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Chrome: Google did it again!

h3rald@h3rald.com — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 00:31:00 -0000

It looks like there’s a new open source browser in town. As usual, nearly everything about it leaked before its release. Every blog that matters is talking about it, so if you didn’t hear anything about it, you’d better take a look yourself. Don’t be fooled by the usual senseless ravings of some weird, overly-hyped blogger though: a browser just came out, nothing more and nothing less. It’s not the end of Windows, it’s not the end of the Internet, it’s not the end of the world as we know it. It’s just a new player in the Browser Wars.

I particularly recommend reading the official Google Comic Book about Chrome, however I included some of the most interesting parts of it in this article. It’s a nice 40-page comic booklet explaining how the browser works in a friendly way… I found it quite amusing and an interesting way to ~~leak~~ distribute info on a new project.

Getting the damn thing

You can freely download Google Chromm from here. You’ll get a tiny 474KB setup file which installs the browser automatically. When I say automatically I mean automatically: you double click it, and it won’t ask anything: it will just install it in Program Files by itself. Idiot proof. Clever. Some people may like it, I damn hated it.

I downloaded it and installed it fine from home, on Vista, and it was blazing fast (on Vista_, imagine!). I tried to do the same thing from work and I couldn’t. The damn installer is supposed to pick up the proxy settings from your default browser, but if the proxy uses authentication (like 99% of corporate proxies) it simply won’t work. As far as I know, there’s no way around thisthread/thread/4c07ec5124f2eebc.

This is the reason why this article won’t have any chrome screenshots… to protest against Google’s stupid way of doing things “too user-friendly”.

Update 1: Actually, it is now possible to download the full Chrome setup from here (Thanks Crazy Australian).

Update 2: After installing Chrome, if your company uses an automatic proxy script you won’t be able to browser web sites using Chrome. If that’s your case, make sure you change IE’s proxy settings by specifying your proxy address and port explicitly.

How Google “re-invented” the browser

Why did Google bother? Officially because…

“[…] we believe we can add value for users and, at the same time, help drive innovation on the web.”
(from Google Blog)

In practice, a Google-branded browser makes sense especially because of the services offered by the search giant right now: nearly every kind of web application, from mail clients to RSS readers.

The philosophy of Google Chrome is fairly simple: the Web has changed since the nineties, we now have full-fledged applications instead of crappy hypertexts with animated GIFs, therefore browsers must change, too.

Every major browser has a fairly long development history. Think of Firefox: version 3? Not really: try adding up at least 7 versions of Netscape before that. Internet Explorer 8, Opera 9.5, …
Safari is probably the newest of the lot, but still not quite right.

All major browsers evolved through the years, but they never really changed: so why not to start from scratch?

Starting from scratch has a lot of advantages:

You can learn from other people’s mistakes, and try to fix them
You can get things right from the very start
You do not have to worry about breaking compatibility with previous versions
People won’t have extremely high expectations, and they’ll be prepared for a relatively unstable product

Obviously building a browser from the ground up is not a weekend project, but things changed since the nineties and starting fresh does not necessarily means re-inventing the wheel!

An “old” Rendering Engine

Let’s just say that the main work was already done for Google by the WebKit guys. The rendering engine which now powers Safari, the Nokia Series 60 browser, Gnome’s Epiphany, Adobe AIR has been picked by the Google guys for Chrome.

This is a fairly obvious choice, if you ask me. Why?

Presto (Opera’s engine) is proprietary
Trident (IE’s engine) is proprietary, and it sucks
Gecko (Mozilla’s engine) is open source, but a bit bulky
WebKit is open source, and arguably the fastest rendering engine to date

The rendering engine, after all, may be considered one of the most important parts of the browser: it’s responsible of what users see, after all.
Google made the right choice, in my opinion: WebKit is also the most “embeddable” and lightweight engine available, and it is also used on the Android platform for this very reason.

A “new” Javascript

Mozilla has a fast engine, which will soon become much faster. WebKit has a blazing fast Javascript engine too, don’t forget. So why Google didn’t just use that?

…Because they wanted something much faster than that, in their own way (as someone already pointed out).

Meet V8, Chrome’s very own Javascript Virtual Machine. When reading the Chrome Comic, I was particularly impressed of two improvements introduced by this new javascript VM:

It actually compiles Javascript to machine code via a Just-In-Time compiler (JIT). This means that whenever you refresh a page containing Javascript the browser won’t re-interpret the whole script, but it will simply run the compiled version of it which was generated the first time the page was loaded. New concept? Not really, Mozilla is going exactly in the same direction with their own engine, and JIT compilation will be added as of Firefox 3.1.
V8’s incremental garbage collection looks like a much better alternative to the current conservative garbage collection methods used for Javascript. Because of V8’s new concept of Hidden Class Transitions, V8 knows exactly when something is no longer needed and thus it is able to garbace-collect it more effectively.

