Google’s I/O conference for developers has been taking place in the States this week, and along with some major predictions for Android, Google’s unveiled a powerful new platform, Google Wave, that brings every type of messaging under one roof.

Google Wave works on the premise that email is old fashioned (And it is decades old): instead of being limited to text directed to specific people in advance, you can now send Waves. They’re like tweets, emails and collaborative documents combined, which can be edited in realtime, and later people invited to view them can look back at what’s been happening already. You can send out event invitations, play games, and - one in the eye for Facebook - drag and drop photos into a Wave straight from your hard drive: thumbnails appear in the conversations instantly, with the pictures loading quickly behind them.
All your Google contacts are available on the left hand side (You can bring in other contacts too), and you can drag and drop participants in a Google Wave conversation. You can even see people’s messages being typed out letter by letter, so you can reply even faster.

It’s similar to what programs like Seesmic Desktop are doing by bringing Twitter and Facebook accounts into one window, but it’s all in your browser (Yup, that means Mac support), and offers far more scope. Google has just opened up the API for developers, meaning that all sorts of services can be synced with Google Wave - and it can be embedded just about anywhere too. There’s already a Twitter gadget for it called Twave, and you can bet everything from Digg to The Telegraph will be jostling to get in on it, while it threatens to make old fashioned forums completely and utterly obsolete.

Will it work? It’s made by the engineers behind Google Maps, so you know what they’re capable of. Google Wave will be out later this year, but if you just can’t wait, the whole Google Wave unveiling and demo video is below for you to watch. It’s pretty lengthy (80 minutes), but well worth a watch: this could be as big as email one day.

Source: mirror.co.uk

Google, the world leader of innovation has done it again. This time they have launched an online service designed to facilitate the addition of various Google features onto your own webpage. Examples including Google Maps, Google News feeds, and YouTube videos.

Google I/O developer introduced during their conference in downtown San Francisco, the new online service - dubbed Google Web Elements, which lets you add Google services to a page by cutting and pasting pre-defined code snippets.

“Google Web Elements bring Google products to people’s web pages using copy and paste,” said DeWitt Clinton, technical manager of Google’s developer relations team. “We’ve seen this for years with YouTube videos, with AdSense. But what we’ve done with this launch is do this across a broader range of products.”

Currently the service offers tools for hooking your site into Google Search, Calendar, Maps, News, spreadsheets and presentations built with Docs and Spreadsheets, YouTube video news feeds, and a Conversation tool that handles site comments. Web Elements adds a handful of brand-new cut-and-paste tools and puts the lot in a single place.

Google’s mission statement is, to organize the world information and make it universally accessible and useful. Few companies follow through with their mission as well as Google.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin created Google on the hypothesis that a search engine that analyzed the relationships between the different websites could get better results than the techniques in that currently existed, which essentially ranked results according to the number of times the search term appeared on a page. They called it Backrub in the beginning due to the fact that the system used back links to estimate a websites importance.

In 2000, Google launched its advertising creation, Ad Words. For a monthly fee, Google offered to both set up and then manage a clients advertising campaign. Ad Words is able to define several important factors in keywords when and ad is first created to determine how much a client will pay-per-click, if the ad is eligible for ad auction, and how the ad ranks in the auction if it is eligible.

Google took clean and simple design elements to a whole new level. Thanks to the text based advertisements, Google was able to maintain an uncluttered page design that encouraged maximum page loading speed. Google’s simple design quickly attracted a large population of loyal internet users.

The web search services offered by Google were instrumental to its success. The company uses Page Rank for its search engine optimization program. Page Rank is a set of algorithms for assigning numerical weighting to hyperlinked documents (web pages).

Its purpose is to measure the relative importance within the set. By following a set of guidelines provided by Google, webmasters can ensure that Google’s web crawlers are able to find, index, and rank their websites. Page Rank is a registered trademark of Google. Stanford University owns Page Rank’s patent.

Google credits its success and popularity to Page Rank. To deter webmasters from using abusive techniques to garner higher rankings for their search engines the company will not disclose the algorithms used to rank pages. Google does, however, confess that Page Rank runs on a link analysis algorithm. Page Rank was different from all the rest of the search engine optimization techniques because it graded each page based on the number of and quality of the links that pointed to it.

Through a series of new product developments, acquisitions and partnerships, the Google has expanded its initial search and advertising business into other areas, including web-based email, online mapping, office productivity, and video sharing, among others.

Since the purchase of dMarc, a radio advertising company, Google has begun to experiment with other markets besides web based advertising; this includes both radio and print publications. Google has been experimenting selling advertisements in the Chicago Sun-Times. This expansion allows Google combine three niche advertising media–internet, radio, and print media. The history of Google had just begun.

The nifty search engine has its own in built converter. Try typing into the Google search box “4ft 6in in meters” or “23c in Fahrenheit” and you will get an instant conversion. Move your calculator to the bottom drawer of your desk or throw your slide rule out of the window. If you don’t know what a slide rule is then Google it – you will be amazed at how your ancestors worked in the old days.

Google Calculator

Similarly, your old friend Google can act as a calculator. Try typing in “43% of 92” and in the twinkle of an eye receive instant enlightenment. Where was this while I was doing my GCSE’S?

Google Currency Converter

You know what’s coming don’t you. Type “£123 in US$” and be amazed with the instant currency conversion.

