In a blog post Thursday, Google Fellow Amit Singhal also referred to a recent op-ed piece suggesting that regulators should control how search engines rank results. He stressed that developing search rankings is very difficult, implying perhaps that regulating search would be hard for any government to do well.

Laying out the challenge, Singhal said Google processes hundreds of millions of queries a day, with at least 20 percent of them totally new. To handle the volume and variety of queries, the company uses a collection of algorithms to sift through data.

“Our algorithms use hundreds of different signals to pick the top results for any given query. Signals are indicators of relevance, and they include items as simple as the words on a webpage or more complex calculations such as the authoritativeness of other sites linking to any given page,” he said.
On a typical day, Google makes one or two changes to the signals and its algorithms to try to improve results, he said.

The company doesn’t manually choose any results, however, he said. “We believe that approach which relies heavily on an individual’s tastes and preferences just doesn’t produce the quality and relevant ranking that our algorithms do,” he wrote.

To show there is room for improvement in its own rankings — and perhaps to suggest that Google doesn’t favor its own sites — he noted that the query “search engine” does not list Google in the top few results.

There is nothing in the post that Google has not revealed before, but the company said news of the Commission’s investigation had prompted “lots of questions” about how Google’s ranking works.

On Wednesday, the Commission confirmed it was looking into three complaints against Google in the preliminary stages of an antitrust investigation. Google pointed to Microsoft as the source of the investigation, since Microsoft owns one of the companies that complained and is linked to another.

One of the complaints was filed by Foundem, a U.K. price comparison site. Foundem’s co-founder wrote the op-ed piece that Singhal links to, which suggests that regulators should set rules for how search engines rank results. The editorial accuses Google of exploiting its dominance in search by displaying its own services at the top of search results, something that Google denies.

Use your 5 free crushes per month to match with the guy or girl in your math class, pique the interest of your friend, make that connection with your crush at the gym or brighten your friend’s day. Connect with new people at your school or turn a missed connection into a new opportunity. We’ll also keep track of the most crushed on – so have fun crushing and getting crushed on!

Here’s how it works:

if you work at Google and have a @google.com email address, you simply enter your name and that email address, and then enter the email address of up to 5 other people that work at Google that you have a crush on. If one of those people also enters you as one of their crushes, you’ll be connected. If the person you added as a crush doesn’t add you back, your name will remain anonymous.

What are GoodCrush “Missed Connections”?

Missed connections are a way to anonymously reach out to the girl or guy you passed in the quad, exchanged glances with at the football game, or chatted with for not-long-enough at the party last night. They’ll check the page and you can turn a missed connection into a Good Connection. If you would like people to be able to respond to your post, login before posting. One real example of a missed connections post is: “Spotted: tall dark haired guy in red forbes hoodie. hottie “

Josh Weinstein started GoodCrush as a student government project as the former VP of USG at Princeton University. Now, there’s a few of us working on GoodCrush out of Manhattan.

To understand Microsoft’s approach to the market with Windows Phone Series 7, we need to examine the diametrically opposing ways its competitors develop products for the space. Apple epitomizes the closed approach. Google and the open source community, on the other hand, view smartphones as an open platform for design and innovation. While both approaches have merit, Apple’s move to drive software developers to write and support a specific OS has helped the company go from zero to 25 percent market share in less than three years. It has served the company well and has generated a lot of money for the developers of the iPhone’s more than 150,000 apps.

Google takes a vastly different approach. While the company does have a set of OS and UI guidelines for Android, its nature as an open source project means that companies can customize the operating system to help differentiate their version from the competition. This is a powerful approach, but it comes with some tricky issues for software developers. When I talk to app developers, they may complain about Apple’s App Store vetting process, but they all seem to hail the company’s SDK guidelines that force them to write to a single user interface and hardware specification. This means they can create applications faster. As long as they write to Apple’s iPhone conventions, their apps will work with the iPhone, iPod touch, and—soon—the iPad.

This isn’t always true for Android. Handset makers want to differentiate their devices from the competition, and in doing so, they may place hard-coded buttons one way and soft buttons another. Add the trend of making the UI touch-sensitive, and you have another layer of complexity. If a developer wants to write an app for Google’s Nexus One, their app has to be created specifically for that phone’s hardware and UI. If they want to create the app for the Motorola Droid, on the other hand, they may have to tweak it quite a bit.

