Category: google

My 20 % Google Product Ideas

If Google leads text mining, why doesnt it move in the numerical data mining space occupied by BI softwares.

And make them free /ad supported

Why it doesnt acquire some company  which aggregates and sells published content, as these are the primary users of Google especially in Paid business research.

Update- Google doesnot want to own content (as per spokesman). They just own everything else (You tube,blogspot,Knol etc etc)

The Empire Strikes Back- MS Products in the wings

MS Products in the wings can be accessed on connect.microsoft.com/

They are extensive, and Steve (Ballmer not Jobs) is using most of the 44 Billion he saved (thanks to Jerry ‘s merry ways) to create savvy tools to match Google in anything they make and more.

Yes the tools are that good.And No, they are only limited to the US as of now.

Google :Protocol Buffers and Lively

1) An Alternative to XML. This is quite a cool initiative as long as it doesnot lead to more skirmishes with the guys from redmond.http://code.google.com/apis/protocolbuffers/docs/overview.html

“”For example, let’s say you want to model a person with a name and an email. In XML, you need to do:
John Doe
jdoe@example.com

while the corresponding protocol buffer message definition (in protocol buffer text format) is:

# Textual representation of a protocol buffer.
# This is *not* the binary format used on the wire.
person {
name: “John Doe”
email: “jdoe@example.com”
}

In binary format, this message would probably be 28 bytes long and take around 100-200 nanoseconds to parse. The XML version is at least 69 bytes (if you remove whitespace) and would take around 5,000-10,000 nanoseconds to parse.

Also, manipulating a protocol buffer is much easier:

cout << “Name: ” << person.name() << endl;
cout << “E-mail: ” << person.email() << endl;

Whereas with XML you would have to do something like:

cout << “Name: ”
<< person.getElementsByTagName(“name”)->item(0)->innerText()
<< endl;
cout << “E-mail: ”
<< person.getElementsByTagName(“email”)->item(0)->innerText()
<< endl;

However, protocol buffers are not always a better solution than XML – for instance, protocol buffers would not be a good way to model a text-based document with markup (e.g. HTML), since you cannot easily interleave structure with text. In addition, XML is human-readable and human-editable; protocol buffers, at least in their native format, are not. XML is also – to some extent – self-describing. A protocol buffer is only meaningful if you have the message definition (the .proto file).””

We think it is one more Google googly at Microsoft (!). But if its faster for consumers so be it.

2) www.lively.com

This one is like Yahoo Avatars or a crude Second Life. We downloaded  it, the app was quite small, but running it was slow ,and  bandwidth heavy (I tested Eve online on the same bandwidth)As more developers pile on, it should get bigger inevitably. Its a fun project but yes you can prompted to click remember chat history ( so as Google can tie up more behavioral ad- targeting to your IP address). Ouch !


Dear Google

Google.com has added its privacy policy to the main page to conform with California law. Here is a question to the masters of the algorithm that I sent to their query system ”

Dear Google ,

I understand that IP Addresses are stored routinely by you, that these IP addresses can be used as unique keys for analytical purposes, but also be used for identifying and locating privacy of people (like in China) with disproportionate technical effort. Why don’t you run a randomizing algorithm that masks the IP addresses but keeps the uniqueness factor alive, and delete the original IP addresses, thus sparing yourself any privacy concerns. The algorithm should be made in a manner that any masked unique  IP number cannot be unmasked , and all same IP addresses have same masked IP addresses.You retain analytical value, consumers retain privacy and we settle this debate once and for all.”
This is in response to its slightly biased privacy policy whose fine print is here ”

http://www.google.co.in/intl/en/privacypolicy.html

Data integrity

Google processes personal information only for the purposes for which it was collected and in accordance with this Policy or any applicable service-specific privacy notice. We review our data collection, storage and processing practices to ensure that we only collect, store and process the personal information needed to provide or improve our services. We take reasonable steps to ensure that the personal information we process is accurate, complete, and current, but we depend on our users to update or correct their personal information whenever necessary.

Accessing and updating personal information

When you use Google services, we make good faith efforts to provide you with access to your personal information and either to correct this data if it is inaccurate or to delete such data at your request if it is not otherwise required to be retained by law or for legitimate business purposes. We ask individual users to identify themselves and the information requested to be accessed, corrected or removed before processing such requests, and we may decline to process requests that are unreasonably repetitive or systematic,  require disproportionate technical effort , jeopardize the privacy of others, or would be extremely impractical (for instance, requests concerning information residing on backup tapes), or for which access is not otherwise required. In any case where we provide information access and correction, we perform this service free of charge, except if doing so would require a disproportionate effort. Some of our services have different procedures to access, correct or delete users’ personal information. We provide the details for these procedures in the specific privacy notices or FAQs for these services.”

This leaves enough loopholes for Google to pick and choose its privacy policy AND its response. Nice spin, but people understanding law, public relations, databases AND algorithms do exist in the non Google world. The New York Times blog “Bits”: is at the forefront. And its a very good blog for all tech news besides the renowned mashable (www.mashable.com) and Silicon Valley Insider (www.alleyinsider.com)

Watch this space.

Orkut and the Quiet Open Social Revolution

Orkut has worked very hard with

1) avoiding clutter unlike the FB (apps go in the left)

2) customized page themes

3) integration with the gtalk

4) scraps/ wall posts updates

5) some better games than FB. yes i especially liked Space invader

almost like a flash game

which hasnot

been seen in some time. And most FB games were there !!

This is one Google product they are keeping much quiet about- wonder if they are

changing their high profile ways with the justice department sniffing on the yahoo deal.

Heres a preview – Go and revive that old Orkut account of yours