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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.'"
Can it still beat my honda hybrid ? second today ?
Seriously, how cool is that?
Best. Company. Ever.
What would Brian Boitano do?
"Meow meow Matt Bruce meow meow Henrietta Pussycat meow meow Presidents of the United States of America meow Kitty?"
Let me be the first to welcome our new code sharing uber-cool Google overlords.
Line forms here for Google-brain chip implant.
We have heard so much talk recently about the "open sourcing" of this piece of software and that piece of software that I just don't know if we should believe any of it anymore.
While Google is probably telling more of a truth than Sun is how do we really know until we see the code?
If a team is now just determining which code should be released we may not see anything useful come of this for months or even more. How about we hold off on these stories until we see something more than just a press release.
In other news, Yahoo! announced it will be completely overhauling its search engine.
Microsoft will smile, but pigeons will frown.
google just made me cream my pants again.
A recruiting drive in Melbourne?
Why wasn't I informed? (nice one RMIT, keeping us students in the know)
I whole-heartedly support open source and I think it's great they're going to reveal some of their code, but I don't feel that Google owes the community anything; they already provide top quality services.
fpfp
Casual Games/Downloads
Yeah, google r0x!
my band is more brutal techno punk than yours
Google's done so much for the quality of web searching that I think they've already given us far more back than I could ever ask for. The only thing I could ask of them is to keep up the good work, and try and keep pagerank useful by stopping exploiters who falsely boost ranks. Other than that, some good old free thinking and continual innovation for the web, which is what they do all the time, is little to ask for. I just hope the momentum doesn't die.
- tristan
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?
I'm sure google isn't stupid, but I'd hate for them to reveal anything that the search engine "optomizers" will leverage to further spam the search results.
A Google Toolbar running on Linux would be a good start...
They're business strategy flips me out the more I learn about it.
Wish I had a crystal ball, or a crystal search engine to see where they're going to go with their 'relevant content' model next. Is there a hole in their approach? Seems pretty strong! Will be intersting to get a look at their financials after public offering.
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.
I love Google, and think this is an excellent idea, but geeks owe Google, not vice-versa. Geeks (and normal users as well) depend on Google. While it could be said that Google does the same, and makes its money from geeks and users, they do not, IMHO owe us anything.
Bored? Why not join a decent mess
how they will manage to do that without shooting themselves in the foot?
#
#\ @ ? Colonize Mars
#
I don't think Google needs to 'give' back since no one "pays" for their service (I don't pay for news or search or gmail, but the ads I don't follow do).
Perhaps this will boost OSS a notch, if a company like Google can contribute, why can't other companies?
They already showed the algorithm they use for Pagerank, and let's see... they have thousands of systems all hooked together, that process terabytes of data every month. That sounds more like hard work and money than magic. The magic will be how they are keeping Microsoft at bay.
stuff |
With all the possibilities for type-specific search engines, this seems like a great step forward. Perhaps some day, I will be able to hum a song I heard on the radio into my computer and find links to the performer, composer, etc. If I am designing a new machine, I might be able to search for pre-existing components over large networks instead of through local libraries. Mmm...
Live free or die
10 Let X=X.
20 You know, I could write a book.
30 And this book would be thick enough to stun an ox.
40 Cause I can see the future and it's a place - about 70 miles east of here.
50 Where it's lighter.
60 Linger on over here.
70 Got the time?
80 Let X=X.
( ^_~ Laurie Anderson, Big Science)
particlesphere.com - quantum
Hmmm... I can only hope they release enough to better my understanding of their anti-SEO mechanisms. At least then I'll finally stand a chance of having a search for "Andrew Davis" actually show my personal website instead of page after page of that movie director dude (Independence Day, etc). :)
Could this be an extension of the google API set ?
http://www.google.com/apis/
Co-inciding with a launch of gmail, this could lead to a slew of advanced 3rd party gmail apps like 'pop goes the gmail'
Seriuosly folks, they probaly make me 30% more effective because I can find the information I need more quickly than anyplace else.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
Click thru for when they ask for reg.6 69904427.html?oneclick=true
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/06/21/1087
I wonder exactly how google go about it.
I reckon they use a neural net type structure.
