where having dinner in a bar, next to the hotel, and I stepped out for a cigarette (Can’t smoke in bars in NY (-:). I struck up a conversation with a fellow smoker who seized the opportunity to bash NY Mayor Bloomberg and Ex-Mayor Giuliani and went strait on to speak against the Republican government. And that’s when I learned, for the first time, that the 9/11/2001 Terrorist Attacks on the World Trade Center were an orchestrated effort of none other than the US government. The motive: to stir up the atmosphere in order to create a reason to wage war that would be very profitable for president bush and his friends. My new smoking buddy spoke with such resolve that I was amazed. I guess that if you live in the states, you’re more aware of the existence of the “9/11 Truthers” movement, but to me it was all new.
And then came this weeks Omgili video buzz. The most discussed video of the week is the one that shows 9/11 Truthers Infiltrate the audience on the Maher show and repeatedly interfere with the show. Watch the video, it’s funny. The Truthers response video was also very popular and just as funny.

1. Whereas with Google/Yahoo you can easily use their results only with their own search engine, we offer an easy search in Omgili and Google/Yahoo as well.
2. The mentioned services offer maximum 10 results for each search term, where Omgili Search Aid returns every query combination we have ordered by relevancy and popularity.
3. The data in Yahoo and Google is edited/censored whereas with Omgili Search Aid we release it “As is”.

So we hope you enjoy using Omgili Search Aid and I can promise there is more to come.

Cheers,
Ran Geva

Yesterday I asked myself: What is the distribution of these words when people discuss (notice how I used a WH word there? – clever). Why? I asked myself, why is it interesting? Dunno, maybe just because its easy to find out. I opened Firefox and entered Omgili – the all mighty search engine for discussions. I used the graphs tool and entered the search keywords and here are the results:

Interesting I thought (really?). Here are some conclusions I drew:

1. We (humans) are most interested in the Object/Idea/Action and least interested in the reason for it.
2. After we understand what we are talking about we would like to know when the whole thing happened!
3. Wow! we think – really? How ( In what manner) could it happen we are now interested in understanding.
4. We then try to dig deeper and examine the choice of alternatives in the scene.
5. Only then we ask who was involved in the whole thing.
6. Now that we understand it better and just before the reason (least interesting) we are interested in knowing where it all happened.

I had more time on my hands so I decided to dig deeper – what is the distribution inside the discussions I asked? After all a discussion isn’t a text bulk, it is build out of three main parts – title, topic and replies. I used Omgili’s advanced search features and made three searches for each word, one for each discussion part (intitle:, intopic:, inreply:). Here are the results:

Notice that word occurrences can overlap between the different discussion sections.
My assumptions are that the title is a brief summation of the topic. The topic is the main subject of the discussion and the replies are circling the topic and the title.

What can we learn from the results?

1. The same conclusion as from the first results, What is the most common question in all discussion sections – we really like to understand the Object/Idea/Action – it is very important to us.
2. The How word (manner) has jumped to the second place when it comes to the titles – its almost 4 times more popular then the When (time) word that is in the overall second place. In essence people are asking more about the How in the summation of the discussion.
3. The When word (time) does a comeback in the topic and replies. It means that when we are truly discussing something the time of subject is the second most important issue.
4. The distribution of the rest of the words in the different sections correlates to the overall results we found – which is good!

I hope this little research helped you understand better what people are most interested in when they discuss an issue, and hopefully you will leverage this knowledge in some way (ideas are welcome in the comments section).

Thank you for reading,
Ran Geva