Category Archives: Google

Google enters the presidential race

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It seems that all the US presidential hopefuls have visited Google’s HQ. According to the New York Times,

The proceedings at Google are not unremittingly serious affairs. Mr. Schmidt asked Senator McCain, “How do you determine good ways of sorting one million 32-bit integers in two megabytes of RAM?” Immediately signaling that the question was asked in jest, Mr. Schmidt moved on. Six months later, Senator Obama faced the same question, but his staff had prepared him. When he replied in fluent tech-speak (“A bubble sort is the wrong way to go”), the quip brought down the house…

Note for non-techies: a bubble sort is a sorting algorithm which works by repeatedly stepping through the list to be sorted, comparing two items at a time and swapping them if they are in the wrong order. The pass through the list is repeated until no swaps are needed, which indicates that the list is sorted. The name comes from the fact that smaller numbers effectively ‘bubble’ to the top.

Aside: There’s something vaguely comical (and intrinsically pathetic) about politicians’ needs to associate themselves with what they perceive as the ‘leading edge’ du jour. The NYT piece points out that in the old days all presidential hopefuls went to visit General Motors. Now it’s Google.

And here’s another funny thing: ten years ago, Microsoft was perceived (by politicians, anyway) as the leading edge and so they all traipsed to Redmond. It’s interesting that the Cameroonian Tories have taken great care to associate themselves not with the world’s leading monopolist but with Google (CEO Eric Schmidt was invited to their annual conference). In contrast, Gordon Brown (who was the driving force behind the idea of giving Bill Gates a knighthood) probably still thinks that Microsoft is the big deal. The irony, of course, is that Google is all set to become, as it were, the next Microsoft.

Pollution 2.0

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MapEcos is very interesting — an application that superimposes location and emission data on Google maps. Go to a location and see where the local polluters are. Click on one of them and up pops date from the EPA database.

It works only for the US at present, but it’s a really neat application of Web 2.0 tools.

What If Gmail had been designed by Microsoft?

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This is lovely.

Today I want to ponder the question: what if Microsoft, not Google, had created Gmail? What would be the differences in that web mail client for users today? What if we apply some of the same design rules that brought us Hotmail, for instance?

Read on. Great illustrations. Reminds me of the spoof put together by Microsoft folks meditating on what the iPod packaging would be like if done by Redmond.

Google is fifth most valuable company

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From the New York Times Blog…

Much is made of round numbers. And so there will be some discussion today of Google’s stock hitting $700 a share.

That big-sounding number itself, of course, is testament to nothing more than the company’s founders’ insistence on not splitting its stock. It does show that Google’s value has increased more than eight times since its initial public offering three years ago.

But the most interesting number is Google’s market capitalization — the value of all of its shares combined. Henry Blodget of Silicon Alley Insider does a little fast fingering to calculate that with the $20 jump in Google’s stock in the last two days, its market value is now about $217 billion. That ranks it the fifth most valuable company in the country.

Most valuable are Exxon Mobil, General Electric, Microsoft, and AT&T. Google has now become worth more than Procter & Gamble, Bank of America and Citigroup. Google of course is a lot smaller than the companies it passed. P&G, for example, has nearly eight times the revenue and three times the profit of Google. But of course Google is growing far, far faster.

The Googlebrain

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Mike Burrows, Google’s Principal Engineer, came to the Cambridge Computer Lab on Wednesday to give a talk on “The Chubby Lock Service for Loosely-Coupled Distributed Systems”, a large-scale distributed lock service used in several Google products. This is a gig he’s done before, but it was interesting to see him in action. As he was talking, the thought that came to mind was that Google has two main advantages over the competition: one is the PageRank algorithm; the other is its ability to manage the Googleplex — the enormous, distributed computing resource that the company owns and operates. Mike’s work is a key element in the latter.

Apple now bigger than IBM

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Hmmm… From Good Morning Silicon Valley…

Ask people these days who Big Brother symbolized in Apple’s classic “1984″ commercial, and a goodly number of folks are liable to say Microsoft. But 23 years ago, the target of Apple’s hammer-wielding freedom fighter was IBM, the PC market leader at the time. So it must have been with an exhilarating sense of satisfaction that Steve Jobs and the Apple brass watched another dazzling set of quarterly financials push the company’s stock price up to around $187 a share today, vaulting Apple’s market cap past IBM’s by about $6 billion.

And while Google-watchers go gaga over its soaring share price (see “A six-letter word for bubble? Try gasbag“), note that an investor who bought Apple on the same day Google stock debuted in 2004 would have, as of the close of market yesterday, made 40 percent more than if the same money had been put into the search sovereign’s shares.

The future of personal computing

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According to Nicholas Carr, it’s captured in a single simple equation: Google plus Apple.

