Yes, thats for real. Now Docs and Spreadsheets from Google Docs that are publicly published will now be crawlable by the search engine. For this, the document should be published publicly and be a part of a public webpage that is already indexed by the webpage.
Here's Marie from Google who on Thursday wrote in a blog post that "in about two weeks, we will be launching a change for published docs. The change will allow published docs that are linked to from a public Web site to be crawled and indexed, which means they can appear in search results you see on Google.com and other search engines...This is a very exciting change as your published docs linked to from public websites will reach a much wider audience of people."
She added that the crawling for search results "only applies to docs which you explicitly publish using the 'Publish as Web page' or 'Publish/embed' option, and which are linked to from a publicly crawled Web page" (documents for which users choose only to "allow anyone with the link to view" will not get crawled. Also, the users can choose to un-publish the documents that they don't wish to be indexed.
Some users of the search giant's suite of online productivity applications expressed concerns about the plan, suggesting better labeling of potentially crawlable documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. For example, how would you know definitively if a publicly crawled Web page has linked to your published document? Is the only way to ensure that your published document does not ultimately show up in search results to actually unpublish it
As noted by The Register, "Google Apps master view does not tell you which docs are publicly published and which aren't." While it may well be obvious to most users how publicly available their Google documents are--and many of those published documents may well be intended to be as publicly available as possible--this seems to be another area where Google needs to find the right balance between transparency and data accessibility.
Respond in the comments about what you think about this move from Google.
Source: CNET News - "Webware"
Showing posts with label google. Show all posts
Showing posts with label google. Show all posts
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
Friday, September 11, 2009
Google just got bigger! Its a bigger search this time.
Google's just got bigger!
Not that it wasn't a giant after all, but Google has recently increased the size of its search box that the company says "will make it easier for people to use".
Google's vice president for search products and user experience, Marissa Mayer, said this teenie-weenie change to the Google hompage symbolizes Google's "Focus on Search". She says that these tiny adjustments to the search box's height and width would make it "even easier and more fun to use."
Google said in an e-mail message that the new search box is "roughly double the size of the (original) search box." The company also made its search buttons "more similar" for those viewing Google "on different operating systems and browsers." Even with a larger search box, the company's search still only allows for up to 2,048 characters in a single query.
Here's a side-by-side view of the two looks of Google: [Click on image to view larger]
Not that it wasn't a giant after all, but Google has recently increased the size of its search box that the company says "will make it easier for people to use".
Google's vice president for search products and user experience, Marissa Mayer, said this teenie-weenie change to the Google hompage symbolizes Google's "Focus on Search". She says that these tiny adjustments to the search box's height and width would make it "even easier and more fun to use."
Google said in an e-mail message that the new search box is "roughly double the size of the (original) search box." The company also made its search buttons "more similar" for those viewing Google "on different operating systems and browsers." Even with a larger search box, the company's search still only allows for up to 2,048 characters in a single query.
Here's a side-by-side view of the two looks of Google: [Click on image to view larger]
Thursday, September 3, 2009
Gmail Fails, Google Apologises
Reference: Techdare.com
Google's Electronic Mail service GMail recently crashed on Wednesday, the 2nd of September for an astonishing 100 minutes! The outage nearly killed the Tweety Twitter again!
But isn't just Google a vast spread network of its never-out-of-run servers. As everyone kept wondering whatever happened with Google and GMail, the service kept responding to the Sign-In requests with the erroneous (but quite friendly!) message:
[Credit: GearDiary.com]
Of course, why do we have to worry????
Better still, 'twas good seeing Google publicly apologizing for the unhappy incident.
Looks like they've got everything tangled, and this one was big!!! Real big!
Google engineering VP Ben Treynor explains on the Gmail Blog:
Gmail, which recently passed AOL to become the third largest Web mail service in the U.S., is obviously having some growing pains. A few hours of downtime is not the end of the world, although it might seem like it at the time. It just better not make this a new habit.
