If you didn’t make it to the “Google Tour†(I had previous commitments) here are some highlights:
* Google launches a Personalized Homepage, a sort of ‘My Google’, that lets you plunk recent Gmail messages, Google News, newsfeeds from providers such as the New York Times, weather, and other bits of information onto Google’s homepage. Personalization of this sort is a very old idea (My Yahoo has offered it for years), but Google’s take on it looks typically Google-esque: It’s simple, functional, and fast. Google’s lab page lets you try it right now.
* Google Research translation technology involves statistical analysis of texts that are available in multiple languages (such as United Nations documents). The examples shown included a couple of Arabic-to-English translations that were, apparently, utterly perfect.
* Google Earth, formerly Keyhole, an astounding 3D mapping program. It includes some built-in searching features that let you do things like see driving directions rendered as photographic flyover animations of actual the route you’ll take.
* During the Factory Tour, Google reps continued to repeat Google’s mission: ‘to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful’. They also focused on their 70/20/10 philosophy, which involves spending 70 percent of the company’s resources on its core business (search), 20 percent on closely related areas (such as news), and 10 percent on oddball projects. To me, that is just “verbal fluffâ€. They are out to crush the competition and boost net earnings. They are a public company, they have stockholders to answer to. What happened to the “Steve Jobs’ Mentality†of “us vs. themâ€. Jobs didn’t mince words. He proudly flew a pirate flag in front of Apple’s headquarters. But then again, I guess when you have shareholders, you have to be on your best behavior. Tragic.
* Google stated that it leaves a service in beta as long as it has specific features they feel the service must have, but which it hasn’t implemented yet. One example is Google Groups, the Usenet archive, which has been in beta for years. Comments from the back received a few chuckles “Isn’t Google still in beta?â€
* Google said that it knows the Google Web Accelerator caused problems for some sites and users, but said they weren’t as bad as some critics claimed (actually they were worse in the testing that we ran). They said that the experience taught them to test products more thoroughly before making them public. They also said that the Web Accelerator had unexpected trouble dealing with poorly-coded Web pages, which is surprising, because you’d think that if anyone knew that the Web is full of sloppy Web pages, it would be Google.
* The number of servers Google has is estimated at 10,000 (at least), and some have speculated that the current total could be as high as 100,000.
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