Google quits plans to make cheap renewable energy

Google Inc has abandoned an ambitious project to make renewable energy cheaper than coal, the latest target of Chief Executive Larry Page's moves to focus the Internet giant on fewer efforts.

Google said on Tuesday that it was pulling the plug on seven projects, including Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal as well as a Wikipedia-like online encyclopedia service known as Knol.

The plans, which Google announced on its corporate blog, represent the third so-called "spring cleaning" announcement that Google has made since Google co-founder Page took the reins in April.

The changes come as Google is facing stiff competition in mobile computing and social networking from Apple Inc and Facebook, and as some investors have groused about rising spending at the world's No.1 Internet search company.

"To recap, we're in the process of shutting down a number of products which haven't had the impact we'd hoped for, integrating others as features into our broader product efforts, and ending several which have shown us a different path forward," wrote Google Senior Vice President of Operations Urs Holzle in the blog post.

Google said that it believed other institutions were better positioned to take its renewable energy efforts "to the next level."

Google began making investments and doing research into technology to drive down the price of renewable energy in 2007, with a particular focus on solar power technology.

In 2009, the company's so-called Green Energy Czar, Bill Weihl, told Reuters that he expected to demonstrate within a few years working technology that could produce renewable energy at a cheaper price than coal.

"It is even odds, more or less," Weihl said at the time. "In three years, we could have multiple megawatts of plants out there."

A Google spokesman said that Weihl had left Google earlier this month.

Google noted in its blog post that it would continue efforts to generate "cleaner, more efficient energy," including procuring renewable energy for its data centers.

Among the other projects included in Tuesday's "spring cleaning" were Google Knol, Google Search Timeline, Google Gear, Google Friend Connect, Google Bookmarks Lists and Google Wave, an ill-fated social networking and communication service that Google had previously said it would cease developing.

Google said that in December its email and calendar applications will no longer work with Gears technology, which allows Google's software to work when not connected to the Internet. Google said it is working to create offline capabilities into HTML5 technology instead.

Google Friend Connect, which allows website publishers to add social features to their sites, will be retired in March for all non-Blogger websites, Google said. It suggested that websites use its Google+ social network instead.

Earlier this year, Google said it would "wind down" Google Labs, a website that offered public access to experimental Google products, as well as terminating products that let consumers monitor their home energy consumption and keep track of their personal health records.

Shares of Google, which finished Tuesday's regular trading session down 94 cents, were up 86 cents at $580.86 in after hours trading.

Google continues its Autumn clearance

INTERNET SEARCH OUTFIT Google is continuing its Autumn cleaning and has announced that it will close out more products, including Gears and Friend Connect.

The firm is shutting down products that have not had the impact it had hoped for, said Urs Hölzle, SVP of Operations and Google Fellow in a blog post that sees off the products.

"Overall, our aim is to build a simpler, more intuitive, truly beautiful Google user experience," he said.

Seven projects have been shuttered and they range from the simple to the far more elaborate.
Google Bookmarks Lists, for example, was a way of sharing bookmarks and collaborating with friends, which is something well catered for anyway. Google will close this down on 19 December.

More elaborate is the 'Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal (RE < C)' initiative that aimed to cut the cost of renewable energy. The work done here so far has been published, so all is not wasted.

"At this point, other institutions are better positioned than Google to take this research to the next level," said Hölzle.
"We will continue our work to generate cleaner, more efficient energy-including our on-campus efforts, procuring renewable energy for our data centers, making our data centers even more efficient and investing more than $850 million in renewable energy technologies."

Also nixed are Google Friend Connect, a webmaster tool for adding social features to web sites, and the social networking stumble, Google Wave.
This makes sense, perhaps, since Google has more recently launched Google+, its social networking service. The firm recommends that any affected web sites add a Google+ badge to their web pages instead.

You can also wave goodbye to Google Gears, whose demise has been on the cards since March when Google stopped supporting new web browsers for it and discontinued its offline development extensions.

Google Search Timeline, a visual way of showing historical search queries, has also had its time, as has Knol, a collaboration tool. Users have about a year to wean themselves off the latter.

