Google Office go on: JotSpot Googled !











Google go on developping their new "Google Office": JotSpot is part of Google today .

JotSpot was founded in 2004 to provide an application wiki which is "a private website designed for collaboration. Unlike a traditional website where pages can only be read, in a wiki everyone can edit, update and append pages with new information, all without knowing HTML."

The startup is based on creating and sharing documents, spreadsheets, photos, and other files, that's why JotSpot is interesting for Google on their way to develop a new software offer online.
New account registrations is closed while JotSpot is now moving to Google's software architecture.

Build your own Search Engine

NEW Google Custom Search Engine
Eureka! Your own search engine has landed! in Google blog

Google mobile improved

Google announced an improvement of Google Mobile to make mobile's services easy to use:

"We've included video tutorials or emulators for every service or application, and we've designed the pages in such a way as to make it easy to learn more about the mobile offerings you're interested in."
in Official Googleblog

Google services for mobile devices:
Search Maps Gmail News SMS Blogger

Edit labels in Beta Blogger

Blogger in Beta added a new feature: labels management that allow adding or removing labels to all posts even the old ones; Blogger users who had switched to the beta version can now organise their old posts into categories.
Labels Management for Blogger in Beta in Blogger Buzz

New Google Website Optimizer tool

Google announced the launch of a new tool in beta: Website Optimizer that is a free tool that helps AdWords advertisers test different landing pages and determine which one drives the most conversions.

For now, this tools is a Beta release and it will be limited to a small number of AdWords advertisers selected from all that apply.

Adsense integrated into Beta Blogger

AdSense ads is now integrated in the new Beta blogger template; Bloggers can now customize ads directly from "Add a Page Element" in new layouts-enabled template.

New Google Office online?

Google integarted Writely with Google Spreadsheets in a new google service: Google Docs & Spreadsheets; A spreadsheet and word processor program that offer Creating, storing and publishing documents and spreadsheets online.

There a also a new official googleblog for this service.

Better together: Docs & Spreadsheets in Official Googleblog

Post photos from Picasa to Blogger

A new feature for Beta Blogger: Posting photos directly from Google’s Picasa photo organizer to the new version of Blogger in Beta.
Post to the Blogger beta from Picasa

Blogger bug: Google blog Hacked

"A bug in Blogger enabled an unauthorized user to make a fake post on the Google Blog last night, claiming that we've discontinued our AdWords click-to-call test. The bug was fixed quickly and the post removed. As for the click-to-call test, it is progressing on schedule, and we're pleased with the results thus far."
that's what google said in google blog to explain the hacking of their official blog last night; this is the copy of the fake post published on googleblog:

Google Click-to-Call project cancelled
By Maximal
After concientiously considering, Google has decided not to continue with Google Click-to-call project. The project has been in the media on last days because of the notice of Google agreement with e-Bay. We finally consider click-to-call agreement with e-Bay a monopolistic aproach that would damage small companies in the CRM area.
This message has been translated using Google language tools.

New version of Google Groups in Beta

Google launched a new beta version of Google Groups, with a lot of new features such as:
- New design for individual groups
-Group owners can now create a welcome message, upload a group logo and customize fonts and colors
-Many of the functions of Google Page Creator right into integrated into Google Groups
-Using Gmail's message cards for discussions, which makes them easier to follow
-Adding a Files section so users can share and collaborate on documents
-Helping groups have a better sense of their members with the Member area

The new Groups experience in Official Google Blog

New Google Code Search

Google launched today Google Code Search, which gives programmers a single place to search publicly accessible source code.
Google also launched a number of general-purpose developer and open-source tools like Google Web Toolkit and project hosting on Google Code.

More developer love with Google Code Search in Official Google Blog

Advanced features in Accessible Search

Google added advanced search features to Google Accessible Search
Example of advanced queries:
restrict search to portions of a page, e.g., the title
restrict search to results in a given language
restrict searches to web pages found during a given time period
restrict searches to content in a given file format

details: Advanced Search Tips

Accessible Search now has advanced search features in Google Blog

Ping Google Blog Search

Google Blog Search launch today a Pinging Service; a way for individual bloggers and blog platform providers to inform Google of content changes.
Blogging providers who syndicate RSS/Atom/XML and want to be included in Google Blog Search can now ping Google directly: Google blog Search Ping Service
It also possible to use Google API to make this ping automatic:
About Google Blog Search Pinging Service API

Fresher query stats in Webmaster tools

Query stats in webmaster tools provide information about the search queries that most often return your site in the results.
Google changed the way to calculate them and how frequently, Google explain also in this post how they calculate query stats :
Fresher query stats in Official Google Webmaster Central Blog

Google Talk open for all


Google Talk is now open for all (Gmail accounts no longer required ); but there are still some features including chat histories and mail notifications that will only work if you sign into Google Talk with a Gmail account.

Now anyone can Talk

New version of Google Reader Today

Google launch today a new version of Google Reader with new features


Your inbox for the web in Official Google Blog
Google Reader

Google Transit add more cities

Google Transit Trip Planner added today five more cities to their coverage:
Eugene, Oregon
Honolulu, Hawaii
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Seattle, Washington
Tampa, Florida
Now riders in these cities (and Portland, of course) can use Google to plan trips using public transportation, and in some cities, compare the cost of public transportation with the cost of driving. You can also specify when you want to leave or arrive, and see different route possibilities.
Happy trails with Google Transit in Official Google Blog.

Google add weather to Google Calendar

Google add weather to Google Calendar:
"You can add web content events to your own calendar for weather forecasts, moon phases, and even Google doodles (those special-occasion logos you sometimes see on Google.com). Now you can be the first to know when there's a new one!"
Google Calendar does something about the weather
Google Calendar

AJAX Search API for Beta Blogger

Blogger template hacking-via-javascript:
Notable stuff:
- the sidebar's "Google Search" field searches multiple indexes (Web and BlogSearch), as well as individual sites (in this case the AJAX Search API blog, the Google blog and www.blogger.com) - you can customize all of these things
- the sidebar's "Video Search" field displays (and plays!) results inline
- links in the main blog section can dynamically link directly into the sidebar's embedded Map and Video boxes (try clicking the 'Sakana' and 'Jimi Hendrix' links)


AJAX Search API Hackery in blogger official blog
further details about the tweaks and integrations:
AJAX Search in TypePad and Blogger

Happy birthday Google

This week google celebrate Google's 8th birthday
a commemorative logo appears on today's homepage
How long is 8 years in Internet time?

Google explain his approach to content

After having legal problems with Belgium's newspapers content in Google News, Google try to explain his vision to using content that are in copyright;
Google's approach is explained: "effectively democratizing access to human knowledge" and "organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible" but also "bring benefit back to content owners by partnering with them"
Our approach to content in Official Google Blog.

New Google Notebook

Google launched a new improved version of Google Notebook with new features such a much slicker drag-and-drop UI to let you organize better, a trash bin for all your deleted items, and the ability to undo your last action. And now you can see your notebooks on your personalized homepage.

Google explain Google News case in Belgium

Google explain in official googleblog they did nothing wrong inof newspapers case in Belgium;
"Google News is no different than Google web search in this regard: We only ever show the headlines and a bit of text. If people want to read the entire story they have to click through to the newspaper’s website."
"And after all, it’s not just users that benefit from these links but publishers do too -- because we drive huge amounts of web traffic to their sites."
"if publishers don’t want their websites to appear in search results (most do) the robots.txt standard enables them to prevent automatically the indexing of their content"

New release of Google Search Appliance

A new version of "Google Search Appliance" is available today with increased document capacity to handle(up to 30 million document) and some new features such as date and number range search. The interface is now available in 16 languages.

New version of Picasa

Google announce a new version of Picasa, Google's photo organizer; It has new features like Picasa Web Albums that lets upload and share photos online. Google say also they've fixed a whole bunch of things so Picasa can work better.

Historian Google

Google News added a new feature: Google News Archives provides copies of articles, journals and news stories from international news sources dating back to 200 years.

"In addition to finding the most relevant articles for your query, you can get an historical overview of the results by browsing an automatically created timeline. The archive search results include articles about an incredibly wide variety of topics, people and events over the last 200 years or so" History as it unfolds on Googleblog.

happy photoblogging!

that what's end a bloggerblog post that announce they're fixing some image uploading problems, they’ve just released an additional change on the Blogger beta site to show thumbnails of photos after the upload
In my opinion the best way is to use firefox, it's possible with it to copy/past photos directly on the post without any upload
By the way, while reading the notes of the new bloggerblog "Known Issues for Blogger in Beta";
it seems that beta blogger have a lot of problems with Internet Explorer so they say: "The best workaround is to simply use Firefox".

