Category Archives: google

google, internet, microsoft, search

A few good things about Bing – but where is the webmaster’s guide?

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So Bing (Bing Is Not Google?) is Microsoft’s new search brand. A few good things about it:

1. Short memorable name, short memorable url

2. Judging by the official video at http://www.decisionengine.com/ Microsoft realises that it has to do something different than Google; doing the same thing almost as well or even just a little better is not enough.

3. Some of the ideas are interesting – morphing the results and the way they are displayed according to the type of search, for example. In the video we see a search for a digital camera that aggregates user reviews from all over the Internet (supposedly); whereas searching for a flight gets you a list of flight offers with fares highlighted.

This kind of thing should work well with microformats, about which Google and Yahoo have also been talking – see my recent post here. But does Bing use them? That’s unknown at the moment, because the Bing Reviewer’s Guide says little about how Bing derives its results. I don’t expect Microsoft to give away its commercial secrets,  but it does have a responsibility to explain how web authors can optimise their sites for Bing – presuming that it has sufficient success to be interesting. Where is the webmaster’s guide?

Some things are troubling. The Bing press material I’ve seen so far is relentlessly commercial, tending to treat users as fodder for ecommerce. While I am sure this is how many businesses perceive them – why else do you want users to come to your site? – it is not a user-centric view. Most searches do not result in a purchase.

There’s a snippet in the reviewer’s guide about why Bing will deliver trustworthy results for medical searches:

Bing Health provides you with access to medical information from nine trusted medical resources, including the Mayo Clinic, the American Cancer Society and MedlinePlus.

No doubt these are trusted names in the USA. Still, reliance on a few trusted brands, while it is good for safety in a sensitive area such as health, is also a route to a dull and sanitized version of the Internet. I am sure there are far more than nine reliable sources of medical information on the Web; and if Bing takes off those others will want to know why they have been excluded.

Back to the introduction in the Reviewer’s Guide:

In a world of excessive choice and too much information, it’s often difficult to make the right decision. What you need is more than just a search engine; you need a decision engine that provides useful tools to help you get what you want fast, rather than simply presenting a list of Web links. Bing is such a decision engine. It provides an easy way to make more informed choices. It organizes popular results by category to help you get the answers you’re looking for without having to guess at the right way to formulate your query. And built right into Bing is a set of intelligent tools to help you accomplish important tasks such as buying a product, planning a trip or finding a local business.

Like many of us, I’ve been searching the web since its earliest days. I found portals and indexes like early Yahoo and dmoz unhelpful: always out of date, never sufficiently thorough. I used DEC’s AltaVista instead, because it seemed to search everywhere. Google came along and did the same thing, but better. Too much categorization and supposed intelligence can work against you, if it hides the result that you really want to see.

Live Search, I’ve come to realise (or theorise), frequently delivers terrible results for me because of faulty localization. It detects that I am in the UK and prioritises what it things are UK results, even though for most of my searches I only care about the quality of the information, not where the web sites are located. It’s another example of the search engine trying to be smart, and ending up with worse results than if it had not bothered.

Still, I’ll undoubtedly try Bing extensively as soon as I can; I do like some of its ideas and will judge it with an open mind.

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cloud computing, eclipse, google, java, software development, Sun

Google’s cut-down Java: wanton and irresponsible, or just necessary?

Sun’s Simon Phipps stirred things up last weekend when he called Google’s actions wanton and irresponsible. Its crime: delivering a cut-down Java library for use on its App Engine platform, “flaunting the rules” which forbid creating sub-sets of the core classes.

It does sound as if Google is not talking to Sun as much as it might. Still, let’s note that Google has good reason to omit certain classes or methods. App Engine is a distributed, shared environment; this mean that some things make no sense – for example: writing to a local file – and other things may be unacceptable, such as grabbing a large slice of CPU time for an extended period.

Salesforce.com addressed this same issue by inventing a new language, called Apex. It’s Java-like, but not Java. The company therefore avoided accusations of creating an incompatible Java, and conveniently ensured that Apex code would run only on Force.com, at least until someone attempts to clone it.

Google’s approach was to use Java, but leave a few things out. This FAQ gives an overview; and the article Will it play in App Engine lists common frameworks and libraries with notes on whether they work. Given that languages like JRuby, Groovy and Rhino work fine, it’s clear that core App Engine Java is not too badly damaged. The big omissions are JDBC (because you are meant to use the App Engine datastore, which is not relational), and Enterprisey things like JMS, EJB and JNDI. Google is nudging, or shoving, developers towards RESTful APIs along with its built-in services.