Google X: The clandestine lab where Google is tackling a list of 100 shoot-for-the-stars ideas

In a top-secret lab in an undisclosed Bay Area location where robots run free, the future is being imagined.

It's a place where your refrigerator could be connected to the Internet, so it could order groceries when they ran low. Your dinner plate could post to a social network what you're eating. Your robot could go to the office while you stay home in your pajamas. And you could, perhaps, take an elevator to outer space.

These are just a few of the dreams being chased at Google X, the clandestine lab where Google is tackling a list of 100 shoot-for-the-stars ideas. In interviews, a dozen people discussed the list; some work at the lab or elsewhere at Google, and some have been briefed on the project. But none would speak for attribution because Google is so secretive about the effort that many employees do not even know the lab exists.

Although most of the ideas on the list are in the conceptual stage, nowhere near reality, two people briefed on the project said one product would be released by the end of the year, although they would not say what it was.

"They're pretty far out in front right now," said Rodney Brooks, a professor emeritus at MIT's computer science and artificial intelligence lab and founder of Heartland Robotics. "But Google's not an ordinary company, so almost nothing applies."

At most Silicon Valley companies, innovation means developing online apps or ads, but Google sees itself as different. Even as Google has grown into a major corporation and tech startups are biting at its heels, the lab reflects its ambition to be a place where groundbreaking research and development are happening, in the tradition of Xerox PARC, which developed the modern personal computer in the 1970s.

A Google spokeswoman, Jill Hazelbaker, declined to comment on the lab, but said that investing in speculative projects was an important part of Google's DNA. "While the possibilities are incredibly exciting, please do keep in mind that the sums involved are very small by comparison to the investments we make in our core businesses," she said.

At Google, which uses artificial intelligence techniques and machine learning in its search algorithm, some of the outlandish projects may not be as much of a stretch as they first appear, even though they defy the bounds of the company's main Web search business.

For example, space elevators, a longtime fantasy of Google's founders and other Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, could collect information or haul things into space. (In theory, they involve rocketless space travel along a cable anchored to Earth.) "Google is collecting the world's data, so now it could be collecting the solar system's data," Brooks said.

Sergey Brin, Google's co-founder, is deeply involved in the lab, said several people with knowledge of it, and came up with the list of ideas along with Larry Page, Google's other founder, who worked on Google X before becoming chief executive in April; Eric E. Schmidt, its chairman; and other top executives. "Where I spend my time is farther afield projects, which we hope will graduate to important key businesses in the future," Brin said recently, though he did not mention Google X.

Google may turn one of the ideas - the driverless cars that it unleashed on California's roads last year - into a new business. Unimpressed by the innovative spirit of Detroit automakers, Google now is considering manufacturing them in the United States, said a person briefed on the effort.

Google could sell navigation or information technology for the cars, and theoretically could show location-based ads to passengers as they zoom by local businesses while playing Angry Birds in the driver's seat.

Robots figure prominently in many of the ideas. They have long captured the imagination of Google engineers, including Brin, who has already attended a conference through robot instead of in the flesh.

Fleets of robots could assist Google with collecting information, replacing the humans who photograph streets for Google Maps, say people with knowledge of Google X. Robots born in the lab could be destined for homes and offices, where they could assist with mundane tasks or allow people to work remotely, they say.

Other ideas involve what Google referred to as the "Web of things" at its software developers conference in May - a way of connecting objects to the Internet. Every time anyone uses the Web, it benefits Google, the company argued, so it could be good for Google if home accessories and wearable objects, not just computers, were connected.

Buying Android phone? Read this

 Over the past one month, five people have asked me, "What's an Android phone? I have to buy a new phone, you think it would be a good idea to try out an Android ?" The surge in numbers of phones with Google's Android operating system has generated a lot of talk, but many aren't clear what it is and whether they actually need an Android phone.

The rule of thumb when going for any gadget is: what do I need it for? The question should be increasingly asked, more so now, when the market has a huge variety of models with confusing permutations and combinations of specifications.

