Google

A tech jargon
Submitted By

Prasham Trivedi (6044)

As a partial fulfillment of the course of B.E.I.T.

2009
 SHANTILAL SHAH ENGINEERING COLLEGE

CERTIFICATE
This is to certify that below mentioned students

Mr. Prasham H Trivedi(Roll No. 6040)

of semester 8th , course B.E.I.T. , have successfully and satisfactorily

completed their Seminar report on

“Google- a tech Jargon”

in subject Seminar report and produced this report of year 2009 and
submitted to S.S.E.C., BHAVNAGAR.

DATE OF SUBMISSION: ---------------------------------------------

STAFF IN CHARGE: HEAD OF DEPARTMENT: PRINCIPAL:

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Contents
Overview…..…………………………………………………………………………………………………………3
Browser: Google Chrome ..................................................................................... 10
Browser extension: Gears .................................................................................... 20
Desktop Search Engine: Google Desktop ............................................................. 22
Picture Organizer Picasa ...................................................................................... 28
IM: Google talk .................................................................................................... 33
Google earth ........................................................................................................ 37
Google packs........................................................................................................ 45
Igoogle ................................................................................................................. 47
Google gadgets .................................................................................................... 50
Developers’ Mecca: Google code ......................................................................... 68
Google App Engine............................................................................................... 69
Google Maps ........................................................................................................ 72
Google notebook ................................................................................................. 78
Mobile OS and software developing platform: Android ....................................... 79
Google search ...................................................................................................... 87
Google image search............................................................................................ 92
Game on Google: image labeler ........................................................................... 93
Google for researchers: Google patent search ..................................................... 96
Code repository: Google Code search .................................................................. 96
Google’s online library: Book Search.................................................................... 98
Google for students: Google scholar .................................................................... 98
Google the real technology behind .................................................................... 100
Google File System............................................................................................. 104
From where Google earns? ................................................................................ 106
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History and overview
Google Inc. is an American public corporation, earning revenue from advertising related
to its Internet search, e-mail, online mapping, office productivity, social networking, and video
sharing services as well as selling advertising-free versions of the same technologies. The
Google headquarters, the Googleplex, is located in Mountain View, California. As of December
31, 2008, the company has 20,222 full-time employees.

Google was co-founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were students at
Stanford University and the company was first incorporated as a privately held company on
September 4, 1998. The initial public offering took place on August 19, 2004, raising US$1.67
billion, making it worth US$23 billion. Google has continued its growth through a series of new
product developments, acquisitions, and partnerships. Environmentalism, philanthropy and
positive employee relations have been important tenets during the growth of Google, the latter
resulting in being identified multiple times as Fortune Magazine's #1 Best Place to Work. The
unofficial company slogan is "Don't be evil", although criticism of Google includes concerns
regarding the privacy of personal information, copyright, censorship and discontinuation of
services. According to Millward Brown, it is the most powerful brand in the world.

Google began in January 1996, as a research project by Larry Page, who was soon joined
by Sergey Brin, when they were both Ph.D. students at Stanford University in California. They
hypothesized that a search engine that analyzed the relationships between websites would
produce better ranking of results than existing techniques, which ranked results according to
the number of times the search term appeared on a page. Their search engine was originally
nicknamed "BackRub" because the system checked backlinks to estimate the importance of a
site. A small search engine called Rankdex was already exploring a similar strategy.

Convinced that the pages with the most links to them from other highly relevant web
pages must be the most relevant pages associated with the search, Page and Brin tested their
thesis as part of their studies, and laid the foundation for their search engine. Originally, the
search engine used the Stanford University website with the domain google.stanford.edu. The
domain google.com was registered on 15 September 1997, and the company was incorporated
as Google Inc. on 4 September 1998 at a friend's garage in Menlo Park, California. The total
initial investment raised for the new company amounted to almost US$1.1 million, including a
US$100,000 check by Andy Bechtolsheim, one of the founders of Sun Microsystems.

In March 1999, the company moved into offices in Palo Alto, home to several other
noted Silicon Valley technology startups. After quickly outgrowing two other sites, the company
leased a complex of buildings in Mountain View at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway from Silicon
Graphics (SGI) in 2003. The company has remained at this location ever since, and the complex

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has since come to be known as the Googleplex (a play on the word googolplex). In 2006, Google
bought the property from SGI for US$319 million.

The Google search engine attracted a loyal following among the growing number of
Internet users, who liked its simple design and useful results. In 2000, Google began selling
advertisements associated with search keywords. The ads were text-based to maintain an
uncluttered page design and to maximize page loading speed. Keywords were sold based on a
combination of price bid and clickthroughs, with bidding starting at US$.05 per click. This model
of selling keyword advertising was pioneered by Goto.com (later renamed Overture Services,
before being acquired by Yahoo! and rebranded as Yahoo! Search Marketing). Goto.com was an
Idealab spin off created by Bill Gross, and was the first company to successfully provide a pay-
for-placement search service. Overture Services later sued Google over alleged infringements of
Overture's pay-per-click and bidding patents by Google's AdWords service. The case was settled
out of court, with Google agreeing to issue shares of common stock to Yahoo! in exchange for a
perpetual license. Thus, while many of its dot-com rivals failed in the new Internet marketplace,
Google quietly rose in stature while generating revenue.

The name "Google" originated from a common misspelling of the word "googol", which
refers to 10100, the number represented by a 1 followed by one hundred zeros. Having found
its way increasingly into everyday language, the verb "google", was added to the Merriam
Webster Collegiate Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary in 2006, meaning "to use the
Google search engine to obtain information on the Internet."

A patent describing part of the Google ranking mechanism (PageRank) was granted on 4
September 2001. The patent was officially assigned to Stanford University and lists Lawrence
Page as the inventor.

Financing and initial public offering

The first funding for Google as a company was secured in August 1998, in the form of a
US$100,000 contribution from Andy Bechtolsheim, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, given to a
corporation which did not yet exist.

On June 7th, 1999 a round of funding of $25 million was announced, with the major
investors being rival venture capital firms Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sequoia Capital.

The Google IPO took place on 19 August 2004. 19,605,052 shares were offered at a price
of US$85 per share. Of that, 14,142,135 (another mathematical reference as √2 ≈ 1.4142135)
were floated by Google, and the remaining 5,462,917 were offered by existing stockholders.
The sale of US$1.67 billion gave Google a market capitalization of more than US$23 billion. The
vast majority of the 271 million shares remained under the control of Google. Many Google
employees became instant paper millionaires. Yahoo!, a competitor of Google, also benefited

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from the IPO because it owned 8.4 million shares of Google as of 9 August 2004, ten days
before the IPO.

The stock performance of Google after its first IPO launch has gone well, with shares
hitting US$700 for the first time on 31 October 2007, due to strong sales and earnings in the
advertising market, as well as the release of new features such as the desktop search function
and its iGoogle personalized home page. The surge in stock price is fueled primarily by
individual investors, as opposed to large institutional investors and mutual funds.

Growth
While the primary business interest is in the web content arena, Google has begun
experimenting with other markets, such as radio and print publications. On 17 January 2006,
Google announced that its purchase of a radio advertising company "dMarc", which provides an
automated system that, allows companies to advertise on the radio. This will allow Google to
combine two niche advertising media—the Internet and radio—with Google's ability to laser-
focus on the tastes of consumers. Google has also begun an experiment in selling
advertisements from its advertisers in offline newspapers and magazines, with select
advertisements in the Chicago Sun-Times. They have been filling unsold space in the newspaper
that would have normally been used for in-house advertisements.

Acquisitions
Since 2001, Google has acquired several small start-up companies.
In 2004, Google acquired a company called Keyhole, Inc., which developed a product
called Earth Viewer which was renamed in 2005 to Google Earth

In February 2006, software company Adaptive Path sold Measure Map, a weblog
statistics application, to Google. Registration to the service has since been temporarily disabled.
The last update regarding the future of Measure Map was made on 6 April 2006 and outlined
many of the known issues of the service.

In late 2006, Google bought the online video site YouTube for US$1.65 billion in stock.
Shortly after, on 31 October 2006, Google announced that it had also acquired JotSpot, a
developer of wiki technology for collaborative Web sites.

On 13 April 2007, Google reached an agreement to acquire DoubleClick. Google agreed

to buy the company for US$3.1 billion.

On 2 July 2007, Google purchased GrandCentral. Google agreed to buy the company for
US$50 million.

On 9 July 2007, Google announced that it had signed a definitive agreement to acquire
enterprise messaging security and compliance company Postini.

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Partnerships
In 2005, Google entered into partnerships with other companies and government
agencies to improve production and services. Google announced a partnership with NASA Ames
Research Center to build up 1,000,000 square feet (93,000 m2) of offices and work on research
projects involving large-scale data management, nanotechnology, distributed computing, and
the entrepreneurial space industry. Google also entered into a partnership with Sun
Microsystems in October to help share and distribute each other's technologies. The company
entered into a partnership with AOL of Time Warner, to enhance each other's video search
services.
The same year, the company became a major financial investor of the new .mobi top-
level domain for mobile devices, in conjunction with several other companies, including
Microsoft, Nokia, and Ericsson among others. In September 2007, Google launched, "Adsense
for Mobile", a service for its publishing partners which provides the ability to monetize their
mobile websites through the targeted placement of mobile text ads, and acquired the mobile
social networking site, Zingku.mobi, to "provide people worldwide with direct access to Google
applications, and ultimately the information they want and need, right from their mobile
devices."
In 2006, Google and Fox Interactive Media of News Corp. entered into a US$900 million
agreement to provide search and advertising on the popular social networking site, MySpace.
Google has developed a partnership with GeoEye to launch a satellite providing Google
with high-resolution (0.41m black and white, 1.65m color) imagery for Google Earth. The
satellite was launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base on 6 September 2008.
In 2008, Google announced that it was hosting an archive of Life magazine's
photographs, as part of a joint effort. Some of the images in the archive were never published
in the magazine

Products and services

Google has created services and tools for the general public and business environment
alike; including Web applications, advertising networks and solutions for businesses.

Advertising
99% of Google's revenue is derived from its advertising programs. For the 2006 fiscal
year, the company reported US$10.492 billion in total advertising revenues and only US$112
million in licensing and other revenues. Google is able to precisely track users' interests across
affiliated sites using DoubleClick technology and Google Analytics. Google's advertisements
carry a lower price tag when their human ad-rating team working around the world believes the
ads improve the company's user experience. Google AdWords allows Web advertisers to
display advertisements in Google's search results and the Google Content Network, through
either a cost-per-click or cost-per-view scheme. Google Adsense website owners can also
display adverts on their own site, and earn money every time ads are clicked.

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 Google has also been criticized by advertisers regarding its inability to combat click
fraud, when a person or automated script is used to generate a charge on an advertisement
without really having an interest in the product. Industry reports in 2006 claim that
approximately 14 to 20 percent of clicks were in fact fraudulent or invalid.

In June 2008, Google reached an advertising agreement with Yahoo!, which would have
allowed Yahoo! to feature Google advertisements on their web pages. The alliance between the
two companies was never completely realized due to antitrust concerns by the U.S.
Department of Justice. As a result, Google pulled out of the deal in November, 2008.

Software
The Google web search engine is the company's most popular service. As of August
2007, Google is the most used search engine on the web with a 53.6% market share, ahead of
Yahoo! (19.9%) and Live Search (12.9%). Google indexes billions of Web pages, so that users can
search for the information they desire, through the use of keywords and operators, although at
any given time it will only return a maximum of 1,000 results for any specific search query.
Google has also employed the Web Search technology into other search services, including
Image Search, Google News, the price comparison site Google Product Search, the interactive
Usenet archive Google Groups, Google Maps, and more.

In 2004, Google launched its own free web-based e-mail service, known as Gmail (or
Google Mail in some jurisdictions). Gmail features conversation view, spam-filtering technology,
and the capability to use Google technology to search e-mail. The service generates revenue by
displaying advertisements and links from the AdWords service that are tailored to the choice of
the user and/or content of the e-mail messages displayed on screen.

In early 2006, the company launched Google Video, which not only allows users to
search and view freely available videos but also offers users and media publishers the ability to
publish their content, including television shows on CBS, NBA basketball games, and music
videos.

Google has also developed several desktop applications, including Google Desktop,
Picasa, SketchUp and Google Earth, an interactive mapping program powered by satellite and
aerial imagery that covers the vast majority of the planet. Many major cities have such detailed
images that one can zoom in close enough to see vehicles and pedestrians clearly.
Consequently, there have been some concerns about national security implications; contention
is that the software can be used to pinpoint with near-precision accuracy the physical location
of critical infrastructure, commercial and residential buildings, bases, government agencies, and
so on. However, the satellite images are not necessarily frequently updated, and all of them are
available at no charge through other products and even government sources; the software
simply makes accessing the information easier. A number of Indian state governments have
raised concerns about the security risks posed by geographic details provided by Google Earth's
satellite imaging.

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 Google has promoted their products in various ways. In London, Google Space was set-
up in Heathrow Airport, showcasing several products, including Gmail, Google Earth and Picasa.
Also, a similar page was launched for American college students, under the name College Life,
Powered by Google.

In 2007, some reports surfaced that Google was planning the release of its own mobile
phone, possibly a competitor to Apple's iPhone. The project, called Android, an operating
system provides a standard development kit that will allow any "Android" phone to run
software developed for the Android SDK, no matter the phone manufacturer. In September
2008, T-Mobile released the first phone running the Android platform, the G1.

Google Translate (site) aka Google Language Tools (site) is a server-side machine
translation service, which can translate 35 different languages to each other, forming 1190
language pairs. Browser extension tools (such as Firefox extensions) allow for easy access to
Google Translate from the browser. The software uses corpus linguistics techniques from
translated documents, (such United Nations documents, which are professionally translated) to
extract translations accurate up to 88 percent. A "suggest a better translation" feature appears
with the original language text in a pop-up text field, allowing users to indicate where the
current translation is incorrect or else inferior to another translation.

On 1 September 2008, Google pre-announced the upcoming availability of Google

Chrome, an open-source web browser, which was released on 2 September 2008.

Enterprise Products
Google entered the Enterprise market in February, 2002 with the launch of its Google
Search Appliance, targeted toward providing search technology to larger organizations.
Providing search for a smaller document repository, Google launched the Mini in 2005.

Late in 2006, Google began to sell Custom Search Business Edition, providing customers
with an advertising-free window into Google.com's index. In 2008, Google re-branded its next
version of Custom Search Business Edition as Google Site Search.

In 2007, Google launched Google Apps Premier Edition, a version of Google Apps
targeted primarily at the business user. It includes such extras as more disk space for e-mail, API
access, and premium support, for a price of US$50 per user per year. A large implementation of
Google Apps with 38,000 users is at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada.

Also in 2007, Google acquired Postini and continued to sell the acquired technology as
Google Security Services

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Resent Developments at Google (As of 28th March 2009)
Do you know why all applications and services of Google are called “Beta”?
As per company’s views their development never stops and they’ve proved it true. Their most
used applications are being developed rapidly, the new services are introduced frequently and
the services criticized by users are dropped eventually. Let’s have a look.
Google has a service called Google Labs. This Google lab is the platform behind each and
every development in Google. They have recently announced that Gmail (their mail service) can
be accessed offline. By help of their browser extension called ‘’Gears’’ you can set your Gmail
account as it can be accessed offline in your private workstation. In Gmail they enabled multiple
inboxes can be viewed on single page. As like Orkut you can also enable a background theme
available. And these themes are far better than those in yahoos.

In iGoogle they have put pages and gadget links as sidebar links on left side on pages.
And if you click on one gadget you can see it on whole page (once again far better than its
counterpart my yahoo). In Google notebook you can put all the notes as rich text format. Yes
notebook clipping is not rich texted before in Google notebook as you can see the images here.
But eventually Google has announced that they are dropping all the plans to develop Notebook
service.

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Google’s applications 1 desktop application

Browser: Google Chrome

Google Chrome is a web browser developed by Google and based on the WebKit layout
engine and application framework. In December 2008, it had a share of 1.04% of the browser
market. It was first released as a beta version for Microsoft Windows on September 2, 2008.
The name is derived from the graphical user interface frame, or "chrome", of web browsers.
The public stable release was on December 11, 2008.

Chromium is the open source project behind Google Chrome. The Google-authored
portion of it is released under the BSD license, with other parts being subject to a variety of
different permissive open-source licenses, including the MIT License, the LGPL, the Microsoft
Permissive License and a MPL/GPL/LGPL tri-license. It implements the same feature set as
Chrome, but has a slightly different logo.

History
Announcement
The release announcement was originally scheduled for September 3, 2008, and a comic
by Scott McCloud was to be sent to journalists and bloggers explaining the features of and
motivations for the new browser. Copies intended for Europe were shipped early and German
blogger Philipp Lenssen of Google Blog scoped made a scanned copy of the 38-page comic
available on his website after receiving it on September 1, 2008. Google subsequently made the
comic available on Google Books and their site and mentioned it on its official blog along with
an explanation for the early release.

Public release

The Chromium Test Shell on Linux

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 The browser was first publicly released for Microsoft Windows (XP and later only) on
September 2, 2008 in 43 languages, officially a beta version. Chrome quickly gained about 1%
market share. Mac OS X and Linux versions are under development. Recently, in the Chromium
project's developer wikia message was placed that a "test shell" is available to build on Linux.
Some have tried this shell, which apparently lacks many features, but appears to function quite
well in rendering web sites (including JavaScript).

On September 2, a CNET news item drew attention to a passage in the terms of service
for the initial beta release, which seemed to grant to Google a license to all content transferred
via the Chrome browser. The passage in question was inherited from the general Google terms
of service. On the same day, Google responded to this criticism by stating that the language
used was borrowed from other products, and removed the passage in question from the Terms
of Service. Google noted that this change would "apply retroactively to all users who have
downloaded Google Chrome." There were subsequent concern and confusion about whether
and what information the program communicates back to Google. The company stated that
usage metrics are only sent when users opt in by checking the option "help make Google
Chrome better by automatically sending usage statistics and crash reports to Google" when the
browser is installed.

The first release of Google Chrome passed the Acid1 and Acid2 (not fully, a small artifact
appears tests. It also passed 79 out of the 100 subtests of the Acid3, higher than both Internet
Explorer 7 (14) and Firefox 3 (71), but lower than Opera (83) When compared with
development builds of Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera, and Safari, Chrome scored lower than
Firefox 3.1 Beta 1 (85), Opera (100), and Safari 4 (Developer Preview) (100), but still higher than
Internet Explorer (21) However, the current Dev channel build scores 100 out of 100 while still
failing the link test.

On January 9, 2009, CNET reports that Google plans to release versions for Mac OS X
and Linux by the first half of the year.

Unofficial Chromium releases

 On September 15, 2008, CodeWeavers released an unofficial bundle of a Wine

derivative and Chromium Developer Build 21 for Linux and Mac OS X, which they
dubbed CrossOver Chromium.
 SRWare Iron is a release of Chromium software that explicitly disables the collection and
transmission of usage information to Google which is optional within Chrome.

Development

Primary design goals were improvements in security, speed, and stability compared to
existing browsers. There also were extensive changes in the user interface. Chrome was
assembled from 26 different code libraries from Google and others from third parties such as
Netscape.

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Security

Chrome periodically downloads updates of two blacklists (one for phishing and one for
malware), and warns users when they attempt to visit a harmful site. This service is also made
available for use by others via a free public API called "Google Safe Browsing API". Google
notifies the owners of listed sites who may not be aware of the presence of the harmful
software.

Chrome will typically allocate each tab to fit into its own process to "prevent malware
from installing itself" or "using what happens in one tab to affect what happens in another",
however the actual process allocation model is more complex. Following the principle of least
privilege, each process is stripped of its rights and can compute, but cannot write files or read
from sensitive areas (e.g. documents, desktop)—this is similar to the "Protected Mode" that is
used by Internet Explorer 7 on Windows Vista. The Sandbox Team is said to have "taken this
existing process boundary and made it into a jail"; for example, malicious software running in
one tab is unable to sniff credit card numbers, interact with the mouse, or tell Windows to "run
an executable on start-up" and it will be terminated when the tab is closed. This enforces a
simple computer security model whereby there are two levels of multilevel security (user and
sandbox) and the sandbox can only respond to communication requests initiated by the user.