Let's hope Google sticks to its commitment
Google's Electronic Mail service GMail recently crashed on Wednesday, the 2nd of September for an astonishing 100 minutes! The outage nearly killed the Tweety Twitter again!
But isn't just Google a vast spread network of its never-out-of-run servers. As everyone kept wondering whatever happened with Google and GMail, the service kept responding to the Sign-In requests with the erroneous (but quite friendly!) message:
[Credit: GearDiary.com]
Of course, why do we have to worry????
Better still, 'twas good seeing Google publicly apologizing for the unhappy incident.
Looks like they've got everything tangled, and this one was big!!! Real big!
Google engineering VP Ben Treynor explains on the Gmail Blog:
Here’s what happened: This morning (Pacific Time) we took a small fraction of Gmail’s servers offline to perform routine upgrades. This isn’t in itself a problem — we do this all the time, and Gmail’s web interface runs in many locations and just sends traffic to other locations when one is offline.
However, as we now know, we had slightly underestimated the load which some recent changes (ironically, some designed to improve service availability) placed on the request routers — servers which direct web queries to the appropriate Gmail server for response. At about 12:30 pm Pacific a few of the request routers became overloaded and in effect told the rest of the system “stop sending us traffic, we’re too slow!”. This transferred the load onto the remaining request routers, causing a few more of them to also become overloaded, and within minutes nearly all of the request routers were overloaded. As a result, people couldn’t access Gmail via the web interface because their requests couldn’t be routed to a Gmail server. IMAP/POP access and mail processing continued to work normally because these requests don’t use the same routers.The Gmail engineering team was alerted to the failures within seconds (we take monitoring very seriously). After establishing that the core problem was insufficient available capacity, the team brought a LOT of additional request routers online (flexible capacity is one of the advantages of Google’s architecture), distributed the traffic across the request routers, and the Gmail web interface came back online.
Gmail, which recently passed AOL to become the third largest Web mail service in the U.S., is obviously having some growing pains. A few hours of downtime is not the end of the world, although it might seem like it at the time. It just better not make this a new habit.
Let's hope Google sticks to its commitment
Friday, August 7, 2009
Twitter Tweety Killed, Facebook ripped and the Social Network Drowned
The two biggies of the Social Network seemed to cripple as both Twitter and Facebook faced outage of services which ultimately came up to be a DDoS attack from an unidentified source. The attack was carried out at some 10 AM Eastern Time. This attack also followed on other sites such as LiveJournal and recently Youtube is reported to have the same slowdown. Although Youtube has not stated any of its service down.
As on Twitter Status Blog, Twitter reported the problem while tweeters waited long to their favorite social network. The outage has been reported to be the longest stretching whole 2 hours which in Online terms is quite a long time!
The blogosphere and other social networks were filled with disappointed Tweeters reaching out for alternatives and with cries for the outage of the service.
Twitter then reported to be "defending against a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack" that was causing the outage.
After it was over with Twitter came a news about Facebook facing the same problem. Worldwide Facebook returned Network errors with its service increasing the disappointment in people. After all we love to be socially connected of which facebook is an indispensable part.
After the Attack was succesfully defended, Facebook Officials stated the same outage to be a DDoS of which the source is still to be tracked.
But what caused this chaos in the Social Network world? Some blogs have reported the source of attack to be related to the Georgia Russia Crisis and that the attack was organized to silence one man reported to be "cyxymu" as on Twitter.
In an interview, Facebook's chief security officer Max Kelly told CNET.com, “It was a simultaneous attack across a number of properties targeting him to keep his voice from being heard. We’re actively investigating the source of the attacks and we hope to be able to find out the individuals involved in the back end and to take action against them if we can.”
he security expert spoke with The New York Times and gave his assessment of the situation:
Whatever happened to the Social World has been a sort of security lessons to this network and if the attack was related to cyber warfare, then we could be seeing a lot more of this. Still, it’s tough to understand how these social media sites would be of any strategic value to either Russia or Georgia. Today’s events are certainly getting even more complicated, though.
