Google Ads on TV

New York Times published an article titled: Google Wants to Dominate Madison Avenue, Too. According to the article, Google wants to use its technology to make ads on TV (and just about everywhere else) more relevant.

"Now Google is preparing to extend its technology to nearly every other medium, most significantly television. It is looking toward a world of digital cable boxes and Internet-delivered television that will allow it to show commercials tailored for each viewer, as it does now for each Web page it displays."

Google Print is back

Google has decided to continue with their plans of digitizing the content available in some of the biggest libraries in the world. Google Print is due to resume from tomorrow in spite of the fact that the company has been hit by two separate lawsuits claiming that the program breaks copyrights of the authors of the books.

Google Print is now scheduled to restart from November 1 after they suspended the process to give the publishers and authors enough time to contact the company if they objected to having their books stored in Google’s database. The deadline is now over and the Google Print program would continue as originally planned.

Major publishers represented by the Association of American Publishers had earlier sued Google this month for digitizing books without the permission of copyright holders. They claimed that Google should have contacted them regarding the copyrights of the content they owned. Before that, Google was sued by the Authors Guild for a similar reason.

Google continues to claim that their program adheres to fair use clause of the U.S. Copyright Act that allows for the reprinting of portions of copyrighted material for certain purposes. Interestingly, now both Yahoo! and Microsoft MSN have announced similar plans to digitize books but they are only targeting books, which are outside the copyright issues.

IBM uses Google technology

IBM, the world's largest computer services company, will use Google Inc.'s technology within its own search programs to help clients better find and manage information.

The agreement is part of IBM's new strategy, "Information as a Service," to provide software, hardware and services to make it easier to find and use data across various formats and locations, Chris Andrews, a spokesman, said in an interview today.

In linking with Google, IBM is tapping a technology used by more than 400 million users a month to search the Internet and desktop files. IBM, based in Armonk, New York, is betting it can use the technology to boost sales by helping customers manage their documents.

Mike Grehan: Google to become a portal

MARKETING SEARCH guru Mike Grehan said at a Netimperative dinner that it was inevitable that Google would turn into a portal.

He suggested that Google had run its course, and the third generation of search would cause changes in the market.

Despite Google's clean interface, all you need to do is to click on the "more" button and it begins to look like a portal anyway, Grehan said.

More at: http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=27271.

PageRank 10 Sites

PageRank is an algorithm for ranking web pages, based on the number of incoming links and their importance. The algorithm was created by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and is the main innovation that made Google the best search engine.

PageRank values are integers from 0 to 10, but very few sites have PageRank 10. Here is an incomplete list.

Software companies:

www.google.com

www.microsoft.com

www.yahoo.com (since April 2007)

www.adobe.com

www.macromedia.com (now redirects to adobe.com)

www.real.com


Government / governmental agencies:

www.whitehouse.gov

www.nasa.gov

www.energy.gov

www.nsf.gov


Sites with many backlinks:

www.w3.org


Educational institutes:

www.keio.ac.jp

www.lcs.mit.edu

www.ercim.org


Sites that dropped from PageRank 10 to PageRank 9 in 2007

www.apple.com

www.mozilla.org

www.firstgov.gov

www.statcounter.com

www.blogger.com

www.nytimes.com (New York Times dropped to PageRank 8)


Found another one? You can check the PageRank of a site and report it in the comments.

Last updated: May 12, 2007

Random Google

Visit a random webpage from a Google search: Google Random.

Google random image: www.ghettodriveby.com/.

And a random Wikipedia page: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random.

Office web applications

Until Google comes with an Office web application here is a list of Ajax-based Office replacements:

Writely - "The Web Word Processor" (note that for creating documents, it uses an HTML editor and then converts to Word format)

FCKeditor is also an MS Word-like web app.

gOFFICE - "a browser-based online word processor and desktop publishing program"

Num Sum - web-based spreadsheets - except only the author of a spreadsheet can edit it.

Kiko - Online calendar solution powered by Ajax.

called S5 - web-based Powerpoint

Webnote - web-based version of Microsoft's OneNote

thinkfree - online Office suite

Openomy - online file-system

WebOS

The Web browser becomes the primary application interface through which the user views content, performs services, and manages data on their local machine and on the Web, often without even knowing the difference. (...)

Aside from the browser and the Web server, applications will be written for the WebOS and won't be specific to Windows, OS X, or Linux. This is also completely feasible, I think, for organizations like Google, Yahoo, Apple, Microsoft, or the Mozilla Foundation to make happen.

Compared to "standalone" Web apps and desktop apps, applications developed for this hypothetical platform have some powerful advantages. Because they run in a Web browser, these applications are cross platform (assuming that whoever develops such a system develops the local Web server part of it for Windows, OS X, Linux, your mobile phone, etc.), just like Web apps such as Gmail, Basecamp, and Salesforce.com. You don't need to be on a specific machine with a specific OS...you just need a browser + local Web server to access your favorite data and apps.

More: http://www.kottke.org/05/08/googleos-webos.