Apple believes that the user should have a single UI on their device that can be used across similar devices, as part of a large ecosystem of products. On the other hand, while Android, mobile Linux, or even Nokia and Intel’s new Meego provide a solid open source approach to a powerful smartphone OS, the HTC Sense UI on the Hero phone is different that the UI on the Nexus One, forcing users to learn a new UI on each device.

In the tech community, we’re often hard on Apple or anyone who delivers a “closed” system. The one thing we often forget is the fact that most customers are much less enamored with UI choices. They want simplicity—products that are easy to use and consistent across platforms and devices. That’s a large part of the reason that Apple rose to a 25 percent market share so quickly. The iPhone is simple, easy to understand, and all of the apps work with the company’s uniform UI.

Microsoft is taking a page out of Apple’s playbook with Windows Phone Series 7. The company has delivered strict hardware and software guidelines to its partners. We won’t know the OS’s exact details until the MIX conference next month, but we can be sure that they will force all applications to be designed around a single hardware and software specification to ensure that any phone that has Windows Phone Series 7 on it will work the same. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer was asked how handset manufacturers can differentiate their products, given the strict guidelines. The details, he told the press, will be revealed at MIX. If we use the Windows PC as a guideline, however, the answer emerges. Windows PCs come in all manner of sizes, shapes, and designs.

Microsoft is at least two years behind Apple in the smartphone market. The company is doing the right thing by making sure all Windows phones work and act the same. Like Apple, it can give smartphone developers a single OS/UI to work with that will ensure that any app written for the OS will work on any phone designed for it. This strategy serves Microsoft well in its core enterprise markets. Windows phones have had success in this space, and if there’s one thing enterprise buyers want, it’s consistency. With Windows Phone 7, enterprise buyers will have plenty of choices for hardware and carriers, while maintaining a single OS and UI across the company.

These new devices won’t be out until Q4, so its too early to tell if Microsoft really has a winner on its hands. Given the fact that it is creating an easy to use platform that is also easy to develop for, Windows Phone Series 7 has the chance to become one of the major smartphone platforms. The attempt to recreate its successful PC OS model may be controversial, but it’s probably the best chance the company has for re-gaining ground in the mobile space.  (Courtesy: www.pcmag.com)

It said it would compete on price with other broadband providers offering much slower speeds. Google said the trial was about promoting killer apps that would take advantage of fast speeds. “We planning to build and test ultra high-speed broadband networks in a small number of trial locations across the United States,” the search giant said in its blog.

“We plan to offer service at a competitive price to at least 50,000 and potentially up to 500,000 people. We’ll deliver internet speeds more than 100 times faster than what most Americans have access to today,” it continued.

Growing Google
Google already has a fibre network which connects its data centres, speeds up search and lowers the cost of streaming video on YouTube. Now it plans to take this to the next stage and connect that network directly to consumers’ homes.

The network will be available for any service provider to use and Google is asking interested parties, from local government as well as members of the public, to sign up to the plan. The offer is part of Google’s expansion into controlling all aspects of a web user’s experience.

In late 2009 Google offered a service called public DNS, which it said would speed up web browsing for users. The domain name system is a series of databases that translate web addresses into computer readable numbers called IP addresses.

“The average Internet user ends up performing hundreds of DNS lookups each day, and some complex pages require multiple DNS lookups before they start loading,” Google wrote in a blog at the time. “This can slow down the browsing experience.” DNS requests are usually handled by a person’s Internet Service Provider (ISP).

In November 2009, the search giant also announced that it was working on a project to develop a faster version of http – which Google call SPDY – to speed up the transfer of content over the web. At the time, the firm said its lab tests had shown that web pages loaded “up to 55% faster” using the protocol.

Broadband expansion
The US, in common with countries around the world, is grappling with the best way to roll out next generation broadband. In the first month of his office President Obama promised to spend $7.2bn on new broadband infrastructure. The pot of money is available for smaller broadband providers and municipalities.

For Drew Clark, editor of US broadband comparison website BroadbandCensus, the impact of Google’s entry into the broadband market will depend on how many homes the network serves. “If it is 50,000 homes then that isn’t a lot. But if it is 500,000 then that is a statement to say it is in the market place competing with the likes of Verizon,” he said.

Verizon has made big investments in fibre networks, with plans to pass 18 million homes with its fibre-optic service by the end of the year.  Rival AT&T has 17 million households in its network but its fibre network does not run all the way to the home. Google said it hopes its fibre network will act as a testbed for new applications.

Andrew Ferguson, editor of UK broadband website ThinkBroadband speculated as to what some of those killer apps could be.