Typically, plugins such as Adobe Flash Player are not standardized and as such, cannot
be sandboxed as tabs can be. These often need to run at, or above, the security level of the
browser itself. To reduce exposure to attack, plugins are run in separate processes that
communicate with the renderer, itself operating at "very low privileges" in dedicated per-tab
processes. Plugins will need to be modified to operate within this software architecture while
following the principle of least privilege. Chrome supports the Netscape Plugin Application
Programming Interface (NPAPI), but does not support the embedding of ActiveX controls. Also,
Chrome does not have an extension system such as Mozilla's XPInstall architecture. Java applets
support is available in Chrome as part of Java 6 update 11, which currently is the latest stable
version.

A private browsing feature called Incognito mode is provided that prevents the browser
from storing any history information or cookies from the websites visited. This feature has been
referred to as a porn mode similar to the private browsing feature available in Apple's Safari
and the latest beta version of Internet Explorer 8.

A denial-of-service vulnerability was found that allowed a malicious web page to crash
the whole web browser. However, Google Chrome developers confirmed the flaw, and it was
fixed in the 0.2.149.29 release.

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Speed

The JavaScript virtual machine was considered a sufficiently important project to be split
off (as was Adobe/Mozilla's Tamarin) and handled by a separate team in Denmark. According to
Google, existing implementations were designed "for small programs, where the performance
and interactivity of the system weren't that important," but web applications such as Gmail
"are using the web browser to the fullest when it comes to DOM manipulations and JavaScript."
The resulting V8 JavaScript engine has features such as hidden class transitions, dynamic code
generation, and precise garbage collection. Tests by Google showed that V8 was about twice as
fast as Firefox 3.0 and the Safari 4 beta.

Several websites performed benchmark tests using the SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark
tool as well as Google's own set of computationally intense benchmarks, which includes ray
tracing and constraint solving. They unanimously reported that Chrome performed much faster
than all competitors against whom it had been tested, including Safari, Firefox 3.0, Internet
Explorer 7, and Internet Explorer 8. While Opera had not been compared to Chrome in those
comparisons, in previous tests, it had been shown to be slightly slower than Firefox 3.0, which
in turn, was slower than Chrome. Another blog post by Mozilla developer Brendan Eich
compared Chrome's V8 engine to his own TraceMonkey JavaScript engine which was
introduced in Firefox 3.1alpha, stating that some tests were faster in one engine and some
were faster in the other, with Firefox 3.1a faster overall. John Resig, Mozilla's JavaScript
evangelist, further commented on the performance of different browsers on Google's own
suite, finding Chrome "decimating" other browsers, but he questions whether Google's suite is
representative of real programs. He stated that Firefox 3.0 performed poorly on recursion
intensive benchmarks, such as those of Google, because the Mozilla team had not implemented
recursion-tracing yet.

Chrome also uses DNS perfecting to speed up website lookups.

Stability

The Gears team was considering a multithreaded browser (noting that a problem with
existing web browser implementations was that they are inherently single-threaded) and
Chrome implemented this concept with a multi-process architecture, similar to Loosely Coupled
Internet Explorer (LCIE) recently implemented by Internet Explorer 8. By default, a separate
process is allocated to each site instance and plug-in. This prevents tasks from interfering with
each other, which is good for security and stability; an attacker successfully gaining access to
one application does not gain access to all, and failure in one application results in a Sad Tab
screen of death, similar to the well-known Sad Mac, except only one single tab crashes instead
of the whole application. This strategy exacts a fixed per-process cost up front, but results in
less memory bloat overall as fragmentation is confined to each process and no longer results in
further memory allocations.

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 Chrome features a process management utility called the Task Manager which allows
the user to "see what sites are using the most memory, downloading the most bytes and
abusing [their] CPU" (as well as the plug-ins which run in separate processes) and terminate
them. Some users have reported a conflict with Internet Explorer, often resulting in the blue
screen error on Windows.

User interface

When Chrome is maximized, the title bar becomes hidden and instead, the tab bar is displayed at the top. Also, when the
mouse is moved over a link, the URL of the link is displayed in a status bar at the bottom left. Otherwise, the status bar is
invisible

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When Chrome is not maximized, the title bar is shown on top of the tab bar.

The main user interface includes back, forward, refresh, bookmark, go, and cancel
options. The options are similar to Safari, while the location of the settings is similar to versions
of Internet Explorer starting with version 7. The design of the window is based on Windows
Vista.

When the window is not maximized, the tab bar appears directly under the title bar.
When maximized, the title bar disappears, and instead, the tab bar is shown at the very top of
the window. Unlike other browsers such as Internet Explorer or Firefox which also have a full-
screen mode that hides the operating system's interface completely, Chrome can only be
maximized like a standard Windows application. Therefore, the Windows task bar, notification
area, and start menu link still take space at all times unless they have been configured to hide
at all times.

Chrome includes Gears, which adds features for web developers typically relating to the
building of web applications (including offline support).

Chrome replaces the browser home page which is displayed when a new tab is created
with a New Tab Page. This shows thumbnails of the nine most visited web sites along with the
sites most often searched, recent bookmarks, and recently closed tabs.

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Chrome's Omnibox

The Omnibox is the URL box at the top of each tab, which combines the functionalities
of both URL box and search box. It includes auto complete functionality, but only will auto
complete URLs that were manually entered (rather than all links), search suggestions, top pages
(previously visited), popular pages (unvisited), and text search over history. Search engines also
can be captured by the browser when used via the native user interface by pressing Tab.

Popup windows "are scoped to the tab they came from" and will not appear outside the
tab unless the user explicitly drags them out.

Chrome uses the WebKit rendering engine to display web pages, on advice from the
Android team. Like most browsers, Chrome was extensively tested internally before release
with unit testing, "automated user interface testing of scripted user actions" and fuzz testing, as
well as WebKit's layout tests (99% of which Chrome is claimed to have passed). New browser
builds are automatically tested against tens of thousands of commonly accessed websites
inside of the Google index within 20-30 minutes.

Tabs are the primary component of Chrome's user interface and as such, have been
moved to the top of the window rather than below the controls. This subtle change contrasts
with many existing tabbed browsers which are based on windows and contain tabs. Tabs
(including their state) can be transferred seamlessly between window containers by dragging.
Each tab has its own set of controls, including the Omnibox.

Chrome allows users to make local desktop shortcuts that open web applications in the
browser. The browser, when opened in this way, contains none of the regular interface except
for the title bar, so as not to "interrupt anything the user is trying to do." This allows web
applications to run alongside local software (similar to Mozilla Prism and Fluid).

By default, the status bar is hidden whenever it is not being used. However, it appears at
the bottom left corner whenever a page is loading and when a hyperlink is hovered over.

For web developers, Chrome features an element inspector similar to the one in
Firebug.

Usage tracking
Usage tracking is an option presented to the user during the software's installation.
Once accepted, it is possible to disable the transmission of this information by modifying
Chrome's "Under the Hood" options. Freeware programs such as UnChrome can remove the
unique ID without having to change the browser. Unofficial builds, such as SRWare Iron, seek to
remove these features from the browser altogether.

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Incognito window

Chrome also has an "incognito" browsing option where an internal browser opens up
that lets one surf where pages do not show up in one's browser history and deletes any tracking
cookies when one exits the incognito browser.
Extensions

As of October 2008, Google Chrome does not support 3rd party extensions.

As of version 3499, Google Chrome has rudimentary Greasemonkey support. This

feature is off by default, and may be turned on by launching the application with a specific
command-line argument.

Google Chrome extensions: Not yet, but later. "We don't have that in the beta today,
but we definitely plan an extension API," or application programming interface, Sundar Pichai, a
Google vice president of product management, said at the Chrome launch event here Tuesday.
"It is one of the things we will get to next."

—CNet News

Stable, Beta and Dev Releases

On January 08, 2009 Google introduced a new release channels system, whereby now
there are three distinct release channels: Stable channel, Beta channel, and Developer preview

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channel. Before this change, there were only two channels: Beta channel and Developer
preview channel. All previous Dev channel users were moved to Beta channel, the reason is
that now the new Dev channel builds will be less stable and polished than what Dev channel
users have been getting during Google Chrome's Beta period. Now the stable channel will be
updated with features and fixes once they have been thoroughly tested in the Beta channel,
and the Beta channel will be updated roughly monthly with stable and complete features from
the Dev channel. The Dev channel is where ideas get tested (and sometimes fail), and it can be
very unstable at times. See http://googlechromereleases.blogspot.com/ for more information
on specific releases.

Reception

The Daily Telegraph's Matthew Moore summarizes the verdict of early reviewers:
"Google Chrome is attractive, fast and has some impressive new features, but may not—yet—
be a threat to its Microsoft rival."

Microsoft reportedly "played down the threat from Chrome" and "predicted that most
people will embrace Internet Explorer 8." Opera Software said that "Chrome will strengthen the
Web as the biggest application platform in the world." Mozilla said that Chrome's introduction
into the web browser market comes as "no real surprise", that "Chrome is not aimed at
competing with Firefox", and furthermore that it should not affect Google's financing of Firefox.

Chrome’s design bridges the gap between desktop and so-called “cloud computing.” At
the touch of a button, Chrome lets you make a desktop, Start menu, or Quick Launch shortcut
to any Web page or Web application, blurring the line between what’s online and what’s inside
your PC. For example, I created a desktop shortcut for Google Maps. When you create a
shortcut for a Web application, Chrome strips away all of the toolbars and tabs from the
window, leaving you with something that feels much more like a desktop application than like a
Web application or page.

—PC World

On September 9, 2008, when Chrome still had been in beta, the German Federal Office
for Information Security (BSI) issued a statement about their first examination of Chrome,
expressing a concern over the prominent download links on Google's German web page,
because "beta versions should not be employed for general use applications" and browser
manufacturers should provide appropriate instructions regarding the use of pre-released
software. They did, however, praise the browser's technical contribution to improving security
on the web.

Concern about Chrome’s optional usage collection and tracking has been noted in
several publications.

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Reverse-engineering issues with Windows

On September 11, 2008, a few days after the release of Chrome's source code, Scott
Hanselman noticed some incriminating lines of comment in Chrome's code. This was further
pushed into limelight by the Ars Technica article Chrome antics: did Google reverse-engineer
Windows? Google later responded to this discovery, denying reverse-engineering by them and
referring to previously documented, although not official, techniques.

Chrome in competition

This was all about Google chrome but where chrome stands in competition? Let’s have a look.

Why should?

 Good GUI
 Omnibox
 Less tool bars and more space to page
 Speed
 Security
 Desktop shortcuts
 Good developer support

Why shouldn’t?

X Crashes frequently on low memory.

X No plug-in support.
X Incognito window – safari’s private browsing is far better.

My verdict on chrome:

I found it using chrome in broadband is better experience. But it is not recommended to

those who have less RAM surfing on dial-ups and though want to open many tabs at a time. No
plug-in support is not a good thing. Though it’s new and it’s from Google I think it will have a
good position in browser market soon

My rating to chrome: 2.5/5

Page 19 of 108
Browser extension: Gears

Gears, formerly Google Gears, is software offered by Google that "enables more
powerful web applications, by adding new features to your web browser." Released under the
BSD license, Gears is free and open source software

What does Gears Have

There are several major API components to Gears:

 A Database module (powered by SQLite) that can store data locally.

 A WorkerPool module that provides parallel execution of JavaScript code.
 A LocalServer module that caches and serves application resources (HTML, JavaScript,
images, etc).
 A Desktop module that lets web applications interact more naturally with the desktop.
 Geolocation modules that lets web applications detect the geographical location of their
users.

Version history

Version Date Description

0.1 2007-05-31 Initial release as Google Gears.

0.2 2008-02-22 Announcement

Project renamed to Gears to reflect the open source, collaborative nature of

- 2008-05-28
the project.

0.3 2008-06-11 Introduced ability to add desktop icons, support for Firefox 3.

Geolocation API / Event handling for upload / download transfer progress,

0.4 2008-04-22
localization in 40 languages

Updated SQLite, Geolocation can now get data from WiFi antennas,
0.5 2008-11-24
Improved API to manage data blobs on LocalServer

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Support

There are a number of web applications that use Gears. These applications come from a
variety of companies, including Google (Gmail, YouTube, Docs, Reader, Picasa for mobile,
Calendar), MySpace (Mail Search), Zoho (Writer, Mail), Remember The Milk, and Buxfer.
WordPress 2.6 added support for Gears, to speed up the administrative interface and reduce
server hits.

Gears can be enabled on sites where it is otherwise unsupported, by using a

Greasemonkey user script one of the Gears engineers has created.

Gears is supported on Google Chrome and IE 6+ on Windows XP and Vista, IE Mobile

4.01+ on Windows Mobile, Safari 3.1.1+ on Mac OS X 10.4+ and Firefox 1.5+ on multiple
platforms.

On May 29, 2008, Opera ASA announced that the new Opera Mobile 9.5 will support
Gears. The technology preview release of the browser was published on February 20, 2009. It is
currently available for touch-screen devices on Windows Mobile 5/6 only. Gears is not built into
the browser and must be downloaded separately.

Rails framework supports interfaces to Gears without needing to understand the Google
Gears API.

My verdict on Gears

Gears are found useful for Google addicts like me. If you are relying to get information
only from Google you must install gears for this. The only one difficulty I faced is to use gears
properly for opera in OpenSUSE Linux 11.0. The thumbs up to Google because still it has no
strong competitor.

My rating to Gears: 4/5

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Desktop Search Engine: Google Desktop

Google Desktop is desktop search software made by Google for Mac OS X, Linux, and
Microsoft Windows. The program allows text searches of a user's e-mails, computer files,
music, photos, chats, Web pages viewed, and other "Google Gadgets."

Snapshot of Google Desktop with gadgets.

File indexing
After initially installing Google Desktop, the software completes an indexing of all the
files in the computer. And after the initial indexing is completed, the software continues to
index files as needed. Users can start searching for files immediately after installing the
program. After performing searches, results can also be returned in an Internet browser on the
Google Desktop Home Page much like the results for Google Web searches.

Google Desktop can index several different types of data, including email, web browsing
history from Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox, office documents in the OpenDocument and
Microsoft Office formats, instant messenger transcripts from AOL, Google, MSN, Skype,

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Tencent QQ, and several multimedia file types. Additional file types can be indexed through the
use of plug-ins. Google Desktop allows the user to control which types of data are indexed by
the program.

One unfortunate aspect for users with large hard drives: Google Desktop only indexes
100,000 files per drive during the initial indexing period. If you have more than 100,000 files in
a particular drive, Google Desktop won't index all of them during this initial period. However,
Google Desktop adds files to your index during real-time indexing when you move or open
them.

Sidebar

Screenshot of gadgets

A prominent feature of Google Desktop is the Sidebar, which holds several common
Gadgets and resides off to one side of the desktop. The Sidebar is available with the Microsoft
Windows version of Google Desktop only. The Sidebar comes pre-installed with the following
gadgets:

 Email - a panel which lets one view one's Gmail messages.

 Scratch Pad - here one can store random notes; they are saved automatically

 Photos - displays a slideshow of photos from the "My Pictures" folder (address can be
changed)

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  News - shows the latest headlines from Google News, and how long ago they were
written. The News panel is personalized depending on the type of news you read.

 Weather - shows the current weather for a location specified by the user.

 Web Clips - shows recent posts from RSS news feeds.

 Google Talk - If Google Talk is installed, double clicking the window title will dock it to
one's sidebar.

Like the Windows Taskbar, the Google Desktop sidebar can be set to Auto-Hide mode,
where it will only appear once the user moves the mouse cursor towards the side where it
resides. If not on auto-hide, by default the sidebar will always take up about 1/6 - 1/9 of one's
screen (depending on the screen resolution), and other windows are forced to resize. However,
the sidebar can be resized to take less space, and you can disable the "always on top" feature in
the options. With the auto-hide feature on, the sidebar temporarily overlaps
maximized windows.

Another feature that comes with the Sidebar is alerts. When the Sidebar is minimized,
new e-mail and news can be displayed on a pop-up window above the Windows Taskbar.

Quick Find
When searching in the sidebar, deskbar or floating deskbar, Google Desktop displays a
"Quick Find" window. This window is filled with 6 (by default) of the most relevant results from
one's computer. These results update as one type so that one can get to what one wants on
one's computer without having to open another browser window.

Google Deskbar

Google floating deskbar

Deskbars
Deskbars are boxes which enable one to type in a search query directly from one's
desktop. Web results will open in a browser window and selected computer results will be
displayed in the "Quick Find" box (see above). A Deskbar can either be a fixed deskbar, which
sits in one's Windows Taskbar, or a Floating Deskbar, which one may position anywhere one
wants on one's desktop.

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Email indexing

Google Desktop includes plugins that allow one to index and search through the
contents of local Microsoft Outlook, IBM Lotus Notes, and Mozilla Thunderbird email
databases, outside of the client applications' built-in search functions. For Lotus Notes, only
local databases are indexed for searching. Google Desktop's email indexing feature is also
integrated with Google's web-based email service, Gmail; it can index and search the email
messages in one's Gmail account.

Gadgets & plug-ins

Desktop gadgets are interactive mini-applications that can be placed anywhere on the
user's desktop – or docked in the Sidebar – to show new email, weather, photos, and
personalized news. Google offers a gallery of pre-built gadgets for download on the official
website. For developers, Google offers an SDK and an official blog for anyone who wants to
write gadgets or plug-ins for Google Desktop. An automated system creates a developer
hierarchy called the "Google Desktop Hall of Fame", where programmers can advance based on
their gadgets' number and popularity.

Snapshot of GD SDK

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 The SDK also allows third-party applications to make use of the search facilities provided
by Google Desktop Search. For example, the file manager Directory Opus offers integrated
Google Desktop Search support.

Criticisms

Security
In February 2007, Yair Amit from Watchfire found a series of vulnerabilities in Google Desktop
that could allow a malicious individual to achieve not only remote, persistent access to sensitive
data, but in some cases full system control as well. The significant impact and the ease of
exploitation forced Google to change some of Google Desktop's logic in Google Desktop version
5.

Privacy

Google Desktop version 3 contains certain features that raise serious security and
privacy concerns. Specifically, the share across computers feature that introduces the ability to
search content from desktop to desktop greatly increases the risk to users' privacy. If Google
Desktop V.3 is set to allow Search across Computers, files on an indexed computer are copied
to Google's servers. The potential for information stored on their computers to be accessed by
others if they enable this feature of Google Desktop v. 3 on their computers should be seriously
considered. The EFF advises against using this feature. Also, those who have confidential data
on their work or home computers should not enable this feature. There are privacy laws and
company policies that could be violated through the installation of this feature, specifically, SB
1386, HIPAA, FERPA, GLBA and Sarbanes-Oxley.

Other more far reaching concerns arise around the packaging and end user license
agreement - specifically the level of intrusion on the local machine and the disclaimers that
users implicitly agree to future changes in the license agreement without actually being able to
see them immediately

Resource use

Although there have been known problems with the GoogleDesktopCrawl.exe process, lately
the presence of smart indexing has improved the use of resources so this is less of a problem
now. As a default setting, after the user installs the application, files, emails and other data will
be indexed at once, in a one-time process. It occurs only when the user's computer is idle for
more than 30 seconds and it will usually be complete in several hours. After the one-time
indexing, the index is kept up-to-date based on user actions and preferences.

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Internationalization/Keyboard

Besides the key combination advertised on the preferences page (hitting Ctrl twice)
Google Desktop's Quick Search Box can be launched with a shortcut Alt Gr + g, Alt Gr, however,
is the standard key to input diacriticized letters on a QWERTY keyboard, e.g. Ģ/ģ in the Latvian
language. Even though it can't be disabled on the preferences page, it can be done through
editing the Windows Registry.

