Preoccupations: The Google Way: Give Engineers Room
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It sounds obvious, but people work better when theyâre involved in something theyâre passionate about.
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The sluggish YPN program gets a Google-esque makeover.
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FINDING your ideal job could soon be as simple as asking Google.   The Internet search engine plans to collect personal data on users so it can advise them on everything from which position to apply for, to how they should spend their days off.
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University of California scientists use a Google widget to improve automatic image cataloging in large collections like the Library of Congress. It'll add "common sense" to computers' ability to recognize objects in photographs, by adding a semantic context to object recognition.
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(InfoWorld) - Google touted on Thursday its building-block approach for application development, which features mashups and open source software. Mashups link different Internet applications to form a new application. They are becoming the model for developers to build applications, said Jeff Huber, Google vice president of engineering, during a keynote presentation at the Google Developer Day 2007 event in San Jose, Calif. Other building blocks in the company's application development model include ads and standards, Huber said. Google expects developers will use technologies such as a MySQL database, a Linux OS, and programming languages such as Ruby, Python, or PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). "By being able to leverage these building blocks, youâre able to create amazing applications [in] probably a tenth the time," as was previously possible, Huber said. Google with its developer tools seeks to make the Web better; this may result in boosting traffic to the Google home page but not necessarily, according to Sundar Pichai, Google director of product management. The newly announced Google Gears project, for example, involves an extension to make Web applications work offline, Pichai noted. "To us, we believe we benefit, users benefit, and everyone benefits if the Web works better," Pichai said in an interview after the morning keynote. In addition to formally unveiling Gears during the morning presentation, Huber touted two other products: Google Mashup Editor, an online editor for building mashups with a few lines of XML, and Google Mapplets, for putting online gadgets on maps. With Mapplets, an application could be built such as one that searches for hotels near an airport, according to Google. Google's free event in San Jose attracted 1,500 persons. Meanwhile, a total of 10 Google Developer Day 2007 events are being held throughout the world on Thursday, including in places such as Sao Paolo, Brazil, and Moscow. Google co-founder Sergey Brin, the company's president of technology, briefly addressed the audience in San Jose. The Internet, he said, has reached the point where systems can re-create themselves, such as a mashup editor that creates Internet applications using Internet applications. A compiler, meanwhile, can compile itself, Brin said. "For the Internet to be truly self-sustaining, you really need to get the person out of the loop, and that's why we corralled all of you here in one room today," Brin said in jest. On a more serious note, Brin thanked the audience. "We want to do as much as we can to repay the community that creates such a fantastic ecosystem for us to work in," Brin said. The explosion in interest in Google of late can be attributed to its brand awareness, said blogger Frank Taylor, author of the Google Earth Blog and an attendee in San Jose. "Obviously, they just have a huge brand awareness and an ability to reach many people through their search engine," Taylor said. Even when other companies do the same thing as Google, Google gets more attention, he said. Google also is attracting top talent, said Taylor. Huber called 2006 a spectacular year for the company, with its introduction of technologies such as its AJAX search API, the Google Web Toolkit, and Google Project Hosting.
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Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page yesterday offered their most detailed glimpse inside the company's operations since selling shares to the public in August, including the firm's inability to swiftly hire enough computer engineers abroad to foster innovation.
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Internet search engine Ask.com has been chasing market leader Google Inc. for years without making much headway, but that hasn't deterred its engineers from trying to set the pace for innovation.
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GOOGLE, the world&#39;s number one search engine, has lost its edge. That&#39;s the considered view of software engineers who have been testing an early version of Microsoft&#39;s MSN Search service, released last week.
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Today Brad  gave me a quick demo of Google  Desktop .  Its great that Google keeps innovating (and more power to them) but to be honest I was a bit underwhelmed.  caption: Google Desktop Homepage.  It should be possible to quickly put together a Lucene  Desktop which performed the same tasks but was Open Source and based on web standards.  There are a few steps here of course:   - Integrating lucene to index the filesystem only when files are changed.  This    can be accomplished by looking at directory timestamps and only searching    directories that have changed since the last index run.    - Only indexing during idle CPU time.  On windows you could build this around a    screensaver.   ...
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ANN ARBOR, Mich. Google is trying to establish an online reading room for the University of Michigan library and four other major libraries.
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In the final article in a series on building a website, Michael Herman explains how Google ranks webpages and what you can do to improve your ranking.
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Blog: Google just picked up Zenter, a presentation creation service.
