Category Archives: Google

Obama’s antitrust nominee: “Microsoft is so last century”

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From Microsoft’s local paper.

According to Bloomberg News, Christine Varney, who President Barack Obama has nominated to be the next antitrust chief, is not so concerned about Microsoft’s market position.

“For me, Microsoft is so last century. They are not the problem,” Varney said at a panel discussion sponsored by the American Antitrust Institute in June, according to the Bloomberg report. The U.S. economy will “continually see a problem — potentially with Google” because it already “has acquired a monopoly in Internet online advertising,” she said.

“When all our enterprises move to computing in the clouds and there is a single firm that is offering a comprehensive solution,” Varney said, “you are going to see the same repeat of Microsoft.”

Varney’s view is clearly good news for Redmond, which already seemed to be in favor with the Bush Justice Department. Google and Yahoo abandoned their advertising deal last fall after the Department of Justice said it would file an antitrust lawsuit to block it. Microsoft had lobbied against the deal.

Thanks to Rex Hughes for spotting it.

Google blacklists entire internet

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From Observer.co.uk.

Google placed the internet on a blacklist today after a mistake caused every site in the search engine’s result pages to be marked as potentially harmful and dangerous.

The problem affected internet pages across the whole planet, and lasted for around 40 minutes before engineeers were able to fix it.

The glitch centred on Google's malware detector, which is designed to keep internet users from visiting sites Google believes may install malicious software when users browse them. Google blamed “human error” when an engineer tried to add one web address to the list of those deemed suspicious, and mistakenly added them all.

“We periodically receive updates to that list and received one such update to release on the site this morning. Unfortunately (and here’s the human error), the URL of ‘/’ was mistakenly checked in as a value to the file and ‘/’ expands to all URLs. Fortunately, our on-call site reliability team found the problem quickly and reverted the file,” Google said in its official blog.

The incident occurred at around 2.40pm.

Phew! I thought it was just me.

If Google were a country…

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Jeff Jarvis musing in Business Week along the lines of his forthcoming book.

To summarize if not oversimplify their vantage points: Where Gore demands taxes and regulation, the Google team proposes invention and investment. Gore & Co. want to raise the cost of carbon—the cost of polluting—whereas the Google team wants to lower the cost of energy, producing clean electricity for less than the cost of power generated with coal. RE

Still, we see different worldviews at work. "You can't succeed just out of conservation because then you won't have economic development," Google.org head Larry Brilliant said. "Find a way to make electricity—not to cut back on it but to have more of it than you ever dreamed of." More power than you ever dreamed of. Create and manage abundance rather than control scarcity—as ever, that is the Google approach. Whereas Gore talks about what we shouldn't do, Google talks about what we can do. There, we see the contrast between the politician's brain and the engineer's. Google people start with a problem and look for a solution. They identify a need, find an opportunity, and then systemically, logically, and aggressively attack it with innovation.

In power or not, Google and the Internet will have a profound impact on how government is run, on its relationship with us, and on our expectations of it. Now that we have the technological means to open up government and make every action transparent, we must insist on a new ethic of openness. I say we should abolish the Freedom of Information Act so we can turn it inside out. Why should we have to ask for information from our government? The government should have to ask to keep it from us.

Offline Gmail

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Google’s begun to roll out an experimental feature in Gmail Labs — offline Gmail. Here’s how the Google Blog describes it.

Once you turn on this feature, Gmail uses Gears to download a local cache of your mail. As long as you’re connected to the network, that cache is synchronized with Gmail’s servers. When you lose your connection, Gmail automatically switches to offline mode, and uses the data stored on your computer’s hard drive instead of the information sent across the network. You can read messages, star and label them, and do all of the things you’re used to doing while reading your webmail online. Any messages you send while offline will be placed in your outbox and automatically sent the next time Gmail detects a connection. And if you’re on an unreliable or slow connection (like when you’re ‘borrowing’ your neighbor’s wireless), you can choose to use ‘flaky connection mode’, which is somewhere in between: it uses the local cache as if you were disconnected, but still synchronizes your mail with the server in the background. Our goal is to provide nearly the same browser-based Gmail experience whether you’re using the data cached on your computer or talking directly to the server.

Hmmm… Wonder how big the cache would have to be for my gmail box.

The downside of Web 2.0

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Hmmm… It’s really tough. On the one hand, one cannot run a business nowadays without taking Google into account. On the other hand, one can’t build a business that depends on Google.