While there has been some initial skepticism on this new Javascript implementation, it looks like Google did it right. If you don’t believe it you can download V8’s C++ code and try it out yourself.

One Process per Tab

Google Chrome is the first multi-process browser. The idea is that each tab (because you can’t do browsers without tabs, these days, right?) has its own phisical process and it is therefore independent from each other.

Hang on, isn’t that what IE 5 did? A new instance of the browser for each window? No, not quite: there’s a single instance of the browser and multiple tab instances. Each tab is independent in the sense that it has its own address bar, but it’s just a tab, at the end of the day.

This is what Internet Explorer could have done, before Internet Explorer 7, as an answer to the traditional concept of tabs promoted by Mozilla and Opera.

Actually, it turns out that this is exactly what’s planned for Internet Explorer 8, as someone already pointed out!

Additionally, Google thought of building in a mini task manager to let users monitor the CPU and memory usage of each tab. This is interesting, but it has a few implications discussed later on in this article.

What’s truly remarkable about this is that each tab seems to have an initial overhead of 1-2KB, which of course grows according to the site it loads. You can see all this in the task manager, which also picks up similar stats for any other browser running at the same time on your machine.
This was another clever move by Google: by looking at their own task manager, and running more than one browser together, you have everything you need to instantly compare browser performance (thus discovering that Chrome does an outstanding job, it seems).

What’s also remarkable about Chrome’s tabs is the way you can interact with them:

You can move them around smoohtly, exactly like with Safari
You can detach them by drag and drop
You can re-attach them by drag and drop (which is truly awesome!)

AwesomeBar OmniBox and Speed Dial New Tab Page

Did you like Mozilla’s AwesomeBar? Well, I personally did, others didn’t so much. Meet OmniBox™ Google’s very own, semi-sentient address bar which really understands you.

Here’s what you can do with it:

Type in URLs and view web sites (it would be damn funny if it couldn’t do that)
Get ~~extra Google crap~~ useful suggestions while typing. This includes, but it is not limited to:
- Pages you visited
- Bookmarks
- Popular pages (guess who decides that…)
Custom searches: search IMDB, Wikipedia, Amazon and google itself with a few clicks

Unlike Firefox’s AwesomeBar, Google’s OmniBox seems more “evolved”: it doesn’t get too much in your way, it lets you go where you want to go, and it’s smart about searching. Apparently Mozilla is already planning to remove the search bar completely and incorporate it in the AwesomeBar… but Google released it first, sorry guys.

The other handy thing they ~~stole~~ kindly borrowed from Opera is the New Tab Page, basically like Opera’s Speed Dial, but with two interesting things:

It displays the nine most visited pages: you don’t have to configure it!
It displays search boxes for the most visited sites where you searched something on.

While I really like how this works (it requires no configuration whatsoever), I kinda miss dragging my favorite pages in the New Tab Page. If you come from Opera, you’ll miss this too: the pages I have in my speed dial are NOT necessarily the pages I visited the most!

I guess I’ll get used to it, though…

Relax, it’s Google!

Google is not Evil™. Google is good to everyone, from their own employees to developers and end users: and the funniest part of this whole thing is that everything they make looks good for you. You have absolutely no reason to fear Google.

They did it again: they apparently released a new browser which definitely looks inherently more secure than competitors.
Here’s why:

It has an Incognito mode, which lets you browse everything you want without logging anything anywhere.
It confines popups to the tab they belong, minimized. You can then seletively decide to drag them out and promote them to their own window.
Each tab is sandboxed: i.e., it has no rights to write anything to your PC. Absolutely no chance. When plugins for Java and Flash are used, however, this doesn’t apply.
Chrome continuously downloads lists of malicious sites, so that you’re protected against phishing in real time.

Now, if everything goes wrong, you know it’s definitely someone else who did it. If you read the comic book between the lines, you’ll notice a not-so-subtle message to the end users:

The browser is sandboxed, so if anything goes wrong, blame others (Adobe for Flash, Sun for Java, Microsoft for some other crap)
You can monitor the resource consumption of each tab, ergo what each website uses. This means that if a site is slow is definitely the web developer’s fault.

This is basically what John Resig immediately pointed out when the comic came out.