As on Twitter Status Blog, Twitter reported the problem while tweeters waited long to their favorite social network. The outage has been reported to be the longest stretching whole 2 hours which in Online terms is quite a long time!
The blogosphere and other social networks were filled with disappointed Tweeters reaching out for alternatives and with cries for the outage of the service.
Twitter then reported to be "defending against a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack" that was causing the outage.
After it was over with Twitter came a news about Facebook facing the same problem. Worldwide Facebook returned Network errors with its service increasing the disappointment in people. After all we love to be socially connected of which facebook is an indispensable part.
After the Attack was succesfully defended, Facebook Officials stated the same outage to be a DDoS of which the source is still to be tracked.
But what caused this chaos in the Social Network world? Some blogs have reported the source of attack to be related to the Georgia Russia Crisis and that the attack was organized to silence one man reported to be "cyxymu" as on Twitter.
In an interview, Facebook's chief security officer Max Kelly told CNET.com, “It was a simultaneous attack across a number of properties targeting him to keep his voice from being heard. We’re actively investigating the source of the attacks and we hope to be able to find out the individuals involved in the back end and to take action against them if we can.”
Google is quoted as saying, “We are aware that a handful of non-Google sites were impacted by a DOS attack this morning, and are in contact with some affected companies to help investigate this attack. Google systems prevented substantive impact to our services.”
The claims back up earlier reports in the New York Times that Thursday’s attack was sparked by the conflict between Russia and Georgia. The aim was to take down Cyxymu’s accounts, particularly the LiveJournal blog where he posted about the crisis. While Google’s sites held up to the barrage, Twitter and LiveJournal proved less robust.
While DDoS attacks are notoriously hard to defend against, it’s clear that Twitter was far less equipped to cope with such an attack: no doubt they’ll be taking a closer look at how such issues could be handled in the future.
Another blog post also reported a leading security expert as stating that this attack was not a normal DDoS that we usually see with a botnet and malware and trojan infected computers supporting the attack. Rather this was an organized attack.he security expert spoke with The New York Times and gave his assessment of the situation:
Reference from: MashableBill Woodcock, a research director of the Packet Clearing House, a nonprofit technical organization that tracks Internet traffic, said Thursday’s attack was an extension of the conflict between Russia and Georgia. It was not clear who initiated the attack, he said, but likely “one side put up propaganda, the other side figured this out and is attacking them.”
Instead of using a botnet, or a network of thousands of malware-infected personal computers to flood a site with traffic, Mr. Woodcock said this particular attack consisted of a wave of spam e-mail messages, which began infiltrating Twitter and other sites at 10:25 a.m. Eastern time. “It’s a vast increase in traffic that creates the denial-of-service,” he said.
YouTube and LiveJournal were also affected, Mr. Woodcock said, although “Twitter was definitely hit the hardest.” YouTube said it had not noticed any problems with its service.
Whatever happened to the Social World has been a sort of security lessons to this network and if the attack was related to cyber warfare, then we could be seeing a lot more of this. Still, it’s tough to understand how these social media sites would be of any strategic value to either Russia or Georgia. Today’s events are certainly getting even more complicated, though.
Sunday, August 2, 2009
What MS and Yahoo get out of the deal; And what advertisers and you could possibly get
Source: CNET News
Its time that everybody's been thinking why Microsoft and Yahoo have come up together with the deal between the two companies getting merged. Some have come up with the view that its an attempt to thwart off Google from its pre-dominant position in search market with MS doing the trick with its Bing Search Engine that was very well received from the consumer according to a report.
Here's an insight into what piece of pie does everyone get out of this delicacy:
Yahoo:
Yahoo is paying a 12 percent share for the outsourced search engine Bing from Microsoft, as MS pays Yahoo 88 per cent of the search revenue generated to it. Yahoo gets a guaranteed stream of search revenue for the next 18 months.
Plus, it gets to sell all the ads that are displayed on both Yahoo and Microsoft sites.
