Google Gears smooths path to Web-based applications for developers.

Everywhere you look, it seems as if more and more core applications are moving from the desktop to the Web, but for all the advantages of Web applications, this emerging class of software carries a major liability when compared with its desktop-bound brethren: Without the Web, there's no application.

Enter Google Gears, a new tool for adding offline capabilities to Web applications from Google, the 800-pound gorilla of the Web application space.

eWEEK Labs tested the initial beta of Google Gears that the search company released at its Developer's Day in late May, and we see a lot of promise in the tool for helping to dissolve the offline access dilemma that threatens to retard the growth of Web-based applications.

For instance, as anyone who relies on Web applications such as those from Google or popular products such as Zimbra can attest, it's rather frustrating to sit on a long train ride without any access to your online applications while the passenger next to you happily works away on his or her offline versions of Office, Outlook or Lotus Domino.

What's more, beyond life's unavoidable but anticipated separations from the Web, there's the whole problem of unexpected disconnections. Nearly all users have experienced the situation of entering information into an online application, only to lose everything when their network connection drops out.

Google Gears runs as a browser plug-in and is easy for users to install on the browsers and platforms that Gears currently supports—namely, Internet Explorer and Firefox on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.

However, Google Gears is first and foremost a developer play, as the Web application developer—for the offline capabilities to work—has to enable this functionality using the Google Gears API.

Source: pcmag.com

Powerset is being extremely careful about showing the public how their search engine works until they are ready. After some initial hype (see our posts here, here and here), the company pretty much shut its doors to the press. I did finally get in to see a demo, and was impressed. But the meeting was off-record and we are waiting for a green light to start writing more about the demo and other background information.

For those of you unfamiliar with Powerset, it is a new, well funded search engine that aims to allow users to write their queries in natural language. In a blog post in October 2006, CEO Barney Pell wrote out some of the ideas driving the company.

A couple of days ago the company showed a sample query and result on their blog. Normally boring stuff, but a lot of people are dying to get more information on the product. We've copied the screen shot above.

The query is "politicians who died in office." This is a much better query that previous examples like "books by children" v. "books for children." Those queries can be handled fairly well by Google by simply putting quotes around the query. But for "politicians who died in office" the results on Google won't be as good. Context is required: Google has only six results for the query in quotes, and without quotes it loses its meaning and the results aren't useful (notice the Powerset blog is the fourth result). The Powerset results are relevant and useful.

Hand picking a query here and there and showing a screen shot of results isn’t the same as killing Google. But it does show that Powerset has the potential of being extremely useful by attacking search from a different angle. I look forward to their launch.

Source: Techcrunch.com

In this paper we study the trade-offs in designing efficient caching systems for Web search engines. We explore the impact of different approaches, such as static vs. dynamic caching, and caching query results vs. caching posting lists. Using a query log spanning a whole year we explore the limitations of caching and we demonstrate that caching posting lists can achieve higher hit rates than caching query answers. We propose a new algorithm for static caching of posting lists, which outperforms previous methods. We also study the problem of finding the optimal way to split the static cache between answers and posting lists. Finally, we measure how the changes in the query log affect the effectiveness of static caching, given our observation that the distribution of the queries changes slowly over time. Our results and observations are applicable to different levels of the data-access hierarchy, for instance, for a memory/disk layer or a broker/remote server layer.

Source: 30th Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference

Webmaster Dennis Hwang dashes off those fanciful logos--and helps keep the brand fresh

Dennis Hwang's drawings are viewed by nearly 180 million people a day. He's one of the most important graphic designers in the business world. And yet the mild-mannered 29-year-old keeps a low profile--and devotes only a small fraction of his time to his art.

Hwang is the Google doodler, the man whose hand-drawn alterations of the search engine's logo commemorate holidays, artists' birthdays, and other random events that the company deems important. In June, 2004, a French astronomer sent Hwang an e-mail explaining that within 24 hours Venus would pass in front of the sun--the first time it had happened in 122 years. Quickly, Hwang mocked up a version of the Google logo where the second "O" had become a sun with a black spot on it representing Venus. He showed the design to Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google's co-founders, who liked it. "We are a geeky company, so it was an easy sell," says Hwang. "Within a few hours, I had posted the doodle and we were alerting the world to this cool event."

A former art-computer science double-major at Stanford University, Hwang is also now Google's Webmaster. He devotes 80% to 90% of his time to managing the team of 30 people who maintain Google's Web pages in more than 100 languages. His doodles, about 50 a year, are dashed off using an electronic tablet that translates his scrawlings onto his screen.

Hwang's whimsical designs serve a serious business function. Google's multi-colored Google logo is just as important a branding device as Apple's apple. As Google balloons into a powerful and controversial tech behemoth, the doodles humanize the company. With their rough, hand-drawn look, they hark back to the company's experimental, nimble, intellectual, and fanciful startup legacy. "The doodles let Google wink at their audience," says Bill Gardner, founder of LogoLounge.com, a site that covers trends in corporate logo design.

Born in Knoxville, Tenn., Hwang also spent part of his youth living in a Seoul suburb. As a junior at Stanford in 2000, his residential adviser asked him to be an assistant Webmaster at a then-little-known search engine startup named Google. He started as a summer intern and then worked 40 hours a week his senior year while completing his undergraduate degree.

By that time, Google had already experimented with doodles. The first one was done by Brin and Page in 1999 when they left for the Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert. Hwang started doodling almost by accident. "It was simply because I was an art major in a very small company," he recalls. His first design honored Bastille Day in 2000.

To plan his doodles, Hwang meets quarterly with a team of vice-presidents and creative directors. People now expect a doodle on certain holidays, like Thanksgiving. "For others, we look at the calendar and muse about what is happening around the world, interesting events or birthdays of people who have contributed something significant." Once he drafts a doodle, he shows it to Page and Brin. "Holding up my mockups and then holding my breath while Larry and Sergey do their 'thumbs-up, thumbs-down' emperor thing is never boring," wrote Hwang on a Google blog. "I love the fact that my little niche within this company turned out to be something so cool and creative and, well, Google-y."

Hwang also gets many ideas from enthusiastic users like the French astronomer. In 2005 librarians around the country lobbied Hwang for a National Library Week doodle. After he created one, he received a big care package complete with a librarian action figure that shushed.

Some doodles draw strong responses. An early design for Thanksgiving featured an innocuous turkey raking leaves. But it drew vitriolic responses from Brazil, Australia, and other parts of the Southern Hemisphere from users who accused Hwang of being Northern Hemisphere-centric. "That one taught me to think more broadly," he said. Another logo, for Michelangelo's birthday, proved to be a little too risqué for some users. "A lot of businessmen were startled when they pulled up the home page in client meetings and there was the nude David."

The afterlives of his doodles form Hwang's favorite stories. In 2003 he wove the double helix into Google's logo to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the discovery of DNA. Recently, he met James Watson, one of the scientists who discovered DNA. "He asked me for a signed print of the Google DNA logo," says Hwang, his voice brimming with enthusiasm. "I couldn't believe it. My drawing had come full circle."

Source: Businessweek.com