If you are using the phone merely to text and call, and if you hate GPRS, you don't need an Android, which is a smart phone (as different from the simple feature phone). Instead of worrying about Android or any other OS, you could look at the keypad or voice clarity or price or design.
What make Android phones attractive are the applications. If you are an app freak, go for Android. And there are tens of thousands of them in the Android Market -- anything from breaking news and cricket scores to astrological forecasts and currency converters.
There are also those that help you see stars and planets . And, if you are shy of popping that all-important question to your partner, well, there's an app for that too.

Don't other phones like Nokia, iPhone and BlackBerry have apps? Yes, they do. But not the variety and numbers that Android offers. Why?
Mainly because Android is an Open Source platform, meaning app developers in any part of the world can write the codes to develop the apps, and put them on the Android Market.

Nokia has lately woken up to the app power, and is proactively forming a vibrant developer community. If you are a fan of Google products, like Gmail, Picasa, Blogger, Calendar, Reader etc, then too it makes sense to go for Android.
The phone contacts , for example, get synced with Gmail contacts; and serve as a good back-up.

Even if you are only texting and calling, an Android smart phone can significantly enhance user experience. There's , for example , Gesture Search that lets you quickly find a contact, a bookmark, an application or a music track on your device by drawing on the screen.
There's the translator app that can work as an interpreter if you are in a new place where you don't understand the local language.

Android phones are available for a wide price range, from as low as Rs 4,000 to as high as Rs 35,000. The low-priced ones, with minimum features may be good enough for basic functions.
If you are aiming at using a number of apps then you will have to loosen the purse strings a bit. So, do I need an Android phone? Well, it's the same old question : What do I need the phone for?

Google Details 10 Search Tweaks

Google has opened up about ten of the hundreds of changes it makes to its search algorithm each year

Google on 14 November peeled away another layer of the multifaceted onion that comprises its search engine by revealing 10 specific algorithm changes the company has made.

The company has traditionally closely guarded its search technology signals, or the 1,000-plus factors that help Google.com serve results at such a prodigious clip.
Transparency

Yet Google is endeavoring to appear more transparent about its search technology in the face of the Federal Trade Commission’s antitrust investigation into its core business. Senator Mike Lee accused Google in a Congressional hearing in September of “cooking” its search results to favour its own products.

Google detailed 10 of the roughly 500 changes it makes each year.
Specifically, Google added increased page content and decreased header and menu content for its search snippets, which are strings of text from search results to give users an idea of whether those results might be useful enough to warrant a click.

Google Search Distinguished Engineer Matt Cutts, who detailed the changes in a corporate blog post, said Google is more likely to pick text from the actual page content in the future.

Google also extended rich snippets for application, which help users searching for applications see details such as cost and reviews.

Google also improved the way it hunts for and finds “official” web pages and changed how it handles result freshness for queries where a user has chosen a specific date range.
Moreover, Cutts and his crew worked to provide better page titles in search results by de-duplicating boilerplate anchors.
Boilerplate links

“We found that boilerplate links with duplicated anchor text are not as relevant, so we are putting less emphasis on these,” he said. “The result is more relevant titles that are specific to the page’s content.”

The company also killed a signal, retiring a factor in its Image Search related to images that contained references from multiple web documents.

Some of the changes involved language. For queries in languages where limited web content is available, Google is now translating English web pages and displaying translated titles below English titles in search results.
Clicking on the translated titles will take searchers to pages translated from English into the query language.

Google is doing this for Afrikaans, Malay, Slovak, Swahili, Hindi, Norwegian, Serbian, Catalan, Maltese, Macedonian, Albanian, Slovenian, Welsh and Icelandic.

Google is also providing autocomplete predictions in Russian based on length to reduce the number of “long, sometimes arbitrary query predictions in Russian”, something it already does for English language results.

The search engine also made changes in how its autocomplete feature handles queries that contain non-Latin characters, such as Hebrew, Russian and Arabic.
Fresh content

Google also improved its ranking of fresh content, such as hot trends, current events or recurring events, a move that affects 35 percent of search results.
The boost came months after Google’s real-time search deal with Twitter lapsed, leaving the company deprived of tweets to surface for users.

Google, which has a 65 percent US search market share, normally keeps such specific tweaks under wraps because it views its search technology as a competitive advantage over Microsoft Bing, Yahoo and other challengers.