Will you be able to escape App Engine if you have a change of heart after deployment? I’d guess that porting the code will not be all that hard. Perhaps the biggest lock-in is with identity; you could roll your own I guess, but Google intends you to use Google accounts and supplies a Java API. Microsoft is ahead of Google here since it does support federated identity, if you can get your head round it: you can authenticate users in the Microsoft cloud against your own directory using Geneva. The best Google can offer is Directory Sync; though even that is some protection from identity lock-in.

Java support on App Engine is actually a vote of confidence in Java; if what is good for Java is good for Sun, then Sun is a winner here. That said, just where is the benefit for Sun if companies host Java applications, built with Eclipse, on Google’s platform? Not much that I can see.

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google, internet, web authoring

Google App Engine to be less free: quotas reduced from May 25th

I’m blogging this because I’ve only just noticed it; I’m not sure when it was announced. From 25th May, Google is reducing the resource quotas allowed for App Engine applications, before you have start paying. The question “by how much” is tough to answer, because the quota system is complex. Here’s the relevant document; there are quotas for bandwidth in and out, internal API calls, CPU time, data sent and received from the internal datastore, emails sent, and use of the image and caching services.

Still, what caught my eye is this:

The new free quota levels to take effect on May 25th will be as follows:

  • CPU Time: 6.5 hours of CPU time per day
  • Bandwidth: 1 gigabyte of data transferred in and out of the application per day
  • Stored Data & Email Recipients: unchanged

Currently, you are allowed 10 gigabytes in and 10 gigabytes out per day. So it looks to me as if by some measures the quotas have been reduced to one tenth of what they were; unless the new limit aggregates incoming and outgoing transfer, in which case it would be one twentieth.

The spin is that:

We believe these new levels will continue to serve a reasonably efficient application around 5 million page views per month, completely free.

It’s true that the old limits are generous. Still, the real point here is not to build your business on “free” services; at any moment the terms can change, sometimes severely. While the same is true of paid-for services, it is more difficult to make extreme changes.

It is also a reminder of Google’s usual tactic, to buy market share with generous initial terms. Remember all those Google Checkout incentives when the company was fighting to win customers from PayPal?

I’m actually more comfortable with Amazon’s approach to web services: nothing free, but commodity pricing from the get-go.

adobe, amazon, google, ibm, internet, microsoft, Sun

Open Cloud Manifesto – but from a closed group?

I’ve read the Open Cloud Manifesto with interest. It’s hard to find much to disagree with; I especially like this point on page 5:

Cloud providers must not use their market position to lock customers into their particular platforms and limit their choice of providers.

Companies like IBM won’t do that? I’m sceptical. Still, it is all very vague; and companies not on the list of supporters have been quick to point out the lack of any effort to achieve cross-industry consensus:

Very recently we were privately shown a copy of the document, warned that it was a secret, and told that it must be signed "as is," without modifications or additional input.  It appears to us that one company, or just a few companies, would prefer to control the evolution of cloud computing, as opposed to reaching a consensus across key stakeholders

says Microsoft’s Steve Martin. Amazon, perhaps the most prominent cloud computing pioneer, is another notable absentee.

It is a general truth that successful incumbents rarely strive for openness; whereas competitors who want to grow their market share frequently demand it.

The manifesto FAQ says:

There are many reasons why companies may not be listed. This moved quickly and some companies may not have been reached or simply didn’t have time to make it through their own internal review process.

A poor excuse. If a few more months would have added Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Salesforce.com to the list, it would have been well worth it and added hugely to its impact.

That said, I’ve found Amazon reluctant to talk about interoperability between clouds, while Salesforce.com makes no secret of its lock-in:

… you are making a platform decision, and our job is to make sure you choose our platform and not another platform, because once they have chosen another platform, getting them off it is usually impossible.

said CEO Marc Benioff when I quizzed him on the subject. I guess it could have taken more than a few months.

cloud computing, facebook, google, salesforce.com, virtualization

Cloud computing means exporting your IT infrastructure to the Internet

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I’ve just attended my first cloudcamp unconference, held during QCon London. We ended up debating how you would explain cloud computing to a non-technical audience. The problem is that different people mean different things by the term.