Outlook indexing

There had been some issues with Microsoft Outlook indexing. Deleted email listings are
not removed and require re-installing Google Desktop for any new archived mail to be listed.
Several versions have been released to patch the Outlook indexing.

64-bit Incompatibility

Google Desktop won't install on Microsoft Windows 64-bit systems, stating it needs a
32-bit operating system. This is easily remedied by using the command
'googledesktopsetup.exe /force', however since it isn't compatible with 64-bit, some features
may not work properly.

My verdict on Google desktop.

For searching your local files? Oh forget it. Because it works great when you have less
files on your computer or your computer is isolated in network. But want to use the cool
gadgets? So you must use Google desktop with sidebar enabled. The gadgets are downloaded
freely and are of almost every type system, office, fun, web, Google almost every type. Thumbs
up for sidebar and I use Google desktop for sidebar only. There are many desktop search
applications but Google once again tops with probably initiating this type of applications.

My rating to Google desktop: 4/5

Page 27 of 108
Picture Organizer Picasa
Picasa is a software application for organizing and editing digital photos, originally
created by Idealab and owned by Google since 2004 "Picasa" is a blend of the name of Spanish
painter Pablo Picasso, the phrase mi casa for "my house" and "pic" for pictures (personalized
art). Organization and editing

Snapshot of Picasa

For organizing photos, Picasa has file importing and tracking features, as well as tags and
collections for further sorting. It also offers several basic photo editing functions, including color
enhancement, red eye reduction and cropping. Other features include slide shows, printing and
image timelines. Images can also be prepared for external use, such as for e-mailing or printing,
by reducing file size and setting up page layouts. There is also integration with online photo
printing services.

Keywords
Picasa uses picasa.ini files to keep track of keywords for each image. In addition to this,
Picasa attaches IPTC keyword data to JPEG files, but not to any other file format. Keywords
attached to JPEG files in Picasa can be read by other image library software like Adobe
(Photoshop, Album and Bridge), digiKam and iPhoto.

According to the Picasa Readme, Picasa can parse XMP data. However, it cannot search
local files for existing XMP keywords.

Page 28 of 108
Searching
Picasa has a search bar that is always visible when viewing the library. Searches are live
in that displayed items are filtered as you type.

When a word is typed into the search bar, an image will be displayed if that word is all
or part of a keyword, or part of the file name. If the search word is part of a folder name, all
images in that folder are also displayed (but not necessarily images in subfolders, unless the
word also exists in a keyword or filename.)

Picasa also supports boolean operators for searching in much the same way as Google's
web search. All search terms are required by default (as with the operator "AND"), and images
tagged with specified keywords can be excluded by using the hyphen (as in the boolean
operator "NOT"). For example, searching for family children -friends will cause Picasa to display
all images with the keywords family and children, but which do not include the keyword
friends.

Viewing
Picasa has no separate view window. There is only an "edit view" with a viewing area.
Fullscreen view is available in slideshow mode, by holding down the ctrl+alt keys while in "edit
view", or by pressing the Alt Gr key.

Backup
In Picasa 2 and later versions, changes to pictures made in Picasa overwrite the original
file, but a backup version of the original is saved in a hidden folder named "Originals" in the
same folder as the original picture.

In previous versions all changes to a picture (but not the picture itself) were stored in a
separate file, and the original image file was left untouched. When the image was opened in
Picasa the software would reapply the modifications; opening the photo with any other
program displayed the original version.

Face recognition
On 15 August 2006, Google announced it had acquired Neven Vision whose technology
can be used to search for features within photos such as people or buildings. Google applied
this technology for face recognition and this functionality was launched on Picasa Web Albums
on 2 September 2008.

Neven Vision incorporates several patents specifically centered around face recognition
from digital photo and video images. Neven Vision's technology was among the top finishers in
both the FERET 1997 and FRVT 2002 independent tests comparing the world's best face
recognition technologies.

Page 29 of 108
Other Picasa applications

Picasa Web Albums

Picasa Web Albums (PWA) is a photo-sharing web application from Google, often
compared to programs like Flickr.

It allows users with accounts at Google to store and share 1 GB of photos for free. Users
can purchase more storage space, which can be shared between Google services.

Additional gigabytes Cost per year (US$) Cost per 1GB/year (US$)

10 20 2.00

40 75 1.875

150 250 1.667

400 500 1.25

Users may upload pictures through a variety of ways; via the PWA web interface on
supported browsers, Picasa 2.5.0 or later on Microsoft Windows, using the Exporter for iPhoto,
the Aperture to Picasa Web Albums plug-in, Uploader on Mac OS X, or F-Spot on Linux. In both
paid and free accounts, the actual resolution of the photo is maintained (even though a smaller
resolution photo may be displayed by the web interface), and the original photo can be
downloaded.

PWA uses an "unlisted number" approach for URLs for private photo albums. This allows
a user to email a private album's URL to anyone s/he wants; the recipient can view the album
without having to create a user account - this is done via an "authentication key" that's needed
to be appended to the URL for the album to be shown. The Picasa help files say that private
albums are not searchable by anyone except the user.

On October 11, 2006, the "Test" name was removed, in favor of purely Picasa Web
Albums.

No ads are shown on Picasa Web Albums, in either free or paid accounts. The Terms of
Service permit Google to use the uploaded photos to display on the website or via RSS feeds,
and also for promoting Google services royalty-free.

Picasa Web Albums was first leaked on June 6, 2006.When introduced, it came with 250
MB free space. On March 7, 2007, it was upgraded to 1 GB.

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Picasa Wordpress Widget
Picasa Wordpress widget is a Wordpress plugin which allows users to publish random
photos from Picasa albums on their blogs.

Version history

Windows
There are no versions of Picasa for Windows 95 or NT. The latest version offered for
Windows 98/ME is 2.0.0 (build 18.84).[12][13] The latest version offered for Windows 2000 is
2.7 (build 37.64).[12][14] Newer versions are for Windows XP and Vista only.

1.618 (build 5.35) July 2004 – free download version offered since Google's acquisition
of Picasa.
2.0.0 (build 18.77) January 18, 2005 – many features including improved search
functions, an automated photo collage maker, massively enhanced photo editing
functions and further integration with Picasa's Hello and Google's Blogger services.
2.0.0 (Build 18.84) June 8, 2005 – bug fix release, latest release for Windows 98/ME.
This version does not suffer from the "picasa2\runtime\hlpsys.dll is not a valid windows
image. Check installation disk." error, which some users have experienced.
2.1.0 (build 27.60) September 19, 2005 – new features including international language
support, one-click photo blogging, CD cover printing, improved RAW handling and
improved support for external drives.
2.2.0 (build 28.20) January 30, 2006 – 25 additional languages are supported, new
network drive support, and bug fixes for IE7 support and CD Burning.
2.5.0 (Builds 32.01) June 12, 2006 onwards – beta versions including Picasa Web Albums
support – last version (build 32.97) started rollout on November 14, 2006.
2.6 (build 35.94.0) December 7, 2006 – new auto update behavior for Windows Vista
support, new CD/DVD-burning engine, improved upload reliability to Picasa Web
Albums, and added support for 18 new languages.
2.7 (build 36.37.0) April 24, 2007 – new RAW processing engine, new color engine for
"tuning" fixes, added support for Google Photos Screensaver, and improved Blog This!
Reliability.
2.7 Build 36.40 May 3, 2007 – support for more cameras, updated version number for
international installs.
2.7 Build 36.60 26 June 2007 – added support for geotag, supposedly fixed problems
with showing up some video files.
2.7 Build 37.23 21 August 2007 – support for more languages, fixes several bugs.
2.7 Build 37.29 13 September 2007 – Added support for RAW pictures from the Canon
40D, fixes several bugs.

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 2.7 Build 37.32 02 October 2007 – Fixed a case where corrupted AVI files could cause a
crash. Fixed a case that would result in a "This account is not enabled for Picasa Web
Albums" error.
2.7 Build 37.36 30 October 2007 – Added support for 11 additional languages: Bulgarian,
Catalan, Filipino, Indonesian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Thai,
Vietnamese.
2.7 Build 37.49 07 March 2008 - Improved performance for new Intel chips. Translation
fixes for Hungarian and Chinese. Fixed a case that would result in an error when
capturing images from webcams.
2.7 Build 37.64 21 August 2008 - See release notes for details.
3.0
3.0.0 Beta Build 57.19.0 2 September 2008 - Initial public beta release of Picasa 3.0
3.0.0 Beta Build 57.22.0 16 September 2008
o 3.0.0 Beta Build 57.24.0 23 September 2008
o 3.0.0 Build 57.41.0 25 October 2008
o 3.0.0 Build 57.44.0 28 October 2008
o 3.0.0 Build 57.52.0 11 November 2008
o 3.0.0 Build 57.53.0 20 November 2008
3.1
o 3.1.0 Build 70.71.0 16 December 2008
o 3.1.0 Build 70.73.0 09 January 2009

Linux
As from about early June 2006, Linux versions (2.2.2820-5) became available as free
downloads for most distributions of the Linux operating system. It is not a native Linux program
but an adapted Windows version that uses the Wine libraries.

A Release Candidate of Picasa for Linux 2.7 (Build 37.3607,0) was released on 21
November 2007.Google added Picasa for Linux 2.7 (Build 37.3615, 0) to its Linux repository on
16 April 2008.

Google added Picasa for Linux 3.0 beta to its Linux repository in October 2008.

Mac OS X
On January 5, 2009, Google released a beta version of Picasa for Mac (Intel-based Macs
only). Also, a plugin is available for iPhoto to upload to the Picasa Web Albums hosting service.
There is also a standalone Picasa Web Albums uploading tools for OS X 10.4 or later.

Picasa IN COMPETITION

Page 32 of 108
Let’s see where Picasa stands in competition

Why should?

 Good UI
 Better organization (though adobe is good option)
 Collage editing
 More options provided to edit the image.
 Good tuning with Flickr and Picasa on web.

Why shouldn’t?

X Slow when uploading on internet

My verdict on Picasa
There are many picture organizers. I was using adobe from two years and using Picasa
along with adobe. I have used IrfanView for a short time as it is given by “digit” with its issues
frequently. But I was amazed by Picasa. I wander that Google is probably late in this market
(only IrfanView was behind it) though it has many god things in it. First collage editing is done
by Google. I wander why Picasa is not favorite but adobe still is?

My Ratings to Picasa: 5/5

IM: Google talk

Google Talk (GTalk) is a free Windows and web-based application for instant messaging
and voice over internet protocol (VOIP), offered by Google Inc. The first beta version of the
program was released on August 24, 2005.

Instant messaging between the Google Talk servers and its clients uses an open
protocol, XMPP, allowing users of other XMPP clients to communicate with Google Talk users.
VoIP in Google Talk is based around the Jingle protocol. The technology used within the Google
server network however is not publicly known.

The Google Talk client is only available for Microsoft Windows (2000, XP, Server 2003,
and Vista). Mobile clients are also available for the Blackberry, iPhone and T-Mobile G1. With
the release of the Google Talk gadget, users of all platforms supported by Adobe Flash Player
can also use Google Talk Many other XMPP clients are compatible with Google Talk, and
support a variety of other platforms.

Page 33 of 108
Features

Interoperability
Google has announced that a major goal of the Google Talk service is interoperability.
Google Talk uses XMPP to provide real-time extensible messaging and presence events,
including offline messaging and voice mailing. On January 17, 2006, Google enabled server-to-
server communications, federating itself with any Jabber server that supports the dialback
protocol.

Product integration
On February 7, 2006, Gmail received chat functionality, using Ajax for server–browser
communication, and was integrated with Google Talk. Users can send instant messages to other
Gmail users. As it works within a browser, Google Talk does not need to be downloaded to send
instant messages to Gmail users.

Conversation logs are automatically saved to a Chats area in the user's Gmail account.
This allows users to search their chat logs and have them centrally stored in their Gmail
accounts. It does not, however, appear possible to download chat logs that are not attached to
an e-mail conversation.

Since November 8, 2006, Google has also integrated Google Talk with Orkut. This
enables Google Talk users to interact with registered Orkut users, by sending and receiving
'scraps' within Orkut.

It is also possible to display the song currently playing on the computer. This music data
is collected, if the user agrees to this, and displayed on the Google Music Trends page.

Also, as of November 11, 2008, it is possible to voice and video chat between Gmail
users and Google Talk users - on some systems, not all major OSs are supported.

The Gmail user requires a plugin download and installation, but is otherwise seamlessly
integrated into the Gmail interface. As of February 2009, the plugin is only available for
Windows (XP and Vista) and Mac OS X (only on Intel-based Macs)

Encryption
The connection between the Google Talk client and the Google Talk server is encrypted,
except when using Gmail's chat over HTTP, a federated network that doesn't support
encryption, or when using a proxy like IMLogic. End-to-end messages are unencrypted. Google
plans to add support for chat and call encryption in a future release. Some XMPP clients
natively support encryption with Google Talk's servers. It is possible to have end-to-end
encryption over the GTalk network using OTR (off-the-record) encryption.

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Voicemail and file-sharing
On July 28, 2006, Google added voicemail and file sending capabilities to the Google
Talk client. Voicemail messages can be 10 minutes long, and they're delivered to the contact's
mailbox as an attached MP3 file (11 kHz mono 24kbit/s). Recipients who use Gmail are offered
better integration. Gmail recognizes that it is a voicemail message, and users can choose to
stream the file using the integrated MP3-playing applet, or to download the MP3 file.

Online Calling (VOIP)

Google Inc. has also incorporated a VOIP calling feature (through gtalk2voip.com,
gTalkPhone and Splinter.net etc.) which allows Google Talk users to call other Google Talk users
while they're online. There is also a video chat feature. There are many rumors going around
that this is to directly compete with Skype and will sooner or later allow outside calling

Offline messaging
On October 31, 2006, Google introduced offline messaging to Google Talk. This allows
users to send messages to their contacts, even if they are not signed in. They will receive the
messages when they next go online even if the user who has sent it is offline.

Mobile device compatibility

On June 30, 2006, Nokia released new software for their Nokia 770 Internet Tablet that
included Google Talk as one of the compatible VoIP clients, due to the XMPP-based software.
Another Google Talk-compatible device is Sony's mylo, released on September 15, 2006. A
Google Talk client is also available for BlackBerry devices from the Blackberry site.

However, given that Google Talk provides XMPP protocol, most mobile phones for
which a suitable XMPP client exists could also offer Google Talk service, at least theoretically
(depending on the handset, the user may encounter security warnings due to unsigned J2ME
midlets or limits put in place by the mobile service provider). Mobile clients specially designed
for Google Talk exist as well.

Most phones support the IMPS protocol, and there are hybrid XMPP/IMPS networks
(through Jabber transports, or specially designed hybrid servers), which can also contact Google
Talk users. The Google Talk service itself is unusable from IMPS (that means, you cannot log
with your Gmail account, but you can talk with your Gmail friends with your IMPS account from
your mobile phone).

Complaints
During Google Talk's ongoing beta period, users have voiced concerns about the service.
There has been some discussion on the Google Talk Help group concerning the fact that certain
personal information is made publicly available without any method to control it. This allows
anyone who has a Google Talk member on their buddy list to see when the user is and is not

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active on their computer, for example, by observing the user's idle status as provided by the
Google Talk client. Certain third-party software products have been developed to provide more
control over the information made available.

gAlwaysIdle, for example, allows users to be 'always idle' or 'never idle', thus preventing
personal presence information from being fed to the Google Talk service. Alternative client
software, such as Pidgin, Adium, and Trillian also permit more privacy controls than the official
Google Talk client. As of October 5, 2008, the official client allows blocking a user (thus also
suspending status notifications to that user) but nothing more granular is apparent.

Labs edition
Google has released a new version of Google Talk called Google Talk, Labs edition. It still
currently lacks many features of Google Talk's 'stable' releases. The features it lacks include File
Sharing and Voice Chat. It features rounded alerts for new email. It can have multiple tabs with
group chat, private chat and the regular screen open at once. It is available for free download
here: http://www.google.com/talk/labsedition/. Flash Player will be required to install, and
upon first launch, a new flash-plugin will need to be downloaded. This edition is not meant for
general use, hence why it is a labs edition.

Google Talk in COMPETITION

Why should?

 Light weight IM
 You can preview your unread mails through a pop up window. (not in yahoo)
 Can integrate with online applications.

Why shouldn’t?
X Limited file sharing.
X Less privacy controls

My verdict on Google Talk

Use only if you are chat addict and don’t want to open your mailbox for a long time.
Though Google made the initiative to embed IM with their online application. I haven’t used
GTalk for a long time. I use to chat with my friend while I am checking with my friends. But
many Orkut fans can attract to use it because Gtalk is not embedded to it.

My Rating to Google Talk: 3/5

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Google earth
Google Earth is a virtual globe, map and geographic information program that was
originally called Earth Viewer, and was created by Keyhole, Inc, a company acquired by Google
in 2004. It maps the Earth by the superimposition of images obtained from satellite imagery,
aerial photography and GIS 3D globe. It is available under three different licenses: Google Earth,
a free version with limited functionality; Google Earth Plus (discontinued), which included
additional features; and Google Earth Pro ($400 per year), which is intended for commercial
use.

The product, re-released as Google Earth in 2005, is currently available for use on
personal computers running Microsoft Windows 2000, XP, Vista, Mac OS X 10.3.9 and above,
Linux (released on June 12, 2006), and FreeBSD. Google Earth is also available as a browser
plugin (released on June 2, 2008) for Firefox, Safari 3, IE6 and IE7. It was also made available on
the iPhone OS on October 27, 2008, as a free download from the App Store. In addition to
releasing an updated Keyhole based client, Google also added the imagery from the Earth
database to their web based mapping software. The release of Google Earth in June 2005 to the
public caused a more than tenfold increase in media coverage on virtual globes between 2005
and 2006

Google Earth displays satellite images of varying resolution of the Earth's surface,
allowing users to visually see things like cities and houses looking perpendicularly down or at an
oblique angle, with perspective (see also bird's eye view). The degree of resolution available is
based somewhat on the points of interest and popularity, but most land (except for some
islands) is covered in at least 15 meters of resolution. Melbourne, Victoria, Las Vegas, Nevada,
and Cambridge, Cambridgeshire include examples of the highest resolution, at 15 cm (6 inches).
Google Earth allows users to search for addresses for some countries, enter coordinates, or
simply use the mouse to browse to a location.

For large parts of the surface of the Earth only 2D images are available, from almost
vertical photography. Viewing this from an oblique angle, there is perspective in the sense that
objects which are horizontally far away are seen smaller, but of course it is like viewing a large
photograph, not quite like a 3D view.

For other parts of the surface of the Earth 3D images of terrain and buildings are
available. Google Earth uses digital elevation model (DEM) data collected by NASA's Shuttle
Radar Topography Mission (SRTM). This means one can view the Grand Canyon or Mount
Everest in three dimensions, instead of 2D like other areas. Since November 2006, the 3D views
of many mountains, including Mount Everest, have been improved by the use of supplementary
DEM data to fill the gaps in SRTM coverage.

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 Many people using the applications are adding their own data and making them
available through various sources, such as the BBS or blogs mentioned in the link section below.
Google Earth is able to show all kinds of images overlaid on the surface of the earth and is also
a Web Map Service client. Google Earth supports managing three-dimensional Geospatial data
through Keyhole Markup Language (KML).

Google Earth has the capability to show 3D buildings and structures (such as bridges),
which consist of users' submissions using SketchUp, a 3D modeling program. In prior versions of
Google Earth (before Version 4), 3D buildings were limited to a few cities, and had poorer
rendering with no textures. Many buildings and structures from around the world now have
detailed 3D structures; including (but not limited to) those in the United States, Canada,
Ireland, India, Japan, United Kingdom, Germany, Pakistan and the cities, Amsterdam and
Alexandria. In August 2007, Hamburg became the first city entirely shown in 3D, including
textures such as façades. The Irish town of Westport was added to Google Earth in 3D on
January 16, 2008. The 'Westport3D' model was created by 3D imaging firm AM3TD using long-
distance laser scanning technology and digital photography and is the first such model of an
Irish town to be created. As it was developed initially to aid Local Government in carrying out
their town planning functions it includes the highest resolution photo-realistic textures to be
found anywhere in Google Earth. Three-dimensional renderings are available for certain
buildings and structures around the world via Google's 3D Warehouse and other websites.

