1. On February 4, 2004, a 19-year old computing and psychology student at Harvard University launched a website. The previous year he had built a website called ‘Facemash’ in which two photos of students were placed next to each other and people had to vote which was more attractive. This got him into trouble at the university but inspired him to launch the new website. In a few months the site had more than a million users. Which website was this?
2. This is one of the oldest websites on the Internet. It started in 1990 as a fun group project for listing ‘actresses with beautiful eyes’. Currently, 250 million visitors visit it every month. It is renowned for its rating, which is done using a complex formula based on ‘weighted average’ mean. It also has an incredibly advanced search function, which can break down the content by pretty much any desired parameter. The name of the website is an abbreviation of three words, with the last letter not capitalised, as it is a part of the third word. What website is this?
3. ‘elgoog’ is a website created just for fun in 2002 that gives search results but shows them horizontally flipped, like a mirror. Later that year, a certain country blocked access to a very popular website. The country’s 45 million users can only access the web through government-run ISPs. Whenever the key word was detected, the access was blocked. The users realised that ‘elgoog.im’ bypassed that and found widespread use by citizens. Which country was this and what site’s results does ‘elgoog’ flip and show?
4. Mike Rowe was a 12th grade student of Belmont High School in Canada who set up a part-time web design business. Because he was working with software, he registered a website with his name and the word ‘soft’ following it. An American technology company, which is the world’s largest software maker, took the kid to court saying it was copyright infringement. Eventually, they settled out of court with Mike getting compensation and free Xbox with his favourite games. What was his website and which company sued him?
5. The Trojan Room coffee pot was a coffee machine in the old Computer Laboratory of the University of Cambridge. Researchers Quentin Stafford-Fraser and Paul Jardetzky wanted to save people working in the building the disappointment of finding the coffee machine empty after making the trip to the room. So they wrote a software called ‘XCoffee’ and used an Acorn Archimedes computer fitted with a tiny greyscale camera focussed on the coffee pot. This was in operation from 1991 till 2001. What now common technology came about from this coffee-based situation?
6. Jawed Karim and his high school friend Yakov Lapitsky visited San Diego Zoo in 2005. Yakov shot a 19-second video of Jawed standing in front of elephants and saying that the cool thing about elephants is that they have really, really long trunks. On April, 23, 2005, this became the first 19 seconds of what now amounts to 3.25 billion hours per month. What site did Jawed co-found with Chad Hurley and Steve Chen that makes this possible?
7. Jean Armour Polly is a librarian, who wanted a title for an article about using the internet which she had written for the Wilson Library Bulletin in June 1992. She was looking for something that would ‘evoke a sense of randomness, chaos, and even danger’. She was inspired by a picture on her mouse pad of a signature scene from the California beaches and coined the term ‘____ the internet’. Though this phrase had been used by Mark McCahill earlier, Jeans article popularised this term. What term is this?
8. The information that you routinely come across is known as the ‘surface web’. A huge chunk of information is not accessible to most, which contains medical records, scientific reports and government resources amongst other things. This is known as the ‘Deep Web’. A small portion contains very sensitive and sometimes strange information which is mostly illegal and cannot be accessed by most people. What is this part of the internet known as?
9. Jennifer Lopez wore an exotic green Versace Silk Chiffon dress to the 42nd Grammy Awards on February 23, 2000. Its extremely low neckline even prompted her co-anchor David Duchovny to remark that he is sure nobody is looking at him. Eric Schmidt was the executive chairman of a search engine site and realised that thousands of people were trying to see what the fuss was all about. This prompted his company to launch a service on which now you can even do a reverse search. What is this service known as?
10. Scott Fahlman is a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University and to help people on a message board to distinguish serious posts from jokes he came up with something on September 19, 1982. What three symbols appeared together for the first time in his message to indicate jokes?
Answers
1. Facebook
2. IMDb
3. China, Google (elgoog is Google backwards)
4. MikeRoweSoft.com, Microsoft
5. Webcam
6. YouTube
7. ‘Surfing’ the internet
8. Dark Web
9. Google Images
10. ‘:-)’
A molecular biologist from Madurai, Berty Ashley enjoys trivia and music, and is working on a rock ballad called ‘Coffee is a Drink, Kaapi is an Emotion’. @bertyashley