New blog for Blogger in Beta

The Blogger blog announce today a new blog as response for users' interrogations about the beta blogger:
"We’re addressing these questions with today’s launch of Known Issues for Blogger in Beta, a new blog that will contain fresh information about the status of issues and bugs that affect you."
The post explain also the various other communication channels that exist between the users and the Blogger Team:
Support form
Blogger Status
Blogger Buzz the blog
Blogger Help Group

Google's rivals

Google's rivals
Search under 'Google, competitor.' The list of prospective rivals grows longer every day. How these various clashes play out will have major consequences for small businesses.

Microsoft
Google's free productivity applications (Gmail, Writely, and Google Spreadsheets) will offer ad-supported alternatives to Outlook, Word, and Excel. Can a free Google version of PowerPoint be far behind? Compelling scenario: Small businesses get free software. Google gets a fresh source of revenues. Microsoft's Live programs are reduced to also-rans in the brave new world of software as a service.

Yahoo
This is a Coke-Pepsi rivalry. Google currently dominates the $9.5 billion search-term ad market, with a 60% share to Yahoo's 30%. But the two giants are duking it out in the ad-supported free software market, with competing e-mail, instant-messaging, blogging, and mapping services. Good news for small business: The rivalry should keep service quality up and prices down.

Craigslist and EBAY
Many small Internet vendors would welcome a viable alternative to eBay. Hence the buzz over Google's new online payment program called Checkout. Meanwhile, Google's new Base service is user friendly and appears well suited for posting classified ads. Look out, Craigslist!

Everyone else
Google's experiments in Internet telephony threaten Vonage, Verizon, and Skype. Its acquisition of dMark Broadcasting, an online broker of advertising airtime, threatens traditional ad agencies. Last year Google's hometown of Mountain View, Calif., accepted the company's offer to wire the entire town for Wi-Fi, an obvious boon for local businesses. Expect communities nationwide to follow suit. Main Street will be the clear winner as these various skirmishes result in better and cheaper services.

(from: money.cnn.com)

Site optimization by Google Analytics

post on Google analytics blog give advices on site optimization in four steps using the data available in Google Analytics.

Have fun with Google !

Philipp Lenssen author of the blog "Google Blogoscoped ", wrote a post in googleblog about his book "55 Ways to Have Fun With Google".
In the book, he present "Google-related games, cartoons, oddities, tips, stories and everything else that’s fun".
The book is available here in PDF.

Edit template in Beta Blogger available

Editing template is now possible in the beta version blogger but the new template is different,
the blogger blog annonces that the new template language is completely different from the old one; and that more documentation about this will be available later.

Free downloads from Google books

Google start today a new free offer: the ability to download full copies of out-of-copyright classics books with Google Book Search.
It is possible now to download Shakespeare's tragedy of Hamlet for free.

New Google offer : Google Apps for Your Domain

Google lunches Google Apps for Your Domain a set of applications (Gmail, Google Talk, Google Calendar, and Google Page) that organizations (domains owners) can give to theirs users
Google explain : "There's no hardware or software required, and you can customize the user interfaces with your branding and color scheme"
the service is still in beta.

Funny google again: Last crawled on Dec,1969 !!!

i've been reading a post on google's blog where they claim loving webmasters as google offers new services on the new Google Webmaster Central; so i tried Site status wizard for one of my new football blog that i didn't submit to google yet; the result is so funny:
this is what google say:

'' Site status › Step 2 of 2
http://football-fc.blogspot.com/
Indexing summary:
No pages from your site are currently included in Google's index. Indexing can take time. You may find it helpful to review our information for webmasters and webmaster guidelines. [?]
Googlebot last successfully accessed your home page on Dec 31, 1969 . ''


google give the same message in google sitemaps:
''No pages from your site are currently included in Google's index. Indexing can take time. You may find it helpful to review our information for webmasters and webmaster guidelines. [?]
Googlebot has successfully accessed your home page. Last crawl date: Dec 31, 1969
You have submitted
1 Sitemaps. You have no Sitemap errors. ''

what is it?! is google joking with webmasters now after loving them?!!

Adsense Game: learn how to make money online

Joel Comm, best-selling author and AdSense expert created The AdSense Game, a Flash simulation designed to teach people how to make money online using Google AdSense contextual advertising program. Joel Comm is the co-founder of ClassicGames.com, which is now known as Yahoo! Games.

New Google Talk

Google have complete testing a new version of Google talk and The new Google Talk is now available updated with a bunch of new features
- File transfer: The "top requested" feature of GTalk users. You can share any type of file, several at a time if you want, including photos, of course. According to a Google representative, when you drop up to 10 photos on Google Talk, smaller previews automatically appear right inside the chat window, so you can chat about them right away.
- Voice mail: You can now leave voice mails for any of your Google Talk contacts when they don't answer a call, but you can also easily record voice notes and send them to anyone you know by just adding their e-mail addresses to your contact list. They don't even have to be running Google Talk. According to the same Google rep: "This is a fun and easy way to just say hello, send someone a reminder, or sing your mom happy birthday. :-)" The Gmail team has added the ability to play back voice mail messages within Gmail.
- Music status sharing: Users can opt to display the titles of the songs they are listening to in their status bar when Google Talk detects that a supported music player is running. Music Status currently supports iTunes, Windows Media Player, Winamp and Yahoo Music Engine.

New Blogger in Beta

Google has started today testing an enhanced version of its blog publishing service Blogger in Beta;

For now, Google is limiting the number of Blogger's members who can switch over to the new beta version of the service. Those who want to try the new features out right away can create a new account at http://beta.blogger.com/. It's also possible now to use google accounts login to have accces to the service.
Here is some of new interesting features and functions of the new release:
-Categorize posts with labels
-Control access to blogs: add authors so multiple people can post to blog, choose who can view blog just by adding their email address.
-Make layout changes : Blogger's Layout feature: edit and customize your Blogger template, edit and customize the colors, fonts, header and sidebar of your blog .
-More feed options
-New Dashboard
-Bunch of new blogger templates

MySpace Gets Googled !!!

News Corp. Chooses Google to Provide MySpace Search
Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. choose Google Inc. to provide search for its MySpace.com Web site, handing a defeat to Microsoft Corp.
Google will be the exclusive provider of search and keyword-targeted ads for Fox Interactive sites including MySpace, the companies said today in a statement.
Google, No. 1 in Internet search, agreed to make minimum revenue-sharing payments of $900 million over a three-year period to snatch the business away from Microsoft, owner of the MSN Web site, the companies said. Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft and Mountain View, California-based Google each fought for the premium exposure on MySpace, News Corp.'s popular friend-finder site.

Google Sitemaps became Webmaster Tools

Google has renamed "Google Sitemaps" to "Google Webmaster Tools" and has added the service to their Google Webmaster Central channel which includes :

Site status wizard
Find out whether your site is currently being indexed by Google.
Webmaster tools (including Sitemaps)
Statistics, diagnostics and management of Google's crawling and indexing of your website, including Sitemap submission and reporting.
Submit your content to Google
Learn about submitting content for Google properties such as Google Base and Google Book Search.
Webmaster Central Blog
The latest news and info on how Google crawls and indexes websites.
Google's discussion group for webmasters
Talk with your fellow webmasters and share your feedback.
Webmaster help center
See answers to frequently asked questions about crawling, indexing, ranking and other webmaster issues.

Tony Blair googlebombed too !

When you type liar on google search the first result you get is the official biography of Tony Blair, but the new thing is that on the top there is a spensored link who links to the explanation of googlebombing in google blog:

"Why these results?
www.google.com/googleblog  These results may seem politically slanted. Here's what happened."







Funny google search or Bush "failure" !!!

If you do a Google search on the word "failure" or the phrase "miserable failure", the top result is currently the White House’s official biographical page for President Bush.
Google explain this result by the practice called googlebombing.
It's just funny and completely justifiable: there is a real link between Bush and failure

New Google Services Uncovered

Tony Ruscoe, a UK developer, had a "quick go" at Google's servers, and got a wealth of information out of that small expedition. Ruscoe discovered the names of fourteen services that, as he put it, "aren't currently available to your 'real' Google account."
There are screenshots of the list (in multiple languages) on Ruscoe's blog. The pictures serve as evidence of the services' existence (in some form), although they don't offer much besides those names. Ruscoe accessed the pages by setting up "some kind of test account" in "the 'sandbox' subdomain."
Ruscoe was able to add Google Events, Google Guess, Google Online Assessment, Google Real Estate Search, Google RS2, Google Writely, Local, Mobile, Mobile Marketplace, New Service (AKA Workplace), New Service, Talk, Weaver, and WiFi to his test account. As he noted, some of these have already been hinted at or discussed.
Others haven't been leaked until now, though, and Ruscoe considered what the names might imply. Of the New Service (AKA Workplace), Ruscoe wrote, "Maybe this is the big one people have been waiting for; the one that will really kill Microsoft Office. At least, if it's at all related to IBM Workplace it could be . . . . All I know is that it's got something to do with OpenOffice.org - so that's why it could be the killer . . ."
With the Mobile Marketplace, Ruscoe speculated, quoting John Battelle, "Maybe Google will finally plug mobile 'into the web in a way that makes sense for the average user' and maybe they'll also be the ones to create 'a major mobile innovation - the kind that makes us all say - Jeez that was obvious.' But we'll see."
More speculation takes place among the comments on Ruscoe's blog. The names of those Google services hint at some very interesting possibilities.

