Google takes big step to make Web work offline
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Google Inc.  said on  Wednesday it was building Web software that runs online and off  to let users work remotely on planes, trains, slow dial-up  connections or even the most remote locations in the world.
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Google is set to unveil the Gears open source tool set for developing Web applications that can be used offline.
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Web search leader Google Inc.  said late on Monday it is working on a project to digitally  scan the collections at five libraries and will make the pages  available to Google users over the coming years.
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Google, which implemented an internal Web log system behind its firewall about 18 months ago, has seen tremendous benefits from it and may in the future consider providing tools and expertise for this purpose to interested clients, a Google executive said.
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Blog: Here's a follow up to a blog of a few days ago outlining workaround until Google issues a patch.
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GOOGLE, with whom I spend more time than with my loved ones, is planning to put the contents of the worldâs greatest libraries on line, including the Bodleian in Oxford and those of Harvard and Stanford in America.
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(InfoWorld) - Developers haveÂ big plans for Gears, the Google Inc. browser plug-in designed to provide offline access to Web-hosted applications. Although Gears has only been available for about two weeks in anÂ early-stage version, many developers have rushed to give it a test drive and brainstorm for new ways to use it. The response to Gears reflects the rising demand for using Web-hosted applications without necessarily being connected to the Internet. Dustin Hand is looking at Gears for a Web application he is creating for an American Red Cross chapter in Tallahassee, Florida. The application must have an offline component so that it can be used even if a major disaster knocks out Internet access. The application will be used to manage the list of local Red Cross volunteers, and will contain these people's contact information along with their skills. Once completed and implemented in the Red Cross' Capital Area Chapter of Florida, the application will be pitched for adoption in Red Cross offices nationwide. "Ensuring that a Web application such as this works during a disaster regardless of the outside [Internet access] networks being down is of top priority," Hand, a Red Cross volunteer IT coordinator, said via e-mail. Gears, an open source browser extension, contains three components. The first is a local server for caching and delivering "application resources" like HTML and JavaScript without a server connection. The second piece is a database that will allow for storing and accessing data from within the browser. The final component is what Google calls "a worker thread pool," designed to boost Web applications' responsiveness by carrying out operations in the background. Before Google released Gears at the end of May, Hand was considering hosting the volunteers' database physically in the Red Cross offices for offline access. However, the chapter lacks the infrastructure to have database access on site. Its Web hosting company could house the database, but then it would be located off site and possibly unavailable in the event of a disaster. "Google Gears would allow us to use our existing infrastructure -- our off-site database -- in the event of Internet connectivity failure, allowing us to continue to provide expedited service to the victims," Hand wrote. He acknowledges that Gears still needs significant improvement for usage in production applications, something Google has also made clear. Although Gears is available to anyone as a free download, at this point it's intended mostly for developers who can give Google feedback to improve the product. Google also hopes to push Gears as an industry standard for offline access to Web-hosted applications. Another developer with high hopes for Gears is Brandon Kraft from the University Catholic Center campus ministry of the University of Texas at Austin. Kraft hopes Gears will allow him to give an offline component to a variety of Web-hosted resources available to university students and staff. Like other early testers, Kraft plans to wait for Gears to mature before using it in production applications. So far, he has run into a few kinks, including a clunky synchronization indicator. Kraft also stumbled with a known issue that has prevented proxy server users from installing Gears. After the installer failed twice on him, Kraft put Gears aside. A week later, he delved into the issue and, after 20 minutes, worked around it. "For the average consumer, once they get an error message [during the installation], they won't come back," Kraft said in a phone interview. The proxy server issue, flagged repeatedly in discussion forums, has caused some developers to take Google to task, a sign that with the high expectations also come strong feelings. Many corporate developers connect to the Internet via a proxy server. However, by the end of next week, the installer's problem with proxy server connections will be solved for most users, a Google spokesman said Friday. Google already started updating its servers with the latest version of the Gears installer, and some users have downloaded it already. "The update will be finished by next week, at which point you can be sure of getting the latest version of the installer from the Gears Web site," the spokesman said via e-mail. Despite its bugs, Gears has also generated enthusiasm among IT security experts. "I strongly believe that light footprint on the end-point device -- the user's computer -- makes for strong security. Because of that, I always prefer Web applications to installed applications," Maxime Rousseau, a security consultant with SociÃ©tÃ© Conseil Lambda Inc. in QuÃ©bec, Canada, said via e-mail. Despite liking Google's Docs & Spreadsheets Web-hosted application suite, Rousseau doesn't recommend it to clients, saying that it's not fast enough due to Web pages' lagging responses. He believes that Google will eventually address those issues, however. Although interest is high among users for Gears to support Docs & Spreadsheets, Gmail and other Google hosted applications, Gears currently only supports one Google application: the Reader RSS syndicated feed manager. "Something like Google Gears has been needed for the Web for quite a long time, and as far as I can tell, it is a nicely structured architecture," Hand, from the Red Cross, wrote. Â
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- Online search engine leader Google is setting out make better sense of all the scholarly work stored on the Web. The company&#39;s new service, unveiled late Wednesday at scholar
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Drawing upon its clout as the Internet's most powerful company, Google Inc. is calling on businesses and regulators throughout the world to set international standards for protecting consumer privacy online and offline.
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After coming up with Gmail and Google News, rumours are rife that search engine Google is now working on a web browser, reports BBC.
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Google Inc. released free software yesterday that lets people simultaneously search the Web and their personal computers for information, a move analysts described as a potential blow to rivals Microsoft Corp.
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Google Inc. GOOG.O said on   Tuesday it is making it easier to add hundreds of miniature   programs to independent Web sites, in a move that brings handy   features to users instead of making users rely on Google.com.
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Google releases a new Javascript API dubbed Gears that adds offline support for web applications. Both IE and Firefox have browser plugins that work on Windows, Mac and Linux machines. Google Reader is updated for the new toolkit.
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By Jefferson Graham  LOS ANGELES -- Internet search giant Google wants to be everywhere you are online. It hopes to be to the Internet what Microsoft is to the desktop, ever-present and essential.
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Google Inc., the search engine whose clean, minimalist home page was a stark contrast to the link-laden Web portals of the late 1990s, made a tiny tweak to its site last week that may have much bigger repercussions.
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Google Inc. now provides a searchable index to the millions of Google Earth layers on the Web.
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The major Web browsers are getting facelifts as they increasingly become the focal point for handling business transactions and running programs over the Internet rather than simply displaying Web sites.