Tagged: google

Show me the money!!


Since I’m now paying for hosting my website out of my own pocket, I figured there’s no harm in trying out the [[https://google.com/adsense/ | Google Adsense]] program. Hopefully the ads are not too distracting, and hopefully they don’t break anything in the site. If they do, let me know.

On the main page, the ads appear in the sidebar, since this page is usually long. For single posts, the ads appear beneath the comment form. I’ve tried to modify the backgrounds and borders so that they don’t break the look and feel of the site.

Though, I was wondering how Google prevents people from gaming the system. I mean, registration in Adsense is free. So I put the ads on my website, and then write a bot that keeps clicking the links on the ads and refreshing the page over and over again. How does Google determine its now the owner of the ads but some third party? Surely it can’t be that simple. I guess I’m missing something obvious. If people know, do drop a note. I’ll try to dig up some more information on this meanwhile.

And now, I just wait to become a millionaire!! muaahahahahhaa :-D

The future of Google


There’s been so much news about Google lately that its all been a blur. Ironically, searning for actual information regarding on Google using Google is quite painful. Inevitably the first few pages are link on Google’s website or affiliate pages, none of them give any new insights or information. But I digress.

So I was talking about Google. Hell, everyone’s talking about Google. Just look at them: first the search engine, then desktop search, then blogging, then photo management, then gmail, then google maps, then google scholar, then local search, then sattelites, then video searches. Using innovative user interfaces built using existing technology, Google has taken web applications to an entirely new level. Google maps and gmail are just as interactive and perhaps more responsive than most of our desktop applications. Combine that with the fact that in the near future, a signifant fraction of Internet users will be connected using broadband and we’ve potentially got the next **big** thing happening.

No wonder a lot of people are worried. Grapevine has it that Google might be working on a whole slew of web based applications. If Google can do for desktop publishing and home office what it did for maps and mail, it could revolutionize the desktop market. Consider this scenario (this idea is not original, I read it somewhere, but can’t locate the source now. Please let me know if you find it): you have just one software on your desktop: a web browser. The rest of the stuff is hosted on Google: Google Mail, Google Photos, Google Maps, Google Office, Google Telephony. The cost of your desktop goes down tremendously! all you need is a thin client able to run a browser, and a good Internet connection. You don’t even need a hard drive, Google stores everything for you. Best of all, you’ve got instant accesibility from all over the world for free. Would you even need a laptop now?

Here are some interesting recent reads on Google:

* [[http://www.fortune.com/fortune/print/0,15935,1050065,00.html|Search and Destroy (on Fortune.com)]]
* [[http://www.globetechnology.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20050322.gtflgooglemar22/BNStory/Technology/|The God Good Google]]
* [[http://adamjh.blogspot.com/2005/05/graduation.html | Graduation speech]]
* [[http://www.betanews.com/article/Google_Preps_Video_Distribution_Service/1113441557|Video distribution platform]]

Whats next?


On a reader’s suggestion, I read [[http://research.microsoft.com/~Gray/|Jim Gray’s]] report (based on his Turing award talk) called [[http://research.microsoft.com/research/pubs/view.aspx?msr_tr_id=MSR-TR-99-50|What Next? A Dozen Information-Technology Research Goals]].

It does make for a very good reading. When people say that experience makes you wiser, they’re not joking. The kind of depth and breadth you need to understand the “big picture� in any area, and then make insightful comments on the same is near-impossible without experience. Needless to add, Jim Gray does a great job (he did win the Turing award, after all!)

He does a very high level, but neat analysis of IT research and proposes 12 research goals that he thinks will drive the research in the coming decades. Of the dozen, I think that the Turing test related goals (AI complete, and human interface design) are going to be the most visibly important. Under the covers, the systems related goals (dependable, highly-available and secure systems) are vital—they will become the fabric of our society in the coming years; the infrastructure will be invisible to end-users, but only insofar as it doesn’t fail or malfunction.

Googls is already on its way to becoming the World Memex! Those who follow Google would have heard about the new video service that Google is planning to launch. Google already indexes most of the available online text and images, and I’m sure very soon they will add features like content-based image research, and audio search.

On the whole, a very good read for anyone who is interested in IT research. Thanks, anonymous!

Interesting Google links


Here are some interesting links related to Google:

* [[http://google.weblogsinc.com/|Unofficial Google Weblog]]
* [[http://www.google.com/googleblog/|Official Google Weblog]]
* [[http://google.blogspace.com/|Another Google blog]]
* [[http://www.googlism.com/|Googlism]]
* [[http://douweosinga.com/projects/googlehacks|Google Hacks]]

On a related note, in a recent talk at the Blackhat Security Conference, a guy showed the audience how Google could be used by hackers to extract credit card numbers and other personal information. See the stories here and here. If you know of more cool Google related links/hacks, do let me know!

Google IPO


[[http://arstechnica.com/|Ars Technica]] [[http://arstechnica.com/news/posts/20040801-4056.html|reports]]:

> If you’ve been waiting for the Google IPO, the time has come: on Friday, Google launched www.ipo.google.com, where you can now register for a bidder ID number for the upcoming offering.

And Google maintains its [[http://news.com.com/Google+files+for+unusual+%242.7+billion+IPO/2100-1024_3-5201978.html?tag=nl|sense of style]]:

> Another flourish involves the company’s allegiance to its geeky roots: The amount of the $2.7 billion offering contains an inside joke for the math-minded. The exact offering, $2,718,281,828, is the product of “e” and $1 billion, where “e” is the base of the natural logarithm–a logarithm especially useful in calculus–and equals about 2.718281828.