A number of Google services just announced that they are about to shut down. The Google Video team announced that it will shut down uploads in a few months, while the Google Notebook team announced that it is stopping development the service will continue to function, however. According to Danny Sullivan, Google is also closing Jaiku, a Twitter-like micro-blogging service that was bought by Google before it even launched, but which has lingered in invite-only mode ever since. Google Catalog search, which made shopping catalogs searchable, will also be closed soon.

Update: Google will release the Jaiku code under the open source Apache license, so that other organizations can pick up where the Google team left off. It is not clear if current users will be able to transfer their accounts.

Googling vs boiling (contd)

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From Nicholas Carr’s Blog.

Still, the numbers add up. Google says "the average car driven for one kilometer … produces as many greenhouse gases as a thousand Google searches." That means that the billion searches Google is estimated to do a day are equivalent to driving a car about a million kilometers. And that doesn't include the energy used to power the PCs of the people doing the searches, which Google says is greater than the power it uses.

Googling vs boiling (contd)

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The Google Blog response to those stories about the carbon costs of a Google search.

Recently, though, others have used much higher estimates, claiming that a typical search uses "half the energy as boiling a kettle of water" and produces 7 grams of CO2. We thought it would be helpful to explain why this number is *many* times too high. Google is fast — a typical search returns results in less than 0.2 seconds. Queries vary in degree of difficulty, but for the average query, the servers it touches each work on it for just a few thousandths of a second. Together with other work performed before your search even starts (such as building the search index) this amounts to 0.0003 kWh of energy per search, or 1 kJ. For comparison, the average adult needs about 8000 kJ a day of energy from food, so a Google search uses just about the same amount of energy that your body burns in ten seconds.

In terms of greenhouse gases, one Google search is equivalent to about 0.2 grams of CO2. The current EU standard for tailpipe emissions calls for 140 grams of CO2 per kilometer driven, but most cars don't reach that level yet. Thus, the average car driven for one kilometer (0.6 miles for those of in the U.S.) produces as many greenhouse gases as a thousand Google searches.

Thanks to Jack Schofield for spotting it.

BlackBerry redux

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Sigh. My Google phone is on its way back to T-Mobile. I write this with some regret, because I had high hopes for it. My GPRS BlackBerry (which is by far the best phone I’ve ever had) was beginning to show signs of physical collapse. And I was really tired of trying to access Google via GPRS, which was like going back to the bad old days of dial-up modems. So I thought: what I need is a proper 3G phone.

But which one? The BlackBerry Storm was considered and discarded, even before Stephen Fry demolished it. To me, it looked like something rushed out to compete with the iPhone, but without proper testing. As an iTouch user, I knew and liked the iPhone interface, but felt that I ought to make a stand because of its non-generativity (to use Jonathan Zittrain’s phrase). So how about the Google Android phone?

Research showed that it was offered by T-Mobile (my network provider). And it met Jonathan’s requirement for open-ness. So I ordered one.

It seemed slick enough at first sight. Setting it up to link with my Google account was a breeze. And it had a real QWERTY keyboard, accessible by sliding the screen up, thus:

The keyboard, though small, was useable in twin-thumb mode, just as the Psion PDAs used to be.

So how was it in practice? Answer: mixed. Very mixed. Battery life (like that of the iPhone) is abysmal if one has the phone permanently online, so I turned everything off and just synchronised Gmail when I needed to update. The camera is, well, dire. The GPS facility is good — really good, actually; but it positively eats battery-life. All of which tended to reduce the phone to a rather more humdrum piece of kit. The biggest problem was that its methods of indicating that messages have arrived was, for me, useless — especially compared with the BlackBerry’s ways of doing things. I need to know instantly when messages have arrived — especially when the phone is on silent. (I spend a lot of time in meetings.)

Composing and typing SMS messages on the G-phone is a tedious palaver. First you have to swing out the screen so that you can type. This requires two hands. So effectively texting on the move is difficult/impossible.

The Android software seems stable and effective. The Apps available on the open ‘market’ are, however, pretty tame compared with what’s available for the iPhone. This may change in time and more handsets become available and the commercial opportunities for Android Apps begins to build. But for now the first G-phone available on the UK market is IMHO just an unsatisfactory beta. If it had come out before the iPhone we would have regarded it as a small miracle. But now it doesn’t cut the mustard. What Android really needs is a slick handset from Nokia or Sony-Ericsson.

So I’m returning to the BlackBerry fold. What the episode has taught me is that easy, efficient SMS and email are the key things I need, plus occasional 3G-speed access to web sites.

Ironically, I will be acquiring a new BlackBerry just as Barack Obama has to surrender his.