In terms of the oil prices, Woodward answers that: "Woodward told 60 Minutes that Saudi Prince Bandar has promised the president that Saudi Arabia will lower oil prices in the months before the election - to ensure the U.S. economy is strong on election day." From CBS News

• Posted by: SorenG
• October 4, 2006 06:06 PM

SorenG, that was in 2004

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/04/20/politics/main612741.shtml

• Posted by: Doccom
• October 4, 2006 07:02 PM

Slate's Money Box to the rescue.

• Posted by: david
• October 4, 2006 08:10 PM

Ask Me-Fi to the rescue: http://ask.metafilter.com/mefi/46901

• Posted by: Steve Eisner
• October 4, 2006 08:14 PM

I'm not sure I follow your logic on selling equities because the Dow is doing so well. Yes, it's at a historical high. That doesn't mean it's a peak. How many times in the last 20 years has it been at a historical high? I've got 40 years until I retire - I'm sure it'll go higher than it is now.

Not that it's certain to, but I think it's likely to. That point aside, timing stocks is tricky, to say the least. Its entirely possible US stocks will outperform the US market (and certainly possible it won't).

• Posted by: J
• October 4, 2006 09:01 PM

What we are seeing is mostly seasonal cycle of oil prices, with the low reached usually around Thanksgiving: http://futures.tradingcharts.com/alpha/CO/W

Interestingly, each year recently this low is a little higher than the previous year. This is due to Hubbert's Peak. Next year, the oil price will probably reach $100 in June. In 2008, $120 and in 2010 $150.

John, what do you think will happen to internet advertising?
I run a company that is not on Web 2.0 radar, but it has about 500,000 users. One of my primary reasons for not raising VC money has been the Oil Peak, I think we are heading into a huge systemic meltdown.

• Posted by: SutroStyle
• October 4, 2006 09:06 PM

Google Movies? Didn't Google already do this, like 2 or maybe even 3 years ago? What am I missing here? Is this a relaunch?

• Posted by: JG
• October 4, 2006 09:07 PM

Thanks Doccoom, could have sworn I had read that in the news about the new book, State of Denial, but they must have been quoting from the previous one. Thanks.

• Posted by: SorenG
• October 4, 2006 09:41 PM

Forget SearchMash, Google just debuted Public Source Code Search Engine

http://www.google.com/codesearch

• Posted by: Search Engines WEB
• October 4, 2006 09:43 PM

Speaking of Google Gadgets, you can now convert them directly into Dashboard widgets for OS X:
http://www.mesadynamics.com/amnesty_generator.htm

It's a beta release at the moment.

• Posted by: LT
• October 4, 2006 11:26 PM

Part of the reason that oil and gas prices are down so much compared to last year is the absence of hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico this year. Another reason is the huge inventory builds that occur when prices get as high as they've been recently. High prices -> more exploration and production -> inventory builds -> low prices.
In the end, oil is just another commodity, subject to the same cyclical forces as all other commodities.
Hubbert's peak? Sold to you, along with Y2K and "The Population Bomb"!

• Posted by: Ollie
• October 5, 2006 12:13 AM

slate is great. do they ever say anything but exactly what we expect from a corporate rag?

"you see, it can all be explained by [insert various and contradictory and muddled and confusing and ultimately meaningless events and indicators here]. move along - nothing to see here. you feel better already, racist, don't you?

what? refineries? hogwash! you nutter conspiracy theorist, you!"

boring.

• Posted by: shmooth
• October 5, 2006 01:05 AM

Google Movies? That's been out forever now. You've really been buried in FM, haven't you?

• Posted by: Justin Gardner
• October 5, 2006 07:40 PM

Yes. Or, I'm getting old.

• Posted by: John Battelle
• October 5, 2006 07:53 PM

about searchmash. It seems to have a different index than regular google. If you run searches on terms like car, flight on both searchmash and google you will get different results. Sometimes the differences are minor sometimes a result is a page later on one than the other. The counts are also different, a seach for google will return: 121,000,000 on searchmash and 113,000,000 on the regular one. Searchmash's index seems to be bigger as most times I've checked it has more results than google. When I searched "the" though search mash returned: 1,050,000,000 while google returned 14,390,000,000. The explore popular searches feature is new also: http://www.searchmash.com/search/wikipedia?explore If you replace wikipedia with BBC, or NYT or anything really it will search that domain/or search for it. The suggestions seem to be improved also, the search term popular will give a suggestion, did you mean popular tv show? interesting. It also displays image results differently when you click on them. But the most amazing thing about it is the reordering results feature. You click next to a result and then you can drag the result higher or lower. I find this fascinating. The algorithm centric google, always saying, we don't want to manually massage results is now looking to have people, not links vote on how results should be ordered? An interesting direction for them.

• Posted by: joris
• October 6, 2006 06:03 AM

Joris: I think Google might already be doing this "people not links" voting that you are concerned about. Think about this: When someone clicks a link on a Google results page, and then clicks another 20 seconds later, and another and another, it could be a good indication that they didn't find what they were looking for with the first link. (asterisk: that is of course not always true, but perhaps true on average).

On the other hand, if they click a link and then don't come back and click anything else, it could be a good indication that they did find what they were looking for. So that link is probably more relevant to the query than other links above it.

I don't know for sure what Google is doing, but my gut tells me that they -have- to be using that click information, that "relevance feedback", to improve (re-rank) their results. Of course, they have algorithms for doing the averaging and re-ranking, based on the amalgamation of thousands++ of click "votes". They don't just believe one person.

If so, then this is already the "people, not links" approach. This has probably been going on for a while; I first noticed in 2003 that when you click a link on a Google results page, it sends that information back to Google. It was probably happening even before 2003...I just wasn't paying attention.

• Posted by: JG
• October 6, 2006 08:38 AM

Oil is coming down because the economy (read: housing) peaked and is cooling down...

• Posted by: Dustin
• October 8, 2006 12:41 AM