Of course I may be proved wrong. I do find it unlikly that they will release the core engine part of the code. Considering how someone probobly has it patented.
May the Maths Be with you!
I got it by doing View>Source. You can too...
b ody,td,a,p,.h{font-family:arial,sans-serif;}f ont-size: 20px;}i pt>< font size=-1><a href="/ads/">Advertising Programs</a&g t; - <a href="/services/">Business Solutions</a> ; - <a href=/about.html>About Google</a></font><p><font size=-2>©2004 Google - Searching 4,285,199,774 web pages</font></p></center></body></html> ;
<html><head><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"><title>Google</title><style><!--
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<for m action="/search" name=f><script><!--
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</script>Language Tools</a></font></td></tr></table></form><br><br>
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
I know I won't be releasing any of the souce code to any of the back-end things I've written for my web site.
People would just laugh at it.
Disclaimer for the clueless: I'm not a programmer, so my code sucks so bad it's funny.
World's tallest building rises in the desert
The code that digitizes and extracts all of the product names, codes and prices from scanned catalogs and then allows searches of the data could prove invaluable to libraries and other organizations trying to make searchable databases of old documents.
I would guess that they are going to open source all their failed bombs from Google Research in the hopes that someone else can get them to work. Did anyone else here ever mess around with the phone search? You would open a window and then call in, and it would voice-recognize and give you your search results. What a dog. Like I'd say "Barney Smurf" and it would search for Blarney Stone. Great stuff, you know, for me to poop on.
Anyway I'll happily take their useless scraps, and their nonexpiring cookie and their unstoppable Orkut/Gmail social information gathering machine. Because when they dump all that stuff into a federal database at the request of USA/PATRIOT, I won't be in there.
Google in putting Social Darwinism into action. You're stupid enough to sign away your privacy for something as simple as email, you deserve the consequences.
...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
Hope Google adds a site similar to akamai's NOC which displas google stats even though google downplays when it comes to numbers.
...now Microsoft can start producing their own great and succesful search engine.
You remember that little pi icon that would take you to a random webpage, potentially past security authorization from the movie The Net?
Imagine if google had a button to send you to a random webpage out of their cache. Considering a lot of sites use no authentication beyond hoping noone knows the url (that google then spiders its way to), you could end up in a similar situation. Would be a fun use of googles database.
Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive. Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
OMG GOOGLE IS TEH BEST!!~1`
clicky
Google provides an ad-supported service...for a profit. They are about to become a publicly-held company with the intention of...continuing to make a profit. I don't believe that Google owes the open source community anything---some may feel it's noble, but I think that it helps promote a certain "debtor" feeling, as if success should bring out timidity and apologies and giveaways. Google's competitors would be better served by innovating on their own and sticking it to them with better search results and more value-added features.
Don't be a looter...and yes, I know that it's spelled with an "A" instead of an "E".
Use Firefox, and get this.
Releasing the page rank formula would allow microsoft/yahoo/inktomi to create their own uber-search engines. But those companies have very different visions w.r.t. what makes a "good" feature. Google's tangible value is in Page Rank; while the sparsity of its pages makes it aesthetic and simple to use, that may not be enough to keep it alive.
OTOH, I would love to be able to play around with GMail's source code. And they could probably release code for, say, GoogleGroups, although I'm not sure why they'd want to or why I'd care.
I cant wait, starting in 2006 Longhorn will be able to find my files faster before giving me a BSOD. I just can't wait.
Google means well, but it almost certainly can't win with this move. They won't give the world the keys to the Google castle, of course, and the (often petty, let's face it folks) FOSS community will see what Google gave back and say "that's it?!?!" and be generally grumpy.
PDHoss
======================================
Writers get in shape by pumping irony.
using System.XML;
[...]
if (ContainsAdSenseAds())
{
pageRank++;
}
Best Buy can have you arrested
Well, the geek community certainly likes this sort of news, even though it doesn't mean crap. Lets stop being emotional about this company which is out there to make money, just like microsoft. No more, no less. This is just a PR stunt, move along.
...this really is rather exciting.
I for one am waiting for the brand new 'gim' tied to my gmail id. Heck, it's time for them to come up with MS passport replacement.