Google News

Visit http://news.google.co.uk (you don’t need the “www” bit) to visit a bang up to date computer generated news site. The Google news site aggregates headlines from over 4,500 English language news sources on the planet. You can ask the site to group news stories together according to your particular interests. An archive section is navigable from the top of the site which lets you look back through history. I typed in “Titanic” in the archives search box and was able to instantly download a PDF of the actual front page of the New York Times from April 12th 1912.

Google Mobile

Download Google Maps for mobile from free by visiting the Google UK website at www.google.co.uk/gmm. I downloaded the software straight onto the desktop of my PC and then hooked up my mobile to my PC with the bit of cable that my mobile phone manufacturer gave me in the box it came with. I think this would prove quicker and easier for most people than getting online with your mobile and downloading directly. Download times to mobiles still seem dreadfully slow to me.

Most mobile phones that are less than 3 years old will operate Google Maps. With Google Maps loaded onto your mobile you will never get lost when walking or driving in any UK city although software specifies that it should not be used when driving (who would think of such a thing?).

Many mobile phones come with GPS all ready installed. GPS stands for “global positioning system” and lets you know exactly where you are on the face of the earth through satellite technology. You can enter a start and end point for any road journey and be supplied with detailed directions. Another nifty feature is that you can specify a start and end point and find the best way to make this journey on public transport.

In their paper ‘The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hyper textual Web Search Engine’ it is very evident that Google  goal has always been to be one of the best search engines there is in terms of the quality of the results it gives. Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page however knew that in order to do this, Google needed to be able to store information efficiently and cost effectively and to have excellent crawling, indexing, and sorting methods or techniques. Google not only aimed to give quality results but to produce the results as fast as possible. Google started as a high quality search engine and continues to be the best search engine today. It has managed to stay true to its original intent to be a search engine that not only crawls and indexes the web efficiently but also to produce more satisfying results in comparison to other existing search engines.

To stay true to their goal of providing the best search results Google knew right from the start that it had to be designed so that the search engine could catch up with the web’s growth.

According to “Brin and Page “In designing Google we have considered both the rate of growth of the Web and technological changes. Google is designed to scale well to extremely large data sets. It makes efficient use of storage space to store the index”. They knew that they needed much space to store and ever growing index.

Google’s index size, which that started out as 24 million web pages was large for its time and has grown to around 25 billion web pages, still keeping Google ahead of its competitors. However, Google is a company that doesn’t settle for just beating the competitors.

They truly aim to give their users the best service there is and that means as a search engine they want to give users access to all or at least most of the quality information that is available on the web.

Google’s New System for Indexing More Pages

As mentioned earlier, Google aims to give access to even more information and has been devoting time and much effort to realize this goal. It seems that the new patent entitled ‘Multiple Index Based Information Retrieval System’ filed by Google employee Anna Patterson might be the answer to the problem.

The patent published just this May of 2006 and filed way back in January of 2005 shows that Google might actually be aiming to expand their index size to as much as a 100 billion web pages or even more.

According to the patent, conventional information retrieval systems, more commonly known as search engines, are able to index only a small part of the documents available on the Internet. According to estimates the existing number of web pages in the Internet as of last year was around 200 billion; however, Patterson claimed that even the best search engine (that is Google) was able to index only up to 6 to 8 billion web pages.

The disparity between the number of indexed pages and existing pages clearly signaled a need for a new breed of information retrieval system. Conventional information retrieval systems just weren’t capable of doing the job and just wouldn’t be able to index enough web pages to give users access to a large enough percentage of the present existing information available on the web.

The Multiple Index Based Information Retrieval System, however, is up to the challenge and is Google’s answer to the problem. Two characteristics of the new system makes it stands out compared to the conventional systems.

One is that it has the “capability to index an extremely large number of documents, on the order of a hundred billion or more”. And the other is its capability to “index multiple versions or instances of documents for archiving…enabling a user to search for documents within a specific range of dates, and allowing date or version related relevance information to be used in evaluating documents in response to a search query and in organizing search results.”

With the new system developed by Patterson, Google now has the ability to expand its index size to unbelievable proportions as well as improve document analysis and processing, document annotation, and even the process of ranking according to contained and anchor phrases.

History of Google’s Index Size

Google started out with an index size of around 24 million web pages in 1996. By August of 200, Google had managed to quadruple their index size to approximately one billion web pages. On September of 2003 Google’s front-page boasted and an index of 3.3 billion web pages.

Microdoc, however, revealed that the actual number of web pages Google had indexed during that time was more than five billion web pages already. In their article ‘Google Understates the Size of Its Database’, they emphasized that Google not only specialized in simplicity but also in understating their power and complexity.

Google was still managing to stay ahead of its competitors and continued to surprise everyone with what they had under their sleeves.

As Google’s index continued to grow the number in their front page grew impressively large as well before it plateaud at eight billion web pages. This was around the time that Patterson filed the new patent. Then in 2005, with controversies in index size growing, Google decided to stop counting in front of the public and simply claimed that their index size was three times larger than the nearest competitor’s index size.

Google also maintained that it was not just the size of indexed pages that was important but how relevant the results they returned were. Then in September of 2005, as part of Google’s 7th anniversary, Anna Patterson, the same software engineer who filed the patent on the Multiple Based Index Information Retrieval System posted an entry on Google’s official blog claiming that the index size was now 1,000 times larger than the original index.

This pegged their index size to around 24 billion web pages, about a fourth of the Google goal of indexing a100 billion web pages. It seems then that Google must have started using the new system in mid 2005. With the new system in place we can only wait and see how fast Google will reach the goal of a 100 billion web pages in its index. It’s most likely though that when Google has reached that goal it would set an even higher goal to provide continuous quality service.