How it feels

Google Chrome is clearly a very nice product to use. It’s as intuitive as IE for the average Windows user, it has the best of Firefox and Opera features and it’s even more sleek than Safari. The UI, in my opinion, is a true masterpiece and feels well though out.

Everything is aimed to be intuitive and does not get in your way: it just works. You want to download a file? You can just do it, without worrying about where to save it: it will appear in a “download bucket” at the bottom of your tabs, and you can just drag and drop what you downloaded anywhere you like, if you need to.
Why nobody thought of this before?

Even the program settings are simple to understand. The Options dialog is divided in “Basics”, “Minor Tweaks” and “Under the Hood”. The idea is that anyone can understand the Basics, some people may tweak a bit more, and only geeks may want to go beyond that. This is particularly evident in the Italian translation (it comes bundled with 40 localizations, by the way), where they translated “Under the Hood” with “Roba da smanettoni” which means something like “Stuff for people who fiddle with PCs”. I personally found this translation a bit irritating, but anyway…

Media Coverage and Target Audience

The overall impression is that Google wanted to target end users with this browser, but also appeal geeks, too. This makes sense from a marketing point of view. While 90% of geeks switched from IE to another browser, ordinary people are still stuck with IE. Why? Because alternative browsers have gained a reputation of being geek-friendly (which, by popular belief, does not mean user-friendly).

Google’s marketing strategy is quite clear, and it doesn’t seem to be failing on any point:

They targeted Windows first, because that’s what the bulk of IE aficionados uses.
They did their best to make it as user-friendly as possible: the sleek GUI, the comic book, etc.
They spread the world like crazy: every blog is talking about it, but also major news sites like BBC and CNN. When I got to work, a collegue of mine asked me if I tried the new Google browser and if I read the comic. She heard it at the radio. Here in Italy!
At the same time, they made the whole thing open source, released APIs and emphasized this, so that “computer fiddlers” couldn’t resist.

To me, it looks like Google Chrome stands a good chance to succeed where others have failed: drive most of the Internet population away from Internet Explorer.

Open Source, testing and quality

Google is well known for its massive infrastructure. Moreover, Google is the only “entity” (let’s call it that way, shall we) who knows and visited almost every web page on the Internet. If something is not “on Google”, it may well not exist at all: this is not strictly true, but it’s the user perspective and ad the end of the day that’s all that matters.
Google, as a consequence, has virtually unlimited resources (compared to any other possible competitor) and virtually unlimited knowledge of the Internet, which makes automated testing no more than a joke.

From the Google Chrome Comic:

“Within 20-30 minutres of each new browser build, we can teswt it on tens of thousands of different web pages”

…and that’s certainly not an understatemend: you can believe that.

Google seems very concerned of building a “rock-solid” browser rather than being the coolest guy in town, and that’s a good sign. Google is smart, remember?

As if it weren’t enough, the entire thing (the rendering engine, the javascript implementation and the whole code of the broswer) is 100% open source which means, in a nutshell:

Free testers
Free developers
Good publicity

If things go as planned, Chrome may become the most widely tested piece of software in the world. Let’s just see how the community takes this.

Why it matters

Everyone seems to have gone crazy about Chrome, even long before it was made available. Why does it matter, anyway? Isn’t it just a browser, at the end of the day? Well, yes, but:

It’s 100% open source. If you like something of it, you can get it, modify it, bundle it in another project and redistribute it. Give it a few weeks and extensions which use some of Google’s new API will flock to the ’fox like crazy.
It’s small, fast and very promising. Sure, it’s not perfect, but YOU can help improving it. Get it?
It’s on Windows, so it will reach the majority of Internet users… in theory.

Last but not least, it comes bundled with Gears, i.e. what Google would like you to use for RIAs. That’s perhaps the only “subliminal” message they are trying to send to their users (for now, at least).
As a matter of fact, nothing prevents them from using Chrome as a way to promote their technology and products. But at the same time nothing prevents a random developer to just fork the project and distribute a neutral and unbranded version of Chrome.

See? Google is not evil at all, it’s just smarter than others.

The Bottom Line

Google showed us once more that their “innovation” can be summarized with the following:

“Do not invent new things, just make them better”

They didn’t invent Internet search: they just made it better and smarted. The same philosophy applies to Chrome, too. Some examples? Sure:

They didn’t create a new rendering engine, they used an existing one
They analyzed Safari’s neat GUI tricks and implemented something even better.
They added an IE8-like domain highlight in the URL.
They got the Firefox’s AwesomeBar and improved it.
They got Opera’s Speed Dial and improved it.
They got IE8’s one-process-per-tab architecture and improved it.
They didn’t think of a Javascript JIT first, they just made it widely-available first.
They didn’t think about merging the address bar with the search bar, Mozilla announced it first, but Google released it before they did.
Safari 4 allows users to create shortcuts for their favorite web apps, but unfortunately it’s only out for developers…

Google did it, again. Exactly as planned.

