Google Keeps Tweaking Its Search Engine

THESE days, Google seems to be doing everything, everywhere. It takes pictures of your house from outer space, copies rare Sanskrit books in India, charms its way onto Madison Avenue, picks fights with Hollywood and tries to undercut Microsoft’s software dominance.

But at its core, Google remains a search engine. And its search pages, blue hyperlinks set against a bland, white background, have made it the most visited, most profitable and arguably the most powerful company on the Internet. Google is the homework helper, navigator and yellow pages for half a billion users, able to find the most improbable needles in the world’s largest haystack of information in just the blink of an eye.

Yet however easy it is to wax poetic about the modern-day miracle of Google, the site is also among the world’s biggest teases. Millions of times a day, users click away from Google, disappointed that they couldn’t find the hotel, the recipe or the background of that hot guy. Google often finds what users want, but it doesn’t always.

That’s why Amit Singhal and hundreds of other Google engineers are constantly tweaking the company’s search engine in an elusive quest to close the gap between often and always.

Mr. Singhal is the master of what Google calls its “ranking algorithm” — the formulas that decide which Web pages best answer each user’s question. It is a crucial part of Google’s inner sanctum, a department called “search quality” that the company treats like a state secret. Google rarely allows outsiders to visit the unit, and it has been cautious about allowing Mr. Singhal to speak with the news media about the magical, mathematical brew inside the millions of black boxes that power its search engine.

Google values Mr. Singhal and his team so highly for the most basic of competitive reasons. It believes that its ability to decrease the number of times it leaves searchers disappointed is crucial to fending off ever fiercer attacks from the likes of Yahoo and Microsoft and preserving the tidy advertising gold mine that search represents.

“The fundamental value created by Google is the ranking,” says John Battelle, the chief executive of Federated Media, a blog ad network, and author of “The Search,” a book about Google.

Online stores, he notes, find that a quarter to a half of their visitors, and most of their new customers, come from search engines. And media sites are discovering that many people are ignoring their home pages — where ad rates are typically highest — and using Google to jump to the specific pages they want.

“Google has become the lifeblood of the Internet,” Mr. Battelle says. “You have to be in it.”

Users, of course, don’t see the science and the artistry that makes Google’s black boxes hum, but the search-quality team makes about a half-dozen major and minor changes a week to the vast nest of mathematical formulas that power the search engine.

These formulas have grown better at reading the minds of users to interpret a very short query. Are the users looking for a job, a purchase or a fact? The formulas can tell that people who type “apples” are likely to be thinking about fruit, while those who type “Apple” are mulling computers or iPods. They can even compensate for vaguely worded queries or outright mistakes.

“Search over the last few years has moved from ‘Give me what I typed’ to ‘Give me what I want,’ ” says Mr. Singhal, a 39-year-old native of India who joined Google in 2000 and is now a Google Fellow, the designation the company reserves for its elite engineers.

Google recently allowed a reporter from The New York Times to spend a day with Mr. Singhal and others in the search-quality team, observing some internal meetings and talking to several top engineers. There were many questions that Google wouldn’t answer. But the engineers still explained more than they ever have before in the news media about how their search system works.

As Google constantly fine-tunes its search engine, one challenge it faces is sheer scale. It is now the most popular Web site in the world, offering its services in 112 languages, indexing tens of billons of Web pages and handling hundreds of millions of queries a day.

Even more daunting, many of those pages are shams created by hucksters trying to lure Web surfers to their sites filled with ads, pornography or financial scams. At the same time, users have come to expect that Google can sift through all that data and find what they are seeking, with just a few words as clues.

Article on Google Book Search Settlement

Yesterday’s issue of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) contains an interesting article on the Google Book Search Settlement written by Prof. Burkhard Hess:

The settlement concerns a class action lawsuit between Google and - as plaintiffs - the Authors Guild, the Association of American Publishers as well as individual authors and publishers about books scanned for the Google Book Search without the authors’ consent. Basically, the proposal for the settlement provides on the one side the payment of compensation for class members and the establishment of a registry of rights to books while it contains on the other side an authorisation of Google to scan books, maintain an electronic database and to make worldwide commercial uses of books.

The problematic issue the present article is dealing with, is the opt-out-mechanism provided by the settlement: Authors who do not object within the opt-out deadline (which has been extended until 4 September 2009) will be bound by the settlement. Thus, authors are “compelled” to take action if they don’t want to be bound by the settlement. In other words - the opt-out mechanism is meant to substitute the authors’ consent in the digitalisation and marketing of their books.

Hess points out in his article that the strategy of an opt-out mechanism might involve difficulties in view of the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works since this Convention guarantees a certain minimum standard of protection: In his article, Hess raises doubts whether the opt-out mechanism - which would lead to an automatic deprivation of the authors’ copyright - meets the requirements of this protection standard.

With regard to the fairness hearing - which will take place in New York on 3 September - Hess suggests that it is not only the concerned authors who should intervene - rather he suggests that also the German Federal Government could do so, as an amicus curiae, in order to submit the reservations against the settlement.

Installed Google Chrome 2.0

Today i'm installed browser at my dekstop with Open Source Google Chrome 2.0. I'm check and try use Google Chrome 2.0 ... WOW.. realy this software work fine. I get suprised from Open Source Google Chrome Stable Release. I have browser alternative too ( Mozila Firefox, IE, Safari, Opera ) and today I'm use new browser Google Chrome... realy this software very fast for me.