List of Google services and tools

Google Accessible Search is a search engine for visually challenged people. It prioritizes usable and accessible web content, as well as using Google's PageRank technology.
As well as the websites containing results being accessible, the Accessible Search interface is also rendered clearly and simply. For example, AdWords results have not been implemented, so they cannot distract the user from the main links.
A similar technology has been used with Google Co-Op, where regular results are sorted in a different manner. The product is currently in early stages of development, and is classified under Google Labs production.

AdSense
AdSense is a advertisement program run by Google. Website owners can enroll in this program to enable text, image and, more recently, video advertisements on their sites. These ads are administered by Google and generate revenue on either a per-click or per-thousand-ads-displayed basis. Advertisements shown are from the Google "pool" using contextual relevancy to determine the subject matter of the page, and display a related advertisement. (Ads are placed via AdWords)

AdWords
AdWords is Google's flagship advertising product, and main source of revenue. AdWords offers pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, and site-targeted advertising for both text and banner ads. (Source of AdSense Ads)

Alerts
Google Alerts are emails automatically sent by Google when there are new Google results for a user's chosen search terms. The service offer four types of alerts: News, Web, News & Web, and Groups. Alerts can be configured to be mailed daily or as soon as news is discovered.

Analytics
Google Analytics is a free service that generates detailed statistics about traffic to a website. It was launched on November 18, 2005. The service is mainly aimed at webmasters who can optimize their ad campaigns through the analysis of where visitors came from, how long they stayed on the website, and their geographical locations. The service is based on the Urchin software that Google acquired when it acquired Urchin Software Corporation.

Answers
Google Answers allows users to pay approved researchers to answer questions for them. Customers ask questions, offer a price for an answer, and researchers answer them. Past questions can be browsed or searched for free.

Base
Google Base is a free service, currently in beta, that enables content owners to submit content, have it hosted and make it easily searchable via Google. Information within the database is described using labels and attributes. It was launched on November 15, 2005.

Blog Search
Google Blog Search is a search engine for blogs. It was launched on September 14, 2005. Results include all blogs, not just those published through Blogger. Users can currently search in English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and Brazilian Portuguese.

Bookmarks
Google Bookmarks is a free online bookmark storage service available to Google Account holders which organizes bookmarks with tags. Bookmarks labelled homepage will be displayed on the user's Personalized Homepage.

Book Search, Formerly Google Print
Google Book Search is a search engine for the full text of books that Google scans and stores in its digital database. Depending on the arrangement with the publishers, users may view: a short extract with their search terms highlighted, sample pages of the book, a limited number of pages, or the entire text. Links to buy the book online are provided. The legality of Google's scanning texts without the author's consent is still an open question. It was launched as Google Print in October 2004. See also: List of digital library projects

Blogger
Blogger is a weblog publishing tool. Google acquired Pyra Labs, and with it Blogger services, in 2003. Blogger allows users to create a highly-customisable weblog with features such as photo publishing, comments, group blogs, blogger profiles and mobile-based posting with little technical knowledge. Blogger also provides free weblog hosting.

Browser Sync
Google Browser Sync for Firefox is an extension that continuously synchronizes browser settings – including bookmarks, history, persistent cookies, and saved passwords – across multiple computers. It also allows users to restore open tabs and windows across different machines and browser sessions. It was launched on June 7, 2006.

Calendar
Google Calendar is a free online calendar. It is similar to those offered by Yahoo! and MSN. It was launched on April 13, 2006. Google Calendar can export calendar files in iCal and XML formats. It can import calendar files from Microsoft Office Outlook, Yahoo! Calendar and iCal. Features include: simple Google-style interface, calendar sharing, Gmail integration, and "Quick Add".

Catalogs
Google Catalogs is a search engine for over 6,600 print catalogs (acquired through Optical character recognition).

Checkout
Google Checkout is an online payment processing service provided by Google aimed at simplifying the process of paying for online purchases. Website administrators can choose to implement Google Checkout as a form of payment. This service is currently only available to US residents.

Code Google
Code is Google's site for developers interested in Google-related development. The site contains Open Source code and lists of their API services.

Click-to-Call
Click-to-Call is a service which allows users to call advertisers for free at Google's expense from search results pages.

Compute
Google Compute is a feature of the Google Toolbar that enables a user's computer to help solve challenging scientific problems when it would otherwise be idle.

Co-Op
Google Co-op allows experts to create a list of sites about a particular topic and users to subscribe to these lists. Google launched the service on May 10, 2006. When a user subscribes to links and labels provided by a Google Co-op contributor this information is incorporated into that user's web search results when they search for a related topic.
Google Co-Op Logo

Desktop
Google Desktop is a desktop search application that runs locally on a Windows XP or Windows 2000 SP3+ PC. The desktop search program allows a user to search their e-mail, computer files, music, photos, chat, and web history. It allows the installation of Google Gadgets, which are similar to Mac OS X's widgets. The first version was launched on October 14, 2004

Directory
Google Directory is a collection of links arranged into hierarchical subcategories. It was launched in April 2000. The links and their categorization are from the Open Directory Project (ODP), but are sorted by PageRank. The directory can be searched or browsed.

dodgeball.com
Dodgeball.com is a social networking site built specifically for use on mobile phones. Google purchased the website in 2005. Users text their location to the service, which then notifies them of crushes, friends, friends' friends and interesting venues nearby.

Earth Google Earth is a free, downloadable virtual globe application. It maps the entire earth by pasting images obtained from satellite imagery, aerial photography and GIS over a 3D globe. It was released on June 28, 2005.

Finance
Google Finance features searchable US business news, opinion, and financial data. It was launched on March 21, 2006 (Official Blog Post). Features include: company-specific pages, blog search, interactive charts (with prices and news stories), information about executives, discussion groups and a portfolio.

Froogle
Froogle is a price engine that searches online stores, including auctions, for products. It is also offered in Wireless Markup Language (WML) form.

Glossary
Google Glossary Find definitions for words, phrases and acronyms; When you include "define" in your query in front of a word, phrase, or acronym, Google displays one Glossary definition above your search results. Example

Gmail
Gmail is a free webmail and POP e-mail service provided by Google, known for its abundant storage and advanced interface (based on Ajax technology). It is known as Google Mail in the United Kingdom and Germany. Its competitors include AIM Mail, MSN Hotmail / Windows Live Mail (beta), and Yahoo! Mail. Gmail Notifier runs in the Windows system tray and informs users when they have new mail. It was first released in an invitation-only form on April 1, 2004, leading many to assume that it was an April Fools' Day joke.

Groups
Google Groups (formerly an independent site known as Deja News) is a searchable Usenet archive. Google is currently testing a new version of its Groups service, which archives mailing lists hosted by Google in addition to Usenet posts, using the same interface as Gmail. As well as searching, users can join a group, make a group, publish posts, and track their favorite topics.

Hello
Hello is a free application that allows users to send images across the Internet and publish them to their blogs.

Images
Google Images is a search engine for images. It was launched in 2001. Results are based on the filename of the image, the link text pointing to the image, and text adjacent to the image. When searching, a thumbnail of each matching image is displayed. When clicking on a thumbnail, the image is displayed in a frame at the top of the page and the URL of the website on which that image was found is displayed in a frame below it.

Joga.com
Joga.com is an Internet community for those interested in soccer. It is in the mold of services such as MySpace, in that each member has their own page, and can join groups based on shared interests. The service allows a user to meet other fans, create games and clubs, access athletes from Nike, and watch and upload video clips and photos. Joga.com is a joint venture of Nike Football and Google, launched on March 29, 2006.

Labs
Google Labs consists of all of Google's experimental technologies. Google Labs is akin to a directory page that links to all Google technologies under development or in beta that have not yet been made widely available. From the Google Labs home page, a user can access Google Suggest, Google Desktop Search, and other web technologies.

Language Tools, Including Google Translate
Google Language Tools allows users to translate text or web pages from one language to another. It also allows searching in web pages located in a specific country or written in a specific language. It currently supports: English to German, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Arabic, Korean, Japanese, Chinese (Simplified) and vice versa, and French to German and vice versa.

Maps
Google Maps provides maps, satellite imagery, driving directions and local search for the USA, Canada, the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Australia and New Zealand. It was launched as a beta on February 8, 2005. It is also available as a mobile service.

