Google will host a conference this summer focused on building scalable websites. The one-day conference takes place on Saturday, June 23, at the Google offices in Seattle, home to Google Webmaster Tools, Google Talk, and a few other teams. The conference organizers are currently accepting applications for 45-minute talks, and hopefully we’ll be able to learn a little more about concepts behind MapReduce, Bigtable and some large-scale data management issues from the Google staff. Registration is not yet open, and it’s unclear whether the conference will be held in the downtown sales office or the engineering office in Kirkland, so…
Category Archives: Google
Add a little Google to your bathroom
If you walk into any of Google’s 500 bathroom stalls you might notice some Python on the walls. Google places tips for its developers above every urinal and bathroom stall to help expounding the virtues of well-tested code, helping a Google engineer stay productive even when nature calls. Google is releasing its “Testing on the Toilet” series on a new testing blog under a Creative Commons license, so now anyone can decorate their bathroom walls to look just like Google. No, it’s not a April Fools joke, Google really does promote 100% coverage in its bathroom stalls….
Google phrase analysis within highly ranked websites
A few more details about Google’s possible analysis of page text is now available thanks to a recently published patent application by Googler Anna Patterson from June 2006. The application details how a search engine like Google might analyze text phrases, date-based topics, and associate a web page with related topics, even if the specific topic does not appear in the document itself. The 22-page document further emphasizes Google’s current work on “shingle” analysis to discover important phrases and concepts. (via Search Engine Land) Highly ranked websites are more likely to receive in-depth analysis through multiple index passes and phrase…
Google Mondrian: web-based code review and storage
Guido van Rossum unveiled his first Google project, Mondrian, tonight during a Python tech talk at the Google campus in Mountain View. Mondrian is a web-based code review system built on top of a Perforce and BigTable backend with a Python-powered front-end. Mondrian is a pretty impressive system and is currently in use across Google. Shared Development Environment Google uses a company-wide Perforce depot with almost no developer branches. Each developer has their own NFS workspace readable by anyone in the company, including automated processes. An administrative process takes snapshots of each developer workspace including local development environments accessed…
Google Personalized Homepage for your domain
Users of Google Apps for Your Domain can now add a homepage with a custom set of configured gadgets for their users. The new feature lets companies configure mail messages, calendar data, specialized web feeds, and more as their employees’ portal to the web. The group customization feature was previously only available to large partnerships such as Dell and Gateway. The Apps for Your Domain program launched in August and includes custom branded and custom addressable access to Google Mail, Talk, Calendar, webpage creation, and now your own start page to bring it all together. The Google search box…
Google collaborative appliance on the way?
Google’s moves into application bundles and collaboration software are setting it up for a bigger enterprise play, taking on Microsoft in an area that consistently feeds their R&D. Maybe you read about the JotSpot acquisition this morning on the Google enterprise blog. We look forward to putting those wikis to work. Google currently searches the enterprise through its search appliance, a brightly colored box you place in your rack and configure to crawl behind the firewall. Just one application on this box seems like a waste of space and could perhaps open up some more applications for small to…
Google Alerts for blog content
Google Alerts now supports blog search content. If you subscribe to a Google News alert for your brand or topic of interest you can now receive the same style alerts for content in the Google Blog Search index. Google Alerts tracks news, blogs, Usenet groups, and Google Groups discussions using the same search syntax found on their respective website. The new blog search e-mail notification will be an easy extension of vertical search for existing users. Advanced users can setup an advanced search, or choose to receive general updates via web feeds and critical updates via e-mail. I expect Google…
New Googlebot controls for webmasters
Google has added new features to its tools for webmasters, allowing us to request Google index our site faster and more thoroughly than before. Crank it up! Control Googlebot crawl rate You can now control how frequently Googlebot crawls your site over the next 90 days. Webmasters can ask Googlebot to slow down or speed up for the next 90 days. Your choice may affect your total bandwidth usage but the tradeoff is possibly more frequent visits from Google’s discovery and indexing tools. Enhanced image search Webmasters can now opt-in to Google enhanced image search. If you opt-in Google may…
Google acquires YouTube for $1.65 billion
Google shocked the online world this weekend with its acquisition of leading video site YouTube for $1.65 billion in Google stock. YouTube will maintain its brand and site, and move into its new San Bruno offices this week as planned. Hitwise estimates YouTube’s market share in September at 46%, an even stronger share in Europe. Google Video had an estimated market share of 11% in the same period. The $1.65 billion acquisition places YouTube at about the same purchase price adjusted for inflation as eBay’s acquisition of PayPal in 2002 for $1.5 billion. I’m sure the similarities are not lost…
Google Blog Search adds ping beacon, changes.xml
Google Blog Search is now accepting pings and republishing the updates it observes. You can submit an update using XML-RPC or REST, similar to other blog services and easily added to your weblog’s ping configuration. RPC endpoint: http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2 Google publishes the last 5 minutes of ping activity in its changes.xml file. It is possible to receive pings of different recency by adding the last parameter to your request with a number of seconds between 1 and 300. The new service is a change in Google’s view of the web, accepting the value of fresh index content within minutes instead…