Recently, Google added a feature that allows users to monitor traffic speeds at loops
located every 200 yards in real-time. In version 4.3 released on April 15, 2008, Google Street
View was fully integrated into the program allowing the program to provide an on the street
level view in many locations.

On January 17, 2009, the entirety of Google Earth's ocean floor imagery was updated to
new images by SIO, NOAA, US Navy, NGA, and GEBCO. The new images have caused smaller
islands, such as some atolls in the Maldives, to be rendered invisible despite their shores being
completely outlined.

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Flight simulator

Downtown Toronto, as seen from a F16 Fighting Falcon during a simulated flight.

Since Google Earth v4.2, a flight simulator has been included as a hidden feature.
Depending on the system, it can be accessed by pressing Control+Alt+A, Control+A, or
Command+Option+A. After this feature has been activated at least once it appears under the
tools menu. Since v4.3 the option is no longer hidden by default. Currently the F-16 Fighting
Falcon and the Cirrus SR-22 are the only aircraft that can be used, in addition to a few airports t
is also possible to control the simulator with a mouse or joystick, although not all models are
currently supported.

The Google Earth flight simulator features the ability to fly to any supported locations of
the world. The pilot can choose any location to start a flight or attempt to land a flight in the
world. Fly time is not much accelerated, as it takes the F-16 at highest speed at least 60 minutes
to fly from coast-to-coast in the US. Aircraft can land on any level surface in the world (including
the ocean) as long as the aircraft is below 250 MPH when touching ground.

Featured planes
 F-16 Fighting Falcon - A much higher speed and maximum altitude than the Cirrus SR-22,
it has the ability to fly at speeds of almost 1,100 MPH near ground level.

 SR-22 - Although slower and with a lower maximum altitude, the SR-22 is much easier to
handle and is preferred for beginners.

On April 15, 2008 with version 4.3, Google fully integrated its Street View into Google
Earth.

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 Google Street View provides 360° panoramic street-level views and allows users to view
parts of selected cities and their surrounding metropolitan areas at ground level. When it was
launched on May 25, 2007 for Google Maps, only five cities were included. It has since
expanded to more than 40 U.S. cities, and includes the suburbs of many, and in some cases,
other nearby cities. A recent update has now implemented Street View in most of the major
cities of Australia and New Zealand as well as parts of Japan, Spain, France, and Italy.

Google Street View, when operated, displays photos that were previously taken by a
camera mounted on an automobile, and can be navigated by using the mouse to click on
photograph icons displayed on the screen in your direction of travel. Using these devices, the
photos can be viewed in different sizes, from any direction, and from a variety of angles.

Google Ocean
Introduced in version 5.0 (February 2009), the Google Ocean feature allows users to
zoom below the surface of the ocean and view the 3D bathymetry beneath the waves.
Supporting over 20 content layers, it contains information from leading scientists and
oceanographers.

Technical Specifications
Detailed release notes/history/changelog are made available by Google.

Coordinate System and Projection

The internal coordinate system of Google Earth is geographic coordinates
(latitude/longitude) on the World Geodetic System of 1984 (WGS84) datum.

Google Earth shows the earth as it looks from an elevated platform such as an airplane
or orbiting satellite. The projection used to achieve this effect is called the General Perspective.
This is similar to the Orthographic projection, except that the point of perspective is a finite
(near earth) distance rather than an infinite (deep space) distance.[21]

Baseline resolutions
U.S.: 15 m (some states are completely in 1 m or better)

Germany, Switzerland, Netherlands, Denmark, U.K., Andorra, Luxembourg,

Liechtenstein, San Marino, Vatican City: 1 m or better

Czech Republic 0.2 m (Prague 0.1 m)

Slovakia, Hungary: 2.5 m (medium resolution)

Global: Generally 15 m (some areas, such as Antarctica, are in extremely low resolution),
but this depends on the quality of the satellite/aerial photograph uploaded.

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Typical high resolutions
U.S.: 1 m, 0.6 m, 0.3 m, 0.15 m (extremely rare; e.g. Cambridge and Google Campus, or
Glendale)

Europe: 0.3 m, 0.15 m (e.g. Berlin, Zürich, Hamburg), 0.1 m Prague

Altitude resolution:

Surface: varies by country

Seabed: Not applicable (a colorscale approximating sea floor depth is "printed" on the
spherical surface).

Age: Images dates vary. The image data can be seen from squares made when
DigitalGlobe Coverage is enabled. The date next to the copyright information is not the correct
image date. Zooming in or out could change the date of the pictures. Most of the international
urban image dates are from 2004 and have not been updated. However, most US images are
kept current. Google announces imagery updates on their LatLong Blog in form of a quiz, with
hints of the updated locations. The answers are posted some days later in the same blog.

Google Earth is unlikely to operate on older hardware configurations. The most recent
downloads available document these minimum configurations:

Pentium 3, 500 MHz

128 MB RAM
12.7 MB free disk space (400 MB for Linux)
Network speed: 128 kbit/s
16MB 3D-capable graphics card
Resolution of 1024x768, 16-bit High Color
Windows XP or Windows 2000, Windows Vista(not Windows Me
compatible), Linux and Mac OS X

The most likely mode of failure is insufficient video RAM: the software is designed to
warn the user if their graphics card is not able to support Earth (this often occurs due to
insufficient Video RAM or buggy graphics card drivers). The next most likely mode of failure is
Internet access speed. Except for the very patient, broadband Internet (Cable, DSL, T1, etc.) is
required.

Resolution and accuracy

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The Isles of Sicily, showing the very low resolution of some islands. The islands (green area) are about 10 km across.
49°56′10.81″N 6°19′22.88″W

The west side of Gibraltar, tilted view showing the sea rising up the Rock of Gibraltar - claimed altitude of the sea just off the
beach at Elliot’s Memorial, 252 m. This is now fixed. 36°6′59.6″N 5°21′5.2″W

Controversy/Criticism
The software has been criticized by a number of special interest groups, including
national officials, as being an invasion of privacy and even posing a threat to national security.
The typical argument is that the software provides information about military or other critical
installations that could be used by terrorists. The following is a selection of such concerns:

Former Indian president APJ Abdul Kalam has expressed concern over the availability of
high-resolution pictures of sensitive locations in India. Google subsequently agreed to censor
such sites

The Indian Space Research Organization has said Google Earth poses a security threat to
India, and seeks dialogue with Google officials.

The South Korean government has expressed concern that the software offers images of
the presidential palace and various military installations that could possibly be used by their
hostile neighbor North Korea.

In 2006, one user spotted a large topographical replica in a remote region of China. The
model is a small-scale (1/500) version of the Karakoram Mountain Range, currently under the
control of China but claimed by India. When later confirmed as a replica of this region,
spectators began entertaining military implications.

Most land areas are covered in satellite imagery with a resolution of at least
about 15 m per pixel. This base imagery is 30m multispectral Landsat which is pansharppened

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with the 15m [panchromatic] Landsat imagery. However, Google is actively replacing this base
imagery with 2.5m SPOTImage imagery and several higher resolution datasets mentioned
below. Some population centers are also covered by aircraft imagery (orthophotography) with
several pixels per meter. Oceans are covered at a much lower resolution, as are a number of
islands; notably, the Isles of Scilly off southwest England, are at a resolution of about 500 m or
less. These pictures are provided by Terrametrics.

Google has resolved many inaccuracies in the vector mapping since the original
public release of the software, without requiring an update to the program itself. An example of
this was the absence from Google Earth's map boundaries of the Nunavut territory in Canada, a
territory that had been created on April 1, 1999; this mistake was corrected by one of the data
updates in early 2006. Recent updates have also increased the coverage of detailed aerial
photography, particularly in certain areas of western and central Europe.

The images are not all taken at the same time, but are generally current to
within three years. Image sets are sometimes not correctly stitched together. Updates to the
photographic database can occasionally be noticed when drastic changes take place in the
appearance of the landscape, for example Google Earth's incomplete updates of New Orleans
following Hurricane Katrina, or when place marks appear to shift unexpectedly across the
Earth's surface. Though the place marks have not in fact moved, the imagery is composed and
stitched differently. Such an update to London's photography in early 2006 created shifts of 15-
20 meters in many areas, noticeable because the resolution is so high.

Place name and road detail vary greatly from place to place. They are most
accurate in North America and Europe, but regular mapping updates are improving coverage
elsewhere.

Errors sometimes occur due to the technology used to measure the height of
terrain; for example, tall buildings in Adelaide cause one part of the city to be rendered as a
small mountain, when it is in fact flat. The height of the Eiffel Tower creates a similar effect in
the rendering of Paris. Also, prior to the release of version 5.0 in February 2009, elevations
below sea level were presented as sea level, for example: Salton City, California; Death Valley;
and the Dead Sea were all listed as 0 m when Salton City is −38 m; Death Valley is −86 m; and
the Dead Sea is −420 m.

Where no 3 arc second digital elevation data was available, the three dimensional
images covering some areas of high relief are not at all accurate, but most mountain areas are
now well mapped. The underlying digital elevation model has been placed 3 arc seconds too far
north and up to 3 arc seconds too far west. This means that some steep mountain ridges
incorrectly appear to have shadows extending over onto their south facing sides. Some high

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resolution images have also been misplaced; an example is the image covering Annapurna,
which is misplaced by about 12 arc seconds. Elevation data was recently updated to 10-meter
(1/3-arc-second) resolution for much of the United States from the previous 30-meter (1-arc-
second) resolution.

The "Measure" function shows that the length of equator is about 40,030.24 km,
giving an error of −0.112% compared with the actual value of 40,075.02 km Earth; for the
meridional circumference, it shows a length of about 39,963.13 km, also giving an error of
−0.112% compared with the actual value of 40,007.86 km.

On December 16, 2007, most of Antarctica was updated to a 15 m resolution

using imagery from the Landsat Image Mosaic of Australia; (1m resolution images of some parts
of Antarctica were added in June 2007); however, the Arctic polar ice cap is completely absent
from the current version of Google Earth, as are waves in the oceans. The geographic North
Pole is found hovering over the Arctic Ocean and the tiling system produces artifacts near the
poles as the tiles become 'infinitely' small and rounding errors accumulate.

Cloud cover and shadows can make it difficult or impossible to see details in some
land areas, including the shadow side of mountains.

Google Earth In competition

Google earth has no competitors but ISRO announced to develop its own Mapping
application called “Bhuvan” or “Bhu-sampada”. It’s still in development phase. So no verdict
now. But as both dial-up and broadband user I recommend to use Google earth to use only on
broadband.

My Rating on Google earth: 3/5

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Google packs
Google Pack is a software package that allows users to discover, install, and maintain a
number of application programs. It was announced at the 2006 Consumer Electronics Show, on
January 6. Google Pack is currently only available for Windows XP and Vista.

Users can choose which of the following software applications to install. If the
application is already installed, Google Updater checks to see if the user has the latest version
and upgrades it, if necessary.

The software applications available vary based on which language and locale is selected,
and operating system. The U.S. Windows XP version of Google Pack offers all of the current
applications listed below.

Google-branded

Google Desktop
Picasa, a photograph organizer and editor
Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer
Google Photos Screensaver, which displays pictures from the user's computers
Google Earth, an electronic globe
Google Talk, an instant messaging and Voice over IP (VoIP) application
Google Video Player, a multi-media player, now withdrawn
Google Chrome, a free web browser developed by Google

Third-party
Mozilla Firefox with Google Toolbar
Spyware Doctor Starter Edition
Norton Security Scan
Adobe Reader 8, a document viewer
RealPlayer, a multi-media player
GalleryPlayer
Skype, a VoIP application

On March 27, 2007, Google added two new applications to the Google Pack: Spyware
Doctor Starter Edition and Norton Security Scan. These programs are free and do not require
subscription, unlike Norton AntiVirus. However, Norton Security Scan does not offer continuous
protection against viruses. Norton Security Scan scans the computer and identifies if there are

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existing viruses, worms, spyware, unwanted adware or Trojans residing on it. The program's
functionality is similar to Microsoft's Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool.

Google says that they have no monetary agreement with the makers of the above
software, and that they offer the applications for the ease of Google's customers, and do not
receive payment, although Miguel Helft in his New York Times blog reported that an
unidentified source stated that Google may pay Sun for each copy of StarOffice. As of
November 2008, StarOffice is no longer part of Google Pack.

Google has included the VoIP application Skype in the pack, even though it is a
competitor of Google's own Google Talk.

Some industry observers claimed that the release was little more than a collection of
software "that Google's wrapped a rubber band around".

Google Pack comes with Google Updater as a package management system to assist in
downloading, installing, removing and automatically updating the Pack's applications. Updater
can be uninstalled without removing the applications.

Google Updater may not reflect the most recent versions of all Google Pack programs.
For example, as of January 2008, StarOffice 8 Update 9 was not provided through Google
Updater, which displays no indication that previous versions are out of date. Sun Microsystems
released Update 9, which includes six security related fixes, on December 10, 2007.

My Verdict to Google pack

Google really prove that they are making their motto “don’t be evil” true here by
including Skype because Skype is one of the leaders in VoIP softwares and are definitely ahead
of Gtalk. Apart from this all the softwares here are really useful ones for beginners. Though
some are propriety but many are freebies. And for this it deserves hats off.

My Rating to Google Packs: 5/5

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From Desktop to Web

Igoogle
iGoogle (formerly Google Personalized Homepage and Google IG), a service of Google, is
a customizable AJAX-based start page or personal web portal much like Netvibes, Pageflakes,
My Yahoo!, MySurfPad and Windows Live Personalized Experience. It was originally launched in
May 2005. Its features include the capability to add web feeds and Google Gadgets (similar to
those available on Google Desktop).

It was renamed and expanded on April 30, 2007, and is currently available in many
localized versions of Globe, in 42 languages, and in over 70 country domain names, as of
October 17, 2007.

Gadgets
IGoogle gadgets interact with the user and utilize the Google Gadgets API. Some gadgets
developed for Google Desktop can also be used within iGoogle. The Google Gadgets API is
public and allows anyone to develop a gadget for any need.

Google also allows all users to create a special gadget that does not require the use of
the Gadgets API. The gadgets are designed to be shared with friends and family. The special
gadgets must be created using an online wizard and must be of one of the following types:

"Framed Photo" - displays a series of photos,

"GoogleGram" - creation of special daily messages,
"Daily Me" - displays user's current mood and feelings,
"Free Form" - allows the user to input text and an image of their choice,
"YouTube Channel" - displays videos from a YouTube channel,
"Personal List" - allows the user to create a list of items,
"Countdown" - countdown timer
"1Club.FM Free Internet Radio Player" - allows users to play over 80 free internet radio
channels

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Themes

My own IGoogle home page with "007" Theme. and gadgets like google tip of the day, Nat Geo pictures, News, Quotes and
Gmail.

With iGoogle, users can select unique themes for their Google homepages. Some of the
themes are animated depending on weather conditions, the time in your area (you provide
your location when selecting a theme), and so on. There are also Easter eggs for the themes—
for example, in the "Sweet Dreams" theme; a Pi sign made of stars appears at 3:14 a.m. In the
"Beach" theme, the Loch Ness Monster appears at 3:14 a.m. These last for only one minute. Other
features include skies that lighten or darken throughout the day and the ability to include color-
changing lady bugs, butterflies, or bubbles that float across the screen.

There are many other Easter eggs, which can be found here or by following the
instructions here:

Artist themes
Starting in April 2008, Google began offering a choice of themes by professional artists.

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Experimental iGoogle
On July 8, 2008, Google announced the beginning of a testing period for a new version
of iGoogle which alters some features, including replacing the tabs with left navigation, adding
chat functionality, and a canvas-view gadget for RSS. Users were selected for this test and
notified when they logged in by a link to a brief description and further links to forums. On the
forums, it was explained that there was no opt-out, as a Control for the test. Further, there was
no information on how long the test would continue. Unfortunately, many were unhappy with
the new version and the inability to opt-out.

On October 16, 2008, Google announced the release of this new version of iGoogle and
retired its older format. The release did not initially include the persistent chat widget. It does
include the left navigation in place of tabs as well as a change to widget controls, however. The
stated purpose is to prepare for OpenSocial, with the new canvas view stated as playing an
important role in that. But this idea was dropped because it was not widely accepted by users.

Igoogle in Competition

Why should?
 Good artist themes.
 Good gadgets.
 All Google services except YouTube and Orkut are easy to access even in dial-ups.
 Themes are changing according to local times. (My 007 theme’s screenshot was taken at
an evening.)
 Enabling tabs.

Why shouldn’t?
X Google’s new approach of sidebar.
X Lacks the technology of yahoo’s glue search.

My Verdict on Igoogle.
It is great easy to customize and use. I’ve find only one problem. I can’t move a gadget
from one tab to other page. More it doesn’t have the Glue search technology used by yahoo
(though yahoo not using it fully). But glue search is not part of yahoo’s iGoogle counterpart my
yahoo. Google is far better than any other personalized page services.

My Rating to iGoogle: 4.5/5

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Google gadgets
This word is not new to you because you have read it twice here first in Google
desktops section and then in iGoogle section. You may wonder what the gadget is. Here
is the closer look to gadgets.

These are very small applications that integrate with the Google homepage,
Google Desktop, or any page on the Web to enhance the user experience. Google
Gadgets come in two variants: universal gadgets and desktop gadgets. The variants serve
different purposes. While universal gadgets can be used on Web pages, desktop gadgets can be
used within Google Desktop. These make integration with various other Google applications
much easier, and can be customized to react to user defined actions.

Google Gadgets are interactive mini applications available in the Sidebar. These
applications are created by both Google as well as independent developers, and can be related
to anything and everything! From a globe, to a clock, to Google calendar, to games, and so
many other applications that the uses are only limited by the developer’s imagination. Gadgets
also need not be restricted to being rectangular in shape or of a size that will fit within the
boundaries of the sidebar. In fact, gadgets can be “undocked from the sidebar and allowed to
‘float’ on your desktop.” There is a huge directory of gadgets that can be added to GD.

Here is the way to add gadgets

To add a Gadget, click on the “Add+” button which appears when the mouse hovers over the
Sidebar.

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Here is the result after clicking + button

Gadgets as the developers view

Before a month I’ve read a blog post of a gadget developer whom I follow. In this blog
the author described Google gadgets as the launch pad for the developers who intend to
develop in JavaScript. The Google gadgets are easy to develop. Both online and offline. Easy to
test and deploy on not only Google products but also in your personal pages. Though I have
only limited experience in developing gadgets online but I’ve now my hands-on to Google’s GD
SDK for desktop. I no wonder the gadgets made here can be deployed on your page as Google’s
universal gadgets with some reasonable efforts.

Want to develop a gadget? Take a look here

Google’s own guideline to develop a gadget.

Here are a few rules of thumb for creating a good gadget. We've learned these from watching
many gadgets come through the pipeline and seeing what kind of adoption they gain from users:

Rule 1: Use a standard height.

Gadgets have a uniform width but a variable height. Sometimes gadget creators with a
lot of content make liberal use of the unlimited vertical real-estate to create a gadget that is
much taller than it is wide. These gadgets don't perform well with users because they often
create a feeling of inconsistency with the rest of the page. They also limit the amount of above-
the-fold screen real-estate that the user can reserve for other things.

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Some users are so tidy that they line up their gadgets of the same vertical height in a row. These users will never adopt a
gadget of non-standard height. See detailed section on style for exact pixel suggestions.

If you have a lot of content you want to fit into a gadget, the best thing is to limit the
vertical real estate and break the gadget into tabs.