It amazes me sometimes, their level of altruism.
dinner: it's what's for beer
Google doesn't have to give anything back, at least not to me. It's enough for me that they are by far the best search engine; lightning fast, accurate, comprehensive, free and with no obtrusive advertising...
The page counter is stuck on ~2^32...
... and all I did was visit they page and select "View Source" from the menu.
This is a bit odd; I suspect they said more than they should have.
Google is in their pre-IPO quiet period; the SEC rules for this are fairly strict about forward-looking statements. I'm surprised this was mentioned at all.
It's a lot like slashcode, really. Lots of great websites run slash, but none of them have the popularity or following that the original has.
Plus, Slashdot gets to "brand" websites with it's look, feel, and system. No matter how much you skin slashcode, it still feels like slashdot in the end, even if it wasn't intentional.
Read the slashdot FAQ, and you see exactly the same kind of response you would expect. Good luck making your own with just the source!
Microsoft revealed a plan to launch a search service a day after Google opens up its code.
They released some of their code in previous programming contests. The code allowed users to access their compressed data file format(compressed/indexed HTML) and quickly run seachs on them. As well they provided 20->200 megs of sample data. (Something like that) It was a couple years ago. April 30 2002. http://www.google.com/programming-contest/
The key word been some. Expect the following precious gem to be released:
int main()
=P
damnit gim, I'm a doctor, not an instant messaging client!
Please oh please let them release the google file system, allowing any random box with some storage space to provide file space for the file system and to appear or disappear at random. That would be a very valuable contribution to the community.
Blockquoth their site:
You can run your own server. Jabber is never down, is and will always be open, and doesn't crap over you with ads.
This just sounds like it's an extension of that philosophy. Some of the smart people who have worked on Google code know their code probably isn't necessarily going to do them damage in the hands of their competitors, and would like for that code to be shared with the world, for, I guess what you would call their "academic merits".
So it seems to me that Google is going on this recruitment tour, demonstrating how, unlike many companies, by working at Google, your labors aren't all going to be locked in a secret vault never to be shared with the world. Knowing that this appeals to some smart/talented people, Google's "charity" seems rather pragmatic.
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
All I want for Christmas is their Swedish Chef translator.
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
I'm hoping they release the source code to their web page. Analysis should provide some insight into how they produce their easy-to-understand user interface.
Most evil is done by good people, and not by accident, but deliberately; motivated by high ideals toward virtuous ends.
Maybe they could give us the source code to their webpage. It would be cool to find out what HTML code they used to get it to look like that
As make extensive use of linux, might I suggest that they include a tiny picture with the text "Google is powered by linux" with the search results? Maybe at the bottom, where you can't barely see it... but it will be enough to raise linux visibility a lot, if google users (i.e.: every internet user) realizes that linux is powerful enough for google.
My journal. Mainly about freedom.
o You haven't #include'd the necessary header files.
/. It only confuses the newcomers.
o You haven't flushed the output stream.
o You haven't seeded rand()
o You've declared main() to have a return type of int but don't actually return anything. Why would you do this?
Please don't post poor code to
It might be a good idea and in their own interest for them to contribute financially to some of the free "core" technologies they use. I don't see them in the osdl memberlist for example.
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.Of course, I could be wrong, I couldn't even RTFA...
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
Call me cynical, but I highly doubt Google are going to release anything useful. Maybe an update to the API.
What I'm thinking is they'll make a big fanfare about PageRank, and release the same thesis paper Brin and Page wrote at Stanford again, with a couple of tweaks.
No more.
i'd like to see how google sets works, myself...
Am I nuts or did I just today accidentally find out that their index page's HTML is pretty low on W3C?
;-)
39 errors for such a small page which happens to be your business card for thousands of people... wonder what the rest looks like then
"We can confirm that Debian does *not* ship the version with the trojan horse. Our version predates it." [CA-2002-28]
how many times havent google made finding stuff on the internet a lot easier? they dont have to give anything back.. but oh well, its cool that they decided to do this tho..
... bacause you are a buttugly greasy-penised nerd?
We at google.au tend towards sexy guys and girl for our renowned office orgies.
Thank you for your interest though.
... it's .NET code. :-)
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.
