The PC Informant » Google

Videos about Google services

Vic Laurie — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 10:01:42 +0000

Google has made some videos to explain a little bit about how its services work. The videos are pretty elementary but they are short so you might take a look.

How search works:

How search ads work:

How Google Apps work:

Does Google’s search algorithm rule the Web?

Vic Laurie — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 09:56:43 +0000

That’s the thesis of a Wired Magazine article by Steven Levy. Before Google, there were many search engines. But the search algorithms of Google made a difference. Somehow Google searches were faster and more accurate. And Google grew and grew. The search algorithms also change constantly. As Google amassed greater and greater databases, it kept tweaking its algorithms to match the way people search. In fact, the average searcher does not formulate a search query with any great skill and Google’s forte is figuring out what the searcher actually wants. Misspelled words, mistaken syntax, Google takes it all in and does a remarkable job of interpreting what you really meant. One thing that has come out of the mountains of data that Google has accumulated is the power of really large databases, something that researchers in science and other disciplines are beginning to appreciate.

Levy’s article discusses how Google works. Here is an example excerpt:

And Google keeps improving. Recently, search engineer Maureen Heymans discovered a problem with “Cindy Louise Greenslade.” The algorithm figured out that it should look for a person — in this case a psychologist in Garden Grove, California — but it failed to place Greenslade’s homepage in the top 10 results. Heymans found that, in essence, Google had downgraded the relevance of her homepage because Greenslade used only her middle initial, not her full middle name as in the query. “We needed to be smarter than that,” Heymans says. So she added a signal that looks for middle initials. Now Greenslade’s homepage is the fifth result.

At any moment, dozens of these changes are going through a well-oiled testing process. Google employs hundreds of people around the world to sit at their home computer and judge results for various queries, marking whether the tweaks return better or worse results than before. But Google also has a larger army of testers — its billions of users, virtually all of whom are unwittingly participating in its constant quality experiments. Every time engineers want to test a tweak, they run the new algorithm on a tiny percentage of random users, letting the rest of the site’s searchers serve as a massive control group. There are so many changes to measure that Google has discarded the traditional scientific nostrum that only one experiment should be conducted at a time. “On most Google queries, you’re actually in multiple control or experimental groups simultaneously,” says search quality engineer Patrick Riley. Then he corrects himself. “Essentially,” he says, “all the queries are involved in some test.” In other words, just about every time you search on Google, you’re a lab rat.

Google everywhere

Vic Laurie — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 10:06:02 +0000

No longer just a search engine, Google seems to be everywhere. In fact, the word “empire” is an apt description. Just how apt is described by the following video clip. It shows how Google has expanded into omnipresence:

Why your search results may differ from someone else’s

Vic Laurie — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 10:26:17 +0000

That search engines want to tailor your search results according to personal preferences is not news. They’ve been doing that through cookies for some time. But you may be surprised by the extent that searches are personalized. According to a post at the Register, Google says that it is using a combination of things to personalize about 20% of searches:

Speaking this afternoon at the search-obsessed SMX West conference in Santa Clara, Horling – a developer with Google’s personalized search team – said that up to one in five searches are tailored to the user’s particular location, web history, or online contacts. “As it stands today,” Horling explained, “between these three techniques, just about every user who’s engaging with Google search today is affected.”

All about Google

Vic Laurie — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 10:41:57 +0000

Google is so often in the news that I could write about the company and nothing else. Here is a list of some of the latest about Google:

Does Google Make Us Stupid?
Majority answering Pew Research survey say “no” but vocal minority (21%) says “yes”.
Top ten Google settings you should know about
Lifehacker selection.
Introducing Google Maps Labs, your passport to a world of new features
Experimental features for Google Maps.
How Google Buzz for mobile will change your life
In his Computerworld column, Mike Elgan writes,”For people with the latest iPhone or Android phone, Google Buzz will soon become an amazing, indispensable app — and a glimpse into the future for all of us.”
Google Buzz Isn’t Exactly Humming Along
Katherine Boehret talks about Google Buzz at All Things Digital.
Google gets go-ahead to buy, sell energy
FERC approves Google application to be an energy company.