The future of personal computing was divulged by Mr. Eric Schmidt, the chief executive officer of Google, on March 23 of this year during an interview with Wired’s Fred Vogelstein. Vogelstein asked Schmidt why he had recently joined Apple’s board of directors, and Schmidt responded:

“Google’s architectural model around broadband and services and so forth plays very well to the powerful devices and services Apple is doing. We’re a perfect back end to the problems that they’re trying to solve. And they have very good judgment on user interface and people. They don’t have this supercomputer I’m talking about, which is the data centers.”

At this very moment, in a building somewhere in Silicon Valley, I guarantee you that a team of engineers from Google and Apple are designing a set of devices that, hooked up as terminals to Google’s “supercomputer,” will define how we use computers in the future. You can see various threads of this system today – in Apple’s iPhone and iPod Touch, its dot-mac service, its iLife and iWork applications as well as in Google’s Apps suite and advertising system, not to mention its vast data-center network. What this team is doing right now is weaving all those threads together into what will be, for most of us, the fabric of cloud computing. (This is so big, you need at least two metaphors to describe it.)

Damn. I’m going to have to get an iPhone…

The looming Google threat

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Microsoft used to be the big threat, but it’s fading as the importance of the platform erodes. I’ve been saying for years that Google will be an even bigger public-policy problem than Microsoft ever was. Jeff Jarvis seems to agree and explains why:

Consumers, as we used to be called, won’t support media and journalism with their money. Advertising will. We will become entirely dependent on advertising. And what happens when Google controls the majority of online ad revenue in this country? They’re headed there, for as a TechCrunch commenter points out, Google’s online ad revenue and share of revenue are growing faster than online advertising as a whole.

On the one hand, we should be grateful to Google for enabling the support of much new media. On the other hand, we should fear teh the vice in which Google holds our privates. That’s where media power is consolidating — not in old conglomerates (some of which now depend for a good bit of revenue on who? — on Google.)

I’m not blaming Google for getting to this point. Big, old media handed them this opportunity on a platter. Google was the one company that truly understood the economics of the open network. It understood that it could grow much bigger enabling than controlling. We in media should have followed that model. We should have asked WWGD. What would Google do?

So what do we do now? We need new networks that identify and create new marketplaces for new value — greater value than the coincidence of words on a page, which Google sells. We need to create our own high-value networks (e.g., hyperlocal news). We need open networks that compete with the closed aspects of Google; openness is water to the witch of an opaque network like Google’s.

Why Did Google Buy Jaiku?

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According to Technology Review, it’s all about mobile phones.

The terms of the deal haven’t been announced, but regardless of Jaiku’s price tag, the purchase could be a significant one. Google has long been rumored to be working on a mobile phone, or “gPhone”; Jaiku was originally developed as software for cell phones, and one of the company’s cofounders, Jyri Engeström, was a product manager at Nokia.

While Google has refused to comment directly on whether it’s developing mobile-phone products, its activities over the past few months indicate that it is. Google has announced its intention to bid on a large swath of spectrum in early 2008; it has acquired a mobile-phone software startup, Android, based in Palo Alto, CA; and in a handful of public statements, representatives of the company have alluded to trying to make the mobile experience better. When asked for comment, Google referred to its public statement about the purchase: “Although we don’t have definite plans to announce at this time, we’re excited about helping to drive the next round of developments in Web and mobile technology.”

Hmmm… Pure speculation, of course.

Google now accounts for half of all web searches

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From the Telegraph…

Google was used for over half of the world’s 61 billion internet searches in the month of August, according to a report.

The US search engine powered 31 billion queries during the month, say the web analysts comScore.

Google sites recorded 37 bn searches in August

In total more than 37 billion searches were carried out across all Google sites.

Google-owned video-sharing phenomenon YouTube scored 5 billion searches in August.

Second on the list was Yahoo!, another US-based search engine, which was a long way behind Google with 8.5 billion searches recorded across the month.

Third was the Chinese search engine Baidu with 3.2 million searches, followed by all Microsoft sites, such as MSN, with 2.1 billion. Fifth was Korea’s NHN, with 2 billion.

ComScore’s Bob Ivins said: “Seeing Asian search engines like China’s Baidu.com and Korea’s NHN ranked alongside Google and Yahoo! underscores the fact that search has become a truly global phenomenon.”

The report is billed as “the first comprehensive study of worldwide search activity”.

It also revealed that the Asia-Pacific region, including China, Japan and India, contained the greatest number of unique searchers, with 258 million conducting over 20 billion searches during the month.

Second was Europe with 210 million searchers making 18 billion searches, followed by North America, with 206 million making 16 billion searches.

The most underdeveloped area in terms of web searches was the Middle East-Africa region, with 30 million recording 2 billion searches…