Technoticles» google

Google’s new +1

technoticles — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 07:40:07 +0000

The coolest thing i always liked about the ‘Like’ button was that it was a master stroke by Facebook in terms of ‘Light Communication’. I know a lot of people who would never comment on anything on facebook but they use the ‘Like’ button pretty often.

Today Google has come out with its new +1 product, which is pretty much like the Facebook Like button. Data from this product will provide Google with a tremendous amount of data to analyse the quality of sites as well as keep a track on the tastes of its users. Though the company says that the data will not be used to influence its search results, but this could be a major step towards building a great semantic search engine where the user’s taste will come to play a major role in the search results returned.

Some relevant link here:

Google's MapReduce patent and the future of Hadoop and CouchDB

nitin — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 01:22:57 +0000

Recently Ars Technica published a good article about Google being awarded a Software Patent (by USPTO) that covers the principle of distributed MapReduce.

The importance of this event lies in the fact that many of todays leading software companies use MapReduce based projects. It is slightly scary for these players especially the users of the Hadoop and the CouchDb projects (refer below for an introduction to these). Hadoop has been a quite popular open source implementation of the MapReduce framework and is used by Yahoo, Amazon, IBM, Facebook, Rackspace, Hulu, the New York Times and many other companies.

But as the article suggests its is very unlikely that Google will go after projects like Hadoop to enforce its patent as that could lead to a backlash (both from software companies and developers) that might be tough to handle.

Hadoop Jobs (source: developer.amazonwebservices.com)

For those who don’t know about Map Reduce, it a software framework introduced by google in a paper in 2004. As the paper specifies ”MapReduce is a programming model and an associated implementation for processing and generating large data sets. Users specify a map function that processes a key/value pair to generate a set of intermediate key/value pairs, and a reduce function that merges all intermediate values associated with the same intermediate key“.

Google Code University has a lecture series here on Cluster Computing and MapReduce .

Hadoop is a free licence Apache project that is a Java software framework that supports data-intensive distributed applications.

Quoting Wikipedia: It enables applications to work with thousands of nodes and petabytes of data. It was originally developed to support distribution for the Nutch search engine project. In 2008, Yahoo launched the world’s largest Hadoop production application that runs on a more than 10,000 core Linux cluster and produces data that is now used in every Yahoo Web search query.

CouchDB is another interesting Apache project. It is an open source database that is not relational. Instead of storing data in rows and columns, the database manages a collection of JSON documents. Basically it is a document database server, accessible via a RESTful JSON API.

Google phases out support for IE6

nitin — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 07:51:42 +0000

Today I got an email from Google (as a google apps admin) saying that over the course of 2010 they we will be phasing out support for Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0. The same is also communicated at their blog.

Email from Google

Also when opening Facebook from IE7 browser I got a box on the top suggesting me to upgrade to IE8. Earlier last year similar phase out warnings had started to appear on YouTube as well.

I am sure seeing this would have brought smiles to the faces of many web developers, as writing JavaScript code to work on IE6 is one of the most painful things in front end web development. So many things just don’t work.

This move by Google and Facebook is very welcome. It will definitely help in the growth of HTML 5 and advanced JavaScripting.

Some organization have long been running on IE6 and upgrading the browser is a big task for their IT departments. No wonder IE6 still commands as much as 20% of the browser market. It is only such actions on part of major websites, that can shake the organizations to make the shift.

One of the other reasons for phasing out IE6 is its security vulnerability. As this Zdnet blog points out, earlier last month Microsoft had admitted that the attack from China on Google and some other US companies had exploited a hole in IE6, which was also present in IE7 and IE8.

Go, the new programming language from Google

nitin — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 07:21:24 +0000

Go is the new, open sourced programming language released by ‘Go’ogle recently. The language is intended for the programmers familiar with C or C++ and like these languages its goal is to serve as a system language. Compiled Go code runs at close to the speed of C and its compilation happens almost instantly.

It still seems to in the under construction phase though, still evolving, and not yet redy for production environments. As Ars Technica mentions the ecosystem around the programming language is still a work in progress (ie. IDE integration and the libraries ).

The creators of the language say that it’s not intended for beginners, but it’s also not terribly difficult to learn. It’s object-oriented and boasts features like true closures and reflection.

This one is another resultant of the 20% time project time that Google is famous for.

Infoq has put together a primer for the language here.

Go’s own tutorial page is here.