Mars
Google Mars provides imagery of Mars through the Google Maps interface. Elevation, visible imagery and infrared imagery can be shown. It was released on March 13, 2006, the anniversary of the birth of astronomer Percival Lowell.

Measure Map
Measure Map provides statistics for blog writers. It was launched on February 2, 2006.

Mobile
Google Mobile allows users to search using Google from wireless devices such as mobile phones and PDAs.

Moon
Google Moon provides NASA imagery of the moon through the Google Maps interface. It was launched on July 20, 2005, in honor of the first manned Moon landing on July 20, 1969. As a joke, the closest zoom level features an image of cheese instead of the moon surface. Six moon landings are marked on the map.

News
Google News is an automated news compilation service and search engine for news. There are versions of the aggregator for more than 20 languages. While the selection of news stories is fully automated, the sites included are selected by human editors. Google News was launched in April 2002 and left beta testing on January 26, 2006.

Notebook
Google Notebook is a free service that provides a simple way to save and organize information when conducting research online. The tool permits users to clip text, images, and links from pages while browsing, save them online, access them from any computer, and share them with others. It was launched on May 15, 2006.

orkut
Orkut is a social networking service, where users can list their personal and professional information, create relationships amongst friends and join communities of mutual interest. New Orkut accounts are by invitation only from an existing member. Affinity Engines, a company based in Palo Alto, has filed a lawsuit alleging that their co-founder Orkut Büyükkökten illegally re-used Affinity Engines software code when he moved to Google.

Pack
Google Pack allows users to download the following programs in a single package: Google Earth, Google Desktop, Picasa, Google Toolbar, Google Talk, Google Video Player, Google Pack Screensaver, Mozilla Firefox with Google Toolbar, Ad-Aware SE Personal, Norton Antivirus Special Edition 2005 (with 6 month trial), Adobe Reader 7, RealPlayer and GalleryPlayer. It was released on January 6, 2006.

Page Creator
Google Page Creator is a beta release of a web-publishing program which creates pages and hosts them on Google's servers. The URL given to members is http://username.googlepages.com/ It was launched on April 20, 2006.

Personalized Home, Formerly Portal or Google Fusion
Google Personlized Home is a customizable, modular page which a user can access through their Google Account. It was launched in May 2005. The user selects the content of the page from RSS feeds as well as specialized modules offering services such as: language translation, recipe databases, new emails, Wikipedia search and weather forecasts.

Personalized Search
Google Personalized Search prioritizes Google search results based on previous search habits. It makes use of Google's Search History feature. It was launched on June 28, 2005.

Picasa
Picasa is a free, downloadable photo-organisation application. It allows users to organise photos into albums and collections, view in various orders, apply simple effects, create slidshows, print and order physical prints. Google Inc. acquired Picasa in August 2004.

Picasa Web Albums
Picasa Web Albums is Picasa’s newest feature, designed to help users post and share their photos quickly and easily on the web. It was released on June 13, 2006.

Reader
Google Reader is a web-based feed reader, or "news aggregator", capable of reading Atom and RSS feeds. It allows the user to subscribe to feeds by URL, import/export subscription lists using OPML, and search for new feeds. The service also embeds audio enclosures in the page. It was launched on October 7, 2005.

Ride Finder
Google Ride Finder is a service that allows users to find a taxi, limousine or shuttle using real time position of vehicles in 14 US cities. Ride Finder uses the Google Maps interface and cooperates with any car service that wishes to participate. It was launched on March 31, 2005

Scholar
Google Scholar a search engine for the full text of scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and scholarly fields. Today, the index includes virtually all peer-reviewed journals available online, except those published by Elsevier, the world's largest scientific publisher. Google Scholar is comparable in function to Elsevier's Scopus and Thomson ISI's subscription-based Web of Science service, though more inclusive in sources and languages. It was launched in November 2004.

Search History, Part of Personalized Search
Google Personalized Search History keeps a record of all searches and clicked results while a user is logged into a Google Account and allows this to be accessed and searched. This also tracks queries made to Google Images and Google News.

Sets
Google Sets attempts to make a list of items when the user enters a few examples. For example, entering "Green, Purple, Red" produces the list "Green, Purple, Red, Blue, Black, White, Yellow, Orange, Brown. It is currently part of Google Labs.

Sitemaps
Google Sitemaps allows Webmasters to generate a file that lists the URLs on the site for better indexing. It was released as a beta in June 2005.

SketchUp
Google SketchUp is a simple 3D sketching program with many of the tools a professional 3D program has. SketchUp models can be directly imported into Google Earth and can be skinned with various premade colours and textures. It was released on April 27, 2004.

SMS Google SMS allows users to send text message queries from mobile phones to get information such as stock quotes, movie listings, and driving directions. It was released on October 7, 2004.

Special Searches
Google Special Searches allows users to perform special searches such as U.S. Government Search, Linux Search, BSD Search, Apple Macintosh Search, and Microsoft Windows Search.

Spreadsheets
Google Spreadsheets allows the creation and editing of spreadsheets online, as well as real-time chat collaboration and editing. It was released on June 6, 2006 on a 'limited test basis'. Users were granted access on a first-come, first-serve basis after requesting to sign up.

Store
Google Store sells a range of physical Google-branded products. These include clothes, toys, office equipment and lava lamps.

Suggest
Google Suggest uses auto-complete while typing to give popular searches. It is still in beta stage.

Talk
Google Talk is a windows application for VoIP and instant messaging. Google Talk beta was released on August 24, 2005. It consists of both a service and a client used to connect to the service. It is integrated with Gmail.

Toolbar
Google Toolbar is an internet browser toolbar available for Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox (with slightly different features). The two versions together include: a Google search box (for different Google sites, the current site, or other added sites), phishing protection, feed subscription, spellcheck, autolink, autofill, translator, pagerank display, address bar browse by name and pop-up blocker.

Transit
Google Transit provides public transport trip planning through the Google Maps interface. Google Transit was released on December 7, 2005, but only for the Portland, Oregon area.

Trends
Google Trends shows, as a graph, the popularity of particular search terms over time. Multiple terms can be shown at once. Results can also be displayed by city, region or language. Related news stories are also shown. The service was launched on May 10, 2006.

University Search
Google University search allows users to search within a large number of educational institution domains.

U.S. Government Search
Google U.S. Government Search offers a single location for searching across U.S. government information, and for keeping up to date on government news. You can choose to search for content located on either U.S. federal, state and local government websites or the entire Web -- from the same search box. Below the search box, the homepage includes government-specific news content from both government agencies and press outlets. You can personalize the page by adding content feeds on government or other topics that you're interested in.
http://www.google.com/ig/usgov

Video
Google Videos allows users to search, buy, watch and upload videos. Users can also see stills and closed caption transcripts of some videos. Search is based on title, keywords, network and transcript. Google has signed agreements with CBS and the NBA to offer some programs online. The service was launched on January 25, 2005.
Google Video Logo

Web Accelerator
Google Web Accelerator is a download that uses various strategies to increase the speed of browsing. It was released on May 4, 2005.
Google Web Accelerator Logo

Web API
The Google Web API (or Google Web Services) is Google's public interface for registered developers. Using Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), a programmer can write services for search and data mining that rely on Google's results. Also, users can view cached pages and make suggestions for better spelling.

Web Search
Google Search is an internet search engine. It was the company's first creation, coming out of beta on September 21, 1999, and remains their most popular and famous: it receives 200 million requests a day and is the largest search engine on the Internet. It uses a proprietary system (including PageRank) to return the search results from its 8 billion Web site index. A culture has grown around the search engine, and to google has come to mean, "to search for something on Google." When certain terms are used, Web Search automatically provides: calculations, conversions, definitions, movie information, music information, phonebook details, spellcheck, alternative terms, or weather information.

Web Toolkit
Google Web Toolkit allows users to create AJAX interfaces for their websites. Google claimed it could be used to create similar interfaces to that of Gmail and Google Calendar. It was released on May 15, 2006.

Writely
Writely is an online word-processor. On March 9, 2006 Google acquired Upstartle, the maker of Writely. It is still in beta and is not available to new users.

Zeitgeist
Google Zeitgeist is a collection of lists of the most frequent search queries. There are weekly, monthly and yearly lists, as well as topic and country specific lists.

Google Technology

The technology behind Google's great results
As a Google user, you're familiar with the speed and accuracy of a Google search. How exactly does Google manage to find the right results for every query as quickly as it does? The heart of Google's search technology is PigeonRank™, a system for ranking web pages developed by Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Stanford University.

Building upon the breakthrough work of B. F. Skinner, Page and Brin reasoned that low cost pigeon clusters (PCs) could be used to compute the relative value of web pages faster than human editors or machine-based algorithms. And while Google has dozens of engineers working to improve every aspect of our service on a daily basis, PigeonRank continues to provide the basis for all of our web search tools.