Hack attacks on Google traced to Chinese schools

Vic Laurie — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 20:39:33 +0000

The New York Times reports:

A series of online attacks on Google and dozens of other American corporations have been traced to computers at two educational institutions in China, including one with close ties to the Chinese military, say people involved in the investigation.

In addition, Computerworld reports:

One of two Chinese academic institutions identified in a New York Times report Thursday as the apparent source of the recent attacks against Google, has also been linked to a hacker who may have been involved with the takedown of whitehouse.gov in 2001.

Google Buzz makes privacy advocates irate

Vic Laurie — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 21:46:52 +0000

Google’s venture into social networking that it calls “Buzz” is creating a different kind of buzz than Google intended. The New York Times reports:

When Google introduced Buzz — its answer to Facebook and Twitter — it hoped to get the service off to a fast start. New users of Buzz, which was added to Gmail on Tuesday, found themselves with a ready-made network of friends automatically selected by the company based on the people that each user communicated with most frequently through Google’s e-mail and chat services.

But what Google viewed as an obvious shortcut stirred up a beehive of angry critics. Many users bristled at what they considered an invasion of privacy, and they faulted the company for failing to ask permission before sharing a person’s Buzz contacts with a broad audience. For the last three days, Google has faced a firestorm of criticism on blogs and Web sites, and it has already been forced to alter some features of the service.

Update 02/14/10: Google has responded quickly to the criticism about privacy and has made changes in Buzz. The New York Times reports:

Google moved quickly to contain a firestorm of criticism over Buzz, its new social network, taking the unusual step of announcing changes to the product over the weekend to address privacy problems.

Late Saturday, Todd Jackson, product manager for Gmail and Google Buzz, wrote in a blog post that Google had decided to alter one of the most vehemently criticized features in Buzz: the ready-made circle of friends that Buzz gives new users based on their most frequent e-mail and chat contacts. Now, instead of automatically connecting people, Buzz merely suggests to new users a group of people that they may want to follow or want to be followed by.

Google announced at the Google Blog:

We’ve heard your feedback loud and clear, and since we launched Google Buzz four days ago, we’ve been working around the clock to address the concerns you’ve raised. Today, we wanted to let you know about a number of changes we’ll be making over the next few days based on all the feedback we’ve received.

Google to be an ISP?

Vic Laurie — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 10:24:07 +0000

Google wants to set up an experimental network with the blazing speed of 1 gigabit/sec. The Official Google Blog says:

We’re planning to build and test ultra high-speed broadband networks in a small number of trial locations across the United States. We’ll deliver Internet speeds more than 100 times faster than what most Americans have access to today with 1 gigabit per second, fiber-to-the-home connections. We plan to offer service at a competitive price to at least 50,000 and potentially up to 500,000 people.

In an interview at GigaOm, Google product manager Minnie Ingersoll is quoted as denying that Google wants to be a nationwide ISP. She says:

We are not planning to roll out a nationwide ISP network. This is a test bed for innovation.

Google Buzz

Vic Laurie — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 15:29:34 +0000

So far, Google has not been much of a player in the social network scene but it is trying to get in the game with something called “Google Buzz”. The Google Operating System blog has some details.

The different ways Google and Microsoft do marketing

Vic Laurie — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 20:05:37 +0000

I have always been baffled by Microsoft marketing. Sometimes it has struck me as being designed by teenagers doing a high school course project. And Microsoft always seems to be assuming that the audience is pretty dumb. Now I realize that most advertising is pretty dumb but a lot of Microsoft customers are highly trained professionals. So you would think that Microsoft would not talk down to us the way it does. I have posted about Microsoft advertising before and I was reminded of the subject by a post from Matt Asay at CNET. He contrasts the style of advertising done by Microsoft with that of Google. He concludes:

Microsoft still fixates on making itself the center of the user’s universe, while Google gets out of the way so that users can experience the Web. It’s perhaps not surprising, therefore, that Google is the one growing and innovating strongly, while Microsoft keeps milking businesses first launched decades ago.