The new Yahoo CEO Tim Morse says that the company estimated that it will save $200 million in capital expenditures and see and overall benefit of $500 million in operating income.
What Yahoo gets low on the deal is the right to choose its destiny. The Search market of Yahoo is now in the hands of MS.
Microsoft:
The part of the good news for Microsoft is the ability to have a far more search market than it would have dreamt of acquiring. MS has almost tripled its search market with the merger. What's more is that all the Yahoo's tried-and-tested search tech and semantics is now available to MS.
And what's rumored is that MS would have to pay "boatloads of money" to get all this what it has got just in a merger rather than an acquisition of the Search Giant.
The part that's prickling is the relationship of MS from its advertisers that are now the "property" of Yahoo.
Google:
But what does Google get out of this? Does it get anything? Yes, Time. This deal as is said will take months, (if not years!) to complete and would be quite a deal to break.
Google Representatives likely called up their major clients to inform them of the uncertainty of this integration process and that they might be better of with a more stable operation.
Just what bitter truth for Google is that it cannot have the old British "Divide-and-Rule" strategy. Google was better off letting Yahoo and MS play like small kids trying to beat the "Daddy" of Search and compete between themselves as well. Now what happens? The two have a far more chance of making serious competition against Google when they're together as one. [The power of Unity!]
Google has more to live up to now!!!
Advertisers:
Advertisers now get a credible second option for their ad-spending as against the only other giant, Google, just about assuming that ad-spending ever becomes trendy again amidst the economic backdrop. They're also in store for a renewed pitch on the benefits of Internet display advertising, which probably still doesn't resonate on Madison Avenue but may one day start to make sense for the Internet advertiser.
But still, the relationships between advertisers and the two companies will grow more complicated as those used to working with certain representatives transfer their business to new faces. These may be resolved, but still are annoying.
Consumers:
For now, the only thing that consumers would get out of this is,
Yahoo Search Results:
Blah Blah Blah Blah
http://Blah Blah.co,m
"Powered by Bing"
What consumers lose out of this is the decrease in the available choices to them. This is not usually seen as good, but time will tell what's better.
Better still, Microsoft's got more market now so much so that it can force Google into playing defense while Yahoo gets to focus on more of its business.
Until then, its just not obvious!
Its time that everybody's been thinking why Microsoft and Yahoo have come up together with the deal between the two companies getting merged. Some have come up with the view that its an attempt to thwart off Google from its pre-dominant position in search market with MS doing the trick with its Bing Search Engine that was very well received from the consumer according to a report.
Here's an insight into what piece of pie does everyone get out of this delicacy:
Yahoo:
Yahoo is paying a 12 percent share for the outsourced search engine Bing from Microsoft, as MS pays Yahoo 88 per cent of the search revenue generated to it. Yahoo gets a guaranteed stream of search revenue for the next 18 months.
Plus, it gets to sell all the ads that are displayed on both Yahoo and Microsoft sites.
The new Yahoo CEO Tim Morse says that the company estimated that it will save $200 million in capital expenditures and see and overall benefit of $500 million in operating income.
What Yahoo gets low on the deal is the right to choose its destiny. The Search market of Yahoo is now in the hands of MS.
Microsoft:
The part of the good news for Microsoft is the ability to have a far more search market than it would have dreamt of acquiring. MS has almost tripled its search market with the merger. What's more is that all the Yahoo's tried-and-tested search tech and semantics is now available to MS.
And what's rumored is that MS would have to pay "boatloads of money" to get all this what it has got just in a merger rather than an acquisition of the Search Giant.
The part that's prickling is the relationship of MS from its advertisers that are now the "property" of Yahoo.
Google:
But what does Google get out of this? Does it get anything? Yes, Time. This deal as is said will take months, (if not years!) to complete and would be quite a deal to break.
Google Representatives likely called up their major clients to inform them of the uncertainty of this integration process and that they might be better of with a more stable operation.
