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Google Plans to Reveal Some of its Code
Andy Beal writes "According to Australia's The Age, Google plans to reveal some of the code it uses to great success. It says '
"The time has come for Google to "give something back", Wayne Rosing, the company's vice-president of engineering, told students while on a recruiting drive in Melbourne last week.
"There have been a lot of conversations in the company in the past two months about (how) . . . it's time for us to give something back. So our technical director, Craig Silverstein, has started a project to look at all the Google code and start figuring out what parts of it we want to give back," Rosing said.'"
Although Google obviously won't be releasing it's search algorithms it might well release the code for things like the Google FileSystem (PDF) which may benefit a lot of people.
The best search engine...one of the best translators, damn good webmail...what next? Guess it's time for gmessenger!!!
What I want to see is whatever mods they've created to make managing the enormous uber-cluster(s) that make the place tick. Plus, more than likely, they won't reveal the search code anyway...
But I salivate to review the code to their management tools.
Who did what now?
A Google Toolbar running on Linux would be a good start...
I think the average web user would be pretty surprised to see what actually goes on behind the scenes at Google. That simple search page which holds very little content -- the search controls, a logo, and a few links -- is actually a front to a mighty army of servers, and some fairly advanced search technology.
:D. A lot of pitfalls and obstacles come to mind for that
though.
I for one know I often take Google for granted. Yet I use it many times, virtually every day. In return for a free service, I get to see a few tiny, highly-revelant unintrusive ads placed alongside my search.
The only improvement for Google I can think of is for them to add regex searches
Anyway, I can't wait to see what Google actually "gives back to us" in terms of source code. Can they give enough source to be interesting/useful without helping out their competitors too much?
Giving something back implies that they took something from the users (?) and are now paying back. So, what did they take? Is there F/OSS code in their code? Or do they just want to thank the users for using their services? In that case, I'd take a Gmail account, please :)
----- One learns to itch where one can scratch.
...what license the code will be released under.
You are just getting confused.
:)
Google's service is to provide an audience for the advertisers.
Their customers are the advertisers, not us. We are just part of their MASSIVE (incredibly so) audience. We are part of what makes google sucessful. The fact we use it.
Thanks for giving back, google. Ill loan you my eyes a few more times
no
It's working already. Of course Google still stores your every search. Google offers a service where they can correlate your emails (and your name) with all these searches. Google encourages you to never delete any of your mail from their servers. Google owns an almost complete archive of Usenet, even from times when people did not realize that their conversations would end up in a publically accessible archive. Google displays ads with javascript on countless third party sites, enabling them to track you on the web. The only thing that stands between them and one of the biggest commercially exploitable data-mine is their word. You see why they are desperate to maintain good public relations?
If Google releases the code they almost guarantee 1000s of new search engines popping up. Which guarantees none of them will ever be noticed.
Sounds like a smart decision. A lot cheaper than trying to sue competition into oblivion. Someone inside of Google is actually thinking.
It amazes me sometimes, their level of altruism.
dinner: it's what's for beer
PageRank is well documented. It's not a neural net. I heard someone say that it's a 12 line perl script, but it's well-publicized that it's python. Might be 12 lines, though. 12 lines and a hell of a lot of data ...
That or enabling private companies or other big organizations which do not want an internet access to their intranet, to offer a google-like search engine to their users.
I've seen some intranet search engines and believe me, they are teh sux0r compared to google.
I don't necessarily see that as "giving" They are a for profit organization. While they provide a service that is 'free' to the end-user, it is still paid for by advertisers. The fact that they are the best at it does not elevate them to a status of saints (for lack of better words). :)
Depending on the code they will show (assuming this is not a lame stunt) they will actually be "giving back" to the community.
Otherwise, they can open their fat pocket books and make donations like everyone else
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
I think that 5 years from now, they may look back and say, you know if we hadn't reveal line 5267 of our code, MSN and Yahoo wouldn't be kicking our asses right now.
Of course my opinion is worth just about as much as the paper you could write it on.
http://jayceecorder.blogspot.com
Hi
..." can I assume that in fact this is some sort of Java applet that is loading. I noticed that someone sent me an email to my account - and it appeared without me having to rfresh the browser - did not see a hidden frame / meta fresh either - interested to know how they are doing this.
