Numbers we use !!!!!!!!

After a mobile communications talk at IU which claimed that Google would index numbers, I wanted to check it myself. Google indeed does index numbers and it lead me to the observation that as the numbers become larger the usage decreases super linearly. Do a google search for some random number like 43538. For this you will get around 200,000 hits. If you do a search for a random 10 digit number, most probably you will not get any hits. The interesting part is for any random number that is smaller than 10 digits you will probably get hits. As the number becomes smaller (in terms of digits) there will be multiple hits for a given random number and the hit rate will increase super linearly as the number becomes smaller.
Bottom line the internet may represent a sample representation of the number usage of people and most of the time the numbers we use are within the first 10 billion range as I observed. Further the we use big number less often as they get bigger even within the above 10 billion range.
Interesting study to be done in a web mining course.

WS-Messenger paper
I was working with my collegue Yi Haung to improve his WS-Notification and WS-Eventing brocker, WS-Messenger, for the past few weeks. This is a publish subscribe framework developped at extreme lab @ IU. A research paperabout this work was published in the ccgrid conference. Yi did most of the work, so great job Yi. Paper can be looked up here.