Google search gets eyes and ears!

Google's first search engine let people search by typing text onto a Web page. Next came queries spoken over the phone.


On Monday, Google announced the ability to perform an Internet search by submitting a photograph.

The experimental search-by-sight feature, called Google Goggles, has a database of billions of images that informs its analysis of what's been uploaded, said Vic Gundotra, Google's vice president of engineering. It can recognize books, album covers, artwork, landmarks, places, logos, and more.

"It is our goal to be able to identify any image," he said. "It represents our earliest efforts in the field of computer vision. You can take a picture of an item, use that picture of whatever you take as the query."

However, the feature is still in Google Labs to deal with the "nascent nature of computer vision" and with the service's present shortcomings. "Google Goggles works well on certain types of objects in certain categories," he said.

Google Goggles was one of the big announcements at an event at the Computer History Museum here to tout the future of Google search. The company also showed off real-time search results and translation of a spoken phrase from English to Spanish using a mobile phone.

"It could be we are really at the cusp of an entirely new computing era," Gundotra said, with "devices that can understand our own speech, help us understand others, and augment our own sight by helping us see further."

Offering one real-world example of the service in action, Gundotra said that when a guest came by for dinner, he snapped a photo of a wine bottle she gave him to assess its merits. The result--"hints of apricot and hibiscus blossom"--went far beyond his expertise, but that didn't stop him from sharing the opinion over dinner.

He also demonstrated Google Goggles to take a photo of the

Itsukushima Shrine in Japan, a landmark tourists may recognize even if they can't read Japanese. The uploaded photo returned a description of the shrine on his mobile phone.

Although the service can recognize faces, since faces are among the billions of images in the database, it doesn't right now, Gundotra said.

"For this product, we made the decision not to do facial recognition," Gundotra said.

"We still want to work on the issues of user opt-in and control. We have the technology to do the underlying face recognition, but we decided to delay that until safeguards are in place."

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Google unveils social search function

HAMBURG: Google is testing a new social search function to make it easier for people find their friends' blogs and twitter feeds.


The only catch is that users of the service need to have an open profile with Google that includes personal contact data.

Once those conditions are met, the user can access the service at the Google Labs. Typing in "New York" will yield a list of friends in the user's social network who have posted items from the Big Apple. Settings can be altered so that only postings from close friends and acquaintances are included in the "social graph."

Google Germany spokesman Stefan Keuchel says the new social search function is separate from a recently launched service allowing real time searches of Twitter feeds. Social Search works quickly, but not in real time. It is currently only available in English.

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Go! a new programming language from google

Go! is a concurrent programming language, first publicly documented by Keith Clark and Francis McCabe in 2003 and included as part of the Network Agents project at Sourceforge. It is oriented to the needs of programming secure, production quality, agent based applications. It is multithreaded, strongly typed and higher order (in the functional programming sense). It has relation, function, and action procedure definitions. Threads execute action procedures, calling functions and querying relations as need be. Threads in different agents communicate and coordinate using asynchronous messages. Threads within the same agent can also use shared dynamic relations acting as memory stores.


Its nature as a multi-paradigm programming language, integrating logic, functional, object-oriented, and imperative programming styles, is particularly applied to ontology-based modeling, as exploited for the Semantic Web in allowing a type system where OWL classes can be represented in the type system. The design of Go!, according to Bordini et al.'s survey, also took into consideration critical issues such as security, transparency, and integrity, in regards to the adoption of logic programming technology. Agents in Go! contain both reactive and deliberative aspects, and coordinate using BDI structures, and their style of expression has influenced the modeling of agent systems in Erlang.

Where did the idea for Go come from?

Pike, Thompson and Robert Griesemer of Java HotSpot virtual machine and V8 JavaScript engine fame, decided to make a go of developing a new language out of frustration with the pace of building software. Said Pike:

"In Google we have very large software systems and we spent so long literally waiting for compilations, even though we have distributed compilation and parallelism in all of these tools to help, it can take a very long time to build a program. Even incremental builds can be slow. And we looked at this and realized many of the reasons for that are just fundamental in working in languages like C and C++, and we needed a different approach. We also decided the tools that everybody used were also slow. So we wanted to start from scratch to write the kind of programs we need to write here at Google in a way that the tools could be really efficient and the build cycles could be very short."

