interesting news from the search engine giant: google will integrate real time information in its search engine. meaning: google will aggregate information from twitter, facebook, friendfeed and others and publish them as a first search result. search.twitter.com and friendfeed.com/search will basically feed into google.
what is the benefit for me?
real time information is a very good indicator for trend analysis. if you want to know what people think of today’s news, a new product, music etc, real time bloggers give a very good indicator. as well this information is up to date. if i want to know about something that happened ten minutes ago, google will (most likely) not have any information about it. but twitter will. and so will google – in future.
what about bing?
bing integrated twitter as well, but focused on bing maps. it lets users see content from twitter, microsoft photosynth, neighborhood blogs and other sources on the surface of the map. i assume its just a matter of time until bing integrates real time information.
how will it appear?
real time results will be appear as the first search result and will be updated on the go like a news feed. check out the following video to see more details.
the idea is as simple as genius: most office applications are nowadays available as rich internet applications (RIA) which are accessed via a browser. by making a browser an OS the initial OS-layer (like windows XP) just vanishes. the available RIAs replace the office package. only precondition: a broadband internet connection. google offers one of the leading RIA office suites, google docs, which will for sure be integrated into the chrome OS.
splashtop interface
the idea is not that new, but finally a big player announced to launch it. splashtop, a DeviceVM, Inc. product, provides a similar OS for Lenovo and Asus computers. but splashtop normally is installed together with an OS, because it is seen only as a browser shortcut and not as a platform to work with.
‘Splashtop is intended to be integrated on a read-only device and shipped with the hardware, rather than installed by the user. It does not prevent the installation of another operating system for dual booting. It boots in about 5 seconds, and is thus marketed as instant-on’ wikipedia.
advantages a browser based OS:
faster boot time: splashtop needs 5 seconds to boot the browser
less memory and RAM costs: the application are running on the server of the provider, eg google. the computer does not have to carry out any computing.
locally unattached: using RIAs all data is stored on servers, no longer on local computers
the google announced stated the following reasons for developing chrome OS:
‘We hear a lot from our users and their message is clear — computers need to get better. People want to get to their email instantly, without wasting time waiting for their computers to boot and browsers to start up. They want their computers to always run as fast as when they first bought them. They want their data to be accessible to them wherever they are and not have to worry about losing their computer or forgetting to back up files. Even more importantly, they don’t want to spend hours configuring their computers to work with every new piece of hardware, or have to worry about constant software updates. And any time our users have a better computing experience, Google benefits as well by having happier users who are more likely to spend time on the Internet.’
google heralds a new age of computing, the one we all dreamed of since using a computer: no boot time, locally unattached and always connected.
just recently linguee.com went online, a online translator that was founded by Gereon Frahling (research scientist at Google Inc) and Leonard Fink. at the first glance linguee looks like a ‘traditional’ translator like leo or beolingus. but looking at the technology on the backend it is one of the most powerful translator tools on the market.
linguee uses statistical machine translation. it compares websites of different languages to each other and predicts the translation of a word by the context and way it was used before. by that it improves itself by aggregating and analyzing texts ongoing. this means that all information available on the web might one day be analyzed and used to improve the translator.
the big advantage compared to other online translators: it is A. not depending on peoples/communities than just on a machine and B. can be used for any language out there.
google uses old traffic information and construction information to predict future traffic
linguee is a good example of how powerful computers can be nowadays and what they will be able of tomorrow. do you remember the ‘translator glass wall’ from the microsoft video? theoretically no problem anymore – if you put the right hard and software tools together.
but many sectors outside the translation area profit from this technology. lets take a look at google’s traffic prediction. google uses old traffic information and construction information in order to predict future traffic. this is pretty easy because traffic is often very static, still it provides very useful information. using this prediction in combination with the amount of cars plus the average co2 emission of a car will show you the produced polution.
by comparing maps, geological data, articles about climate worming, development data of the past 100 years, mineral resources, natural resources (and so on) with each other you get a pretty good picture where it would make sense where and how to build future streets. ’show me how to expand NYC by 1 million people during the next 10 years by being as eco-friendly as possible’ could be the question for the computer. and the answer would be a three dimensional map showing different locations describing a scenario and prediction to every location based on the predictions.
future applications will be based on statistical prediction and information aggregation. the result will be the reduction of complexity on the one hand and a better quality of results on the other hand.
wolframAlpha is supposed to go online this month; a search engine that aims to be better than google. well, there have been many search engines that stated to be better than google, why should this one be? because its founder is stephen wolfram, well known physicist, mathematician and founder of the software Mathematica.