Why Google's patented PigeonRank™ works so well
PigeonRank's success relies primarily on the superior trainability of the domestic pigeon (Columba livia) and its unique capacity to recognize objects regardless of spatial orientation. The common gray pigeon can easily distinguish among items displaying only the minutest differences, an ability that enables it to select relevant web sites from among thousands of similar pages.

By collecting flocks of pigeons in dense clusters, Google is able to process search queries at speeds superior to traditional search engines, which typically rely on birds of prey, brooding hens or slow-moving waterfowl to do their relevance rankings.

When a search query is submitted to Google, it is routed to a data coop where monitors flash result pages at blazing speeds. When a relevant result is observed by one of the pigeons in the cluster, it strikes a rubber-coated steel bar with its beak, which assigns the page a PigeonRank value of one. For each peck, the PigeonRank increases. Those pages receiving the most pecks, are returned at the top of the user's results page with the other results displayed in pecking order.

Integrity
Google's pigeon-driven methods make tampering with our results extremely difficult. While some unscrupulous websites have tried to boost their ranking by including images on their pages of bread crumbs, bird seed and parrots posing seductively in resplendent plumage, Google's PigeonRank technology cannot be deceived by these techniques. A Google search is an easy, honest and objective way to find high-quality websites with information relevant to your search.

Data


PigeonRank Frequently Asked Questions
How was PigeonRank developed?
The ease of training pigeons was documented early in the annals of science and fully explored by noted psychologist B.F. Skinner, who demonstrated that with only minor incentives, pigeons could be trained to execute complex tasks such as playing ping pong, piloting bombs or revising the Abatements, Credits and Refunds section of the national tax code.

Brin and Page were the first to recognize that this adaptability could be harnessed through massively parallel pecking to solve complex problems, such as ordering large datasets or ordering pizza for large groups of engineers. Page and Brin experimented with numerous avian motivators before settling on a combination of linseed and flax (lin/ax) that not only offered superior performance, but could be gathered at no cost from nearby open space preserves. This open space lin/ax powers Google's operations to this day, and a visit to the data coop reveals pigeons happily pecking away at lin/ax kernels and seeds.

What are the challenges of operating so many pigeon clusters (PCs)?
Pigeons naturally operate in dense populations, as anyone holding a pack of peanuts in an urban plaza is aware. This compactability enables Google to pack enormous numbers of processors into small spaces, with rack after rack stacked up in our data coops. While this is optimal from the standpoint of space conservation and pigeon contentment, it does create issues during molting season, when large fans must be brought in to blow feathers out of the data coop. Removal of other pigeon byproducts was a greater challenge, until Page and Brin developed groundbreaking technology for converting poop to pixels, the tiny dots that make up a monitor's display. The clean white background of Google's home page is powered by this renewable process.

Aren't pigeons really stupid? How do they do this?
While no pigeon has actually been confirmed for a seat on the Supreme Court, pigeons are surprisingly adept at making instant judgments when confronted with difficult choices. This makes them suitable for any job requiring accurate and authoritative decision-making under pressure. Among the positions in which pigeons have served capably are replacement air traffic controllers, butterfly ballot counters and pro football referees during the "no-instant replay" years.

Where does Google get its pigeons? Some special breeding lab?
Google uses only low-cost, off-the-street pigeons for its clusters. Gathered from city parks and plazas by Google's pack of more than 50 Phds (Pigeon-harvesting dogs), the pigeons are given a quick orientation on web site relevance and assigned to an appropriate data coop.

Isn't it cruel to keep pigeons penned up in tiny data coops?
Google exceeds all international standards for the ethical treatment of its pigeon personnel. Not only are they given free range of the coop and its window ledges, special break rooms have been set up for their convenience. These rooms are stocked with an assortment of delectable seeds and grains and feature the finest in European statuary for roosting.

What's the future of pigeon computing?
Google continues to explore new applications for PigeonRank and affiliated technologies. One of the most promising projects in development involves harnessing millions of pigeons worldwide to work on complex scientific challenges.

From PigeonRank by Google

Google Search

The search engine
Most of poeople use google as a search engine only, google search is certainly the most used and known of google's services across the world.
Index size
At its start in 1998, Google claimed to index 25,000,000 web pages. By June 2005, this number had grown to 8,058,044,651 web pages, as well as 1,187,630,000 images, 1 billion Usenet messages, 6,600 print catalogs, and 4,500 news sources.
Web:
January 1998: 25,000,000
August 2000: 1,060,000,000
January 2002: 2,073,000,000
February 2003: 3,083,000,000
September 2004: 4,285,000,000
November 2004: 8,058,044,651
June 2005: 8,058,044,651
February 2006: 20,000,000,000
May 2006: 25,270,000,000
Images:
May 2006: 15,400,000

Physical structure
Google employs data centers full of low-cost commodity computers running a custom Red Hat Linux in several locations around the world to respond to search requests and to index the web. The server farms in the data centers are built using a shared nothing architecture. The indexing is performed by a program named Googlebot, which periodically requests new copies of web pages it already knows about. The more often a page updates, the more often Googlebot will visit. The links in these pages are examined to discover new pages to be added to its internal database of the web. This index database and web page cache is several terabytes in size. Google has developed its own file system called Google File System for storing all this data.

PageRank
Google uses an algorithm called PageRank to rank web pages that match a given search string. The PageRank algorithm computes a recursive figure of merit for web pages, based on the weighted sum of the PageRanks of the pages linking to them. The PageRank thus derives from human-generated links, and correlates well with human concepts of importance. Previous keyword-based methods of ranking search results, used by many search engines that were once more popular than Google, would rank pages by how often the search terms occurred in the page, or how strongly associated the search terms were within each resulting page. In addition to PageRank, Google also uses other secret criteria for determining the ranking of pages on result lists.
Google not only indexes and caches HTML files but also 13 other file types, which include PDF, Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, Flash SWF, plain text files, among others. Except in the case of text and SWF files, the cached version is a conversion to HTML, allowing those without the corresponding viewer application to read the file.
Users can customize the search engine somewhat. They can set a default language, use "SafeSearch" filtering technology (which is on 'moderate' setting by default), and set the number of results shown on each page. Google has been criticized for placing long-term cookies on users' machines to store these preferences, a tactic which also enables them to track a user's search terms over time. For any query (of which only the 32 first keywords are taken into account), up to the first 1000 results can be shown with a maximum of 100 displayed per page.
Despite its immense index, there is also a considerable amount of data in databases, which are accessible from websites by means of queries, but not by links. This so-called deep web is minimally covered by Google and contains, for example, catalogs of libraries, official legislative documents of governments, phone books, and more.

Google optimization
Since Google is the most popular search engine, many webmasters have become eager to influence their website's Google rankings. An industry of consultants has arisen to help websites raise their rankings on Google and on other search engines. This field, called search engine optimization, attempts to discern patterns in search engine listings, and then develop a methodology for improving rankings.
One of Google's chief challenges is that as its algorithms and results have gained the trust of web users, the profit to be gained by a commercial website in subverting those results has increased dramatically. Some search engine optimization firms have attempted to inflate specific Google rankings by various artifices, and thereby draw more searchers to their client's sites. Google has managed to weaken some of these attempts by reducing the ranking of sites known to use them.
Search engine optimization encompasses both "on page" factors (like body copy, title tags, H1 heading tags and image alt attributes) and "off page" factors (like anchor text and PageRank). The general idea is to affect Google's relevance algorithm by incorporating the keywords being targeted in various places "on page," in particular the title tag and the body copy (note: the higher up in the page, the better its keyword prominence and thus the ranking). Too many occurrences of the keyword, however, cause the page to look suspect to Google's spam checking algorithms.
One "off page" technique that works particularly well is Google bombing in which websites link to another site using a particular phrase in the anchor text, in order to give the site a high ranking when the word is searched for.
Google publishes a set of guidelines for a website's owners who would like to raise their rankings when using legitimate optimization consultants.

Uses of Google
A corollary use of Google -- and other internet search engines - is that it can help translators to determine the most common way of expressing ideas in the English language (and other languages). This is generally done by doing a 'count' of different variants, thereby establishing which expression is more common. While this approach requires careful judgement, it does improve the ability of non-native translators to use more idiomatically correct English expressions.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Links:

Google Machine

Google platform
Being one of the most popular Internet search engines, Google requires large computational resources in order to provide their service.
Network topology
Google has several clusters in locations across the world. When an attempt to connect to Google is made, Google's DNS servers perform load balancing to allow the user to access Google's content most rapidly. This is done by sending the user the IP address of a cluster that is not under heavy load, and is geographically proximate to them. Each cluster has a few thousand servers, and upon connection to a cluster further load balancing is performed by hardware in the cluster, in order to send the queries to the least loaded Web Server.
Racks are custom-made and contain 40 to 80 servers (20 to 40 1U servers on either side), new servers are 2U Rackmount systems. Each rack has a switch. Servers are connected via a 100 Mbit/s Ethernet link to the local switch. Switches are connected to core gigabit switch using one or two gigabit uplinks.

