google | iface thoughts

May 13, 2009

Google Updates, To Support Microformats

Google has announced a few updates to its search engine during its Searchology event. Google will now support microformats and RDFa to show rich snippets from a web page. Considering that these technologies were developed to extract structured data from web pages, search engines should have adopted them long back, and in fact helped them grow. [Continue]

Mar 27, 2009

Unladen Swallow – A Faster Python

Google wants a faster Python. Unladen Swallow is one of the recent projects out of Google, which aims to produce a Python version at least 5x faster than CPython, the current implementation of Python. Note that Python has already seen multiple implementations, but this seems to be the first one wanting to make Python fast enough to replace C, atleast in some projects. [Continue]

Feb 16, 2009

Will Google Chrome Be Late?

Google Chrome have decided to go with Gtk+ for the Linux version. However you still see mentions of Qt in the developers mailing list. I too had wondered the same after Qt went LGPL. [Continue]

Jan 12, 2009

Google Blog Converters To Help You Switch Blogging Tools

If moving your data has been the main hurdle for you to switch between blogging tools and services, then Google is coming to help you. Google Blog Converters (via Lidija Davis) contains converters to and from various blog tools. It is a set of Python scripts, and some hosted services, though with certain limitations. [Continue]

Nov 21, 2008

Control Search Results With SearchWiki

Google has finally allowed you to modify the search results – SearchWiki. Of course the modifications will be only for you, otherwise rest of the Google would not make sense. But you can now improve the search results by reordering/deleting/adding individual entries. [Continue]

Oct 30, 2008

Google Too Offers OpenID, But With A Twist

Google too steps towards supporting OpenID now. However, nowadays supporting OpenID has started to take different meanings. Most of the new supporters are providing OpenID, none of them accepting it. [Continue]

Sep 2, 2008

Google Chrome Raising Its Head

The Google browser has raised its head, and is being called Google Chrome. It is based on Webkit, and aims to be clean and fast. I did not find anything new, most of the new browsers talk about this. [Continue]

Jul 4, 2008

Eliminating The Thorn In Flash

Adobe has finally eliminated the thorn in Flash. It is working with search industry leaders to make Flash content indexable. Flash content was not accessible to search engines, rather it was quite laborious to make it accessible, until now. [Continue]

Jan 9, 2008

Facebook And Google Finally Share Something

Social networks think that the members’ data is what differentiates them from other social networks. The data using which they draw social graphs or find contexts for advertising is gold and there is no way that can be shared. While there was a small project called DataPortability.org aimed at making data portable and networks interoperable, social network members used unusual ways of extracting their own data. [Continue]

Dec 17, 2007

Knol, Is It Really That New?

Google has started with Knol, which they define as a unit of knowledge. Is it the same as Wikipedia? No. [Continue]