Tag Archives: Google

Google’s New Search Engine

Posted by Daniel on September 12, 2009 None comments

Thanks to a post by my friend Daryl, I’ve been looking at the improved Google search engine, codenamed Caffeine. Google has had a bunch of competition lately. Bing which is Microsoft’s new search engine recently launched, followed by an announcement that Yahoo will use Bing as its engine.

The current version of Google updates its index on a schedule. This means that sites that have only just been crawled will have to wait a while before being included in search results. I have experienced this with my site, only recently has Google started giving me hits, although they have been crawling my site for about a month.

Google’s new search engine use a new backend which not only improves the time required to perform a search but allows indexes to be easily updated. This means Google can now include real time sensitive results such as those from twitter or from my blog minutes after I post. This means that instead of searching the web of about an hour ago you are now searching what is on the web now.

Effectively Google is making a real time search engine. Where informatin is avaliable to you as it happens. Imagine the implications of having an auto updating search results page where new results dynamically appear as they are posted. This is thereason why Google is pushing the Pubsubhubbub protocol and blog pinging services.

Random Thought: Google Androids wpToGo application makes it easy to post from my mobile, but it’s a bit of a pain in the thumbs.

The New Google Reader

Posted by Daniel on July 23, 2009 None comments

This morning Google announced some new features for Google Reader. These features make Reader feel like a social networking website. I think Google is taking an interesting approach to social networking. They’re refitting all their existing products to include social features. It still feels a little separate though. There isn’t a feel of congruency across all the applications.

You can now decide who sees your shared items, and who can comment on them. I don’t see this as a feature I’d likely use as everything I share is already on the web and if I block people from seeing it on my shared items then they can just find it elsewhere. I have a feeling that Google did this to fight off the hordes of people yelling loudly about privacy lately.

Google Reader now displays information from your profile and a link to your fully profile at the top of your shared items page. What you can store on your Google Profile appears akin to what you can store on other social networking sites. A link to your profile is kind of a different approach to social networking. Sites likRSS Feed Icone Facebook and MySpace focus on your profile and links to other features. Google’s approach seems to be to add social features to all their applications and link that to a profile. This approach seems to me to be the best way to muscle in on the social networking scene.

Google Reader now includes a button to ‘like’ a post. This is the most controversial features as it adds an extra line to the post and takes up a fair bit of screen real estate. I don’t notice it taking up too much space, that could either be due to the fact I’m used to having a small screen on my laptop and on my desktop my monitor is big enough for me to not notice. I think the idea is great, you can easily find people who like the same things you do and follow them. The only issue i have with it right now is that everyone is clicking like on everything and there are way too many people to sort through to find somebody with similar interests.

This is an interesting approach for Google, but i believe it will pay off. Google is creating a social network that isn’t about having friends or getting the most views. Google’s social network is about people similar to you and things you like.

Random thought: Punishment in real life: You perform an illegal operation and you go to jail, Punishment in computing: You perform an illegal operation and you get killed.

The Obligatory Post on Google Chrome OS

Posted by Daniel on July 9, 2009 2 comments

I’m not excited by Google Chrome OS. And the majority of the reason for that stems from the following paragraph posted on the Official Google Blog:

Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS. We’re designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds. The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the web. And as we did for the Google Chrome browser, we are going back to the basics and completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don’t have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It should just work.

They keep mentioning simplicity, lightweight and ‘back to the basics’. have you ever used an OS designed to be extremely simple? Have you ever tried SplashTop, HyperSpace, Latitude ON or even gOS? They may be fast to start up, but you’ll curse just as much when the one thing you want to do is only possible on the actual OS you have installed, requiring a reboot. My opinion is that these lightweight OSes actually make my life harder. Lets see one use case.

I’m at home and I need to check my email. This can be done in ExpressGate so I boot it up (really fast) open up a browser and browse to my Gmail. So far the experience is relatively smooth, until I discover that somebody has sent me an attachment that I need to see. Of course this requires an application installed in my OS so I have to close my browser and any other sites I had open and wait for a reboot into my OS. This is the inherent problem, if I need to use something that isn’t part of my lightweight distribution then I have to stop everything and wait.

Now I understand Google Chrome OS is going to be the actual OS, except most of the applications will be based in the cloud. This presents another problem, especially on netbooks. Netbooks are portable, and designed to be used in places where there is no internet connection. See the problem? Sure you could use a 3G modem but then you have to fork out a fortune for data (especially excess usage).

Unless Google can find a creative way to solve these problems I don’t think that Chrome OS will be anything exciting. It should be noted though that if I were to pick a company that would be able to take on this challenge I would pick Google. I suppose in the end there is only one way to find out, and that would be to wait until the end product is released.

Random thought: If you use a Live CD of another distribution, but don’t install it, is it still cheating?