Microsoft says Web site violates copyright
Time based hardware button for application launch i.e. Double click
HetInternet Afbeeldingen Discussiegroepen Gids
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TaalhulpmiddelenHet web doorzoekenZoeken in pagina's in het Nederlands
Advertentie programma's - Alles over Google - Google.com in English
©2004 Google - Zoekt in 4,285,199,774 webpagina's
Hi, Google here!
We would like to give back to the community, so here is some code we'd like to share:
#include
main() { printf("GOOGLE says Hello World!\n"); }
We really hope that you enjoy and benefit from our generosity. We hereby release the above under the Google Public License (GooPL) which can be found online at our web site.
This is so unlike any reaction I thought I might have to such an announcement, but I really do feel that Google, by giving us such a great search engine (and working so constantly to improve it) is giving us enough. I wouldn't want them to risk any of that by giving away bits of PageRank!
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
Ayone?
use strict; # pragma
would you get criticised for bugs and deviation from standards in your joke source code.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
In the article, Wayne Rosing explicitly says that Google is not planning on open-sourcing the Google code base, but that they will publish academic papers on their work. "I'm not saying we're going to open-source Google, because that would be a little dumb when we have these Microsoft guys making noise. . . We're encouraging the software engineers to submit papers where it makes sense, particularly where it is landmark work and it is really important that other people know."
Google already has published a number of papers on their systems, including descriptions of PageRank, their clustering architecture, and their high availability file system (the Google File System). Seems like this is merely an announcement that they intend to do more of the same.
/*
;)
* Allocate 'size' units from the given map.
* Return the base of the allocated space.
* In a map, the addresses are increasing and the
* list is terminated by a 0 size.
* Algorithm is first-fit.
*/
ulong_t
atealloc(
struct map *mp,
size_t size)
{
register unsigned int a;
register struct map *bp;
register unsigned long s;
SCO's not going to be happy about this
Unstable Apps: Our Android Apps Don't Suck
Perhaps I don't understand something here, but shouldn't Google not be making these type of public statments until its IPO happens?
"here 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. ...Which would imply they've taken something from everybody??? Yeah, that just gives me all kinds of warm fuzzies about gMail and their other future plans.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
If they really want to give back, they should use Google to push Firefox and Opera. They have the clout to help break Microsoft's chokehold on the net before Longhorn finally arrives... if they decide to put their closed-source money where their open-source mouth is.
Are people really buying this??
I am usually optimistic, but I find this hard to believe. Google is in the pre-IPO mode, #1 search company with Microsoft on its heals, and so on. Who in the right mind would provide information about their business, let alone anything concrete? If you read interviews with Google's C*O people, you will not that they always avoid answering questions like "How many servers does Google really have? 10K, 100K, or more?". Nobody has ever answered that simple and seemingly benign question, so why would they now reveal what makes them number one?
My guess would be that this is another elegant marketing trick playing the good guy (e.g. no ad banner, no sponsored links (I'm talking early Google), no evil software campaign, then the generous 1GB mail, etc.) in every possible geek (read: early adopters/thought leaders) facet.
Simpy
Google's been on top for too long. Microsoft and other search engines are really starting to push competition. But even if they equal or surpass Google's services, they still won't succeed (lawfully, at least). Google has something none of them have, and something most of them can never get with their histories: Trust.
I'm not to sure what google would actually release, however it is interesting they're trying to back pedal on some of there policies and recent patents they had been filling
I don't wear a tinfoil hat, but i don't like the enormity and control google is pushing over the search engine world as well as the advertising/contextual marketing world. They have some of the most assinine Terms of Services and agreement policies i have ever seen. basically if you choose google you have to walk on pins and needles because you don't (nor never will) know how they operate and nor do you know if they will change something that will lead you to loosig all of your revenue or being banned, kicked or whatever they choose.
See what it is all about.