This gadget uses the tabs library.

Rule 2: Be engaging. Distinguish yourself from feeds.

A feed is a great way to syndicate content, but the downside of feeds is that they're
uniform and unidirectional. Gadgets provide more flexibility and so they make it easier for you
to make your content stand out. When creating a gadget, it's important to try to present
content in a unique and interesting way. For example, if you are creating a gadget that
announces the winners of the Emmy awards, you could create a quiz or a poll for the user
leading up the awards, and then, after the awards are announced, notify the user about
whether he or she was correct. Gadget users love participating with their content rather than
simply digesting it.

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Developed by People.com, In-style and EW.com. Note : This
is a mock-up and does not necessarily reflect the outcome
of the 2006 Emmy Awards

Rule 3: Keep your content fresh. Update it at least once a day.

Some of the best-performing feeds and gadgets on the homepage have titles that end in
"of the day": "Word of the day," "Quote of the day," and "Beer of the day," for example. All of
these perform well and have lots of users. If you keep your content fresh, users will be much
more likely to keep your gadget on their page. Gadgets that update in real-time (i.e. every time
a user refreshes their page) are becoming more and more popular.

This gadget from tarot.com gives a daily update of horoscope.

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Rule 4: Be fun. Style counts.
It has become really clear to us that users care about fun. Our best performing feeds
when we launched iGoogle were "Word of the day" and "Quote of the day." More recently, the
feeds "How-to of the day" and "Oddly enough" were so popular that we placed them on the
default homepage for new users. Our best-performing gadget right now is the "Date & Time"
gadget, which renders a little JavaScript clock that the user can customize into different colors.
People love the colors. They also love the attractiveness of the gadget. Style counts.

Rule 5: Be a good citizen.

When you create a gadget, you're entering into a contract with the user. While you're
free to do anything with your own gadget, it's generally a good idea to keep the user
experience consistent. Don't replace the gadget with a different gadget, suddenly start showing
a banner ad, or "trick" the user into clicking through to your site. The content within the gadget
is directly associated with your brand and you'll want that branding experience to be positively
reinforced.

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Remember that you are a part of the user's whole page and your gadget is going to sit next to
other gadgets and feeds. When adding a large logo or a background color to your gadget, think
not just about the gadget itself but about how the gadget will look in the context of the entire
page. (See below for tips on gadget UI Design and Style.)

Rule 6: Avoid asking for personal information.

Many users will delete gadgets that ask for personal information, especially if the gadget is
unfamiliar to them. However, in the rare cases where you must do it, here are a few points to
consider:

1. Make the gadget work with or without personal information being entered in by the
user.

2. Make it clear what the benefits are when personal information is provided.

3. Build trust in your users by branding your gadget to make it look more reputable and by
clearly indicating the company and possibly what the intentions are.

Rule 7: Conserve real-estate.

Vertical space on the homepage is limited, and your gadget must share it with a number
of other gadgets. Nobody likes it when a single gadget hogs unnecessary space on the
homepage.
Conserve whitespace wherever possible by decreasing font sizes, paddings, and margins. If the
height of your gadget changes due to dynamic content, use our dynamic height library to resize
your gadget appropriately.

Creating gadgets that require login

They’re tricky to build, but if you manage to do it, don’t assume the user has an account.
Make sure the gadget shows interesting content even when the user isn’t logged in. Displaying
a simple login form to the user is hardly interesting and most users won’t go through the
trouble of setting up an account just to see the gadget in action. Instead, add some content and
functionality to the gadget to entice logged-out users to keep your gadget. Also, be sure to
provide a link that redirects users to create an account if they don’t have one. A good example
to look at is the Google Calendar gadget. A basic calendar is displayed even when the user isn’t
logged in. It also provides a link that allows users to setup a calendar account.

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How are gadgets discovered, ranked and promoted?

Gadgets are available for webpage owners to add to their own WebPages or for users to
add to their Google homepage or to Google Desktop. Webpage owners can find gadgets in our
directory of Gadgets For Your Page, Google users can find gadgets to add to Google in our
directory of Gadgets for iGoogle or in our directory of Gadgets for Google Desktop, and anyone
can discover new gadgets they like on pages across the web.

Gadget directories:
http://www.google.com/ig/directory?synd=open
http://www.google.com/ig/directory
http://desktop.google.com/plugins/

Since the gadget ranking in our directories depends largely on the number of users for your
gadget, and since the number of webpage owners who use your gadget directly influences the
number of people who see your gadget, it's in your best interest to make your gadget as useful
and interesting as possible so that lots of people will use it. Here are some things you can do to
improve the adoption of your gadget:

 Create an attractive thumbnail. When you submit your gadget, you will submit a
thumbnail to be shown in the directory. This is the user's first impression of the module.
Note: If you don't submit a thumbnail or a screenshot along with your gadget, your
gadget is automatically demoted. These images are important.

 Use a descriptive title. It's best to use a short title that effectively communicates what
the gadget does – for example, "Baseball scores," "World Cup," "Horoscopes," "Todo
list," "Bible verse of the day."

 Submit your gadget to be included in our third-party directories. Google Modules is one
example of such a directory.

 Promote your gadget on your own site. We provide an easy-to-use Add to Google
button that will subscribe users to your gadget. You can use the button we provide or
design your own. Encouraging your active users to subscribe to your content is a good
way to keep them coming back to your site. Here's what the button looks like:

http://www.google.com/webmasters/add.html

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After guidelines here are the specifications

Width and different sized screens

Screens can vary a lot in width, from 800x600 to 1400x1050 and up. Therefore it's
important that your gadget scale from (at least) 250px to 500px. You can test various widths
using Firefox, with the Web Developer extension
(http://chrispederick.com/work/webdeveloper/, Resize menu).

 UI gadgets like input boxes and tables should not be fixed width. They should be
width=100% so that they look good in different resolutions and window sizes.

 Centering elements often looks better on higher resolutions so there isn't excessive
whitespace on the right.

 Using tables safely keeps things all on one line while allowing elements to resize when
the browser resizes.

Images
Images are slow to load but may convey more information than text. Consider carefully
whether they are really needed.

 Images may convey more information than text and reduce screen space.

 Set the width and height attributes of an image ahead of time so the gadget does not
"pop" when an image is done loading.

 An "icon" on the left of a welcome mode of a gadget points out to the user that they
must enter information into the gadget.

Look and Feel

Fonts
 If you're designing your gadget for iGoogle, use Arial font and a font size to match the
iGoogle page.

 #008000 for green links to things like news sources, #7777cc for
unimportant/deemphasized links, default link colors for anything else.

Other

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  On Google, links go places and buttons do things.

 Use a standard amount of white space between buttons and input boxes.

 Avoid intrusive ads and use the gadget title URL link to your page instead.

Presenting Information
Many times there’s more information than there is space within a gadget that you want
to display. There are typically two different UI models to achieve this. The first is to simply open
up a new window that takes the user to a different page. The second is to dynamically generate
and display the information within the gadget itself. Both have their pros and cons.

What is the right answer? Surprisingly, the answer is both. We’ve observed that both UI
models actually perform fairly well. For example, the Wikipedia gadget is very highly ranked in
the content directory. It’s a basic search gadget where users enter in any search query, click
‘Search’, and a new window opens up with the results. On the other hand, Google is also a top-
rated gadget. Instead of popping up a new window, it displays all the information directly
within the gadget.

Try experimenting with both and you’ll soon figure out which model makes the most sense for
your gadgets.

Setting and Editing Preferences

If your gadget requires preferences, use a "Welcome mode" and include sample values
for them. Using an icon on the left side really helps.

This "welcome mode" gives the user a friendly way to set up the gadget for the first time.

Customizable user preferences (other than the first-time setup) should be put into the
blue edit mode, not on the gadget itself. Also, consider having options to hide or show certain
information in the gadget so user can see exactly what they want and minimize screen space.

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Understanding the gadget
There are many types of gadgets in Google’s gadget directory. All gadgets are freely
downloadable and can be studied by extracting themselves and opening their .js files. Here I’ve
explained the steps how to start studying the gadget?

1. Download the gadget you want to study.

2. Select the gadget file having .gg extension
3. Open it with WinZip or WinRar (recommended).
4. Extract it to specific folder.
5. Open the main.js files and other required files to study it.

Let’s check out some gadgets.

The gadgets
The MS office quickstart gadget
This gadget starts ms office by just one click this gadget is developed by @edit team.
This gadget uses shortcut logic by the line var prg= new ActiveXObject("Shell.Application"); and
then using prg.ShellExecute(options.getValue(controlname)); to use the shortcut.

var prg= new ActiveXObject("Shell.Application");//this line is to use shortcuts

function view_onOpen()
{
//Here they defined the controls
options.putDefaultValue('word_ut', '');
options.putDefaultValue('excel_ut', '');
options.putDefaultValue('access_ut', '');
options.putDefaultValue('power_ut', '');
options.putDefaultValue('outlook_ut', '');
}

function szinez(n)
{
switch(n)
{
case 1:
excel.opacity=255;
ido=setTimeOut("valtas(1)",250);
break;
case 2:
word.opacity=255;
ido=setTimeOut("valtas(2)",250);
break;
case 3:
access.opacity=255;

Page 59 of 108
 ido=setTimeOut("valtas(3)",250);
break;
case 4:
powerpoint.opacity=255;
ido=setTimeOut("valtas(4)",250);
break;
case 5:
outlook.opacity=255;
ido=setTimeOut("valtas(5)",250);
break;
}
}
function valtas(n)
{
switch(n)
{
case 1:
if (excel.opacity<75){
excel.opacity=255;
}
else{
excel.opacity-=50;
}
break;
case 2:
if (word.opacity<75){
word.opacity=255;
}
else{
word.opacity-=50;
}
break;
case 3:
if (access.opacity<75){
access.opacity=255;
}
else{
access.opacity-=50;
}
break;
case 4:
if (powerpoint.opacity<75){
powerpoint.opacity=255;
}
else{
powerpoint.opacity-=50;
}
break;
case 5:
if (outlook.opacity<75){
outlook.opacity=255;

Page 60 of 108
 }
else{
outlook.opacity-=50;
}
break;
}

}
function allit()
{
clearTimeOut(ido);
excel.opacity=200;
word.opacity=200;
powerpoint.opacity=200;
access.opacity=200;
outlook.opacity=200;
}

function indit_excel() {
if (options.getValue('excel_ut').length!=''){
prg.ShellExecute(options.getValue('excel_ut'));
} else {
alert("Configure Excel path. Right click on the icon!");
}
}

function set_excel() {
var ut = framework.BrowseForFile('Exe files(*.exe)|*.exe|All Files(*.*)|*.*');
if (ut.length!=0){
options.putValue('excel_ut',ut);
}
}

function set_word() {
var ut = framework.BrowseForFile('Exe files(*.exe)|*.exe|All Files(*.*)|*.*');
if (ut.length!=0){
options.putValue('word_ut',ut);
}
}

function set_access() {
var ut = framework.BrowseForFile('Exe files(*.exe)|*.exe|All Files(*.*)|*.*');
if (ut.length!=0){
options.putValue('access_ut',ut);
}
}

function set_power() {
var ut = framework.BrowseForFile('Exe files(*.exe)|*.exe|All Files(*.*)|*.*');
if (ut.length!=0){
options.putValue('power_ut',ut);

Page 61 of 108
 }
}

function set_outlook() {
var ut = framework.BrowseForFile('Exe files(*.exe)|*.exe|All Files(*.*)|*.*');
if (ut.length!=0){
options.putValue('outlook_ut',ut);
}
}
function indit_word() {
if (options.getValue('word_ut').length!=''){
prg.ShellExecute(options.getValue('word_ut'));
} else {
alert("Configure Word path. Right click on the icon!");
}

function indit_access() {
if (options.getValue('access_ut').length!=''){
prg.ShellExecute(options.getValue('access_ut'));
} else {
alert("Configure Access path. Right click on the icon!");
}

function indit_power() {
if (options.getValue('power_ut').length!=''){
prg.ShellExecute(options.getValue('power_ut'));
} else {
alert("Configure PowerPoint path. Right click on the icon!");
}

function indit_outlook() {
if (options.getValue('outlook_ut').length!=''){
prg.ShellExecute(options.getValue('outlook_ut'));//this line is to call shortcuts
} else {
alert("Configure Outlook path. Right click on the icon!");
}

Page 62 of 108
The internet database application
This type of gadgets are connected with internet requires login or access to database in
their servers. This gadget is dictionary gadget. It returns the word’s meaning from
edictionary.com. It uses the XMLhttprequest class to access the internet and the database on
server. The key method is .open ("GET", URL, true); here GET is the get method of http, URL is
the URL site and true is for allowing access to database or not. Here is the code.

var DURL = "http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/"; // this is the URL to be accessed

var TURL = "http://thesaurus.reference.com/browse/";
var logoRequest_ = null;
var RENDEREDHTML = "<html><body><center><h3>FAILED</h3></center></body></html>";

function view_onOpen()
{
//onShowDictionary();
}

function OnKeyDown()
{
if(event.keyCode == 13)
{
OnClickDictionary();
}
}

function onShowDetails()
{
var htmlDetailsView = new DetailsView();
htmlDetailsView.html_content = true;
htmlDetailsView.setContent( "", undefined, RENDEREDHTML, false, 0);
pluginHelper.showDetailsView(htmlDetailsView, "Results for : " + txtWord.value,
gddDetailsViewFlagToolbarOpen, onDetailsViewFeedback);
}

function onDetailsViewFeedback(detailsViewFlags)
{
if (detailsViewFlags == gddDetailsViewFlagNone)
{
// User closed the details view
}
else if (detailsViewFlags == gddDetailsViewFlagToolbarOpen)
{
// User clicked on the title of the details view

Page 63 of 108
 }
}

function onLogoData()
{
if (logoRequest_.readyState != 4)
return;

if (logoRequest_.status != 200)
{
RENDEREDHTML = "<html><body><center><h3>FAILED</h3></center></body></html>";
logoRequest_ = null;
return;
}
try
{
RENDEREDHTML = logoRequest_.responseText.toLowerCase();
var PosEnd = -1;
var Found = false;
var Pos = RENDEREDHTML.indexOf("http://cache.lexico.com/g/d/speaker.gif");
if(Pos != -1)
{
RENDEREDHTML = RENDEREDHTML.substr(Pos);
Pos = RENDEREDHTML.indexOf("1.");
if(Pos != -1)
{
RENDEREDHTML = RENDEREDHTML.substr(Pos);
Pos = RENDEREDHTML.indexOf("<div class=\"tail\"");
if(Pos != -1)
{
RENDEREDHTML = RENDEREDHTML.substr(0,Pos);
Found = true;
}
}
//view.alert(RENDEREDHTML);
}
if(!Found)
{
RENDEREDHTML = "<html><body><center><h4>No Results found for : " + txtWord.value +
"</h4></center></body></html>";
}
}
catch(e)
{

Page 64 of 108
 }
lblMessage.visible = false;
onShowDetails();
logoRequest_ = null;
}

function onLogoDataT()
{
if (logoRequest_.readyState != 4)
return;

if (logoRequest_.status != 200)
{
RENDEREDHTML = "<html><body><center><h3>FAILED</h3></center></body></html>";
logoRequest_ = null;
return;
}
try
{
RENDEREDHTML = logoRequest_.responseText.toLowerCase();
var Pos = RENDEREDHTML.indexOf("http://cache.lexico.com/g/d/speaker.gif");
if(Pos != -1)
{
RENDEREDHTML = RENDEREDHTML.substr(Pos);
Pos = RENDEREDHTML.indexOf("1.");
if(Pos != -1)
{
RENDEREDHTML = RENDEREDHTML.substr(Pos);
Pos = RENDEREDHTML.indexOf("<div class=\"tail\"");
if(Pos != -1)
{
RENDEREDHTML = RENDEREDHTML.substr(0,Pos);
}
}
lblMessage.visible = false;
//view.alert(RENDEREDHTML);
}
}
catch(e)
{
}
onShowDetails();
logoRequest_ = null;

Page 65 of 108
}

function OnClickDictionary()//this is button’s event handeler

{
var Word = txtWord.value; //this is the word whose meaning is to be searched
if(Word == "") return;

logoRequest_ = new XMLHttpRequest();//the connection is established here

try
{
logoRequest_.open("GET", DURL + Word, true);// page is opened here
}
catch (e)
{
view.alert("FAILED");
logoRequest_ = null;
return;
}
logoRequest_.onreadystatechange = onLogoData;

try
{
logoRequest_.send();
lblMessage.visible = true;
}
catch (e)
{
view.alert("FAILED");
logoRequest_ = null;
return;
}
}

function OnClickThesaurus()
{
var Word = txtWord.value;
if(Word == "") return;

logoRequest_ = new XMLHttpRequest();

try
{
logoRequest_.open("GET", TURL + Word, true);
}
catch (e)

Page 66 of 108
 {
logoRequest_ = null;
return;
}
logoRequest_.onreadystatechange = onLogoDataT;

try
{
logoRequest_.send();
lblMessage.visible = true;
}
catch (e)
{
logoRequest_ = null;
return;
}
}

Page 67 of 108
Developers’ Mecca: Google code
Google Code is Google's site for developers interested in Google-related/open-source
development. The site contains open source code and a list of their services which support
public APIs.

APIs
Google offers a variety of APIs for web and desktop programmers alike. They are often
based around current Google products, including AdSense, Google Checkout and Google
Toolbar.

SOAP-based APIs

The AdSense and AdWords APIs, based on the Simple Object Access
Protocol (SOAP) data exchange standard, allow developers to integrate their own
applications with these Google services. The AdSense API allows owners of web sites
and blogs to manage AdSense sign-up, content and reporting, while the AdWords API
gives AdWords customers programmatic access to their AdWords accounts and
campaigns.

Google Data APIs

The Google Data APIs allow programmers to create applications that read and write
data from Google services. Currently, these include APIs for Google Apps, Blogger, Google Base,
Google Book Search, Google Calendar, Google Code Search, Google Spreadsheets, Google
Notebook, and Picasa Web Albums.

Open source projects

Google Projects and Patches are Open Source software that Google has developed.

Gears
Gears is beta software offered by Google to enable off-line access to services that
normally only work on-line. It installs a database engine, based on SQLite, on the client system
to cache the data locally. Gears-enabled pages use data from this local cache rather than from
the online service. Using Gears, a web application may periodically synchronize the data in the
local cache with the online service. If a network connection is not available, the synchronization
is deferred until a network connection is established. Thus Gears enables web applications to
work even though access to the network service is not present.

Google Web Toolkit

The Google Web Toolkit is an open source toolkit allowing developers to create Ajax
applications in the Java programming language. GWT supports rapid client/server development
and debugging in any Java IDE. In a subsequent deployment step, the GWT compiler translates
Page 68 of 108
a working Java application into equivalent JavaScript that programmatically manipulates a web
browser's HTML DOM using DHTML techniques. GWT emphasizes reusable, efficient solutions
to recurring Ajax challenges, namely asynchronous remote procedure calls, history
management, bookmarking, and cross-browser portability. It is released under the Apache
License version 2.0.

Summer of Code
Google Summer of Code s a mentoring program to find students for Open Source
projects. In 2007, the program received nearly 6,200 applications.

Project Hosting
Google Code runs a project hosting service that provides revision control using
Subversion (the repositories are implemented on top of Google's BigTable, but this is hidden to
the user), an issue tracker, a wiki for documentation, and a file download feature. The service is
available and free for all Open Source projects that are licensed to Google's liking.

Allowed licenses
The site allows the projects to use only one of nine licenses (Apache, Artistic, BSD,
GPLv2, GPLv3, LGPL, MIT, MPL and EPL).

Limitations
The site limits the number of projects one person can have to 10, as well as only a
certain amount of projects may be created within 1 day.

Google App Engine

Google App Engine is a platform for building and hosting web applications on Google's
infrastructure. It was first released as a beta version in April 2008.