Base speculations unconfirmed

"You may have seen stories today reporting on a new product that we're testing, and speculating about our plans. Here's what's really going on. We are testing a new way for content owners to submit their content to Google, which we hope will complement existing methods such as our web crawl and Google Sitemaps." (Tom Oliveri, Product Marketing Manager at Google)

Well, the screenshot doesn't seem to match this information.

Google OS - No viruses, no worms, no corrupted disks

"Though there is no indication that anything like this is in the works, one can easily imagine a streamlined Google OS on its own hard disk partition, separated from the entertainment, gaming, and media production environments. In addition to Google's signature services—a high-powered internet, media, and local disk search engine—it would likely consist of an office suite, a lean web browser, and various other applications and utilities. (...)

Let's take it one step further. Imagine that all of this software—like the Google search engine, Gmail, etc.—is stored on Google's notoriously well-backed-up servers and operates at relatively high speed with any internet connection, thanks to its simplicity and javascript code base. Supported by unobtrusive (sometimes even helpful) ads, and hosted on a distant server, this is free, convenient, and accessible from ANY computer, anywhere, anytime. Additionally, you have the world's best IT department working on your behalf to protect your software, its accessibility, and its security. No viruses, no worms, no corrupted disks.

Let's say they go even further: Google gives you, say, 1000GB on their servers, hosts all your data (with multiple levels of permissions), and provides everything mentioned above, and extends their video search (currently in beta) to provide access to a wealth of streaming audio (like iTunes radio) and video. All of it is free, all of it is easily accessible through a powerful, extensible web browser, and all of it simple and easy to use (it's still Google, remember). What are the implications of such a system? First, no more purchasing software (at least not the consumer grade applications hosted on the server); second, companies actually competing for your business (Google would surely be followed by the other major players); third, your work is finally mobile."

More: A Google OS by 2010?

Google semantics

Google already searched the entire Web. Google already had a distributed framework with thousands of independent machines. Google already looked for the links between pages, the way they fit together, in order to build its index. Google's search engine solved equations with millions of variables. Semantic Web content, in RDF, was just another search problem, another set of equations.

August 2009: How Google beat Amazon and Ebay to the Semantic Web (great fiction writen by Paul Ford).

Philosophy of tags / Social software

del.icio.us

* stores bookmarks online
* tag bookmarks
* shares bokmarks

flickr

* stores photos online
* tag photos
* shares photos

technorati

* tags blogs

This products let people share and tag personal goals online. They are a way to organise data online, a form of folksonomy (practice of collaborative categorization using freely chosen keywords).

Google already added a tagging feature to My Search History product. Another product that will have tags is Google Base.

Google knows all about you

Everything you search for using Google

Every web page you visit that has Google Adsense ads on it

Which country you're in

Every Blogger page you visit, including this one

Who you send emails to

Who sends emails to you

Google Base - your personal database

"Post your items on Google.

Google Base is Google’s database into which you can add all types of content. We’ll host your content and make it searchable online for free.

Examples of items you can find in Google Base:

• Description of your party planning service
• Articles on current events from your website
• Listing of your used car for sale
• Database of protein structures

You can describe any item you post with attributes, which will help people find it when they search Google Base. In fact, based on the relevance of your items, they may also be included in the main Google search index and other Google products like Froogle and Google Local."

Soon at http://base.google.com

Google corporate values

What are Google's values?

1. Focus on the user and all else will follow.

* The interface is clear and simple.
* Pages load instantly.
* Placement in search results is never sold to anyone.
* Advertising on the site must offer relevant content and not be a distraction.

2. It's best to do one thing really, really well.

* Google does search.
* Gmail, Google Desktop, and Google Maps => bring the power of search to previously unexplored areas.

3. Fast is better than slow.

* Google believes in instant gratification.

4. Democracy on the web works.

* PageRank™ evaluates all of the sites linking to a web page and assigns them a value.

5. You don't need to be at your desk to need an answer.

* PDAs, wireless phones or automobiles.

6. You can make money without doing evil.

* relevant ads
* non-manipulative ads

7. There's always more information out there.

* images, PDF files, Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint.
* HTML for mobile phones.

8. The need for information crosses all borders.

* restrict results to pages written in more than 35 languages.
* translation feature.
* Google's interface can be customized into more than 100 languages.

9. You can be serious without a suit.

* work should be challenging and the challenge should be fun.
* emphasis on team achievements and pride in individual accomplishments.
* ideas are traded, tested and put into practice.
* give the proper tools to a group of people who like to make a difference, and they will.

10. Great just isn't good enough.

* innovation and iteration.
* anticipate the needs and meet them with products and services that set new standards.

Google 10 things: http://www.google.com/corporate/tenthings.html.

Google operating system

"Google is a company that has built a single very large, custom computer. It's running their own cluster operating system. They make their big computer even bigger and faster each month, while lowering the cost of CPU cycles. It's looking more like a general purpose platform than a cluster optimized for a single application.

While competitors are targeting the individual applications Google has deployed, Google is building a massive, general purpose computing platform for web-scale programming.

This computer is running the world's top search engine, a social networking service, a shopping price comparison engine, a new email service, and a local search/yellow pages engine. What will they do next with the world's biggest computer and most advanced operating system?"

More at: The secret source of Google's power