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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.'"
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.
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.
Casual Games/Downloads
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...
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
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
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
*don's tinfoil hat*
You better give it back. Don gets very nervous without it.
...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.
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".
using System.XML;
[...]
if (ContainsAdSenseAds())
{
pageRank++;
}
Best Buy can have you arrested
"Is there anything Google can't do? Seriously, how cool is that?"
Just about as cool as when Apple, Sony, and even Microsoft (with restrictions) released some of their code. It's nothing new -- companies do it all the time for good PR and to help jumpstart initiatives. Question is, what code are they going to release, how much and when?
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 ...
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...
...
This is not the greatest sig in the world, no. This is a tribute.
I have the algorithm but this comment does not have enough space for me to describe it :)
Actually, I'd love to have a brain implant that would allow me to query Google just by thinking about it. It would probably disqualify me for any TV quiz show, but would otherwise be really nifty.
-- Spelling and grammar errors tend to be a sign of erroneous thinking.
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!
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.
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/
Google makes alot of money from providing this service to companies already. See the ever-so-cool Google Search Appliance. I don't know why they'd cannibalize that market.
They're releasing all the code that changes the bannerhead to some cute picture on holidays. Powerful stuff.
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
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.
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.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.
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
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."
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.
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&
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.