Based on cloud computing technology, Google App Engine uses multiple servers to run
an application and store data, and automatically adjusts the number of servers to handle
requests reliably. Comparable cloud-based platforms include offerings such as Amazon Web
Services and Microsoft's Azure Services Platform.

Google App Engine is free up to a certain level of used resources, after which fees are
charged for additional storage, bandwidth, or CPU cycles required by the application.

Supported programming languages and frameworks

Currently, the supported programming languages are Python and Java. A limited version
of the Django web framework is available, as well as a custom Google-written web app

Page 69 of 108
framework similar to JSP or ASP.NET. Google has said that it plans to support more languages in
the future, and that the Google App Engine has been written to be language independent. Any
Python framework that supports the WSGI using the CGI adapter can be used to create an
application; the framework can be uploaded with the developed application. Third-party
libraries written in pure Python may also be uploaded.

Differences from other application hosting

Compared to other scalable hosting services such as Amazon EC2, App Engine provides
more infrastructures to make it easy to write scalable applications, but can only run a limited
range of applications designed for that infrastructure.

App Engine's infrastructure removes many of the system administration and

development challenges of building applications to scale to millions of hits. Google handles
deploying code to a cluster, database sharding, monitoring, failover, and launching application
instances as necessary.

While other services let users install and configure nearly any *NIX compatible software,
AppEngine requires developers to use Python or Java as the programming language and a
limited set of APIs. Current APIs allow storing and retrieving data from a BigTable non-relational
database; making HTTP requests; sending e-mail; manipulating images; and caching. Most
existing Web applications can't run on App Engine without modification, because they require a
relational database.

Per-day and per-minute quotas restrict bandwidth and CPU use, number of requests
served, number of concurrent requests, and calls to the various APIs, and individual requests
are terminated if they take more than 30 seconds or return more than 10MB of data.

Differences between SQL and GQL

Google App Engine's data store has a SQL-like syntax called "GQL". Select statements in
GQL can be performed on one table only. GQL intentionally does not support the Join
statement, because it is seen to be inefficient when queries span more than one machine.
Instead, one-to-many and many-to-many relationships can be accomplished using
ReferenceProperty().This shared-nothing approach allows disks to fail without the system
failing. he where clause of select statements can perform >, >=, <, <= operations on one column
only. Therefore, only simple where clauses can be constructed. Switching from a relational
database to the Datastore requires a paradigm shift for developers when modeling their data.

App Engine limits the maximum rows returned from an entity get to 1000 rows per
Datastore call. Most web database applications use paging and caching, and hence do not
require this much data at once, so this is a non-issue in most scenarios If an application needs

Page 70 of 108
more than 1,000 records per operation, it can use its own client-side software or an Ajax page
to perform an operation on an unlimited number of rows.

Unlike a relational database such as Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, or

PostgreSQL, the Data store API is not relational in the SQL sense.

Restrictions
Developers have read-only access to the filesystem on App Engine.
App Engine can only execute code called from an HTTP request (except for
scheduled background tasks).
Users may upload arbitrary Python modules, but only if they are pure-Python; C
and Pyrex modules are not supported.

My Verdict to app engine

Sorry but Google is lacking something here. There are many old players in the room like
Amazon and Microsoft’s azure. Though Google’s cloud computing infrastructure helps a lot but
many limitations are there to drive the developers away from this. Use it only if you are
planning to host pure Google based application.

My Ratings to app engine: 1.5/5

Page 71 of 108
Google Maps
Google Maps (for a time named Google Local) is a free web mapping (for non-
commercial use) service application and technology provided by Google that powers many
map-based services, including the Google Maps website, Google Ride Finder, Google Transit,
and maps embedded on third-party websites via the Google Maps API. It offers street maps, a
route planner for traveling by foot, bicycle, car, or public transport and an urban business
locator for numerous countries around the world. It also can help find the location of
businesses.

Google Maps uses the Mercator projection, so it cannot show areas around the poles. A
related product is Google Earth, a stand-alone program for Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X,
Linux, SymbianOS, and iPhone OS which offers more globe-viewing features, including showing
polar areas.

Satellite view
Google Maps provides high-resolution satellite images for most urban areas in Canada,
and the United States (including Hawaii, Alaska, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands) as well
as parts of Australia, the Bahamas, Barbados, Bermuda, Chile, Dominican Republic, Egypt,
France, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Hungary, Iceland, India, Iran, Iraq, Ireland,
Israel, Italy, Japan, Jordan, Kuwait, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, South Korea, Spain,
Taiwan, the United Kingdom, and many other countries. Google Maps also covers many cities,
including Istanbul, Moscow, and most of India and Pakistan.

Various governments have complained about the potential for terrorists to use the
satellite images in planning attacks as a result Google has blurred some areas for security.

With the introduction of an easily pannable and searchable mapping and satellite
imagery tool, Google's mapping engine prompted a surge of interest in satellite imagery. Sites
were established which feature satellite images of interesting natural and man-made
landmarks, including such novelties as "large type" writing visible in the imagery, as well as
famous stadia and unique geological formations. As of November 2008, the U.S. National
Weather Service also now uses Google Maps within its local weather forecasts, showing the 5
times 5 km "point forecast" squares used in forecast models.

Although Google uses the word satellite, most of the high-resolution imagery is aerial
photography taken from airplanes rather than from satellites.

Directions
Google Maps directions work:

Contiguously in North America: Alaska*, Canada* and United States*.

Page 72 of 108
 Contiguously in Europe: Albania, Andorra, Austria*, Belarus^, Belgium*, Bosnia
and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic*, Denmark*, Estonia, France*,
Finland*, Germany*, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy*, Latvia, Liechtenstein*, Lithuania,
Luxembourg*, Macedonia, Moldova^, Montenegro, Monaco*, The Netherlands*,
Norway*, Poland*, Portugal*, Romania^, San Marino, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain*,
Sweden*, Switzerland*, Ukraine^, United Kingdom*, Vatican City (i.e. all of Europe,
excluding Russia, Iceland and Turkey).
Contiguously in South East Asia: Singapore*, Malaysia and Thailand
Single countries: Australia*, Brazil*, Chile, China^, Israel (and parts of the West
Bank), Hawaii*, Hong Kong*, Japan*, New Zealand*, Russia* (Moscow area only) and
Taiwan.

^ = not all roads are featured in this country, so directions are limited.

* = has directions and places of interest.

Implementation
Like many other Google web applications, Google Maps uses JavaScript extensively. As
the user drags the map, the grid squares are downloaded from the server and inserted into the
page. When a user searches for a business, the results are downloaded in the background for
insertion into the side panel and map; the page is not reloaded. Locations are drawn
dynamically by positioning a red pin (composed of several partially-transparent PNGs) on top of
the map images.

A hidden IFrame with form submission is used because it preserves browser history. The
site also uses JSON for data transfer rather than XML, for performance reasons. These
techniques both fall under the broad Ajax umbrella.

The geographic information system data used in Google Maps are provided by Tele
Atlas.

Satellites
Small patches of high-resolution satellite imagery are provided mainly by DigitalGlobe
and its QuickBird satellite, with some imagery also from government sources. The main global
imagery base, called NaturalVue, was derived from Landsat 7 imagery by MDA Federal
(formerly Earth Satellite Corporation). Landsat 7's maximum ground imagery was 15 m (49 ft)
for black and white. QuickBird's designed maximum ground imagery is 60 cm (24 in). This global
image base provides the essential foundation for the entire application.

On September 6, 2008, a Delta II rocket bearing the Google logo lifted off from
Vandenberg Air Force Base. It carried the GeoEye-1 satellite, the most powerful commercial

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space image satellite yet launched. The satellite will provide 41-centimeter (16-inch) imagery to
the United States government, and downsampled 50-centimeter (20-inch) imagery to Google,
which has the exclusive rights to use the images for mapping. Press releases stated that
Google's imagery would be able to display home plates in baseball parks. GeoEye's IKONOS
satellite – which has a maximum ground resolution of 82 cm (32 in) – provides images to
Microsoft and Yahoo.

Extensibility and customization

As Google Maps is coded almost entirely JavaScript and XML, some end users have
reverse-engineered the tool and produced client-side scripts and server-side hooks which
allowed a user or website to introduce expanded or customized features into the Google Maps
interface.

Using the core engine and the map/satellite images hosted by Google, such tools can
introduce custom location icons, location coordinates and metadata, and even custom map
image sources into the Google Maps interface. The script-insertion tool Greasemonkey provides
a large number of client-side scripts to customize Google Maps data.

Combinations with photo sharing websites, such as Flickr, are used to create "memory
maps". Using copies of the Keyhole satellite photos, users have taken advantage of image
annotation features to provide personal histories and information regarding particular points of
the area.

Google Maps API

Google created the Google Maps API to allow developers to integrate Google Maps into
their websites with their own data points. It is a free service, and currently does not contain
ads, but Google states in their terms of use that they reserve the right to display ads in the
future

By using the Google Maps API, it is possible to embed the full Google Maps site into an
external website. Developers are required to request an API key, which is bound to the website
and directory entered when creating the key. Creating a customized map interface requires
adding the Google JavaScript code to a page, and then using Javascript functions to add points
to the map.

When the API first launched, it lacked the ability to geocode addresses, requiring users
to manually add points in (latitude, longitude) format. This feature has since been added.

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 At the same time as the release of the Google Maps API, Yahoo! released its own Maps
APIThe releases coincided with the O'Reilly Web 2.0 Conference. Yahoo! Maps, which lacks
international support, included a geocoder in the first release.

As of October 2006, the implementation of Google Gadgets' Google Maps is simpler,

requiring only one line of script, but it is not as customizable as the full API.

In 2006, Yahoo began a campaign to upgrade their maps to compete better with Google
and other online map companies. Several of the maps used in a survey were similar to Google
maps.

Google Maps actively promotes the commercial use of its API. One of its first large-scale
adopters was real estate mashup sites. Google performed a case study is about Nestoria, a
property search engine in the UK and Spain.

Google Maps for Mobile

In 2006, Google introduced a Java application called Google Maps for Mobile, which is
intended to run on any Java-based phone or mobile device. Many of the web-based site's
features are provided in the application.

On November 28, 2007, Google Maps for Mobile 2.0 was released. It introduced a GPS-
like location service that does not require a GPS receiver. The "my location" feature works by
utilizing the GPS location of the mobile device, if it is available. This information is
supplemented by the software determining the nearest cell site. The software then looks up
the location of the cell site using a database of known cell sites. The software plots the streets
in blue that are available with a yellow icon and a green circle around the estimated range of
the cell site based on the transmitter's rated power (among other variables). The estimate is
refined using the strength of the cell phone signal to estimate how close to the cell site the
mobile device is.

As of December 15, 2008, this service is available for the following platforms:

Android (HTC Dream)

iPhone OS (iPhone/iPod Touch)
Windows Mobile
Nokia/Symbian (S60 3rd edition only)
Symbian OS (UIQ v3)
BlackBerry
Phones with Java-Platform (MIDP 2.0 and up), for example the Sony
Ericsson K800i
Palm OS (Centro and newer)

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Google Maps parameters

In Google Maps, URL parameters may be tweaked to offer views and options not
normally available through on-screen controls.

For instance, the maximum zoom level offered is normally 18, but if higher-resolution
images are available, changing the z parameter, which sets the zoom level, will allow the user to
access them, as in this view of elephants or this view of people at a well deep in Chad, Africa
using the parameter z=23.

Google's use of Google Maps

Google Moon

In honor of the 36th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing on July 20, 1969, Google
took public domain imagery of the Moon, integrated it into the Google Maps interface, and
created a tool called Google Moon. By default this tool, with a reduced set of features, also
displays the points of landing of all Apollo spacecraft to land on the Moon. It also included an
Easter egg, displaying a Swiss cheese design at the highest zoom level, which Google has since
removed. A recent collaborative project between NASA Ames Research Center and Google is
integrating and improving the data that is used for Google Moon. This is the Planetary Content
Project. Google Moon was linked from a special commemorative version of the Google logo
displayed at the top of the main Google search page for July 20, 2005.

Google Mars

Google Mars provides a visible imagery view, like Google Moon, as well as infrared
imagery and shaded relief (elevation) of the planet Mars. Users can toggle between the
elevation, visible, and infrared data, in the same manner as switching between map, satellite,
and hybrid modes of Google Maps. In collaboration with NASA scientists at the Mars Space
Flight Facility located at Arizona State University, Google has provided the public with data
collected from two NASA Mars missions, Mars Global Surveyor and 2001 Mars Odyssey.

NASA has made available a number of Google Earth desktop client maps for Mars at
http://onmars.jpl.nasa.gov/.

More Mars data sets with more recent data are available at Google Maps based interface at
http://jmars.asu.edu/maps provided by the Mars Space Flight Facility Arizona State University

Now, with Google Earth 5 it is possible to access new improved Google Mars’s data at a
much higher resolution, as well as being able to view the terrain in 3D, and viewing panoramas
from various Mars Landers in a similar way to Google Street View.

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Google Ride Finder
Google launched an experimental Google Maps-based tool called Ride Finder, tapping
into in-car GPS units for a selection of participating taxi and limousine services. The tool
displays the current location of all supported vehicles of the participating services in major U.S.
cities, including Chicago and San Francisco on a Google Maps street map.

Google My Maps
In April 2007, My Maps was a new feature added to Google's local search maps. My
Maps lets users and businesses create their own map by positioning markers, polylines and
polygons onto a map. The interface is a straightforward overlay on the map. A set of eighty-four
pre-designed markers is available, ranging from bars and restaurants to webcam and
earthquake symbols. Polyline and Polygon color, width and opacity are selectable. Maps
modified using My Maps can be saved for later viewing and made public (or marked as private),
but cannot be printed. Note: this can easily be overcome by using the 'Print Screen' function
key and simple image editing software such as Paint.

Each element added to a My Map has an editable tag. This tag can contain text, rich text
or HTML. Embeddable video and other content can be included within the HTML tag.

Upon the launch of My Maps there was no facility to embed the created maps into a
webpage or blog. A few independent websites have now produced tools to let users embed
maps and add further functionality to their maps. This has been resolved with version 2.78.

Google Latitude
Google Latitude is a feature from Google that lets users share their physical locations
with other people. This service is based on Google Maps, specifically on mobile devices. There's
an iGoogle widget for Desktops and Laptops as well. Some concerns have been expressed about
the privacy issues raised by the use of the service.

Google Maps in competition

Why should?
 Perfection in data.
 Freely accessible worldwide.
 Easy to create your own application from coding.
 Can act as GPS if you have internet connected with your laptop, palmtop or mobile
device. (PCworld .com in May 2006).

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Why shouldn’t?

X Privacy concerns.
X Not much perfect in remote locations in India.

My Verdict on Google Maps

It’s such a good application and is and will be popular because it’s free to use. Somehow
its counterpart yahoo maps are using better technologies. But they are not free to use. That will
keep Google maps “ahead of curves”. For developers it’s easy to use and develop an application
based on GMap API. I had created an application based on GMap API just in 2 days.

My Ratings to Google maps: 3.5/5

Google notebook
Google Notebook is a free online application offered by Google that provides a simple
way to save and organize clips of information when conducting research online. This personal
browser tool permits a user to write notes, and to clip text, images, and links from pages during
browsing. These are saved to an online "notebook" with sharing and collaboration features.

Google Notebook is an interactive scratch pad for any visited web pages, offering to
collect web findings within the browser window.

Sharing functions permit a user to make public notebooks visible to others, or to

collaborate with a list of users (with or without making collaborative notebooks public).

A mini version of the Google notebook is available through browser extensions

(available for Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer) that allows clipping information from the
web without leaving the displayed page using a quick "note this" function available within the
context right click menu from anywhere inside a webpage. The latest version of the Firefox
extension is 1.0.0.20.

A few months after the Firefox extension was released, Google added a "Note this" link
to each Google search result when users are logged in. Clicking on it opens up an AJAX user
interface near the bottom right of the screen just like the extension, but without the need for
installing a browser add-on.

Notebooks may contain headings and notes. New notes go at the bottom of a notebook,
unless an insertion point (any specific note or section) has been pre-selected in the mini-
notebook sub-window. Using the full-page notebook view, drag-and-drop features allow
moving and reorganizing notes within a notebook, or between notebooks. It is also possible to

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export one's notebooks to Google Documents. As of November 1, 2007 labeling has now
become available.

Google Notebook was announced on May 10, 2006 and made available May 15,
2006. In early 2009 Google announced that they were stopping development on the
service it is no longer open to sign-ups by new users nor being improved/debugged,
however current users can still access all notebooks and data.

Mobile OS and software developing platform: Android

A possible home screen of Android.

Android is a software platform and operating system for mobile devices, based on the
Linux kernel, and developed by Google and later the Open Handset Alliance. It allows
developers to write managed code in the Java language, controlling the device via Google-
developed Java libraries. Applications written in C and other languages can be compiled to ARM
native code and run, but this development path is not officially supported by Google.

The unveiling of the Android platform on 5 November 2007 was announced with the
founding of the Open Handset Alliance, a consortium of 48 hardware, software, and telecom
companies devoted to advancing open standards for mobile devices. Google released most of
the Android code under the Apache license, a free-software and open source license.

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Features

The platform is adaptable to larger, VGA, 2D graphics library, 3D

Handset layouts graphics library based onOpenGL ES 1.0 specifications, and traditional
smartphone layouts.

Storage The Database Software SQLite is used for data storage purposes

Android supports connectivity technologies includingGSM/EDGE, CDMA, EV-

Connectivity
DO, UMTS, Bluetooth, andWi-Fi.

SMS and MMS are available forms of messaging including threaded text
Messaging
messaging.

The web browser available in Android is based on the open-

Web browser
source WebKit application framework.

Software written in Java can be compiled into Dalvik bytecodes and executed
Dalvik virtual in the Dalvik virtual machine, which is a specialized VM implementation
machine designed for mobile device use, although not technically a standard Java
Virtual Machine.

Android supports the following audio/video/still media formats: MPEG-

Media support
4, H.264, MP3, AAC, OGG,AMR, JPEG, PNG, GIF.

Additional Android can utilize video/still cameras,touchscreens, GPS, accelerometers, and

hardware accelerated 3D graphics.
support

Development Includes a device emulator, tools for debugging, memory and performance
environment profiling, a plugin for theEclipse IDE.

Similar to the App Store on the iPhone, The Android Market is a catalog of
Market
applications that can be downloaded and installed to target hardware over-
the-air, without the use of a PC. Originally only freeware applications were

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 supported. Paid-for apps have been available on Android Market since 19
February 2009.[32]

Android has native support for multi-touch but the feature is disabled (possibly
Multi-touch to avoid infringing Apple patents on touch-screen technology). An unofficial
mod has been developed that enables multi-touch.

Android SDK
The Android SDK includes a comprehensive set of development tools. These include a
debugger, libraries, a handset emulator (based on QEMU), documentation, sample code, and
tutorials. Currently supported development platforms include x86-based computers running
Linux (any modern desktop Linux Distribution), Mac OS X 10.4.8 or later, Windows XP or Vista.
Requirements also include Java Development Kit, Apache Ant, and Python 2.2 or later. The
officially supported integrated development environment (IDE) is Eclipse (3.2 or later) using the
Android Development Tools (ADT) Plugin, though developers may use any text editor to edit
Java and XML files then use command line tools to create, build and debug Android
applications.

A preview release of the Android software development kit (SDK) was released on 12
November 2007. On 15 July 2008, the Android Developer Challenge Team accidentally sent an
email to all entrants in the Android Developer Challenge announcing that a new release of the
SDK was available in a "private" download area. The email was intended for winners of the first
round of the Android Developer Challenge. The revelation that Google was supplying new SDK
releases to some developers and not others (and keeping this arrangement private) has led to
widely reported frustration within the Android developer community

Native code
The ADB debugger gives a root shell under the Android Emulator which allows native
ARM code to be uploaded and executed. ARM code can be compiled using GCC on a standard
PC. Running native code is complicated by the fact that Android uses a non-standard C library
(known as Bionic). The underlying graphics device is available as a framebuffer at
/dev/graphics/fb0. The graphics library that Android uses to arbitrate and control access to this
device is called the Skia Graphics Library (SGL), and it has been released under an open source
license. Skia has backends for both win32 and Cairo, allowing the development of cross-
platform applications, and it is the graphics engine underlying the Google Chrome web browser.

