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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.'"
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?
While Google is probably telling more of a truth than Sun is how do we really know until we see the code?
You don't. But rather than just bitching about it, how about you just exercise some patience and wait a little while? Counting them out before they even get started is a little unfair, don't you think?
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?
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.
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...
They don't "have to" give anything back, but the idea is that they are acting altruistically. They feel that the public has supported their company (via usage, interest in the IPO, jobs, income, etc), that they recipricolly owe something substantial to the consumer.
Read a little Ayn Rand (like Atlas Shrugged) for the concept... Essentially, corporations (whether private or not) derive their status as a legal "person" from implicit trust the public has placed in them. As such, corporations have an obligation to provide service back to the community and to act in a moral fashon... I for one am glad to see that this company is acting in this accord, instead of all of the depravity we have seen as of late.
-jokerghost
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.
They're releasing all the code that changes the bannerhead to some cute picture on holidays. Powerful stuff.
would you get criticised for bugs and deviation from standards in your joke source code.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
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.