4/13/2006
谷歌
Yes, this is my first ever post with a chinese title. Google China got itself a new name, as announced by CEO Eric Schmidt on a conference in Bejing. The name 谷歌 is pronounced Guge, and said to mean ‘Valley’s Song’ literally.
Yes, this is my first ever post with a chinese title. Google China got itself a new name, as announced by CEO Eric Schmidt on a conference in Bejing. The name 谷歌 is pronounced Guge, and said to mean ‘Valley’s Song’ literally.
So today Google finally released the beta to their long awaited calendar application. My first trial was less than expected, as I only got a server error. The site seems to work stable now though, and I am rather pleased. Unfortunately, features like natural language input or automatic event parsing are only useful to native English speakers, and since there still isn’t a decent Google Maps for Europe I don’t bet on a localized calendar to appear anytime soon. Anyway, I like the interface a lot and will give it a try for managing my appointments with Google Calendar in the next few days.
According to Haaretz Google has just acquired a new search algorithm that has been developed by Israeli student Ori Alon. The algorithm, named Orion, seems to recognize the topic of a search query and generates a list of keywords relevant to that query. A webpage will only appear in the search results, if the page contains enough of the relevant keywords. The algorithm also considers the quality of the website for the ranking, although it is not yet clear how Orion determines quality. Alon reportedly works at Google’s offices now. I wonder if Google is actually going to implement this for their web search, or if they only acquired Orion to keep Yahoo and MSN from getting their hands onto it.
PRWeb has an Article suggesting there is a lot of money to be made with MySpace related websites. Of course MySpace is a traffic phenomenon, with a huge mindshare among teenage users. Obviously there is a big demand for support sites that offer help in creating appealing profiles, and some of these sites are reported to earn millions of dollars with advertising. While I do believe this market exists, I have a hard time believing these numbers. I wonder if there is a similar market for Facebook?