Native classes can be called from Java code running under the Dalvik VM using the
System.loadLibrary call, which is part of the standard Android Java classes. Elements Interactive

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Mobile B.V. have ported their EdgeLib C++ library to Android, and native code executables of
their S-Tris2 game (a Tetris clone) and Animate3D technology demo are available for download.

Restrictions
Tethering (internet connectivity to a laptop or pc via the cell phone) is forbidden by T-
Mobile USA and Google has banned such applications for T-Mobile USA users. This also means
that the apps can be carrier specific as chosen by Google.

Android uses a Linux kernel, but, according to Google, it is not a Linux operating system
(it neither has a native windowing system, nor supports the full set of standard Linux libraries,
including GNU C Library). This specific nature makes it difficult to reuse existing Linux
applications or libraries.

Android does not use established Java standards, i.e. Java SE and ME. This prevents
compatibility among Java applications written for those platforms and those for the Android
platform. Android only reuses the Java language syntax, but does not provide the full-class
libraries and APIs bundled with Java SE or ME.

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Google’s own approach to mail: Gmail
Gmail is a free POP3 and IMAP webmail service provided by Google. Gmail launched on
April 1, 2004 as an invitation-only beta release and became available to the general public on
February 7, 2007. Although over 100 million users have taken advantage of stable releases for
years, to this day the service remains in beta status.

With an initial storage capacity offer of 1 GB per user, Gmail significantly increased the
webmail standard for free storage from the 2 to 4MB its competitors offered at that time. The
service currently offers over 7300 MB of free storage with additional storage ranging from 10
GB to 400 GB available for $20 to $500 (US) per year.

Gmail has a search-oriented interface and a "conversation view" similar to an

Internet forum. Software developers know Gmail for its use of the Ajax programming
technique.

Gmail runs on Google Servlet Engine and Google GFE/1.3 which run on Linux.

Features
The Gmail service currently provides more than 7300 MB of free storage .Users can rent
additional storage (shared between Picasa Web Albums and Gmail) from 10 GB (US$20/year) to
400 GB (US$500/year). On April 1, 2005, the first anniversary of Gmail, Google announced the
increase from 1 GB, stating that Google would "keep giving people more space forever."

In April 2005 Gmail engineer Rob Siemborski stated that Google would keep increasing
storage by the second as long as it had enough space on its servers. On October 12, 2007, the
rate of increase was 5.37 MB per hour.

Approximately a week later, the rate decreased to 1.12 MB per hour, on January 4, 2008
further down to about 3.35 MB per day, or 0.14 MB per hour, and in October 2008 further
down to about 353.9 KB per day.

Gmail Labs
The Gmail Labs feature, introduced on June 5, 2008, allows users to test new or
experimental features of Gmail, such as bookmarking of important e-mail messages, custom
keyboard-shortcuts and games.

Users can enable or disable Labs features selectively and provide feedback about each
of them. This allows Gmail engineers to obtain user input about new features to improve them
and also to assess their popularity and whether they merit developing into regular Gmail
features. All Labs features are experimental and are subject to termination at any time.

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 On December 10, 2008, Gmail added support for SMS Messaging through its integrated
Chat. On January 28, 2009, Gmail added support for offline access through its integration with
Gears.

Gmail hoaxes

Gmail Paper hoax

On April Fools' Day 2007, Google made fun of Gmail by introducing "Gmail Paper",
where a user could click a button and Gmail would purportedly mail an ad-supported hard copy
for free.

Gmail Custom Time hoax

On April Fools' Day 2008, Google introduced a fake service named Gmail Custom Time,
which would allegedly allow a user to send up to ten e-mails per year with forged timestamps.
The hoax stated that by bending space-time on the Google servers, the e-mails actually get
routed through the fourth dimension of time itself before reaching their intended recipient.

Gmail Autopilot hoax

On April Fools' Day 2009, Google introduced a service called Gmail Autopilot by CADIE.
According to Google, the service purported to automatically read and respond to emails for the
user. It appeared to work by analyzing messages for the emotions involved in writing the
message and either providing advice to the user, or automatically responding to the message.

Code changes
Gmail's JavaScript front-end was rewritten in late summer and early fall of 2007 and was
released to users starting on October 29, 2007. The new version had a redesigned contacts
section; quick contacts box and chat popup, which were added to names in the message list as
well as the contact list. The contacts application is integrated into other Google services, such
as Google Docs. Users granted access to the new version were given a link at the top-right
corner which read "Newer Version". As of December 2007, most new registrations in English
(US) along with most pre-existing accounts are given the new interface by default when
supported. There remains the option to downgrade via a link labeled "Older Version".

These coding changes mean that only users of Internet Explorer 7, Firefox 2, Google
Chrome and Safari 3.0 (or more recent versions) can fully use the new code. Internet Explorer
5.5+, Netscape 7.1+, Mozilla 1.4+, Firefox 0.8, Safari 1.3 and some other browsers will give
limited functionality. Other browsers may be redirected to the basic-HTML-only version of
Gmail.

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 During the week of January 18, 2008, Google released an update that changed the way
Gmail loads JavaScript. This caused the failure of some third-party extensions. n December 12,
2008, Gmail added support for faster PDF viewing within the browser.

Criticisms
Privacy

Google automatically scans e-mails to add context-sensitive advertisements to them.

Privacy advocates raised concerns that the plan involved scanning their personal, assumed
private, e-mails, and that this was a security problem. Allowing e-mail content to be read, even
by a computer, raises the risk that the expectation of privacy in e-mail will be reduced.
Furthermore, e-mail that non-subscribers choose to send to Gmail accounts is scanned by Gmail
as well and these senders did not agree to Gmail's terms of service or privacy policy. Google can
change its privacy policy unilaterally and Google is technically able to cross-reference cookies
across its information-rich product line to make dossiers on individuals. However, most e-mail
systems make use of server-side content scanning in order to check for spam.

Privacy-advocates also regard the lack of disclosed data retention and correlation
policies as problematic. Google has the ability to combine information contained in a person's
e-mails with information about their Internet searches. Google has not confirmed how long
such information would be kept and how it could be used. One of the concerns is that it could
be of interest to law enforcement agencies. More than 30 privacy and civil liberties
organizations have urged Google to suspend Gmail service until these issues are resolved.

Technical issues

Gmail does not allow users to send or receive executable files or archives containing
executable files if it recognizes the file extension as one used for executable files or archives.

Tech-savvy users who are not prone to casual errors report loss of random messages in
random amounts.

Gmail has been unavailable on several occasions. On February 24, 2009, the Gmail
service was offline for 2.5 hours, preventing millions of users from accessing their accounts.
People who rely entirely on Gmail for business purposes complained about these outages.

Gmail only sorts e-mail in conversations (or "threading"), which is a problem for large
conversations. For example, if a user sends a query to a large group of people, all of the
responses are stored in a single conversation that is impossible to break apart. There is no way
to search for responses from one user without getting the entire conversation. Archiving,
labeling and some other special operations on just one part of a conversation are not possible.

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Auto save
Gmail is unique in that a user's newly composed email or existing email which is being
edited is automatically saved approximately every minute to the account's "Drafts" folder.
Although this feature contributes to the reliability of the service, some users complain that the
auto save feature causes visible and noticeable interruptions in the flow of typing and is not
customizable in any way.

Gmail in Competitions
Why should?

Technologies like offline support, multiple inbox etc.

Initiators in many technologies that is now followed by others.
Cool and easy to use themes.
Indic languages support.

Why shouldn’t?

Some technologic lacks featured here.

Newer version of Gmail crashes easily.

My Verdict to Gmail
I used it, using it and will use it. I’m happy that Google is rapidly developing Gmail, but
still not serious. I love the way Google works here. Though I’m using yahoo because its tabbed
browsing, AOL because its access to Gmail and yahoo mail but I love Gmail because yahoo and
AOL doesn’t give me offline access nor give me multiple inboxes nor cool themes and probably
every month they come with something new and really cool thing. They have fun, innovation
and user friendliness. Hats off Gmail!

My ratings to Gmail: 4/5

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Google’s home ground: searches

Google search
Search, of course, is what Google is mostly about. Evolved out of their original research
paper, The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hyper textual Web Search Engine
(http://tinyurl.com/y98mbt), the Google search engine is a distributed network of hundreds of
thousands of computers that take about half a second to process a search query. Yes, one half
of one second! For an overview of the technology, go to
www.google.com/corporate/tech.html.

Building on this breakthrough approach to searching the Web, Google search has grown
into a plethora of specialized services that enables people to search the Web in so many
different useful ways. In this chapter we look at the various ways you can Google the Web for
information.

Functionality
The Google search engine has many intuitive features making it more functional. This
could have played a role in making it as popular as it is today. Google is one of the top ten
most-visited websites today. Some of its features include a definition link for most searches
including dictionary words, a list of how many results you got on your search, links to other
searches (e.g. you misspelled something, it gives you a link to the search results had you typed
in the correct search), and many more. It is unknown whether functionality, speed, or luck
brought it its peak status.

"I'm Feeling Lucky"

Google's homepage includes a button labeled "I'm Feeling Lucky". When a user clicks on
the button the user will be taken directly to the first search result, bypassing the search engine
results page. The thought is that, if a user is "feeling lucky", the search engine will return the
perfect match the first time without having to page through the search results.

According to a study by Tom Chavez of "Rapt", this feature costs Google $110 million a
year as 1% of all searches use this feature and bypass all advertising

Basic search
Searching is easy—just type in the search term(s) and hit [Enter] or click the Google
Search button. However, choosing the right search term is important in getting the most
relevant results. If the results are too broad you can use a number of basic and advanced search
operators to refine your results. You may use up to 32 keywords in your search term, which in

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practice should be more than enough to handle even the most complex searches. The following
list gives you examples of the basic search operators:

Vacation shimla

Lists all the sites with the words vacation and Shimla. Note that Google automatically
searches for all the words in your search term. Also, searches are not case-sensitive.

vacation shimla OR ooty

Lists all sites with the words “vacation” and “Shimla”, or “vacation” and “Ooty”, or
“vacation” and “Shimla” and “Ooty”. Note that the OR operator should be in capitals, that is, if
either “o” or “r” are in lowercase, Google will treat it like an ordinary word. Instead of using the
word OR, you can also use the vertical bar symbol |. Thus, the above search term can also be
entered as “vacation shimla | ooty”.

“freedom at midnight”

A search term enclosed in quotes indicates that the search should be for the entire
phrase. Thus, in the above example the result will show all the sites with the exact phrase
“freedom at midnight”. This can be particularly useful when you are searching for proper
names, snippets of famous quotes, song lyrics, and such.

Caricatures where sketches +are not permitted

By default, Google ignores common words like “where”, “how”, “are”, etc. If you want
to include a specific common word, use the plus sign before the word. Also, Google, by default,
will include spelling variations of the same keyword. Thus if your search keyword is “coloring
book”, the Google results will include both “coloring” and “colouring”. To search only for
“colouring”, include the plus sign: “+colouring book”. Make sure there is a space before the sign
and no space between the plus sign and the word you want included in your search results.

Caricatures -sketches

If you want to exclude a particular word from your search results, you can use the minus
sign. Like the plus sign, make sure there is a space before the sign and no space between it and
the word you want excluded. These basic search operators can also be combined in one or
more ways to give you refined, highly focused results for your search. For example, consider the
search term:

Job vacancy erp senior “project manager” -junior manufacturing OR Automotive

This search term will search for sites:

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 With the words job AND vacancy AND erp AND senior
With the phrase “project manager”
Without the word junior
With the word manufacturing OR automotive OR both

To see the difference between this search and a simple keyword search, compare it with
the undifferentiated search term “job vacancy erp senior project manager manufacturing
automotive”. One additional feature of Google search is automatic word stemming technology.
That is, when searching for a keyword, not only is the exact word searched for, but also words
with related meanings. For example a search for “cardiac arrest” will also includes results with
“heart attack”! In addition, Google is aware of plurals and such, so if you search for “flowers”,
pages with just “flower” in them will show up too.

The Anatomy of a Search Result

A Google search result is a complex rendering of information from multiple data stores
that is displayed in a quick and easy-to-understand format. Other than the complex formula
applied to rank the results, the results displayed will also vary according to the type of search
term. For example, if you search for “Windows Vista”, you will not only be able to see the most
relevant Web sites, you will also be shown the latest news clippings. This can become very
useful especially when you are searching for information related to current affairs. In addition,
Google displays advertisements—Google AdWords, which closely match your keywords.

However if you search for the term “streptomycin”, Google recognizes that you are
searching for information on medicine, and provides you with relevant additional filters to help
you refine your results. This feature is part of the Google Co-op service.

Similarly, depending on the search terms, you may see relevant supplemental results
based on additional information available, your personalized search settings, or subscription to
other Google services. For example, searching for a book author may show up additional results
from Google Books Search Google also stores copies of many Web pages in a temporary cache,
which becomes useful when the main site is no longer available or has gone temporarily offline.
These will appear beneath the main results as links. In addition to the cache, if possible, the
result will also show a link to pages that are similar to the result. And if you are using Firefox
and the Google Notebook extension, you will also see a link called “Note this”. Clicking that link
will create an entry in Google Notebook with a link to the site in the result.

Google Power Search

The real power of searching with Google comes when you start using the advanced
search operators. There are two ways you can use Google advanced search options. One is
through the Google

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 Advanced Search page (click on the Advanced Search link next to the Google search box,
go directly to www.google.com/ advanced_search, or by using the operators themselves. The
decision to use to the advanced search page or the operators directly will depend on the
complexity of your search. If your have a complex search query it is generally easier to use the
Advanced Search page. However if you want to filter your searches on only one or two
parameters, using the search operators directly may be easier.

Most of the options in this page are self-explanatory. A couple needs some clarification.
One is the Usage Rights filter. This enables you to restrict your searches for content that have
specific rights associated with them. For example, if you are looking for content that you can
use, share and modify commercially, this filter will enable you to find sites that implicitly allow
you to do so. The second is the SafeSearch filter. This will filter out any results with adult
content. However, it is better to specify this setting through the Preferences page, as Web
searches tend not to be filtered for adult content even with SafeSearch filtering turned on. To
learn how to configure your Google search preferences, . Many of the options on the advanced
search page are available as operators that can be used independently and are applicable to
other search services like image search and product search (Froogle) too. These and other
advanced search operators are explained here:

Advanced Topic Search

The advanced search page also links you to various specialized topic specific searches.
These can be very useful when you want to search for content within a single area of interest.
The searches are optimized for the specific topic area and search queries on these pages will
return results that are drawn exclusively from the sites that are considered part of this topic.

Special Operators
Other than search-related operators, Google also provides you with a quick and easy
way to find definitions and meanings of words, and do basic mathematical calculations and
conversions, using the search box.

This table shows you how to use power search. (Contains search tools for Google search
and blog search)

Operator Meaning Example

~ Synonym and glossary search ~job ~vacancy "project manager"
site: Search only within the site. tsunami site:timesofindia.com
number..number Search within a range of numbers Mahatma Gandhi 1900..1950
filetype:ORext: Search for specified file types only Website security filetype:odt
link: Searches for pages that point to the link: thinkdigit.com
specified URL
Books Search the full text of books books Atticus finch

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cache: Show the cached version of a Web Cache:thinkdigit.com
site.
info:orid: Show information related to a Website nfo:thinkdigit.com
or page
related: Show sites that are similar or related related:thinkdigit.com
to the specified URL
allinanchor: Show pages with text that appear in allinanchor:boot devices
the link or anchor text
inanchor: Show pages for the given search terms red hat linux inanchor:dual-boot
and the anchor text
allintext: Show pages only with the specified allintext:camping equipment hire
keywords himalayas
Intext Show pages where the given search narayanamurthy intext:retirement
term includes the specified keywords.
allintitle: Show pages where all search keywords allintitle:free memory diagnostic
appears in the title
intitle: Show pages with both the search linux intitle:memory
terms for pages and title text
allinurl: Show pages where the URL contain all allinurl:linux installation
the words
inurl: Show Web pages where the search Red hat inurl:linux inurl:installation
term and the URL text are both
present
define :ordefine Shows definitions of a word define: onomatopoeia
+-*/ Arithmetic operators 10+12*5/7-1
% of percentage of 45% of 250
^ or ** To the power of 2^8
Old units in new Conversion from one unit to another 300 dollars in Indian rupees
units
stock: Show stock information for the given stock:infy
ticker symbol
movie: Show reviews and show times for movie: the last king of Scotland
given movie`
weather Weather information weather new York
inblogtitle: Search in the title of the blog inblogtitle”Ricky martin"
inpostauthor: Search blogs where the author's name Linux inpostsauthor: Linus Torvalds
is as given
blogurl: Search blogs at this URL Beatles blogurl: wordpress.com
inauthor: Show books with the specified author the last juror inauthor:Grisham
and containing the search term
inpublisher: Show books with the specified JSP 2.0 inpublisher: Mc grawhill
publisher
isbn: Show book with the ISBN number isbn:0802131255

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 specified
date: Show books published within the date:1950-2000
given date range

Google image search

If you want to search for images, a quick and efficient way is to use Google Image
search. Click on the Images link above the search box on the google.com (or google.co.in)
homepage to take you to the image search home page. Alternatively, type in your search term
in the search box and click on the Images link from the homepage.

Searches are similar to Web search, where you specify the search keywords for the
images you want to find. Image search will display all results where the search term is found in
the name of the image file. For example, typing in “moto razr” (without the quotes) will display
images of Motorola’s RAZR cell phone.

Each search result will have a thumbnail of the image, the name of the image file, its size
in pixels and kilobytes, and the Web address where the image was found. In some cases, where
more than one image can be found on the same site, an addition al link that says “More results
from (Website name)” will be displayed below the search result.

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Game on Google: image labeler
Google Image Labeler is a feature, in the form of a game, of Google Image Search that
allows the user to label random images to help improve the quality of Google's image search
results.

History

On August 31, 2006 Google launched this service, as a beta. Luis von Ahn developed the
ESP Game. a game in which two people are simultaneously given an image, with no way to
communicate, other than knowing the matching label for each picture or the pass signal. The
ESP Game has been licensed by Google in the form of the Google Image Labeler.

Players have noticed various subtle changes in the game over time. In the earliest
months, through about November, 2006, you could see your partner's guesses during play by
mousing over the image. When the "congenita abuse" started (see below) you could see if your
partner was using those terms, while the game was underway. The game was changed so that
only at the end of the game could you click "see partner's guesses" and learn what he or she
had typed. "Congenita abuse" was finally stopped by changes in the structure of the game in
Feb. 2007 (see below). During the first few months of 2007 regular players grew to recognize a
group of images that signified a "robot" partner, always with the same labels in the same order.
This appears to have changed as of about March 13, 2007. Suddenly most of the images seen
are brand new, and the older images come with extensive off-limits lists.

As of May 4, 2007 there have been fundamental and substantial changes made to the
game. Instead of 90 seconds, players now have 2 minutes. Instead of 100 points per image, the
score is varied to reward higher specificity. "Man" might get 50 points whereas "Bill Gates"
might get 140 points. On August 7, 2007 another change was made. Instead of simply showing
the point values of each match as the match occurs, the value of each match is shown next to
the matching word at the end of the game. This makes it much easier to see the exact value of
specific versus general labeling. A further change was observed on October 15, 2007. The new
version was put into place and then seems to have been withdrawn. In the new version you see
only the image you are labeling, whereas in the old version the images are collected in the
lower part of the screen as you play. Other changes are subtle, for example the score is in green
letters in the new version and red in the old. The most significant change is that the clock
freezes during the image change, and that time used to be essentially subtracted from the two
minutes of play. The changes appear to have gone into full effect on October 18, 2007.

