'Google's Gdrive on Way'

Google Inc is preparing a service that would enable users to store data from their personal hard drives on its computers, the Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday in its online edition.

Users would be able to house files they would normally store on personal computers -- such as word-processing documents, digital music, video clips and images -- on Google's computers, the Journal said, citing sources familiar with the matter.

According to the Journal, the service could let users access their files through the Internet from different computers and mobile devices when they sign on using a password.

The service could be released as soon as a few months from now, the Journal said, citing a source.

The newspaper also said Google plans to provide some free storage, with additional storage allotments available for a fee.

Planned pricing isn't known, the Journal added.

Google has responded. And it insists on using that silly cloud computing moniker:

"Cloud computing is going mainstream. The apps people use every day, such as email, photo sharing, and word processing, are moving to the web because it's easier to share and access your data from anywhere when it's online, in one place.
Storage is an important component of making web apps fit easily into consumers' and business users' lives. That's why we've always offered a lot of free storage, and it's why we offer paid options for buckets of 'overflow' storage spanning across apps, including Picasa Web Albums and Gmail for now, with more services like Google Docs to come.
We're always listening to our users and looking for ways to update and improve our web applications, including storage options, but we don't have anything new to announce right now."

Of course, we all know that sooner or later, GDrive will arrive.

Google's new cookie recipe!

Following reports from ,Privacy International, a London-based organization focused on privacy intrusions by government and businesses,that analyzed the privacy practices of 22 Internet companies. Google received the lowest mark, followed by Yahoo, Windows Live Spaces, Hi5, Apple and AOL.

Reacting to this Google is thinking up a new cookie recipe!

Google Inc is scaling back how long it keeps personally identifiable data accumulated from its Web users.The world's top provider of Web search services said late on Monday that it is ready to curtail the time it stores user data to a year-and-a-half, the low end of an 18 to 24 month period it had originally proposed to regulators in March.

Google said it was studying how it can meet the concerns of European regulators over cookies, a widely-used consumer tracking technology that Web sites rely on to customize what users see and advertisers use to target ads.

"We are exploring ways to redesign cookies and to reduce their expiration," Fleischer states. "We plan to make an announcement about privacy improvements for our cookies in the coming months.

Privacy continues to be the Achilles' heel of Google, even though they didn't release millions of search queries that contained personal information (like AOL) or sent people to jail (like Yahoo).

Google: Champions Of Innovation

Google has added one more fantastic feature to its search queries. A Link to the Stock quote of the searched company in the first search result.



This is going to add lot more value to it.
Although this was available with Yahoo Search Engine, but I feel there interface is not so good, because it leads you to a different page with all data stuffed in a single page.

Googlers score in
1. Easy integration of Stock prices in the same web page
2. Refreshing the same in every 15 minutes.
3. Its simple not cluttered with all bits n pieces.
4. Graph representing the stock index in last 24 hrs.
5. Than finally a link which gives detailed information about the stock.

Keep tracking Google , some more rabbits may come out of Hat!

How Googling a.k.a Google works?

It takes 8 not so simple steps to Google to find millions of results in fraction of a Second.
Lets’ find out what are they-




A peep inside Google’s Web
Google searches harness one of the world’s most powerful computers. A search, which typically takes less than half a second, is the result of a complex journey that typically makes at least two stops, often thousands of miles apart.

Googlebots
Google creates its own version of the Internet, using automated programs called Googlebots, which crawl the web in search of new information. Web sites known to be important and frequently modified are scanned every minutes; sites less frequently updated may be scanned every few weeks

Feeders
Googlebots feed key information from a Web page to Google’s central network: URL, full text of the page, references to images and other embedded files and specific information the site owner creates about the page, called metadata.

Central Network
At the central network, the information is indexed; every word that could be used in a search query is listed along with information referencing Web sites where the word can be found. The index is broken into ‘shards’ and sent to data centers - facilities made up of thousands of servers wired around the world; because centers may have slightly different versions of the index, depending on when they received the last update, users in different places may get slightly different results for the same search.

Searching and ranking
When people search Google, they are asking the company to find every instance of the term in its index and rank the corresponding documents by their relevance. This is how it happens, stage by stage. The user types a search query; the typical query is two to three words, which can make finding the most relevant results challenging; roughly one in 10 queries are miss-spelt.

Locate It
Before Google provides any information, it identifies the searcher’s location through his or her Internet Protocol (IP) address. The IP helps speed up the search by sending the request to the nearest data center and allows Google to identify geographically appropriate ads.

Snippets
The query is sent to the central network, then redirected to the nearest data center. At the datacenter, the search term is run through the index; matching terms are sent back to the central network, then to the user with a summary of the Web page, called snippet.

The Secret Sauce
Google determines which web sites are the most relevant to a search term by using its ‘secret sauce’ a formula that weighs more than 200 measurements, such as the number of times the search appears on a Web page, the number of visitors to the page and the Page Rank - the number of sites linking to the page and the popularity of those sites.