Main index
Since queries are composed of words, an inverted index of documents is required. Such an index allows obtaining a list of documents by a query word. The index is very large due to the number of documents stored in the servers, therefore it needs to be split up into "index shards". Each shard is hosted by a set of index servers. The load balancer decides which index server to query based on the availability of each server.

Server types
Google's server infrastructure is divided in several types, each assigned to a different purpose:
Google Web Servers coordinate the execution of queries sent by users, then format the result into an HTML page. The execution consists of sending queries to index servers, merging the results, computing their rank, retrieving a summary for each hit (using the document server), asking for suggestions from the spelling servers, and finally getting a list of advertisements from the ad server.
Data-gathering servers are permanently dedicated to spidering the Web. They update the index and document databases and apply Google's algorithms to assign ranks to pages.
Index servers each contain a set of index shards. They return a list of document IDs ("docid"), such that documents corresponding to a certain docid contain the query word. These servers need less disk space, but suffer the greatest CPU workload.
Document servers store documents. Each document is stored on dozens of document servers. When performing a search, a document server returns a summary for the document based on query words. They can also fetch the complete document when asked. These servers need more disk space.
Ad servers manage advertisements offered by services like AdWords and AdSense.
Spelling servers make suggestions about the spelling of queries.
List of Google server types
Google's servers use a wide-range of software to complete the requests. Although there is no official information on the software Google uses for its servers, information about the server is available via HTTP headers. Below is a list of Google's Services/Tools, and the server software that runs each. This is an unofficial list (From Wikipedia) generated by analysis of HTTP headers received on different Google pages.
Services and Server Software
(*) Denotes Encrypted Page
(GWS: Google Web Server)
Main Search: GWS/2.1
Google Accounts: GFE/1.3*
Google AdSense: GFE/1.3*
Google AdWords: GFE/1.3*
Google Hosted(mail for your domain) : GWS/2.1
Google Analytics (Login Page): GWS/2.1
Google Analytics (Auth Page): GFE/1.3*
Google Analytics (Other Pages): ucfe*
Google Analytics (Analysis Image and JS): ucfe
Google Analytics (Images/JS/CSS/Flash): ga-reporting-fe
Google Answers: GFE/1.3
Google Base: asfe
Blogger: Apache
Google Book Search: OFE/0.1
Google Calendar: GFE/1.3
Google Catalogs: OFE/0.1
Google Checkout: GFE/1.3*
Google Code: codesite/2750796
Google Co-Op: pfe
Google Desktop: GFE/1.3
Google Directory: DFE/1.0
Google Downloads: GWS/2.1
Google Finance: SFE/0.8
Google Finance Stock Charts (Images): FTS (C)1997-2006 IS.Teledata AG
Froogle: cffe
Google Groups: GWS-GRFE/0.50
Hello: Apache/2.0.53
Google Help Pages: TrakhelpServer/1.0a
Google Images: GWS/2.1
Google Labs: Apache
Google Local / Maps: mfe
Google Local/Maps (Images): Keyhole Server 2.4
Google Mail: GFE/1.3
Google Mobile: GWS/2.1
Google Moon: mfe
Google Moon (Images): Keyhole Server 2.4
Google Music Search: mws
Google News: NFE/1.0
Google Notebook GFE/1.3
Orkut: GFE/1.3*
Google Pack: COMINST/1.0
Picasa (.com): Apache/2.0.53
Picasa (.google.com): GWS/2.1
Picasa Web Album: GFE/1.3
Picasa Web Album (Static Images): staticfe
Picasa Web Album (Uploaded Images): cachefe:image
Google Page Creator (Sign-up page): GFE/1.3*
Google Page Creator (User pages): GFE/1.3
Google Personalized Homepage: igfe
Google Scholar: GWS/2.1
Google Search History: Search-History HTTP Server
Google Sets: Apache
Google Site-Flavored: GWS/2.1
Google Sitemaps: GFE/1.3
Google SMS: GWS/2.1
Google SMS Search Requests: SMPP server 1.0
Google SMS (GMail Registration): GFE/1.3*
Google SMS (Page Viewer): GFE/1.3
Google Spreadsheet: GFE/1.3
Google Suggest: Auto-Completion Server
Google Transit: mfe
Google Translate: TWS/0.9
Google Trends: Google Trends
Google Video: GFE/1.3
Google Video (Thumbnails): thumbnail_server.cc version 1.0
Google Reader: GFE/1.3
Google Ride Finder: Apache
Google Talk: GWS/2.1
Google Toolbar: GFE/1.3
Google Toolbar (PR Lookup): GWS/2.1
Google Web Accelerator: GFE/1.3
Google Web Alerts: PSFE/4.0
Writely: GFE/1.3

Server hardware and software:
Original hardware
The original hardware circa 1998 used by Google included:
Sun Ultra II with dual 200MHz processors, and 256MB of RAM. This was the main machine for the original Backrub system.
2 x 300 MHz Dual Pentium II Servers donated by Intel, they included 512MB of RAM and 9 x 9GB hard drives between the two. It was on these that the main search ran.
F50 IBM RS/6000 donated by IBM, included 4 processors, 512MB of memory and 8 x 9GB hard drives.
Two additional boxes included 3 x 9GB hard drives and 6 x 4GB hard drives respectively (the original storage for Backrub). These were attached to the Sun Ultra II.
IBM disk expansion box with another 8 x 9GB hard drives donated by IBM.
Homemade disk box which contained 10 x 9GB SCSI hard drives
Current hardware
Servers are commodity-class x86 PCs running customized versions of GNU/Linux. Indeed, the goal is to purchase CPU generations that offer the best performance per unit of power, not absolute performance. Other than the wages bill, the biggest cost that Google faces is electric power consumption. Estimates of the power required for over 250,000 servers range upwards of 20 megawatts, which could cost on the order of 1-2 million $US per month in electricity charges.
For this reason, the Pentium II has been the most favoured processor, but this could change in the future as processor manufacturers are increasingly limited by the power output of their devices.
Published specifications:
over-250,000 servers ranging from 533 MHz Intel Celeron to dual 1.4 GHz Intel Pentium III (as of 2005)
One or more 80GB hard disk per server. (2003)
2–4 GiB memory per machine (2004)
The exact size and whereabouts of the data centers Google uses are unknown, and official figures remain intentionally vague. According to John Hennessy and David Patterson's Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach, Google's server farm computer cluster in the year 2000 consisted of approximately 6000 processors, 12000 common IDE disks (2 per machine, and one processor per machine), at four sites: two in Silicon Valley, California and two in Virginia. Each site had an OC-48 (2488 Mbit/s) internet connection and an OC-12 (622 Mbit/s) connection to other Google sites. The connections are eventually routed down to 4 x 1 Gbit/s lines connecting up to 64 racks, each rack holding 80 machines and two ethernet switches. Google has almost certainly dramatically changed and enlarged their network architecture since then. In 2006, they started work on a large complex in The Dalles, Oregon; one attraction of this site was cheap hydro-electric power.
Based on the Google IPO S-1 form released in April 2004, Tristan Louis estimated the current server farm to contain something like the following:
719 racks
63,272 machines
126,544 CPUs
253 THz of processing power
126,544 GB (approx. 123.58 TB) of RAM
5,062 TB (approx. 4.77 PB) of hard drive space
According to this estimate, the Google server farm constitutes one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world. At 126–316 teraflops, it can perform at over one third the speed of the Blue Gene supercomputer, which is (as of 2006) the top entry in the TOP500 list of most powerful unclassified computing machines in the world.
Future hardware
Google is in the process of developing a new Google complex according to The Telegraph, Google is building a vast complex said to be the size of two football pitches with cooling towers four floors high in Oregon. The new Google "powerplant", which is known as Project 02, has already created hundreds of jobs.