Example
Gender::= male

female.
person <˜ {dayOfBirth:[]=>day. age:[]=>integer.
gender:[]=>Gender. name:[]=>string.
home:[]=>string. lives:[string]{}}.
person:[string,day,Gender,string]$=person.
person(Nm,Born,Sx,Hm)..{
dayOfBirth()=>Born.
age() => yearsBetween(now(),Born).
gender()=>Sx.
name()=>Nm.
home()=>Hm.
lives(Pl) :- Pl=home().
yearsBetween:[integer,day]=>integer.
yearsBetween(...) => ..
}.
newPerson:[string,day,Gender,string]=>person.
newPerson(Nm,Born,Sx,Hm)=>$person(Nm,Born,Sx,Hm).

- Rohy :)
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Google's SPDY: Doubles the speed of Web!

SPDY: An experimental protocol for a faster web
Google is apparently in the early stages of a research project that appears to aim as high as perhaps replacing the HTTP protocol, the fundamental technology that essentially makes the World Wide Web possible.


In a somewhat obscure post on the Chromium blog, the development branch of their Chrome browser, Google reveals they’ve been working on a new protocol dubbed SPDY for “SPeeDY” for its goal of making the web faster.

While HTTP is an “elegantly simple protocol” that has powered the web since 1996, the tone of Google’s post is almost patronizing, as if HTTP were our doddering old uncle that’s had his day and needs to be put out to pasture. Then again, Google’s hubris is perhaps warranted as one of the only companies with enough clout and resources to indeed spur on the “evolution of websites and browsers” with an entirely new protocol designed to speed up the communication between web servers and clients.

They reveal they’ve already got a prototype web server and a Chrome client with built-in SPDY support that they’ve been testing in the lab. With these tools they’ve reportedly been able to see an up to 55% speed increase in page loading, and feel like the project is now stable enough to warrant soliciting feedback from the web community. The SPDY documentation is now available, as well as the source code. Google encourages feedback on the new protocol in the Chromium Google Group.

Google:
Executive summary
As part of the "Let's make the web faster" initiative, we are experimenting with alternative protocols to help reduce the latency of web pages. One of these experiments is SPDY (pronounced "SPeeDY"), an application-layer protocol for transporting content over the web, designed specifically for minimal latency. In addition to a specification of the protocol, we have developed a SPDY-enabled Google Chrome browser and open-source web server. In lab tests, we have compared the performance of these applications over HTTP and SPDY, and have observed up to 64% reductions in page load times in SPDY. We hope to engage the open source community to contribute ideas, feedback, code, and test results, to make SPDY the next-generation application protocol for a faster web.

SPDY frequently asked questions
Q: Doesn't HTTP pipelining already solve the latency problem?
A: No. While pipelining does allow for multiple requests to be sent in parallel over a single TCP stream, it is still but a single stream. Any delays in the processing of anything in the stream (either a long request at the head-of-line or packet loss) will delay the entire stream. Pipelining has proven difficult to deploy, and because of this remains disabled by default in all of the major browsers.

Q: Is SPDY a replacement for HTTP?
A: No. SPDY replaces some parts of HTTP, but mostly augments it. At the highest level of the application layer, the request-response protocol remains the same. SPDY still uses HTTP methods, headers, and other semantics. But SPDY overrides other parts of the protocol, such as connection management and data transfer formats.

Q: Why did you choose this name?
A: We wanted a name that captures speed. SPDY, pronounced "SPeeDY", captures this and also shows how compression can help improve speed.

Q: Should SPDY change the transport layer?
A: More research should be done to determine if an alternate transport could reduce latency. However, replacing the transport is a complicated endeavor, and if we can overcome the inefficiencies of TCP and HTTP at the application layer, it is simpler to deploy.