Rules
The user will be randomly paired with a partner who is online and using the feature.
Users can be registered players who accumulate a total score over all games played, or guests

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who just play for one game at a time. Note that players come from around the world, some
practicing their English, and both American and British English will be encountered (soccer vs.
football). When an uneven number of players are online, a player will play against a
prerecorded set of words.

The current rules follow. For changes in the rules, see the history section. Over a 2
minute period, the user and his/her partner will be shown the same set of images and asked to
provide as many labels as possible to describe each image you see. When the user's label
matches the partner's label, both will earn points and move on to the next image until time
runs out. It is possible to pass on an image but both users must agree to do this. The score is
variable from 50 to 150 depending on the specificity of the answer. The 150 score is rare but
140 points will be awarded for a name or specific word, even if the word is spelled out in the
image. Terms with low specificity like "trees" or "man" earn only 50 points. There has never
been any screening for correctness, so that if both players type "Jupiter" for an image of Saturn,
they would presumably both get 140 points.

Labels that have been agreed on by previous users may show on an "off limits" list and
cannot be used in that round. Some players think that the game staggers appearance of the
images, and that sometimes it takes the first words typed by one player to form an "off limits"
list for the other player. In other words, the off limits words may be unilateral, asymmetrical.
This would explain the rather frequent circumstance when it seems a partner can't think of
words like "car," "bird," or "girl." Very rarely, at the end of the match it becomes obvious that
one image was different for the two players. Perhaps this is simply an error, or perhaps it is a
test to see how quickly people will pass when their descriptions do not match, but it may also
be a mechanism implemented to view cheaters, if the words for the different images are
similar. At times, one user's computer will fail to load a new image, or continue to display the
previous image shown. Times likes these also call for a mutual "pass" on the part of both
players.

End of game

After the 120 second time expires, the game is over. The user can see the user name of
the partner for the first time, their score for the game (with which both are credited) and their
individual cumulative score to date. These are compared to the daily high scores for teams and
the all-time individual high scores. Google is betting on users' competitiveness to rack up high
scores to swell the number of images ranked.

The game's end screen also shows all the images presented during the game along with
the list of labels guessed by the other player. The images themselves then link to the websites

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where those images were found and can be explored for more information and to satisfy
curiosity.

Benefits to Google

The game is not designed simply for fun. Though the feature is enjoyable for the users, it
is also a clever way for Google to ensure that its keywords are matched to correct images. Each
matched word will help Google to build an accurate database used when using the Google
Image Search.

Without human tagging of images, Google Images search has in the past relied on the
context of the image. For example, a photo that is captioned "Portrait of Bill Gates" might have
"Bill Gates" associated as a possible search term. The Google Image Labeler relies on humans
that tag the meaning or content of the image, rather than its context looking on at where the
image was used. By storing more information about the image, Google stores more possible
avenues of discovering the image in response to a user's search.

Issues and Problems

Additional Rules
Some users complain that the rules are difficult to decipher. Nowhere is it stated, for
example, that a player should press Return after typing a label.
Beginners often make the mistake of typing several terms into the first box, not realizing
that those words are then all considered, together, as a phrase.
The "pass" option is also not explained; although it means that the player does not want
to rate a word, some players have thought that this button is to be pressed after making a
guess. Either of these mistakes can easily result in a zero score.
While these rules are not explained on the playing screen, some are in fact explained on
the Help Page
Some images may fail to load, or will load very slowly, using time off the clock
Experienced users type the letter "x" to avoid simply passing (and scoring zero) when
this happens. Note that "x" (nor any other word) will not work for two successive images so
other terms ("blank" or "none") could also be utilized, since sometimes many images do not
load.
Only six labels appear on the screen during a round, if more are added some scroll off
the top. Observation shows that all of these labels count, and with a fast partner you can
see nine or ten words for one image. Also, after hitting "Pass" you will no longer see the
count of your partner's labels. If you continue to type, you can get a match on words your

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 partner had already typed when you passed. If your partner types a matching word after
you pass, it will not count.
Scores are typically low when several of the images presented have a number of "off
limits" tags. In some cases, the "off limits" tags are quite extensive or exhaustive, making it
difficult for both partners to create a novel tag that matches. This tends to use time and
reduce the total score.

Google for researchers: Google patent search

Google Patents is a search engine from Google that indexes patents from the United
States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), which are taken from the original USPTO
database (which is in the public domain). All 7 million patents have been put in the database.
Optical character recognition (OCR) has been performed on the pages to make them
searchable. This searchability includes all US patents.

The service was launched on December 14, 2006. Google says it uses "the same
technology as that underlying “Google Books". allowing scrolling through pages, and zooming in
on areas. The images are saveable as PNG files but can be converted with a graphics program to
TIFF files which can be OCRed.

Review and criticisms

The indexing is not perfect. Reportedly, as of 14 December, not all IBM patents were
locatable, as searching for IBM patents retrieved only 1,197 results on Google Patents, but that
IBM received nearly 3,000 patents in 2005 alone.

Unlike Google Patents, Espacenet includes US patent applications as well as granted

patents. In terms of response time however, the performance of Google Patents is considered
to be very good.

Code repository: Google Code search

Google Code Search is a free beta product from Google which debuted in Google Labs
on October 5, 2006 allowing web users to search for open-source code on the Internet.

Features include the ability to search using operators. These are lang:, package:, license:
and file:.

The code available for searching is in various formats including tar.gz, .tar.bz2, .tar, and
.zip, CVS and Subversion repositories as well as snippets from HTML pages such as Wikipedia
itself.

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 The service is designed to be intuitive in manner and conduct. The user can use regular
expressions (search for patterns of words rather than keywords) to search for more precise
results. Searches can be restricted by language, license, or filename, and the user can trace the
link right back to its originating package and Web page. Google has also released the API for
Code Search, which utilises Google’s GDATA API format
(http://code.google.com/apis/gdata/index.html).

One important thing to note is that Google Code Search is different from Google Search
(the standard search engine), and therefore, the results of Code Search results are not
integrated into the main Google index.

How To Search

The Code Search interface is similar to the standard Google search page. However, the
first thing anyone would notice is the set of syntax instructions and examples given right under
the search function.

1. Regexp—a regular expression is meant to search for a pattern of words rather than a set
of keywords. For example, “hello, \world”. When this is used, the search engine opens up the
result page that displays code corresponding to that requirement.
2. Exact string—to search for an exact string, enclose the search string within double
quotes. For example, “hello world”
3. file:regexp—this searches only in files or directories matching the regular expression.
4. package:regexp—this searches for packages containing the specified expression. This
presents a list of archives in the ZIP or TAR formats, for example.
5. lang:regexp—this crawls through the repositories for code written in the specified
language. For example, you could use the search string “lang:c++ hello world”.
6. license:regexp—this searches for code available under a particular license. To cite an
example, the search string “license:bsd hello world” gets you all code licensed under the BSD
license,containing the words “hello” and/or “world”.

Advanced Code Search

The Advanced Code Search page is for more specific search queries. For instance, it
provides a list of the programming languages that correspond to your search requirement. Your
results will turn up even if the language you’re looking for is not listed just select “any
language.”

The Benefits of Code Search

Code Search allows coders to refer to a number of sources, compare their own code or
to get ideas on how to tackle a particular issue. According to programmers, this removes

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roadblocks that existed earlier, since it provides different ways of approaching a particular
programming problem. Code Search could also allow code auditors to warn people much
sooner of vulnerabilities in a program. A central argument for open source software has been
that security is enhanced by more people looking at the available code. Another probable and
important use for Google Code Search is that it allows developers to do searches for their own
code and see where it is being used. A positive implication is that it may also help to combat
plagiarism and software license use violations.

Google has a mechanism to tackle illegal postings and plagiarism. The moment it is
notified of fraud, it initiates an inquiry, and if proven true, the entry is removed from the index.

Google’s online library: Book Search

Google Book Search is a tool from Google that searches the full text of books that
Google scans, converts to text using optical character recognition, and stores in its digital
database. The service was formerly known as Google Print when it was introduced at the
Frankfurt Book Fair in October 2004. When relevant to a user's keyword search, up to three
results from the Google Book Search index are displayed above search results in the Google
Web Search service (google.com). A user may also search just for books at the dedicated
Google Book Search service. Clicking a result from Google Book Search opens an interface in
which the user may view pages from the book as well as content-related advertisements and
links to the publisher's website and booksellers. Through a variety of access limitations and
security measures, some based on user-tracking; Google limits the number of viewable pages
and attempts to prevent page printing and text copying of material under copyright.

The Google Book Search service remains in a beta stage but the underlying database
continues to grow. Google Book Search allows public-domain works and other out-of-copyright
material to be downloaded in PDF format. For users outside the United States, though, Google
must be sure that the work in question is indeed out of copyright under local laws. According to
a member of the Google Book Search Support Team, "Since whether a book is in the public
domain can often be a tricky legal question, we err on the side of caution and display at most a
few snippets until we have determined that the book has entered the public domain.”

Google for students: Google scholar

Google Scholar is a freely-accessible Web search engine that indexes the full text of
scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines. Released in beta in
November 2004, the Google Scholar index includes most peer-reviewed online journals of the
world's largest scientific publishers. It is similar in function to the freely available Scirus from
Elsevier, CiteSeer, and getCITED. It is also similar to the subscription-based tools, Elsevier's

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Scopus and Thomson ISI's Web of Science. Google Scholar nonetheless claims to cover more
websites, journal sources and languages.

Its advertising slogan — "Stand on the shoulders of giants" — is a nod to the scholars
who have contributed to their fields over the centuries, providing the foundation for new
intellectual achievements.

Features

Google Scholar allows users to search for digital or physical copies of articles, whether
they be online or in libraries.

Using its "group of" feature, it shows the various available links to the journal article. In
the 2005 version, this feature provided a link both to subscription-access versions of the article
and to free full text versions of articles; for most of 2006, it provided links to only the official
versions. As of December 2006, it provides access to both published versions and on major
open access repositories, but does still not cover individual university pages; access to such self-
archived non-subscription versions is now provided by a link to Google, where one can find
such open access articles.

Through its "cited by" feature, Google Scholar provides access to abstracts of articles
that have cited the article being viewed. It is this feature in particular that provides the citation
indexing previously only found in Scopus and Web of Knowledge. Through its "Related articles"
feature, Google Scholar presents a list of closely related articles, ranked primarily by how
similar these articles are to the original result, but also taking into account the relevance of
each paper.

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Google the real technology behind

PageRank

Mathematical PageRanks (out of 100) for a simple network (PageRanks reported by Google are rescaled logarithmically).
Page C has a higher PageRank than Page E, even though it has fewer links to it: the link it has is much higher valued. A web
surfer who

PageRank is a link analysis algorithm used by the Google Internet search engine that
assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the
World Wide Web, with the purpose of "measuring" its relative importance within the set. The
algorithm may be applied to any collection of entities with reciprocal quotations and
references. The numerical weight that it assigns to any given element E is also called the
PageRank of E and denoted by PR(E).

The name "PageRank" is a trademark of Google, and the PageRank process has been
patented (U.S. patent 6,285,999 ). However, the patent is assigned to Stanford University and
not to Google. Google has exclusive license rights on the patent from Stanford University. The
university received 1.8 million shares of Google in exchange for use of the patent; the shares
were sold in 2005 for $336 million.

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How PageRank works?

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link
structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from
page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer
volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes
cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other
pages "important".

In other words, a PageRank results from a "ballot" among all the other pages on the
World Wide Web about how important a page is. A hyperlink to a page counts as a vote of
support. The PageRank of a page is defined recursively and depends on the number and
PageRank metric of all pages that link to it ("incoming links"). A page that is linked to by many
pages with high PageRank receives a high rank itself. If there are no links to a web page there is
no support for that page.

Google assigns a numeric weighting from 0-10 for each webpage on the Internet; this
PageRank denotes a site’s importance in the eyes of Google. The PageRank is derived from a
theoretical probability value on a logarithmic scale like the Richter Scale. The PageRank of a
particular page is roughly based upon the quantity of inbound links as well as the PageRank of
the pages providing the links. It is known that other factors, e.g. relevance of search words on
the page and actual visits to the page reported by the Google toolbar also influence the
PageRank. In order to prevent manipulation, spoofing and Spamdexing, Google provides no
specific details about how other factors influence PageRank

Numerous academic papers concerning PageRank have been published since Page
and Brin's original paper. In practice, the PageRank concept has proven to be vulnerable to
manipulation, and extensive research has been devoted to identifying falsely inflated PageRank
and ways to ignore links from documents with falsely inflated PageRank.

Other link-based ranking algorithms for Web pages include the HITS algorithm invented
by Jon Kleinberg (used by Teoma and now Ask.com), the IBM CLEVER project, and the
TrustRank algorithm.

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Algorithm

Simplified algorithm

How PageRank Works

Assume a small universe of four web pages: A, B, C and D. The initial approximation
of PageRank would be evenly divided between these four documents. Hence, each document
would begin with an estimated PageRank of 0.25.

In the original form of PageRank initial values were simply 1. This meant that the
sum of all pages was the total number of pages on the web. Later versions of PageRank (see the
below formulas) would assume a probability distribution between 0 and 1. Here we're going to
simply use a probability distribution hence the initial value of 0.25.

If pages B, C, and D each only link toA, they would each confer 0.25 PageRank to A.
All PageRank PR( )in this simplistic system would thus gather to A because all links would be
pointing to A.

This is 0.75.

Again, suppose page B also has a link to page C, and page D has links to all three
pages. The value of the link-votes is divided among all the outbound links on a page. Thus,

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page B gives a vote worth 0.125 to page A and a vote worth 0.125 to page C. Only one third
of D's PageRank is counted for A's PageRank (approximately 0.083).

In other words, the PageRank conferred by an outbound link L( ) is equal to the

document's own PageRank score divided by the normalized number of outbound links (it is
assumed that links to specific URLs only count once per document).

In the general case, the PageRank value for any page u can be expressed as:

i.e. the PageRank value for a page u is dependent on the PageRank values for each
page v out of the set Bu (this set contains all pages linking to page u), divided by the
number L(v) of links from page v.

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Google File System
Google File System (GFS) is a proprietary distributed file system developed by Google
Inc. for its own use. It is designed to provide efficient, reliable access to data using large clusters
of commodity hardware.

Design

GFS is optimized for Google's core data storage and usage needs (primarily the search
engine), which can generate enormous amounts of data that needs to be retained;[2] Google
File System grew out of an earlier Google effort, "BigFiles", developed by Larry Page and Sergey
Brin in the early days of Google, while it was still located in Stanford. Files are divided into
chunks of 64 megabytes, which are only extremely rarely overwritten, or shrunk; files are
usually appended to or read. It is also designed and optimized to run on Google's computing
clusters, the nodes of which consist of cheap, "commodity" computers, which means
precautions must be taken against the high failure rate of individual nodes and the subsequent
data loss. Other design decisions select for high data throughputs, even when it comes at the
cost of latency.

The nodes are divided into two types: one Master node and a large number of
Chunkservers. Chunkservers store the data files, with each individual file broken up into fixed
size chunks (hence the name) of about 64 megabytes. similar to clusters or sectors in regular
file systems. Each chunk is assigned a unique 64-bit label, and logical mappings of files to
constituent chunks are maintained. Each chunk is replicated several times throughout the
network, with the minimum being three, but even more for files that have high demand or
need more redundancy.

The Master server doesn't usually store the actual chunks, but rather all the metadata
associated with the chunks, such as the tables mapping the 64-bit labels to chunk locations and
the files they make up, the locations of the copies of the chunks, what processes are reading or
writing to a particular chunk, or taking a "snapshot" of the chunk pursuant to replicating it
(usually at the instigation of the Master server, when, due to node failures, the number of
copies of a chunk has fallen beneath the set number). All this metadata is kept current by the
Master server periodically receiving updates from each chunk server ("Heart-beat messages").

Permissions for modifications are handled by a system of time-limited, expiring "leases",

where the Master server grants permission to a process for a finite period of time during which
no other process will be granted permission by the Master server to modify the chunk. The
modified chunkserver, which is always the primary chunk holder, then propagates the changes
to the chunkservers with the backup copies. The changes are not saved until all chunkservers
acknowledge, thus guaranteeing the completion and atomicity of the operation.

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 Programs access the chunks by first querying the Master server for the locations of the
desired chunks; if the chunks are not being operated on (if there are no outstanding leases), the
Master replies with the locations, and the program then contacts and receives the data from
the chunkserver directly (similar to Kazaa and its supernodes).

As opposed to many filesystems, GFS is not implemented in the kernel of an operating

system, but is instead provided as a user space library.

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From where Google earns?
AdSense
AdSense is an advertisement application run by Google. Website owners can
enroll in this program to enable text, image, and more recently, video advertisements
on their websites. These advertisements are administered by Google and generate
revenue on either a per-click or per-impression basis. Google beta tested a cost-per-
action service, but discontinued it in October 2008 in favor of a DoubleClick offering
(also owned by Google).

Types

AdSense for Feeds

In May 2005, Google announced a limited-participation beta version of AdSense for
Feeds, a version of AdSense that runs on RSS and Atom feeds that have more than 100 active
subscribers. According to the Official Google Blog, "advertisers have their ads placed in the
most appropriate feed articles; publishers are paid for their original content; readers see
relevant advertising—and in the long run, more quality feeds to choose from."

AdSense for search

A companion to the regular AdSense program, AdSense for search, allows website
owners to place Google search boxes on their websites. When a user searches the Internet or
the website with the search box, Google shares any advertising revenue it makes from those
searches with the website owner. However the publisher is paid only if the advertisements on
the page are clicked: AdSense does not pay publishers for mere searches.

How AdSense works

The webmaster inserts the AdSense JavaScript code into a webpage.
Each time this page is visited, the JavaScript code creates an IFrame with
a src attribute set to the page's URL.
For contextual advertisements, Google's servers use a cache of the page
to determine a set of high-value keywords. If keywords have been cached already,
advertisements are served for those keywords based on the AdWords bidding
system. (More details are described in the AdSense patent.)
For site-targeted advertisements, the advertiser chooses the page(s) on
which to display advertisements, and pays based on cost per mille (CPM), or the
price advertisers choose to pay for every thousand advertisements displayed.
For referrals, Google adds money to the advertiser's account when
visitors either download the referred software or subscribe to the referred service.
The referral program was retired in August 2008.

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 For referrals, Google adds money to the advertiser's account when
visitors either download the referred software or subscribe to the referred service.
The referral program was retired in August 2008.
Because the JavaScript is sent to the Web browser when the page is
requested, it is possible for other website owners to copy the JavaScript code into
their own webpages. To protect against this type of fraud, AdSense customers can
specify the pages on which advertisements should be shown. AdSense then ignores
clicks from pages other than those specified.

AdWords
AdWords is Google's flagship advertising product and main source of revenue
($16.4 billion in 2007). AdWords offers pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, and site-targeted
advertising for both text and banner ads. The AdWords program includes local, national, and
international distribution. Google's text advertisements are short, consisting of one title line
and two content text lines. Image ads can be one of several different Interactive Advertising
Bureau (IAB) standard sizes.

Technology behind AdWords

The AdWords system was initially implemented on top of the MySQL database
engine. After the system had been launched, management decided to use a commercial
database (Oracle) instead. As is typical of applications simultaneously written and tuned for one
database, and ported to another, the system became much slower, so eventually it was
returned to MySQL.

Conclusion
Mails, various types of searches, maps, connectivity with friends with one of the sleek
and beautiful technologies and a good thing is that everything is free-to use and to develop on
your likes. What else does anyone want? This is the Google world where they say “don’t be
evil”. And set example how not to be evil.

Bibliography
M www.google.com/aboutus
M Ankithtyagrajan-gdeveloper.blogspot.com
M www.thinkdigit.com
M www.pcworld.com/news/google
M Fast track- the DIGIT supplement Dec-2006 and Jan-2007

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