Just what bitter truth for Google is that it cannot have the old British "Divide-and-Rule" strategy. Google was better off letting Yahoo and MS play like small kids trying to beat the "Daddy" of Search and compete between themselves as well. Now what happens? The two have a far more chance of making serious competition against Google when they're together as one. [The power of Unity!]
Google has more to live up to now!!!
Advertisers:
Advertisers now get a credible second option for their ad-spending as against the only other giant, Google, just about assuming that ad-spending ever becomes trendy again amidst the economic backdrop. They're also in store for a renewed pitch on the benefits of Internet display advertising, which probably still doesn't resonate on Madison Avenue but may one day start to make sense for the Internet advertiser.
But still, the relationships between advertisers and the two companies will grow more complicated as those used to working with certain representatives transfer their business to new faces. These may be resolved, but still are annoying.
Consumers:
For now, the only thing that consumers would get out of this is,
Yahoo Search Results:
Blah Blah Blah Blah
http://Blah Blah.co,m
"Powered by Bing"
What consumers lose out of this is the decrease in the available choices to them. This is not usually seen as good, but time will tell what's better.
Better still, Microsoft's got more market now so much so that it can force Google into playing defense while Yahoo gets to focus on more of its business.
Until then, its just not obvious!
Thursday, July 30, 2009
Microsoft, Yahoo join forces to challenge Google
Source: SiliconIndia News
Tech giants Microsoft and Yahoo reached a long-awaited partnership on Wednesday in a bid to challenge Google, which holds a 65 percent market share in online search. The two companies have plenty of challenges now, but the ground rules have been set: Yahoo's job is to be an online hub, and Microsoft's job is to out-Google Google
Under the 10-year deal, Microsoft would provide Yahoo with the Search Engine Technology with its Bing Search while Yahoo would handle the Advertising part from its huge traffic.
In exchange, Microsoft will pay its partner Yahoo with 88% of the search revenues generated on yahoo sites.
According to Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer, the deal will allow Microsoft to "create more innovation in search, better value for advertisers and real consumer choice in a market currently dominated by a single company".
A Yahoo-Microsoft partnership would mean about 28 percent of Internet searches would be performed on their combined platform, according to figures from ratings firm ComScore.
That would still be less than half of the about 65 percent market share of Google Inc., which has long dominated the search space.
Last year, Microsoft attempted to buy Yahoo for more than $45 billion, an unsolicited bid Yahoo rejected, but the Redmond, Washington-based software giant has long had Yahoo's search business at the top of its wish list, and the two had reportedly been in discussions for months.
Yahoo estimated the deal would add $500 million to its annual operating profit, as well as saving it around $275 million in expenses related to developing and maintaining its own search technology.
Tech giants Microsoft and Yahoo reached a long-awaited partnership on Wednesday in a bid to challenge Google, which holds a 65 percent market share in online search. The two companies have plenty of challenges now, but the ground rules have been set: Yahoo's job is to be an online hub, and Microsoft's job is to out-Google Google
Under the 10-year deal, Microsoft would provide Yahoo with the Search Engine Technology with its Bing Search while Yahoo would handle the Advertising part from its huge traffic.
In exchange, Microsoft will pay its partner Yahoo with 88% of the search revenues generated on yahoo sites.
According to Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer, the deal will allow Microsoft to "create more innovation in search, better value for advertisers and real consumer choice in a market currently dominated by a single company".
A Yahoo-Microsoft partnership would mean about 28 percent of Internet searches would be performed on their combined platform, according to figures from ratings firm ComScore.
That would still be less than half of the about 65 percent market share of Google Inc., which has long dominated the search space.
Last year, Microsoft attempted to buy Yahoo for more than $45 billion, an unsolicited bid Yahoo rejected, but the Redmond, Washington-based software giant has long had Yahoo's search business at the top of its wish list, and the two had reportedly been in discussions for months.
Yahoo estimated the deal would add $500 million to its annual operating profit, as well as saving it around $275 million in expenses related to developing and maintaining its own search technology.