The consumer perspective is to do with running applications and storing your stuff on the Internet. Gmail, Google Docs, Skydrive, are all examples of doing cloud-based computing from a consumer perspective. Somehow we brought BBC iPlayer, Facebook and YouTube into the mix as well. Some think that the home computer will disappear, replaced by Internet-connected appliances and devices.

The small business and entrepreneur’s perspective is to do with low start-up costs and low barriers to entry. Anyone can run a web site, take payments with PayPal or Amazon Payment Services or Google Checkout, and use cloud services for email and collaboration.

The larger business or enterprise perspective is do with exporting IT infrastructure to the Internet. Close your data centre, sell your servers, move your computing to virtual servers running on Amazon’s elastic compute cloud or some such. There is not much of this happening as far as I can see, though we are seeing virtualization (which might be a first step), and some take-up for software-as-a-service (SAAS) applications like Salesforce.com.

I suppose it is appropriate that the cloud term is fluffy. To some it is synonymous with the Internet; to others it means SAAS applications; to others it means virtual servers running who knows what; to others it means a hosted application platform (platform-as-a-service or PAAS).

The problem with vague terms is that they make discussion difficult.

My favourite usage: cloud computing means exporting IT infrastructure to the Internet.

google, internet, search, Uncategorized

Latest steps in the Google dance: brands, or not?

There’s a buzz in the SEO community about an update which the search company has made to its algorithms – though Google’s Matt Cutts calls it a change, if you can figure out the difference, albeit one important enough to have a name within the company – it’s “Vince’s change”, after the employee who contributed it.

According to SEO guru Aaron Wall  it is related to CEO Eric Schmidt’s comments last year that the Internet is a “cesspool” of false information. Big idea: promote trusted brands in the search results to ensure quality in the top hits.

As usual with Google, it’s hard to discern whether this is a big deal as Wall claims, or a minor evolution as Cutts presents it. Still, it is worth a few observations.

First, it seems obvious that Google’s original big idea, pagerank based on incoming links, is becoming less and less useful. It has been killed first by the SEO industry itself and its unceasing link farms and exchanges, and second by Google’s promotion of the “nofollow” attribute, which ironically means that many of the best incoming links are now supposedly ignored, while the SEO folk ensure that low-quality links which are not tagged nofollow abound.

That being the case, Google has to look for other ways to rank sites. According to Cutts, there are three things (in addition to pagerank) that it tries to identify: trust, authority, and reputation.

The brands idea is an easy solution. Prefer the well-known names; that way you may not get the best content or the best price; but at least users generally won’t be scammed.

The potential consequences of this kind of thinking are far-reaching. It is undermining one of the Web’s key attractions, which is low barriers to entry. If SEO becomes a matter of building a big brand, it is no different than the old world of big-budget marketing campaigns (and perhaps that should not come as a surprise).

The other twist on this is that users searching don’t necessarily want the big brands. Rather, they want the best information. Further, if a user wants to find a big brand on the Web, it does not need Google to do so. If Google goes too far in promoting familiar names above the best content, it leaves an opportunity for other search engines.

I think Google is smarter than that. Nevertheless, the problem which Schmidt refers to is real, and I reckon that barriers to entry on the Internet are rising and will continue to do so.

The power Google exerts to make or break Internet enterprises and to influence the flow of information is downright spooky, mitigated by the fact that it does an excellent job as far as I can tell (and there lies the rub).

Finally, one tip for Google. Scrap nofollow. It was a bad idea, for reasons which only now are becoming obvious. If I were building a search engine today, I would take little or no account of it.

PS great comment from @monkchips on Twitter just as I posted this entry:

for my purposes google search has actually become less useful over time. Now its kind of like a mall of corporations

.net, adobe, google, iphone, microsoft, ruby, silverlight, software development, web authoring

Programming language trends: Flash up, AJAX down?

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I’m fascinated by the O’Reilly reports on the state of the computer book market in 2008, particularly the one relating to programming languages.

Notable facts and speculations:

C# is the number one language, overtaking Java (which is down 12%), and was consistently so throughout 2008. Although the .NET platform is no longer new and exciting, I’m guessing this reflects Microsoft’s success in corporate development, plus the fact that the language is changing fast enough to stimulate book purchases. Absolute growth is small though: just 1%.

Objective-C is growing massively (965%). That’s probably stimulated by iPhone app development more than anything else. It’s a perfect topic for a programming book, since the platform is important and popular, and attracting developers who were previously ignorant of Objective-C.

