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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.
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.
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?
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
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.
You haven't flushed your output ;-)
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.
Don't need the code for that
http://googlebar.mozdev.org/
I'm guessing the answers are "no" and "no". SEOs (search engine exploiters) would only damage google if google gave out their source code for pagerank. And each change to pagerank has been accompanied with much speculation in the SEO community about what the change was, with lots of graphs and experiments and gnashing of teeth. So no, I'm pretty sure we never have and never will see the source for PageRank.
Well it is common knowledge that they run their system off of (lots and lots of) Linux servers. So maybe that is what they mean by "give back"
Home Automation & Linux -- now I know I'm a geek
"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
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.
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!
They're releasing all the code that changes the bannerhead to some cute picture on holidays. Powerful stuff.
using System.XML;
[...]
if (ContainsAdSenseAds())
{
pageRank++;
profit();
}
there's no place like ~
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.
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.