Just took me a notepad and a browser ;)
.h{font-size: 20px;} .q{color:#0000cc;} //--> // --> // -->
<html><head><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"><title>Google</title><style><!--
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</script><table border=0 cellspacing=0 cellpadding=4><tr><td nowrap class=q><font size=-1><b><font color=#000000>Web</font></b> &nbs p;<a id=1a class=q href="/imghp?hl=en&tab=wi" onClick="return qs(this);">Images</a> <a id=2a class=q href="/grphp?hl=en&tab=wg" onClick="return qs(this);">Groups</a> <a id=4a class=q href="/nwshp?hl=en&tab=wn" onClick="return qs(this);">News</a> <b>< a href="/options/index.html" class=q>more »</a></b></font></td></tr> </table><table cellspacing=0 cellpadding=0><tr valign=middle><td width=25%> </td><td align=center><input maxLength=256 size=55 name=q value="">
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<input type=hidden name=ie value="UTF-8"><input name=hl type=hidden value=en><br><input type=submit value="Google Search" name=btnG><input type=submit value="I'm Feeling Lucky" name=btnI></td><td valign=top nowrap width=25%><font size=-2> <a href=/advanced_search?hl=en>Advanced Search</a><br> < a href=/preferences?hl=en>Preferences</a><br> & nbsp;<a href=/language_tools?hl=en>Language Tools</a></font></td></tr><tr><t d colspan=3 align=center><font size=-1>Search: <input id=all type=radio name=meta value="" checked><label for=all> the web</label><input id=cty type=radio name=meta value="cr=countryIN" ><label for=cty>pages from India</label></font></td></tr></table></form><p><f ont size=-1><p></font><br>Google.co. in offered in: <a href="http://www.google.co.in/hi">Hindi</a&g t; <a href="http://www.google.co.in/bn">Bengali</a> ; <a href="http://www.google.co.in/te">Telugu</a> <a href="http://www.google.co.in/mr">Ma
Striving to be common...
The original pagerank patent 6,285,999 lists larry page as inventor, but The Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University is the assignee. Google has an exclusive license on that patent through 2011. There's a later patent, 6,526,440, listing Krishna Bharat as inventor, Google as the assignee. The latter patent appears to be a minor refinement, per the abstract:
"A search engine for searching a corpus improves the relevancy of the results by refining a standard relevancy score based on the interconnectivity of the initially returned set of documents. The search engine obtains an initial set of relevant documents by matching a user's search terms to an index of a corpus. A re-ranking component in the search engine then refines the initially returned document rankings so that documents that are frequently cited in the initial set of relevant documents are preferred over documents that are less frequently cited within the initial set."
...their source code is already available! just point your browser at google.com, left click on the page and choose "View Source"
...code that SCO can now claim they own the rights to. Do you think I should buy SCO stock now before investors realise SCO is talking even more sh*t for their pump and dump scheme? ;-)
Every article i try to find now has been google bombed. It's harder and harder to find anything on Google.
I don't know or why people assume that their low tech algorithmn is so great. There's nothing that prevents crass commercial companies from telling their customers or paid cronies to link to them.
I think Google is very overrated and can't handle searches on a variety of topics and I can't believe the media attention that this lone search engine gets when there are others just like it.
Hear Hear, this google worship amazes me. I think I have enjoyed far more free as in beer content from ABC/NBC/CBS than I have from google, yet you would never hear these guys adulated in the same way that google is. Yeah they use linux but so do plenty of other companies, unlike google they don't find it necessary to say aren't we so effin cool, we use linux.
Luckily the world is not Ayn Randish. Yet.
We might be enjoying the benefits of Google, but are Google's employees themselves not content? Acoording to this link on NYT[reg. required, yada, yada], the top search for "out of touch management" in Google caused the search engine to list as its first result a page describing the company's top management.
Google should consider "giving back" by providing a platform for services to run on -- a PlanetLab for the SourceForge world. Google code isn't about a single server, it's about clusters of servers, and few people have the budget and experience to set up distributed clusters on their own.
I don't have a PhD but I have ideas. And it would be giving back to the society too.
-- Leeeter than leet
All this talk about Google makes me want to barf. Google is so boring! What about Ask Jeeves? This small innovative search engine company is roaring and we are hiring Software Engineers, Research Engineers, Computational Linguistics & NLP Engineers, Product Managers and more in New York, New Jersey & Northern California. Please check out our jobs at www.Ask.com to see what is new. I currently have an urgent position for a Software Engineer, Content Group. Here is the link to the job description. Regular full-time & very competitive compensation. http://www.askjeevescareers.com/askjeeves/NC.asp?I D=234
Thank you!