Does anyone know if gmail was an inhouse devleopment ? Or is it third party. I am interested on becuase I notice that when it load of gmail it says "please wait
Paul
Seeing some of the euphoric comments here is pretty interesting. It just shows how good googleans are at maintaining their "we're the good guys" image. And that's good, because indeed they seem to have cleaner business practices than many other.
However, let's set the record straight here. There is no magic algorithms and most likely no new science in the technology google uses for search. The original page ranking paper published by Sergei et al. explained the entire algorithm, and data structures they needed to have a fast search. The paper was quite detailed. It's good old computer science. Nothing extraordinarily outrageous about it (from a mathematical standpoint), except that it worked damn well: it leveraged human knowledge, which is something a lot of people don't yet either understand the importance of, or don't know how to do it.
Since then, google has improved on the original algorithm, data structures, and overall implementation. But the main technology was in plain sight from the beginning.
My guess to why google is releasing some source code is because it will pay off for them. Forget the "give back" bit. It'll improve the image, and, potentially they might benefit from people using that source. How? Not clear yet until we see the source code.
In any case, as slashdotters ubergeeks we should keep a cool head and look at what google will show. I'm 100% sure that if they said they release some source they'll do it. You see, it would hurt their image if they didn't, and they're too good at image management to make such a stupid mistake.
It's obviously a strategic move on their part, just that we don't see yet the real reason for it.
BTW, it's just a matter of time for MS or Yahoo to incorporate this type of technology into their search engines, and google knows that. As they loose their technological edge over the competitors, keeping a good image is very important. As is branching out into other services (e.g. gmail).
Just my 2c.Google has been unclear about their future plans for the API, though it seems that it has allowed some apps to go commercial - see this article.
One wonders if this source code will actually add value to the developer community, or is simply a way of counteracting the capitalistic vibes of the IPO.
I think they do owe the community a lot. They are breaking the spirit of GNU. The idea behind open source is that if I choose to publish my stuff under GNU, you can take my code, work with it, sell it, but I get your improvements and use that myself. This works great if software is something that you buy or download, but it doesn't work if it is a service like google. If I was say a coder on an open source IMAP client and google used my code as a basis for gmail, they could keep all the code for themselves. Google is using a lot of open source software but they are not giving any of there improvements back to the community. I know Google is nice and all, but as software gets more service oriented this could be a problem in the future.
There are things that you have no problem saying in front of an audience of a few hundred people but would not dare say in front of your employer or a customer. The consequence of "it was public, so a public archive makes no difference" is that people constantly have to act like they're interviewing for a job or selling something to a customer. People need a mode of conversation which is not logged, and Usenet did offer something which was reasonably expected to be transient.
The community they're giving back to is not the people who search the web, but the people who develop software they use. Of course, practically anyone who develops software searches the web, but the service isn't really a repayment in kind.
In addition to their web searching engine, they have a whole lot of interesting software. Their PDF to HTML converter, for example, is nicer in some ways than any PDF viewer I've seen for Linux. They clearly have some useful tools for transforming HTML, as well (highlighting words, e.g.). That's the sort of thing that's nice to release to the community, both because people will like it, and because people will improve and maintain it.
Actually, the best benefit could be the simple fact of the code and therefore capabilities being the same: consider the effect it would have on web publishing if Google searches would only find a Word document if Open Office could read it, and FireFox would render DOC the way Google sees it. IE has a large market share, but Google's is possibly even more strategic. There are lots of good possibilities here: if FireFox can't skip your flash intro, Google won't either, and you won't get any hits. If Open Office mangles your document, Google will also mangle it while highlighting the search terms.
"While Google is probably telling more of a truth than Sun..." I have to disagree. Sun already has things open source. Google is as locked up as Microsoft. Google is in violation of the GPL; they distribute their Google serach servers that use Linux without releasing the code, the vary thing we bitched to Linksys about.
Profit is not their core interest? But it is one of their interests? I worked for a bank, and their mission statement that their most important priority was customer service...I am pretty sure the COMPANY's most important priority was making a buck.
A company that wants to make a buck does not qualify as an "evil" organization. Google is a for-profit company - again let's not elevate them to saints because they happen to be popular and have a clean reputation (so far).
Don't get me wrong, I do like the Google search engine and I wish them the best. But I am realistic and do realize they are here to make money - otherwise they wouldn't charge more then the bare minimum needed to keep their servers running and their employees paid at an average level.
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.