Jagster lives!
My latest novel, Wake, postulates a competitor for Google named Jagster. As the novel says:
In the tradition of silly Web acronyms ("Yahoo!" stands for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle"), Jagster is short for "Judiciously Arranged Global Search-Term Evaluative Ranker" -- and the battle between Google and Jagster has been dubbed the "Ranker rancor" by the press ...And now a technology using very much the sort of system I described for Jagster is being employed in the UK to search to gauge the degree of online piracy. (I make no comment here about the ethics of what's happening the UK, but the technique of actually analyzing every packet in the datastream to determine who is looking at what is very similar to the technique I proposed for Jagster.)
Read about it at The Register and New Scientist.
(Seekrit RJS trivia: I really named Jagster in honour of my great friend, Hugo-nominated SF writer James Alan Gardner, whom I often affectionately call "The Jagster.")
Visit The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
and WakeWatchWonder.com
Posted by Rob on Wednesday, December 09, 2009
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4 comments
4 Comments:
I felt downright saddened that there wasn't really a search engine like Jagster. I've never completely trusted Google (why would they have "Don't be evil" as a motto if the temptation wasn't there?).
I was saddened too when I finished reading your book and realized that there wasn't a real Jagster...
Ah well. There's still time.
Great book by the way!
I've just gone searching for jagster, hoping, like so much else in the background to your novel, that it was real.
Alas, I've arrived here.
Sadder but wiser.
I still have the last third of Wake to read, then onto Watch. So I have a lot to look forward to that will cheer me up.
i'm only halfway through WWW.WAKE, but I had to search to see if there really was a Jagster available. Your novel is so filled with accurate detail that I hoped it was one more.
In spite of that, your novel is one of the best I have read in years. The waking of an intelligence and the thoughts of a very bright teenager who finally can see seem completely real. The sympathy evoked by your writing is masterful.
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