“One idea would be to expand Google Streetview, so that you can play a movie of a route you wanted to take, so that when you are visiting a brand new area you will have a much better understanding of the area than is possible from simple static street view maps,” he said. 

(Courtesy : BBC.co.uk)

Google Chrome online TV

Google is doing so many things. Everywhere in day to day life, we are using so many things related to google. Browsing, mapping, searching, earning with adsense, online shopping with google checkout… Oh god, it is really huge. But now, google has set a new era with google chrome Online TV, this small add-on icon allows you to watch TV directly from your Chrome browser, 100% free! Thousands of TV stations are waiting for you in this cool add-on, Probably the best way to watch live TV!

http://www.chromeonlinetv.com/ gives you an great add-one feature for those who love to watch “Idiot Box”, just like me.

To run the app, just go to m.google.com/voice in your mobile Web browser.

Features:

Free text messages :: Send and receive text messages through the Google Voice app for free.

Voicemail transcription :: Voicemails are automatically transcribed to text so you can read them like email.

Free text messages :: Send and receive text messages through the Google Voice app for free.

Cheap international calls :: Make low-priced international calls directly from your phone.

Integration :: Google Voice integrates with your phone’s native address book or Google Contacts.

Custom greetings :: Set up different greetings for different callers.

Dino Dai Zovi, a security researcher and co-author of The Mac Hacker’s Handbook , believes that the future of security relies on “sandboxing,” the practice of separating application processes from other applications, the operating system and user data.

In a Wednesday entry on Kaspersky Labs’ ThreatPost blog, Dai Zovi described sandboxing, as well as the lesser security technique of “privilege reduction,” as “[moving] the bull (untrusted data) from the china shop (your data) to the outside where it belongs (a sandbox).”

The idea behind sandboxing is to make it harder for attackers to get their malicious software onto machines. Even if an attacker was able to exploit a browser vulnerability and execute malware, he would still have to exploit another vulnerability in the sandbox technology to break into the operating system and, thus, get to the user’s data.

“Sandboxing raises the bar significantly enough that attackers will have to turn to other [types of attacks], like rogue anti-virus software,” Dai Zovi said today in a telephone interview.

The pervasiveness of Web-based attacks calls for browser sandboxing, Dai Zovi argued. “It’s crucially important because, in my opinion, the browser will become the OS,” he said. ” Google is the first to realize that the browser is the operating system, and Chrome is a huge leap forward with its ground-up rewrite.”

Chrome has included sandboxing since its September 2008 debut. And while Dai Zovi considers it easily the leader in security because of that, other browser have, or will, make their own stabs at reducing users’ risks.

For example, Microsoft ‘s Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) and IE8 on Vista and Windows 7 include a feature dubbed “Protected Mode,” which reduces the privileges of the application so that it’s difficult for attackers to write, alter or destroy data on the machine, or to install malware. But it’s not a true sandbox as far as Dai Zovi is concerned.

Currently, Mozilla’s Firefox, Apple ‘s Safari and Opera Software’s Opera lack any sandboxing or privilege reduction features. “Apple, for example, has implemented some sandboxing in Snow Leopard , but [although] security researchers were hoping to see some of that technology used in Safari, that hasn’t happened,” Dai Zovi said.

Mozilla is working on Chrome-like sandboxing for Firefox — the project’s dubbed “Electrolysis” — but the feature probably won’t make it into the browser until Firefox 4.0, which is now slated to ship in late 2010 or early 2011.

Dai Zovi sees browser sandboxing as an answer to the flood of exploits that have overwhelmed users in the past year. “This isn’t perfect, but it’s the direction we should be heading in,” he said. “The idea of fixing every vulnerability is clearly not working. We can’t always win the race to patch.”

But sandboxing, or at the least, reducing the browser’s ability to affect the rest of the OS, may be the way to block most attacks. “It adds more defense-in-depth and impedes attackers,” Dai Zovi said. (Courtesy : pcworld.com)

Size and weight

Height : 119mm

Width : 59.8mm

Depth : 11.5mm

Weight : 130 grams w/battery, 100g w/o battery

Display

3.7-inch (diagonal) widescreen WVGA AMOLED touchscreen

800 x 480 pixels

100,000:1 typical contrast ratio

1ms typical response rate

• Text REGISTER to BLOGGR to create your mobile blog. The text and/or photo in your message will be uploaded to that blog right away. We’ll message you back with the address, (so you can visit your new blog on the web) and a token (so you can claim your blog and access it from your account).
• OPTIONAL – If you feel like changing anything on your new mobile blog or if you already have a Blogger account and want the posts to go to your existing blog, you can log in to go.blogger.com and enter the token we sent to your phone. You’ll then have the option to claim your new mobile blog and merge it with your existing blog. Note to users whose blog address does not contain blogspot.com: Once you make the aforementioned switch, new mobile posts will be published to your chosen blog but mobile posts published prior to the switch will not be moved over automatically.