Tiffany @ Ask Jeeves, Inc.
Aren't there some open source alternatives to the GoogleFS? Are they "production stable" ? Would we benefit from Google releasing some of that code?
-- Leeeter than leet
They've been waiting for this. Can you imagine? Just grab Google's code, implement it in the new msn search and don't tell anyone...
"A Note on the Eigenvalues of the Google Matrix"
http://arxiv.org/abs/math.RA/0401177
Interview with Matt Wells (GigaBlast)p a=showpage&pid=135&page=1
http://www.acmqueue.com/modules.php?name=Content&
I think google wants to give out peices that are fairly obviouse but are fairly large and they think it would be possible for the compitition (yahoo, msn) to patent parts of it. By releasing it it would be impossible for the compitition to do this.
Classic buisniss protection move...shore up the edges to prevent any flanking move from the enemey...plus i am sure there are some genuin open source people who work for the company.
stendec@gmail.com
I hope they release their clustering filesystem. From what I read in the paper they did on it, it just sounds awsome.
After reading through this article about the fall of the Win32 API, I think Google may be doing something a bit more clever than simply 'giving back'.
The article discusses how the plethora of APIs Microsoft is shipping and uncertainty of just when the APIs will be on real hardware have caused new development to move to the web (for example, building a new email client). It also mentions there are several drawbacks to web programming, but the author expects them to be overcome soon, further sapping the appeal of the Win32 API.
Perhaps this is exactly Google's strategy. How better to further enhance the desireability of web programming versus desktop programming than by demonstraiting in source how to perform some really compelling features? How many developers will take these techniques and use them at the heart of new killer apps; apps that run on any web browser rather than locked to a specific API?
Google may be giving a small bit away, but the potential gains in mindshare among developers may be much, much greater than the loss of this already paid for source code. Further, if the code in question relies on a particular technology, protocol or standard they are well versed in, they have succeeded in enticing developers to play in their sandbox.
Quite clever, really.
They won't release any really "vital" pieces of code, because it would reduce their competitiveness, and the most intelligent of the porn spammers and viagara salesmen would find weaknesses in the search /indexing algorithm and exploit them to bring their pages higher in the rankings.
:-(
Now if only they'd hurry up and open up gmail to the general public! I've had no luck in getting an invite
Google have a public API you can download.
...how long before the search code is integrated into SETI@home and discover aliens searching with their 802.11xxx for hot alien pr0n?!
(It's a joke. Larf.)
Moderation Total: -1 Troll, +3 Goat
Ask Jeeves is lame.
What if SCO finds the source for grep in google.c?
----
Is Your Boss A Muppet?
I read your sig before I read the comment, and wondered if it was related to Ayn Rand... then read the command, and was pretty sure of it... then the email address, and was embarrassingly certain. :-)
Rock on with your Rational self.
"I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.
What he did suggest is that they are keen to give something back to the OSS community that has given them so much. The impression that I got was that they would return much of their operating systems work to the community. They do spend a great deal of effort in Linux kernel hacking and so forth.
I was very pleased to hear this from a senior member of Google's engineering team. We're yet to see the fruits of this decision, but the policy change has to come first. Let's hope it works out.
Exclusive code-leak to slashdot!
void main()
{
webcrawler();
}
the end!
-- Having a Creationist Museum is like having an Atheist place of worship
If they indeed intent to open-source some code under one license or another, they need to do it before they go public, as I suspect it's impossible to convince a post-IPO company's board to give out source code, or any other asset for free.
IMO AdWords alone is enough to seperate Google from any TV network. Non-intrusive, non-annoying, non-bandwidth hogging ads that are actually relevant to page content, as opposed to taking 15-20 minutes of every hour to shove random products down my throat.
:)
I'm not sure where you've heard Google claim to be cool because they use linux. Maybe something about them being cool because they have a custom variant of linux.
Also, you don't hear the networks elevated because you don't communicate with people over your TV. People on the net (who are likely to dislike TV and prefer the net) are the ones you'll hear, and that kind of person is likely to use and love google's services often.
Come to think of it, why are you here?
I've got more mod points and GMail invi
I got 4 gmail invitations left from my second quota. Any takers?