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In a new post to his blog today, Stuart Herbert continues the theme he started in a previous post about a business case for PHP. In this new entry, he shares some things he's done to further the effort.   To turn this from an idea into reality, I've setup a Google group where anyone who is interested can join in, and help build this resource. Please come along with your ideas and concerns, and let's see what we can achieve together.   He also suggests some "first steps" to get the ball rolling, namely a list of topics the business case needs to cover.
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Product Manager Rajen Sheth tells how Google Apps will lure enterprise tech managers to Google services.
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Google has a tremendous amount of power, and it grows daily.  Here's what the company should do to guard against its best (and worst) intentions.
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Harvard University is embarking on a collaboration with Google that could harness Google&#39;s search technology to provide to both the Harvard community and the larger public a revolutionary new information location tool to find materials available in
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The TC40 conference, which (important caveat) I did not attend, had a big impact on the space I occupy. Sometimes I think we put too much emphasis on Techmeme, but it is important, and for the two days of TC40, most of the top articles had something to do with the conference. Yet most of the people in the TechMeme loop were not there. This makes me wonder if we can do better with these conferences that become the cursor for a few days. And the answer is of course we can. But it may mean reconfiguring the conference to take the emphasis off the people in the room and put it on the people on the net. As Jim Forbes points out, if you wait for hotels to change, you're going to wait a long time. They're not really in the conference business, they're in the bedroom business. So anything that keeps people out of the hotel is likely to stay out of the conference -- like really terrific networking. So that suggests a different approach, one that does not rely on hotels.  I've done four conferences, three of them at universities, and one at CNET in San Francisco. At two of them, we hosted as many people as they did at TC40, because we had multiple tracks, and a very large facility. And the last three were all very much present on the net. The first, not so much. If I do another conference, we'd try to push the envelope on the net side of things, and probably not try to host as many people in person. Instead of 500 to 1000 people, I'd try for 50 to 100 people. Kind of a middle-ground between the experts at the TC40 conf, and the audience. More like a TV studio than a conference. Everyone would be either a blogger or reporter. All would be encouraged to participate. And everyone would lead a chat room, or a blog comment section, or a video track. We could have much more diverse video nowadays, because of services like justin.tv and ustream.tv, and I'm sure many others, who provide outbound bandwidth. All we'd need at the facility is enough bandwidth to connect to these services, and if you're not at a hotel, that's not at all hard these days. You could do it at Stanford or Cal, or even the Hillside Club. If you're not deep inside a building with thick walls, EVDO can serve as a backup. If you can't get on through the LAN, try a WAN instead.  I'd also like to see less of a focus on the interests and success stories of venture capital. Something has really changed, even the VCs seem to know it. Money is undifferentiated, so why pay so much attention to what the money people say. Let's get people with big ideas to contribute them, and to disagree with other people with big ideas. That's not to say I'd exclude the money people. But I would insist that they be people who are participating in the networked conversation, not just at the show, but 24 by 7, on blogs, on Twitter, on whatever. I had this discussion with Loic last week. I didn't think and still don't think that it was a good idea for him to have French politicians speak at LeWeb last year. I didn't think it was a good idea for Chris to invite John Edwards to speak at Gnomedex in 2006. Why? Because these people don't have blogs, they don't understand the net. They want to use it, for sure, to get money and votes, but they don't have a vision for it, beyond that, so what they have to say is uninteresting. "Give me money. Vote for me." That's all they say. If they want to come, great, let them listen and ask questions. And look for politicos (as with the VCs) who are making a difference on the net. People like Fred Wilson or Paul Kedrosky, for example. I'm sure there are many more. And I'd work to develop more ways for the back-channel to participate, to come to the front. That's the key to the future of conferences, how to extend them into the net, so the communication path is every way imaginable, not just from the venue out to the world. I want to feel like I'm in a nerve center, whether I'm at the venue or sitting in my living room in Berkeley. I had that feeling, btw, or an inkling of it, watching the AlwaysOn conference eariler this year, which had excellent presence on the net, real-time. The TC40 conference promoters, amazingly, actively thwarted the back channel. I don't know what their thinking was, but I think it was wrong.  Maybe someday these conferences could host real-time development, where media hackers put together new communication systems and deploy them before the conference is over. The moon mission approach to development, if you want to get something done quickly, make sure you know where you're going and are excited about it. Sometimes it's amazing how quickly these things can bootstrap. I'd also like to see a mix of interviews and debates, and open discussion. Dinners in every major city that wants to have them. The truly great tech conferences of the future will be world wide events, as the web itself is world wide, and will be inclusive, not exclusive, and cost very little to participate in, if not $0. Mundeemo: "Don't forget a row of suicide booths.."