Blogged with the Flock Browser
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
Firefox 4.0 to look like Chrome!
Source : CNet News - Webware
A recent design idea from Mozilla had eliminated the browser's title bar for the more nearer firefox 3.7 mockup. This was replaced by two drop down menu buttons on the right of the new browser...the same that Google Chrome has natively since its debut.
Secondly, the new Firefox 4.0 includes the "Tabs-on-top concept" where all the tabs for a certain page reside where the Title Bar must've been.
Mozilla says the advantages to this is that it saves vertical space and removes visual complexity.
On the other side, it is new and a bit different and might confuse people who look for the usual File and Edit Menus. Also, the users see a part of the original title of a page at any point of usage.
For Firefox, putting tabs on top meshes conceptually with Electrolysis, aka Content Processes, an under-the-covers change that will make each tab a separate computing process. That carries potential performance, stability, and security advantages, but requires more memory.
The Firefox 4.0 mockups also show a combination button to the right of the address bar that changes behavior depending on what the browser is up to. The button can be used to start loading a page whose address has been typed, to stop loading if it's in the process of doing so, and to reload it if it's finished loading.
A recent design idea from Mozilla had eliminated the browser's title bar for the more nearer firefox 3.7 mockup. This was replaced by two drop down menu buttons on the right of the new browser...the same that Google Chrome has natively since its debut.
This Firefox 4.0 mockup shows a very Chrome-like interface.
(Credit: Mozilla)Secondly, the new Firefox 4.0 includes the "Tabs-on-top concept" where all the tabs for a certain page reside where the Title Bar must've been.
Mozilla says the advantages to this is that it saves vertical space and removes visual complexity.
On the other side, it is new and a bit different and might confuse people who look for the usual File and Edit Menus. Also, the users see a part of the original title of a page at any point of usage.
For Firefox, putting tabs on top meshes conceptually with Electrolysis, aka Content Processes, an under-the-covers change that will make each tab a separate computing process. That carries potential performance, stability, and security advantages, but requires more memory.
The Firefox 4.0 mockups also show a combination button to the right of the address bar that changes behavior depending on what the browser is up to. The button can be used to start loading a page whose address has been typed, to stop loading if it's in the process of doing so, and to reload it if it's finished loading.
An example of Chrome's latest interface.
(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)Blogged with the Flock Browser
Its time for Donuts;Google Android's team circulates for Android 2.0
Google's Android team has started circulating the ingredients that will make up the donut release of its Android mobile operating system.
After Cupcake's entry in May this year, its time now for Donut labeled as Android 2.0.
However, Google's not expecting more than 2 Android releases a year. So, it might not be right to label Donut as Android 2.0.
Donut was rumored to incorporate multitouch support but a Google developer shot down the rumor.
Donut code is starting to make its way arounfd the community of developers that work on Android this weekend.
Among the notable additions are support for the CDMA networks used by Verizon WIreless and Sprint to the operating system, as wellas new features like Universal Search. It may as well have incremental features like a redesigned camera application but is still saving the big additions for another time.
Blogged with the Flock Browser
Thursday, July 16, 2009
The Creatures of Wikipedia and Bill Gates on Chrome OS
The real world might have thousands of lacs of species of animals, but nowhere can you find such a diverse fauna as that of WikiFauna.
Yes, there's a whole lot of animals that make WikiPedia the beast it is at knowledge.
From WikiDragons to WikiPrincesses, there's a whole lot on the Internet when it comes to sharing knowledge at a site such as the WikiPedia.
Crawling thru the net as usual, here's an article that illustrates all those beings of the WikiWorld.
Source: thinkdigit.com
While talking of creatures and creators, came along a news of Bill Gates, (finally!) talking of Google's Chrome OS, changing his "No comments" opinion over the thing.
Gates offered an insight into the marketing strategy of Google, explaining, "When Google is doing anything it gets this (way) - the more vague they are, the more interesting it is."
Vague, or not, Chrome OS is sure the center of attraction when it comes to being a Google Thing.
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