But Google also keeps its search updates quiet to keep SEO specialists and enterprising businesses from “gaming” Google to improve their search ranking for their own marketing designs. Cutts alluded to this in a cautionary note in his blog post:

“If you’re a site owner, before you go wild tuning your anchor text or thinking about your web presence for Icelandic users, please remember that this is only a sampling of the hundreds of changes we make to our search algorithms in a given year, and even these changes may not work precisely as you’d imagine,” Cutts wrote.

“We’ve decided to publish these descriptions in part because these specific changes are less susceptible to gaming.”

In other words, if you are a website publisher looking to play an angle, use the information Cutts provided at your own risk and don’t expect to benefit from a better search ranking on Google.

Chromebooks in Indian markets by 2012

The next edition of the Google Chromebooks would be available in the Indian markets by 2012, according to the Senior vice-president( Chrome and apps), Sundar Pichai.

Interacting with media persons in the city, Pichai said that the Chromebook was only available in seven countries currently and were available only online. Dismissing claims that the product was badly received, he stated that product was ‘not a volume play’.

Unwilling to announce a specific date for the launch, he said that a decision such as this would have t o b e taken in consideration. Contradicting claims of Google Plus, their social networking effort, did not make the impact the company had hoped for, he said that Plus had over 40 million subscribers.

Admitting to the flaws existent in ‘Google Buzz,’ Pichai said, “We did not fully understand privacy issues and if we hadn’t made those mistakes in Buzz, then the same mistakes would have been repeated in Plus.”

Facebook security breach raises concerns

A widespread spam attack on Facebook has caused violent and pornographic images to be posted on some users’ profile pages, representing one of the worst security breaches in the young Web site’s history and raising concerns about its vulnerability to hackers.

The company, which acknowledged the problem Monday, said it was working to shut down the accounts responsible for the attack.

The disturbing pictures surfaced as the company tries to quell concerns about user safety and privacy. Facebook is reportedly near a settlement with the Federal Trade Commission over complaints about the way it stores and shares user data. Experts said that while this latest attack didn’t appear to compromise users’ data, it was a serious security breach.

“Protecting the people who use Facebook from spam and malicious content is a top priority for us, and we are always working to improve our systems to isolate and remove material that violates our terms,” Facebook spokesman Andrew Noyes said in a statement. “Our efforts have drastically limited the damage caused by this attack, and we are now in the process of investigating to identify those responsible.”

According to Facebook, users were somehow tricked into copying and pasting malicious code into their browser bars. Hackers then gained access to their profiles and could post whatever they wished, and any of the user’s Facebook friends could see the images.

Chester Wisniewski, a security researcher at Sophos, said similar schemes in the past have lured users in with promises of free or discounted products.

It was unclear Tuesday who was responsible. Groups of hackers have threatened to put out a virus to “take down Facebook” over their concerns with the way it handles user privacy.

Daimon Geopfert, a security expert for RSM McGladrey, said that this was one of the largest Facebook attacks he has seen. The scale and speed were “unprecedented,” he said.

Experts said it was easy to imagine another attack on the Facebook platform that would be more troubling: sending false messages to family and friends to lure them to malicious sites, where they might be tricked into revealing private information. They warned that hackers could use the template of this attack to launch copycat efforts.

The presence of the photos upset many Facebook users, who took to Twitter to say they were weighing whether to deactivate their accounts.

Part of Facebook’s success has stemmed from its ability to get developers to create games and other applications that work seamlessly on the site’s platform. But giving such leeway to outside programmers means the site is also vulnerable to hackers, Wisniewski said.

Facebook could be doing more to stop these kinds of attacks, he said, such as checking the credentials of programmers who register with the site and giving users the option to double-check any actions before they take effect. The company has made an effort to make things seamless, he said, but convenience often comes at the expense of security.

“The technical pieces of this aren’t going to matter,” Geopfert said. “The idea that it happened and that the platform is more risky than you thought is damaging.”

Washington Post Co. chairman and chief executive Donald E. Graham is a member of the Facebook board of directors.