Netizen

Thursday, August 24, 2006

Google Audio, Google Office

Google Audio

There is Google Video, but no audio equivalent. I am surprised. Should not audio have come first? I wrote to the Google Video people earlier to that effect. I had been bugging them about making pay per view possible. They have said it will be done, they just can't say when.

I hit reply to their last email to me and brought up Google Audio as an idea! Don't click on it just yet. Because http://audio.google.com does not exist for now.

Google Word Processing

Google now offers word processing and spreadsheets online. I learned about the word processing just now. As in, they just now went public. I knew they had bought Writely. Now I got my free account with them.

The best part is it is like having your own free, private virtual office. You can invite people to collaborate. That was one thing I was missing with Blogger. If you could have a private blog with many members, that would be like a private office. But that is not an option.

And many of the virtual offices available online, mostly for rent, are designed to upload your Word documents. Then what's the point?

In The News

VCs see opportunity in blogosphere

BusinessWeek

The Best Product Design of 2006
Dark Days at Dell
Apple's iPod Season Looms
Keeping BlackBerry Juiced
Ford on Ford
Tata Takes a Swig of Vitaminwater
Online Video: Tasty Takeover Targets?
More Banks Turn to Private Equity Funds
The Chip Industry's Comeback Kid
Japan's Samurai Entrepreneurs
Eurozone Creating Jobs Faster Than U.S.
Jack's Mixed Bag
Haute Hybrid
A Quantum Leap for Cell Phones
A Crusade to Connect Children
Green: The Next Big Thing
The Chip Industry's Comeback Kid
India's Banks Are Big on Microfinance
Asia's Young Entrepreneurs
How to Fix Ford

CNet News

Sony battery woes hit Apple
YouTube could be
a steal at $1 billion
AOL to sell digital movie downloads
Microsoft moves closer to new browser release
A divide over the future of hard drives
Has iPod's hit parade stalled?
Can German engineering fix Wikipedia?
Amazon servers, starting at 10 cents an hour
Internet search gets Web 2.0 style

Visitors

Page views yesterday

2.	3 August	14:52	Cisco Systems, Inc., United States
3.	3 August	15:24	ProXad, France

6.	4 August	01:36	Hong Kong S.A.R. (infolink.hk)
7.	4 August	17:22	Dow Jones International, United States

14 August

15:13

Cornell University, Ithaca, United States

21.	15 August	15:00	Verizon Online, Reston, United States
22.	19 August	03:37	National Internet Backbone, India
23.	19 August	08:55	Satyam Infoway Limited, India

19 August

14:33

Cotas Ltd., Bolivia

21 August

01:29

Dattelkabel Internet, Czech Republic

22 August

14:41

The McGraw-Hill Companies, United States

Wednesday, July 19, 2006

The Next Search Engine

It might as well be Google itself, but there sure is a lot of room for search. The amount of data available online is just going to keep growing like crazy. Five of the six billion people are not yet online. And as they come online, companies are going to work to make it easier and easier for people to create data online, text, audio, video and more. So you are looking at more and more stuff, in more and more languages, in more and more formats, text, audio,video. And there is the perennial demand: the quality of search. Can you find what you are looking for? How precise is the result? How user friendly is the search experience?

Google's handicap for now is it only knows text. And even text it does not do as well as we might want, even though it does it better than anyone else.

When you search for something you want the most relevant webpages and sites to show up first. And you want to be able to search within sites. How to rank pages? Google started out by saying the more sites that link to your site, the more valuable it is. Well, maybe, but not if many of them are link farms. But that was a great way to start. That still has to be the basic formula. But then each site has to be given a weight of its own based on many different criteria.

The language challenge is a big one, as is the format challenge. Can a search engine "read" audio and video like it reads words? Can a search engine search content regardless of what language or format it might be in, and then present the same in the language of the end user's choosing? You are talking real time translation. That right there is a huge challenge. Major work will have to be done in speech software to make this possible.

The formula that a website's worth is how many other websites link to it is basically good. But the formula has to get more sophisticated than that. Not all links are equal. And each site should have a weight based on a few different things. So one link from a really good site should count for more than many links from so so sites. And the search engine should be able to count the page hits for each site in real time. The activity level of a site should be a major factor of how important a site is. As important as links.

And there is this real time thing. Say if I put out a new website or just a new page to an existing site, how long before the search engine finds it? Can it be an hour? A minute? Less? It should be less than a second. The reverse should also be true. If a site or a page is taken down, the search engine should know.

Language, content format, speech, website weightage based on links and page hits. These are some of the things that come to mind. This is enough homework for now.

Google might or might not deliver. There is plenty of room for others, especially for bold upstarts.

Eric Schmidt interview (39mins MP3)