It was one of many to take Google to court for digitising its books without explicit permission. Google was also ordered to pay 10,000 euros a day until it removes extracts of the books from its database. Google expressed disappointment at the ruling.

“French readers now face the threat of losing access to a significant body of knowledge and falling behind the rest of internet users,” said a spokesman for the firm. Serge Eyrolles, head of the French publisher’s union Syndicat National de l’Edition, said he was “completely satisfied with the verdict”.  “It shows Google that they are not the kings of the world and they can’t do whatever they want,” he said. Google wants to scan millions of books to make them available online.

This court case will be seen as a victory for critics of the plan who fear Google is creating a monopoly over information. Publisher Herve de La Martiniere launched his court case three years ago but Google continued to scan books during this period.

La Martiniere, the French Publishers’ Association and authors’ group SGDL who started the court battle initially demanded that Google be fined 15m euros (£13.2m). The book publishers claimed that scanning books was an act of reproduction and, as such, was something that should be paid for. Google’s plans to establish a digital library have hit several buffers.

It agreed to a settlement with US authors and publishers but is renegotiating after the US Justice Department concluded that the deal violates anti-trust law.
(Courtesy: bbc.co.uk)

Google has found the solution in Gmail for this kind of problem. Managing a big address book can be a challenge, so it’s no surprise that the top request for Google contacts is a fast, easy way to merge duplicate contacts. You’ve been able to merge contacts one-by-one for a while, but now we’ve added a single button that merges all your duplicate contacts at once. To clean up your contact list in one fell swoop, just click the “Find duplicates” button in the contact manager, review the merge suggestions (and uncheck any suggestions you don’t want merged), and hit the “Merge” button.

In an interview aired by CNBC on Sunday, the Google boss insisted that anyone who worries about Mountain View retaining personal data must be guilty of improper behavior. “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place,” he said.

“If you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines – including Google – do retain this information for some time and it’s important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act and it is possible that all that information could be made available to the authorities.”

In a post to his personal blog Thursday morning, ten-year Mozilla vet Asa Dotzler quoted Schmidt in full before indicating that he’s not too happy with the Googler’s haughty take on data retention.

“That was Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google, telling you exactly what he thinks about your privacy,” Dotzler says, after quoting the Google boss. “There is no ambiguity, no ‘out of context’ here.”

Then he pointed Firefox users to an add-on that inserts Bing into the browser’s built-in list of search engines.

“Here’s how you can easily switch Firefox’s search from Google to Bing. (Yes, Bing does have a better privacy policy than Google),” Dotzler said. The links are his.

Dotzler was part of the tiny Mozilla team that founded the Firefox project back in 2002. The project was originally known as Phoenix, a standalone open source browser that would rise from the ashes of Netscape. It was specifically designed to battle back against the Microsoft borg, which had commandeered 95 per cent of the browser market through, shall we say, less-than-fair methods.

Speaking before the fifth anniversary of the browser’s official debut, Dotzler showed signs of Mozilla’s usual contempt for Redmond. But following Google’s shock entry into the browser market in the fall of 2008, Mozilla has exhibited a certain chilliness towards Google as well, and Dotzler wasn’t shy about it.

“Google is essentially an advertising company. That’s where they make their money. They provide a wonderful service – primarily their search service – but it serves their advertising goals. It serves their revenue goals. The more they can know about their users, the more effective they believe they can advertise, the more money they believe they can make. That is most fundamental.”

He even indicted that Mozilla would work to boost traffic to alternative search engines via Firefox.

But today’s blog post is still a tad unexpected. It’s not just that Microsoft is traditionally Mozilla’s mortal enemy. According to the open source outfit’s latest financial statements, Google supplies 91 per cent of Mozilla’s revenues.

Since 2004, an agreement between the two organizations gives Mozilla a portion of all Google search cash generated by Firefox traffic. In the US and Western Europe, you’ll notice that Google is the default home – the default search bar in the top right hand corner of the browser.

Last month, Dotzler seemed confident that the financial relationship between the two won’t change anytime soon. “We need the revenue,” he told us, “and they need the traffic.” And he made a point of saying that when it comes to questionable web behavior, Google is no Microsoft.