ActionScript is growing (33%). That’s Adobe’s success in establishing Flex and the Flash platform.

PHP is up 3%. I’m not surprised; it’s usually the P in LAMP, everyone’s favourite free and open source web platform. That said, the online documentation and community support for PHP is so good that a book is less necessary than for some other languages.

JavaScript is down 24%. I’m a little surprised, as JavaScript is still a language everyone has to grapple with to some degree. It may be a stretch; but I wonder if this is a symptom of AJAX losing developer mindshare to Flash/Flex (ActionScript) and maybe Silverlight (C#)? Another factor is that JavaScript is not changing much; last year’s JavaScript book is still good enough.

Visual Basic is down 15%. Exactly what I would expect; slow-ish decline but still popular.

Ruby is down 51%. This is a surprise; though it was well up in 2007 so you could be kind and describe this as settling. The problem with Ruby though is lack of a major sponsor; plus the migration from PHP to Ruby that seemed possible a couple of years ago just has not happened. It may be intimidating to casual developers who find PHP more approachable; plus of course, Ruby probably is not installed on your low-cost shared web hosting package.

Python is down 14%. Google sponsors Python, in that it is the language of App Engine, but apparently this has not been enough to stimulate grown in book sales. I guess App Engine is still not mainstream; or maybe there just aren’t enough good Python books out there.*

It will be interesting to see the 2009 report in a year or so. Meanwhile, I’m off to write an Objective C tutorial (joke!).

*Update: I was reading the charts too quickly; it looks as if the percentages above are only for the last quarter; the annual figures are similar except that Python actually grew over the year as a whole.

google, internet, software development, web authoring

Want Google Earth in your browser? Don’t use Google Chrome.

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I’ve been trying various mapping APIs and took a look at Google’s new Earth browser plug-in. It looked a bit odd in IE7 so I tried Google Chrome. Not supported:

Given that it now works in Safari on the Mac (which also uses Webkit) I’m a little surprised. No doubt the team will add it soon, but this sort of thing doesn’t help Chrome adoptiom.

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google, microsoft, search, windows, windows 7

Another useless Microsoft search experience

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I do not make posts like this just to needle Microsoft. I’d like to see it compete better with Google, not because I have anything against Google, but because competition is good. So I’m explaining why I can’t use Microsoft’s search product as currently implemented, in the hope that it will help to improve it.

I am aware that the Windows 7 beta SDK is now available, and wanted to download it. I tried the search on Microsoft’s site:

Top hit is from November 2007 and is a forum discussion of dxtrans.h. Correct result nowhere to be seen.

So I tried Live Search:

I get ads for double-glazing and a top hit for the QuickTime 7.3 SDK from Apple. Correct result nowhere to be seen.

So I tried Google:

Top hit is relevant but wrong. Second hit is a blog post which has the URL I’m looking for, not bad. Fourth hit is the exact URL. By the way, the Windows 7 SDK beta is here.

It is no use Microsoft doing search bundling deals with Dell. If it cannot fix the product, users will run back to Google.

Incidentally, I believe US searchers get better results from Live Search than I do, because of faulty regionalisation. Live Search seems to have a heavier bias than Google towards what it thinks are (in my case) UK results. That doesn’t explain why it gives an Apple QuickTime site as its top hit for “Windows 7 SDK”.

facebook, google, internet, microsoft

BBC looking at OpenID for iPlayer social network

At Adobe’s MAX conference in Milan last week I spoke to the BBC’s Anthony Rose, who runs iPlayer at the BBC, and wrote this up for today’s Guardian. One of the things we discussed is social networking planned for iPlayer, where you will be able to see comments, ratings and recommendations from your friends. I asked Rose how user identities will be managed:

“We’ll make sure you never have to log in to use our services. But if you want to post comments and create a profile then you’ll need to log in. We’re going to start by using a BBC one, then we’re going to look at OpenID and see if we can synch to others. OpenID is very cool but is a challenging user experience, and some people will get it, and some will go, why have you made it more difficult?”

Right now there are multiple competing “networks of friends”: Facebook, MySpace, Microsoft Live Messenger, Twitter and so on. Facebook is trying to extend its reach with Facebook Connect; Google is evangelising OpenSocial which “defines a common API for social applications across multiple websites”, along with an implementation called Friend Connect. It will be interesting to see to what extent the BBC creates yet another social network, and to what extent it hooks into existing ones.