stephen wolfram published an article on particle physics at age 16, entered Oxford University at age 17 and wrote a widely cited paper on heavy quark production at age 17. he received his ph.d. in particle physics from caltech at age 20 (wikipedia)… now you know, why we computer geeks are waiting for wolframAlpha to go online.
nova spivack, CEO and founder of Radar Networks, already had the chance to take a look at WolframAlpha. he stated the following: “It’s not a Google killer — it does something different. It answers questions. It’s an answer engine rather than a search engine. [...] The Wolfram|Alpha engine differs from traditional search engines in that it does not simply return a list of results based on a query, but instead computes an answer. (more)”
nicholas carr is well known for his controversial perspective on different internet topics. he sees a lost of privacy in the internet and predicts the transparent user in 2015, he blames users and governments of offering way too much information and not being aware of the danger. sometimes nicholas is a bit over the top, still i think he got some good points in his book and blog. i totally agree with him on the fact that people are not aware of the danger.
people-search-engines such as yasni provide already very good profiles about users of facebook, xing or flickr. by predicting patterns, connecting information, relating items and pictures it is easily possible to build profiles about people of interests. by having access to someones’ instant messenger it is possible to log status messages and online time and easily predict where and when someone will be. stalking was never easier. but is this dangerous?
libby hoeler - first internet video star
to give you and idea about the danger: in 2001 a home video of colleague student libby hoeler was made public; incl. her telephone number and address. soon stalkers were waiting in front of her house, she received calls from strangers and was sexual harassed. when she tried to disappear an internet chivvy started with thousands of internet users trying to find her. at the end she joined a witness protection program.
back then there was no facebook available. nowadays people know your friends and family, social connections, locations etc. with some information from facebook and some social attacks like phone calls it is pretty easy to find out much more information about you. and from my point of view it is pretty easy to drive you mad, resp. destroy your life.
the described stories are a result of extreme criminal energy but show the potential risk. less tragic, but as well very controversy, is the story of james brennan from the UK who was fired for a comment on facebook. in this case colleagues collected private information in order to set him up. just think of everything you have ever watched, commented or stated on the internet (pictures, blogs, forums, etc) and imagine someone puts the pieces together.
there is not even a need for a complex collection of information, just imagine what you can do with a simple telephone number: post a VW Golf on mobile.de, price 1000 euro, with the phone number of your victim. believe me, the telephone will ring all day long. post it on an internet sex site and the phone will ring all night long.
it is easy to become a target and with nowadays information it is pretty easy to destroy a reputation. take care of what information you offer on facebook, google or youtube. sometimes a little less is a little more.
this video from Robin Sloan and Matt Thompson is already 5 years old, but some of you might not have watched it yet. even those who have watched it can now see how the internet developed in the last couple of years. facebook, for example, wasn’t mentioned in the movie… ipod for broadcasting is kyte or bambuser… google grid is somehow available in google docs… googlezone is facebook… epic will for sure soon be available; blyg, skype, facebook and google have just to align with each other…
search engines are our main tool in order to navigate through the internet (31 billion search requests are sent to google every month). they work precise, fast and on request.
most of us just use the engine without knowing how it works. where does google receives all the information from? well, to keep it short: it permanentally crawls the internet for new information using links for references and site content for description. google repeats object-describing information.
from a web 1.0 perspective (google is very much 1.0 from my pov) this works good for text based media such as websites, less good for image based media such as pictures and video.
manual meta tag @ polar rose
web 2.0 brings text to image. swedish startup Polar Rose is a good example for storing meta information regarding the content in every picture (i.e. in exif meta file). facebook already combined this technology with a social network. and Riya, a US-based ‘visual’ search engine, combines not only text information than as well color and pattern information in order to find better results. the upcoming generation of search engines will use meta tags in order to improve search results. examples for image-meta-data: date picture taken, GPS information, who is in the picture, etc.
what is the future of search? well, lets just assume that the memory power will improve, pattern analyzers will become better and footage resolution will raise.
computer will start to search for individual, personal properties and compare them to each other. comparing eyeballs or face patterns from a surveillance camera to a database – concealable fingerprints that are available on every picture. we know this already from CSI or Minority Report and it is very likely that it will become real. royal palm middle school in phoenix USA installed face recognition video surveillance as a first pilot.
just imagine a public-available search engine starts crawling the internet comparing eyeballs or face patterns to each other. Riya, on a much more sophisticated level, could deliver excellent search results. we might find pictures and videos of ourselves we did not even know about. others might find pictures and videos of ourselves we do not want be known about. the ‘anonymity’ of the internet might finally catch up with us.
interesting news from the search engine giant: google will integrate real time information in its search engine. meaning: google will aggregate information from twitter, facebook, friendfeed and others and publish them as a first search result. search.twitter.com and friendfeed.com/search will basically feed into google.
