Exclusive: How Google’s Algorithm Rules the Web | Magazine

Exclusive: How Google’s Algorithm Rules the Web | Magazine: "That’s where the contextual signals come in. All search engines incorporate them, but none has added as many or made use of them as skillfully as Google has. PageRank itself is a signal, an attribute of a Web page (in this case, its importance relative to the rest of the Web) that can be used to help determine relevance. Some of the signals now seem obvious. Early on, Google’s algorithm gave special consideration to the title on a Web page — clearly an important signal for determining relevance. Another key technique exploited anchor text, the words that make up the actual hyperlink connecting one page to another. As a result, “when you did a search, the right page would come up, even if the page didn’t include the actual words you were searching for,” says Scott Hassan, an early Google architect who worked with Page and Brin at Stanford. “That was pretty cool.” Later signals included attributes like freshness (for certain queries, pages created more recently may be more valuable than older ones) and location (Google knows the rough geographic coordinates of searchers and favors local results). The search engine currently uses more than 200 signals to help rank its results."

Google Points At WebFinger. Your Gmail Address Could Soon Be Your ID.

Google Points At WebFinger. Your Gmail Address Could Soon Be Your ID.: "...something everyone on the web knows is their email address. And they’re conditioned by services like Google and Facebook to use it as their identifier. The problem with it has been that it’s just a string of text, nothing more. You cannot attach information to it to let others know a bit more about you — something vital for true identification. Then idea behind WebFinger is that you should be able to attach any information you choose to your email address."

Forms : Creating forms - Google Docs Help

Forms : Creating forms - Google Docs Help

This is a pretty neat feature I just became a ware of. Google Docs has a form designer and publisher

On2 Flix Cloud | On-Demand Video Transcoding Powered by On2 Flix Engine and Zencoder

On2 Flix Cloud | On-Demand Video Transcoding Powered by On2 Flix Engine and Zencoder: "On2 Flix Cloud is a web-based transcoding service that reduces the cost and complexity of converting digital video for the web, IPTV, HD and devices."

Ajaxian � Google buying On2; New twist in the hope for Open Video

Ajaxian � Google buying On2; New twist in the hope for Open Video

"This could be huge for the Open Video movement. It all depends on what Google does with the codecs going forward (and the deal going through of course)."

"Back in 2001, On2 made waves by releasing their VP3 compression technology to the open-source community, including their patents on the technology. The technology lives on in the form of (Ogg) Theora. You can find more information about this here"

google-acquires-video-compression-technology-company-on2-for-106-million

Google Wave as infrastructure

Google Wave as infrastructure: "All of the things in the Wave demo are possible without Wave. The interesting thing about Wave is not so much the application, but the infrastructure, the protocol and the underlying concepts. Many limited collaboration apps have offered various subsets of the Wave functionality, for example, and the superficial functionality can be built using existing technology, without fancy new protocols and clients etc.

But that's missing the point. Wave is interesting because the infrastructure makes it extremely open-ended.

A lot of people have been comparing Wave to e-mail. That's missing the point too. Wave has the potential to be as important as the Web. I'm serious. Wave is taking the web and making it interactive, embeddable, recordable, and shareable on a whole different level than what we are used to. And like most great 'revolutionary' ideas it doesn't actually add all that much new"

Google Bets Big on HTML 5: News from Google I/O - O'Reilly Radar

Google Bets Big on HTML 5: News from Google I/O - O'Reilly Radar: "'Never underestimate the web,' says Google VP of Engineering Vic Gundotra in his keynote at Google I/O this morning. He goes on to tell the story of a meeting he remembers when he was VP of Platform Evangelism at Microsoft five years ago. 'We believed that web apps would never rival desktop apps. There was this small company called �Keyhole, which made this most fantastic geo-visualization software for Windows. This was the kind of software we always used to prove to ourselves that there were things that could never be done on the web.' A few months later, Google acquired Keyhole, and shortly thereafter released Google Maps with satellite view.
'We knew then that the web had won,' he said. 'What was once thought impossible is now commonplace.'
Google doesn't want to repeat that mistake, and as a result, he said, 'we're betting big on HTML 5.'"

Google Wave Preview

Google Wave PreviewThis presentation is an hour and 20 minutes but an interesting view into collaborative systems. Google are positioning this as the future of email while merging with tools like Google Docs. A chain of emails is a conversation, which in Wave is a type of document, somewhat like a Wiki or a bulletin board. In essence it is a server hosted document tree collaboratively edited. Changes are made real-time like Google Talk (pushed through via Jabber-like XMPP)

Draft Protocol Spec ‎(Google Wave Federation Protocol)‎

Draft Protocol Spec ‎(Google Wave Federation Protocol)‎: 

Google Wave is built on top of XMPP which is the core protocol of the Jabber Instant Messaging.

"Waves are a new medium for communication that could be described as a new form of multi-user document. Conceptually, waves do not exist themselves, instead being made up of a set of one or more wavelets which in turn contain one or more documents. A wave is visualised to participants primarily through display of its root conversation wavelet, which is discovered through convention (wavelet of ID '~conversation/root'). Users become notified of wavelets by being added as participants, ala being invited to edit and participate in a multi-user document. It is also worth noting that wavelets have create-on-use semantics, and as such, users must create a new wave by adding themselves to its (currently non-existant) root wavelet."

Google Wave Drips With Ambition. A New Communication Platform For A New Web.

Google Wave Drips With Ambition. A New Communication Platform For A New Web.

Yesterday, during the Google I/O keynote, Google’s VP of Engineering, Vic Gundotra, laid out a grand vision for the direction Google sees the web heading towards with the move to the HTML 5 standard. While we’re not there yet, all the major browser players besides Microsoft are aligned and ready for the next phase, which will include such things as the ability to run 3D games and movies in the browser without additional plug-ins. But Google wants to take it one step further with a brand new method of communication for this new era. It’s called Google Wave.