That was meant as Google praise. But it would appear that as of today, those words could be read quite differently. As Firefox celebrated its fifth birthday, we spoke of a Cold War between Mozilla and Google. But now we wonder if the chilliness has escalated to something else entirely. (Courtesy : theregister.co.uk)

Each living story resides at a permanent URL, making it easier to follow the latest updates to the stories that interest you, as well as review deeper background materials that are relevant for a story’s context. Living Stories automatically track your interaction with the story, making sure that you are always presented with the news you need, the way you want it.

You can read full articles and browse multimedia without ever leaving the Living Story page. Just expand the content you want to see, and minimize it when you’re done. Whether you want a short update, deep analysis, feature stories, video, or important quotes, everything related to the story is on the Living Story page.

Google has developed the Chrome’s beta version for Mac and Linux. Google has written in its post about the new Chrome beta. Google launched this beta version as a Holiday Chrome package. Google Chrome for Mac (Beta)
We’ve been working hard to deliver a first-class browser for the Mac — it took longer than we expected, but we hope the wait was worth it! We wanted Google Chrome to feel at home on the Mac, so we’ve focused on uniting our clean, simple design with subtle animations and effects to create a snappy and satisfying browsing experience on OS X. As you might expect, the speed of Google Chrome for Mac is something we’re very proud of. If you have a Mac, try installing the beta and see how fast it launches — there’s hardly even time for the icon in the dock to bounce!

Google Chrome for Linux (Beta)
At Google, most engineers use Linux machines, so we certainly heard loud and clear how much they wanted Google Chrome for Linux. Just like Google Chrome for Windows and Mac, we focused on speed, stability and security, but we also wanted a high-performance browser that integrated well with the Linux ecosystem. This includes tight integration with native GTK themes, updates that are managed by the standard system package manager, and many other features that fit in natively with the operating system where possible.

Until now, you would have had to comb through dozens of webpages to compile the information. With Google Squared, all you have to do is type the search box at http://www.google.com/squared and thats all. you can get all the information on a single page.

You can modify your square by removing rows and columns you don’t like–or by adding new rows and columns and having Google Squared attempt to fetch the relevant facts. Verify and correct the facts in your square by exploring the original sources and investigating other possible values. If you’re happy with your square you can save it and come back to it later. Google Squared does the grunt work for you, making research fast and easy.
Google Squared is still in an experimental phase at this point, so you might encounter some hiccups while using it.

The Californian search engine is part of a consortium that confirmed its plans to install the new Southeast Asia Japan Cable (SJC) yesterday, the centrepiece of a $400m (£245m) project that will create the highest capacity system ever built.
Google is undertaking the scheme with a number of Asian telecommunications companies, including Japan’s KDDI and India’s Reliance Globalcom. The agreement to build the submarine cable was first proposed three years ago, but negotiations finally came to a close on Wednesday as officials signed what they promised was a groundbreaking deal.

“We will now be uniquely positioned to provide our customers voice, internet and data services across the entire Asian continent,” said Punit Garg, the chief executive of Reliance.

When it opens for business in 2012, the SJC will run 3,000 miles from Singapore to Japan – with branches reaching out to Hong Kong, the Philippines, Thailand and Guam. In total, it will consist of more than 5,000 miles of cable, sunk deep under the seabed.

The move is intended to boost the amount of capacity available for phone calls and internet traffic by bringing new. In turn, this should ease any potential congestion and make it easier for communications traffic to route around the world.

The SJC is set to break records by allowing up to 17 terabits of data to be sent every second – the equivalent of around 250m telephone lines, and large enough to allow the contents of every single book in the British Library to be transferred 20 times per second.

And as if that was not enough, the line is also upgradeable and could eventually run as fast as 23Tbps – space for another 88m phone lines.

It is not the first time that Google has made significant investments in the physical infrastructure that underpins the internet.

Recently, the company took a leading role in developing a parallel project to build the $300m Unity cable, which will run a high-capacity line from Japan to Los Angeles.

Demand for connectivity has grown drastically in recent years, thanks to increased internet traffic. Research company TeleGeography pinned annual growth between 2002 and 2007 at around 63% per year, and expects demand to double each year until 2012.

Earlier this year a new line running into east Africa was finally completed, promising to bring improved broadband to countries including Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and South Africa. (Courtesy: guardian.co.uk)

Google is waiting to see the greatest experiments on Chromium OS, which is absolutely free and complete open source.