Q: TCP has been time-tested to avoid congestion and network collapse. Will SPDY break the Internet?
A: No. SPDY runs atop TCP, and benefits from all of TCP's congestion control algorithms. Further, HTTP has already changed the way congestion control works on the Internet. For example, HTTP clients today open up to 6 concurrent connections to a single server; at the same time, some HTTP servers have increased the initial congestion window to 4 packets. Because TCP independently throttles each connection, servers are effectively sending up to 24 packets in an initial burst. The multiple connections side-step TCP's slow-start. SPDY, by contrast, implements multiple streams over a single connection.

Q: What about SCTP?
A: SCTP is an interesting potential alternate transport, which offers multiple streams over a single connection. However, again, it requires changing the transport stack, which will make it very difficult to deploy across existing home routers. Also, SCTP alone isn't the silver bullet; application-layer changes still need to be made to efficiently use the channel between the server and client.

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Doodle 4 Google - My India

Google likes to reflect the ever-changing world of the users through the logo designs on their homepage. These ‘doodles’ celebrate scientists, artists, local events or special dates and are designed by the original doodler, 31-year-old, Dennis Hwang.

Google now giving you a chance to design a doodle for them, through their doodle competition, Doodle 4 Google. If you are currently a student in any school in India (between the 1st and 10th standards), then this is your chance to have your doodle be displayed on the Google India homepage. The theme of this competition is 'My India'. The best doodles will be voted on by a panel of judges as well as by the Indian public, and the winning doodle will be featured on the Google India homepage for a day, to be viewed by millions of people. The final winner will also win his or her very own laptop (and a technology grant for their school)!

Winning Doodle 4 Google 'My India' Doodle - Puru Pratap Singh

Original Doodler

Google doodles, the drawings that are designed on, and through, the Google logo on our home page, are the creation of 31-year-old Google Webmaster Dennis Hwang. Since Dennis began celebrating and marking worldwide events and holidays with his doodles in 2000, his work has been seen by millions and reached cult status, with fans waiting with bated breath to see his next creation, and even websites and blogs devoted to his work. We spoke to Dennis about his doodles and how he got his ideal job:

Most people have to choose only one of their interests to pursue. How did you get such a cool job that meshes computers and art?

"I had an internship with Google in college. I was given the task of helping with maintenance of the website and I soon became an assistant webmaster. Before I joined Google, the founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin were already thinking about holiday logos...and when I joined, they knew I was studying art and suggested I should give it a shot. I've been doing it since then as my 20% project."

Are you constantly trying to keep up with current events and holidays?

"How far I work in advance depends. Sometimes, we react really quickly to current events. When the Mars Rover landed, I created a logo in less than 24 hours. For all of the international countries, if there's a special day and we think it's in line with the Google brand, we want to commemorate it."

Do you get suggestions from Google users?

"I get quite a lot of suggestions from users. We're really open to user feedback and having ideas sent to us because our users are really creative. For example, a French astronomer had emailed us about the Venus Transit, in which Venus casts a shadow on the sun every 122 years. During the transit, you'll see a black dot moves across the sun, so here is what I drew."

How do you decide on the design of the drawings?

"First, I do a lot of brainstorming, search for images on Google, and absorb all the imagery. Then I apply a design that interacts with letters. I find that a bit more interesting."

Do you have favorite doodles?

"I have several favorites. Usually, artists' birthdays are the ones I spend the most effort on, like Monet's birthday."

How difficult is it to reinvent recurring holidays?

"It's definitely a challenge, but it's one I look forward to. I've been doing this for quite a while and need to come up with fresh ideas every year. There's only so many ways to draw a turkey or a pumpkin!"

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Water on the Moon; Even Google’s Celebrating!

Google’s been on a homepage logo changing spree: they’ve celebrated H.G. Wells, the bar code, Confucious, Gandhi, and Sesame Street over the last few months alone.


If you check Google.com now though, you’ll see that the search giant is celebrating something different: the discovery of water on the moon! NASA made the stunning announcement earlier today after its moon bombing mission successfully revealed water under the lunar surface. And now the GoogleGoogle logo depicts the bombing revealing water.

When you think about it, Google had a quick turnaround time for this logo. As fellow space enthusiasts, our hats go off to NASA and the men and women behind the successful mission. Hopefully this is only the beginning of something even bigger than ourselves.

Water on the moon:
YouTube Video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpsGO-JhrJQ