Server operation
Most operations are read-only. When an update is required, queries are redirected to other servers, such as to simplify consistency issues. Queries are divided into sub-queries, where those sub-queries may be sent to different ducts in parallel, thus reducing the latency time.
In order to avoid the effects of unavoidable hardware failure, data stored in the servers may be mirrored using hardware RAID. Software is also designed to be fault tolerant. Thus when a system goes down, data is still available on other servers, which increases the throughput.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Links:

History of Google

Type: Public (NASDAQ: GOOG) and (LSE: GGEA)
Founded: Menlo Park, California (1998)
Location:Mountain View, California, USA
Key people:

Eric E. Schmidt, CEO/Director
Sergey Brin, Technology President
Larry E. Page, Products President
George Reyes, CFO
Revenue: $7.14 Billion USD (2006)
Net income: $1.69 Billion USD (2005)
Employees: 6,800 (2006)
Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG and LSE: GGEA) is an American multinational software corporation, first incorporated as a privately held corporation in September, 1998, that specializes in search engine, information retrieval technology and online advertising. With a market capitalization of US$118.32 billion as of June 2006, Google is the largest internet search company in the world, almost twice as large as rival Yahoo!; The company employs approximately 6,800 employees and is based in Mountain View, California. Eric Schmidt, formerly chief executive officer of Novell, was named Google's CEO when co-founder Larry Page stepped down. The name "Google" originated from a misspelling of "googol," which refers to 10100 (a 1 followed by one-hundred zeros). Google has become well known for its corporate culture and innovative, clean products, and has a major impact on online culture. The verb "to google" has come to mean "to perform a Web search", usually with the Google search engine. Google's services are run on several server farms, which, in 2004, consisted of over 30 clusters of up to 2,000 PCs per cluster. Each cluster contains one petabyte of data with sustained transfer rates of 2 Gbps. Combined, over four billion web pages, averaging 10 Kb each, have been fully indexed.


Early history
Google began as a research project in January, 1996 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two Ph.D. students at Stanford. They hypothesized that a search engine that analyzed the relationships between websites would produce better results than existing techniques (existing search engines at the time essentially ranked results according to how many times the search term appeared on a page). It was originally nicknamed, "BackRub," because the system checked backlinks to estimate a site's importance. A small search engine called RankDex was already exploring a similar strategy. Convinced that the pages with the most links to them from other highly relevant Web pages must be the most relevant pages associated with the search, Page and Brin tested their thesis as part of their studies, and laid the foundation for their search engine. Originally the search engine used the Stanford website with the domain google.stanford.edu. The domain google.com was registered on September 15, 1997. They formally incorporated their company, Google Inc., on September 7, 1998 at a friend's garage in Menlo Park, California. In March 1999, the company moved into offices at 165 University Avenue in Palo Alto, home to a number of other noted Silicon Valley technology startups. Google received a big break in 1999 when one of the most popular search engines, AltaVista, relaunched itself as a user web entry point, or portal. This unexpected change alienated part of AltaVista's user base. Google quickly outgrew its University Avenue home. The company settled into a complex of buildings, called the Googleplex in Mountain View in 1999. Silicon Graphics leased these buildings to Google. The Google search engine attracted a loyal following among the growing number of Internet users. They were attracted to its simple, uncluttered, clean design — a competitive advantage to attract users who did not wish to enter searches on web pages filled with visual distractions. This appearance, while imitating the early AltaVista, had behind it Google's unique search capabilities. In 2000, Google began selling advertisements associated with the search keyword to produce enhanced search results for the user. This strategy was important for increasing advertising revenue, which is based upon the number of "hits" users make upon ads. The ads were text-based in order to maintain an uncluttered page design and to maximize page loading speed. It also only cost a very small amount per click to the websites that advertised this way. This model of selling keyword advertising was originally pioneered by Goto.com (later renamed Overture, then Yahoo! Search Marketing). While many of its dot-com rivals failed in the new Internet marketplace, Google quietly rose in stature while generating revenue. U.S. Patent 6,285,999 describing Google's ranking mechanism (PageRank) was granted on September 4, 2001. The patent was officially assigned to Stanford University and lists Lawrence Page as the inventor. Google's declared code of conduct is, "Don't Be Evil", a phrase which they went so far as to include in their prospectus (aka "red herring" or "S-1") for their IPO, noting, "We believe strongly that in the long term, we will be better served — as shareholders and in all other ways — by a company that does good things for the world even if we forgo some short term gains."
Google's Logo
Logo The Google site often includes humorous features such as cartoon modifications of the Google logo to recognize special occasions and anniversaries. Known as "Google Doodles," most have been drawn by Google's international webmaster, Dennis Hwang. Not only may decorative drawings be attached to the logo, but the font design may also mimic a fictional or humorous language such as Star Trek Klingon and Leet. The logo is also notorious among web users for April Fool's Day tie-ins and jokes about the company.

Financing and initial public offering
The first funding for Google as a company was secured in the form of a $100,000 contribution from Andy Bechtolsheim, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, given to a corporation which didn't yet exist. After a frantic few weeks, this was topped up to give an initial investment of almost $1 million. Around six months later, a much larger round of funding was announced, with the major investors being rival venture capital firms Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sequoia Capital. In October, 2003, while discussing a possible IPO (Initial Public Offering of shares), Microsoft approached the company about a possible partnership or merger. However, no such deal ever materialized. In January, 2004, Google announced the hiring of Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs Group to arrange an IPO. The IPO was projected to raise as much as $4 billion. On April 29, 2004, Google made an S-1 form SEC filing for an IPO to raise as much as $2,718,281,828. This alludes to Google's corporate culture with a touch of mathematical humor as e ≈ 2.718281828. April 29 was also the 120th day of 2004, and according to section 12(g) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, "a company must file financial and other information with the SEC 120 days after the close of the year in which the company reaches $10 million in assets and/or 500 shareholders, including people with stock options. Google has stated in its Annual filing for 2004 that every one of its 3,021 employees, "except temporary employees and contractors, are also equity holders, with significant collective employee ownership," so Google would have needed to make its financial information public by filing them with the SEC regardless of whether or not they intended to make a public offering. As Google stated in the filing, their, "growth has reduced some of the advantages of private ownership. By law, certain private companies must report as if they were public companies. The deadline imposed by this requirement accelerated our decision." The SEC filing revealed that Google turned a profit every year since 2001 and earned a profit of $105.6 million on revenues of $961.8 million during 2003. In May 2004, Google officially cut Goldman Sachs from the IPO, leaving Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse First Boston as the joint underwriters. They chose the unconventional way of allocating the initial offering through an auction (specifically, a "Dutch auction"), so that "anyone" would be able to participate in the offering. The smallest required account balances at most authorized online brokers that are allowed to participate in an IPO, however, are around $100,000. In the run-up to the IPO the company was forced to slash the price and size of the offering, but the process did not run into any technical difficulties or result in any significant legal challenges. The initial offering of shares was sold for $85 a piece. The public valued it at $100.34 at the close of the first day of trading, which saw 22,351,900 shares change hands. After some initial stumbles, Google's initial public offering took place on August 19, 2004. 19,605,052 shares were offered at a price of $85 per share. Of that, 14,142,135 (another mathematical reference as √2 ≈ 1.4142135) were floated by Google and 5,462,917 by selling stockholders. The sale raised $1.67 Billion, of which approximately $1.2 Billion went to Google. The vast majority of Google's 271 million shares remained under Google's control. The IPO gave Google a market capitalization of more than $23 Billion. Many of Google's employees became instant paper millionaires. Yahoo!, a competitor of Google, also benefited from the IPO because it owns 2.7 million shares of Google. The company was listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange under the ticker symbol GOOG.

Growth
In February 2003, Google acquired Pyra Labs, owner of Blogger, a pioneering and leading weblog hosting website. Some analysts considered the acquisition inconsistent with Google's business model. However, the acquisition secured the company's competitive ability to use information gleaned from blog postings to improve the speed and relevance of articles contained in a companion product to the search engine, Google News. At its peak in early 2004, Google handled upwards of 84.7 percent of all search requests on the World Wide Web through its website and through its partnerships with other Internet clients like Yahoo!, AOL, and CNN. In February 2004, Yahoo! dropped its partnership with Google, providing an independent search engine of its own. This cost Google some marketshare, yet Yahoo!'s move highlighted Google's own distinctiveness, and today the verb "to google" has entered a number of languages (first as a slang verb and now as a standard word), meaning, "to perform a web search" (a possible indication of "Google" becoming a genericized trademark). Analysts speculate that Google's response to its separation from Yahoo! will be to continue to make technical and visual enhancements to personalized searches, using the personal data that is gathering from orkut, Gmail, and Froogle to produce unique results based on the user. Frequently, new Google enhancements or products appear in its inventory. Google Labs, the experimental section of Google.com, helps Google maximize its relationships with its users by including them in the beta development, design and testing stages of new products and enhancements of already existing ones. After the IPO, Google's stock market capitalization rose greatly and the stock price more than quadrupled. On August 19, 2004 the number of shares outstanding was 172.85 million while the "free float" was 19.60 million (which makes 89% held by insiders). In January, 2005 the shares outstanding was up 100 million to 273.42 million, 53% of that was held by insiders which made the float 127.70 million (up 110 million shares from the first trading day). The two founders are said to hold almost 30% of the outstanding shares. The actual voting power of the insiders is much higher, however, as Google has a dual class stock structure in which each Class B share gets ten votes compared to each Class A share getting one. Page says in the prospectus that Google has, "a dual class structure that is biased toward stability and independence and that requires investors to bet on the team, especially Sergey and me." The company has not reported any treasury stock holdings as of the Q3 2004 report. On June 1, 2005, Google shares gained nearly 4 percent after Credit Suisse First Boston raised its price target on the stock to $350. On that same day, rumors circulated in the financial community that Google would soon be included in the S&P 500. When companies are first listed on the S&P 500 they typically experience a bump in share price due to the rapid accumulation of the stock within index funds that track the S&P 500. The rumors, however, were premature and Google was not added to the S&P 500 until 2006. Nevertheless, on June 7, 2005, Google was valued at nearly $52 billion, making it one of the world's biggest media companies by stock market value. On August 18, 2005 (one year after the initial IPO), Google announced that it would sell 14,159,265 (another mathematical reference as π ≈ 3.14159265) more shares of its stock to raise money. The move would double Google's cash stockpile to $7 billion. Google said it would use the money for "acquisitions of complementary businesses, technologies or other assets". On September 28, 2005, Google announced a long-term research partnership with NASA which would involve Google building a 1-million square foot R&D center at NASA's Ames Research Center. NASA and Google are planning to work together on a variety of areas, including large-scale data management, massively distributed computing, bio-info-nano convergence, and encouragement of the entrepreneurial space industry. The new building would also include labs, offices, and housing for Google engineers. Time Warner's AOL unit and Google unveiled an expanded partnership on December 21, 2005, including an enhanced global advertising partnership and a $1 Billion investment by Google for a 5% stake in AOL. As part of the collaboration, Google plans to work with AOL on video search and offer AOL's premium-video service within Google Video. This will allow users of Google Video to search for AOL's premium-video services. Display advertising throughout the Google network will also increase. Additionally, Google has also recently formed a partnership with Sun Microsystems to help share and distribute each other's technologies. As part of the partnership Google will hire employees to help in the open source office program OpenOffice.org. With Google's increased size comes more competition from large mainstream technology companies. One such example is the rivalry between Microsoft and Google. Microsoft has been touting its MSN Search engine to counter Google's competitive position. Furthermore, the two companies are increasingly offering overlapping services, such as webmail (Gmail vs. Hotmail), search (both online and local desktop searching), and other applications (for example, Microsoft's Windows Live Local competes with Google Earth). Some have even suggested that in addition to an Internet Explorer replacement Google is designing its own Linux-based operating system called Google OS to directly compete with Microsoft Windows. There are also rumors of a Google web browser, primarily fueled by the fact that Google is the owner of the domain name "gbrowser.com." This corporate feud is most directly expressed in hiring offers and defections. Many Microsoft employees who worked on Internet Explorer have left to work for Google. This feud boiled over into the courts when Kai-Fu Lee, a former vice-president of Microsoft, quit Microsoft to work for Google. Microsoft sued to stop his move by citing Lee's non-compete contract (he had access to much sensitive information regarding Microsoft's plans in China). Google and Microsoft reached a settlement out of court on 22 December 2005, the terms of which are confidential. Click fraud has also become a growing problem for Google's business strategy. Google's CFO George Reyes said in a December 2004 investor conference that "something has to be done about this really, really quickly, because I think, potentially, it threatens our business model." Some have suggested that Google is not doing enough to combat click fraud. Jessie Stricchiola, president of Alchemist Media, called Google, "the most stubborn and the least willing to cooperate with advertisers," when it comes to click fraud. While the company's primary market is in the web content arena, Google has also recently began to experiment with other markets, such as radio and print publications. On January 17, 2006, Google announced that it had purchased the radio advertising company dMarc, which provides an automated system that allows companies to advertise on the radio. This will allow Google to combine two niche advertising media -- the Internet and radio -- with Google's ability to laser-focus on the tastes of consumers. Google has also begun an experiment in selling advertisements from its advertisers in offline newspapers and magazines, with select advertisements in the Chicago Sun-Times. They have been filling unsold space in the newspaper that would have normally been used for in-house advertisements. During the third quarter 2005 Google Conference Call, Eric Schmidt said, "We don't do the same thing as everyone else does. And so if you try to predict our product strategy by simply saying well so and so has this and Google will do the same thing, it's almost always the wrong answer. We look at markets as they exist and we assume they are pretty well served by their existing players. We try to see new problems and new markets using the technology that others use and we build." After months of speculation, Google was added to the Standard & Poor's 500 index (S&P 500) on March 31, 2006. Google replaced Burlington Resources, a major oil producer based in Houston that had been acquired by ConocoPhillips.. The day after the announcement Google's share price rose by 7%.
Salaries
Originally, typical salaries at Google were considered to be quite low by industry standards. For example, some system administrators earned no more than $33,000 — while $40,000 at that time was considered to be low for the Bay Area job market. Nevertheless, Google's excellent stock performance following the IPO has enabled these early employees to be competitively compensated by participation in the corporation's remarkable equity growth. In 2005, Google has implemented other employee incentives such as the Google Founders' Award, in addition to offering higher salaries to new employees. Google's workplace amenities, culture, global popularity, and strong brand recognition have also attracted potential applicants.
After the company's IPO in August 2004, it was reported that Founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, as well as CEO Eric Schmidt, have accepted a base salary of $1.00, echoing the reported salary of Apple's Steve Jobs. They have all declined recent offers of income bonuses and increases in compensation by Google's board of directors. This effectively reduces their tax liability, because under current U.S. tax law, salary income is taxed at a top rate of 35%, whereas capital gains tax, which applies to stock grants, maxes out at 15% for profits derived from long-term capital gains. Obtaining remuneration through stock instead of income is a common tax minimization strategy for many upper-echelon U.S. executives. In a 2006 report of the world's richest people, Forbes reported that Sergey Brin was #26 with a net worth of $12.9 Billion, and Larry Page was #27 with a net worth of $12.8 Billion.

Corporate culture
Google adopts a relaxed corporate culture, reminiscent of the Dot-com boom. Google's corporate philosophy is based on principles like "You can make money without doing evil", "You can be serious without a suit" and, "Work should be challenging and the challenge should be fun." A complete list of corporate fundamentals is available on Google's website. The company encourages equality within corporate levels. Twice a week there is a roller hockey game in the company parking lot. Google's relaxed corporate culture can also be seen externally through their holiday variations of the Google logo.

"Twenty percent" time
All Google engineers are encouraged to spend 20% of their work time on projects that interest them. The time can be allocated to one day a week, or pooled into a month. Some of Google's newer services, such as Gmail, Google News and orkut, are said to have originated from these independent endeavors.

Googleplex
As a further play on Google's name, its headquarters, located in California, are referred to as "the Googleplex" — a googolplex being 1 followed by a googol of zeros, and the HQ being a complex of buildings (cf. multiplex, cineplex, etc). The lobby is decorated with a piano, lava lamps, and a real-time projection of current search queries. The hallways are full of exercise balls and bicycles. Each employee has access to the corporate recreation center. Recreational amenities are scattered throughout the campus, and include a workout room with weights and rowing machines, locker rooms, washers and dryers, a massage room, assorted video games, Foosball, a baby grand piano, a pool table, and ping pong. In addition to the rec room, there are snack rooms stocked with various cereals, gummy bears, toffee, licorice, cashews, yogurt, carrots, fresh fruit, and dozens of different drinks including fresh juice, soda, and make your own cappuccino.

April Fool's Day jokes
Main article: Google's hoaxes
Google has a tradition of creating April Fool's Day jokes such as Google MentalPlex, which featured the use of mental power to search the web. In 2002, they claimed that pigeons were the secret behind their growing search engine. In 2004, it featured Google Lunar, which featured jobs on the moon, and in 2005, a fictitious brain-boosting drink, termed Google Gulp, was announced. In 2006, they came up with Google Romance. One can find other pranks hidden between Google's pages. Additionally, in the languages list one can find the Bork! Bork! Bork! version, imitating the Muppet Show's Swedish Chef. They also offer versions in Pig Latin, Elmer Fudd, Klingon, and Leet (or h4x0r). Some people thought the announcement of Gmail in 2004 around April Fool's Day (as well as the doubling of Gmail's storage space to two gigabytes in 2005) was a joke. In 2005, featured on the Gmail homepage, was a comedic graph depicting Google's goal of "infinity plus one" GB.

IPO and culture
Many people speculated that Google's initial public offering would inevitably lead to changes in the company's culture, because of shareholder pressure for employee benefit reductions and short-term advances, or because a large number of the company's employees would suddenly become millionaires on paper. In a report given to potential investors, co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page promised that the IPO would not change the company's culture. Later Mr. Page said, "We think a lot about how to maintain our culture and the fun elements."
As Google grows, many analysts are finding that the company is becoming more "corporate." In 2005, articles in The New York Times and other sources began suggesting that Google had lost its anti-corporate, Don't Be Evil philosophy.
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