Google Apps for your domain: a shared hosting killer service?

h3rald@h3rald.com — Mon, 28 Aug 2006 03:51:00 -0000

A while ago Google started offering services like Google Mail (Gmail) and Google Calendar to domain owners. Sure everyone likes Gmail, but one of the few bad things about it is that it never feels “unique”: your email address is always gonna be gmail.com or <something>googlemail.com. Not a big deal? Well, sure, not really, but it really depends on the people using the service and how fussy they are:

small/medium business wouldn’t like this: @gmail.com gives farless credibility than @domain.com
When using Gmail with the Send As feature, messages will be sent “on behalf of”, and this can potentially mess things up as some spam filters don’t like it.

Now it seems to be official: Google is starting to offer customizable services to anyone who wish to sign up for it, not only as a restricted beta service.
What does this mean? Well, it can be the (free and easy) definitive web solution for small business, kids, grandmas and everyone who wants to establish a presence on the web by paying only the annual domain renewal fees…

Included applications

Note the title: Google Apps for your domain, not only Gmail. Here’s what you get:

Gmail – You know what it offers: a state-of-the art AJAX interface, speed, reliability, very effective spam filter, loads of space, tagging (labels) stars and all the rest.
Google Calendar – One of the best online calendar available. Features and AJAX interface, full integration with Gmail, ability to create private and public calendars, reminders,
Google Chat – Google’s instant messenger, available through Google Talk desktop application or online, seamlessly integrated in your Gmail interface.
Google Web Pages – aka Google’s page creator, easily create webpages using Google’s WYSIWYG online editor.

Now, try imagining these four services combined and (almost) fully customizable… Still no idea? Well, keep reading for a list of all the included features.

Included Features

In order to use Google Apps for your domain, you must of course own a domain. The next step involves changing your domain’s MX entry to “ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM”, and follow the instructions to create an administration account for your Google applications, and after a while every email sent to your domain’s accounts will be routed to your new Google-powered inbox. Similarly, in order to use Google Page Creator on your domain, you’re required to change the CNAME record of your DNS to “ghs.google.com”.

Note: in order to avoid inconveniences especially if a lot of users use your domain’s email, it is recommended that you pay attention on Google’s instructions on how to set the whole thing up. For further information refer to the official FAQ. In order to be able to use Google Page Creator on your domain, you must setup an URL to publish your webpages: of course do NOT set this to “www.yourdomain.com” or any subdomain currently in use or your visitors will access the pages you created with Google Page Creator.

Here’s what you get:

For a bigger image click here. Let’s now have a look at what are the main differences from the standard Gmail.

Include your own logo

Your own logo will be displayed on the upper left corner of every page. And this is truly sweet. All you have to do to change it is uploading a 143×59 PNG or GIF image from your domain management panel (see below).

Use your company name instead of Google’s

Besides a custom logo, it is possible to set a company name to be used instead of “Google” or “Gmail” in page titles and links. I chose “H3RALD.com Mail” and that’s displayed everywhere, including on the sign-in page.

Control Panel
All the custom settings can easily be managed through an easy-to use control panel:

It’s really easy to use and has wizards to setup all the included services and options like setting up user accounts, settings etc.

User Accounts
Through the control panel you can add new users and modifying existing user accounts to access your services. You can create administrators who are able to access administrative domain-wide settings, and standard users. Every user gets 2048MB of space for their emails, and that’s pretty generous considering that it seems that you’re able to create around 25 user accounts.

Already have a list of users you’re like to import? Just save them in CSV format and upload them.

Would you like to be able to contact all your users at once, e.g. via a newsletter? Google thought about this as well, and you can create your own personal newsletters which can be sent out automatically to your @yourdomain.com email accounts.

Internal Messaging System
But there’s more. We all know Google Talk: yes it’s nice, but probably MSN has more features, smileys and all the rest but it still remains a perfectly usable instant manager, which also allows file transfer. Your users can use Google Talk to communicate with each other or simply chat through their webmail interface, More features? Well, for example you can setup Google Talk to work on federated networks.

Appointments/Projects management
Google Calendar is an excellent online calendar, and now you can use it within your own domain as well. This means, for example, that it can be used to set your company’s appointments, reminder, project deadlines by creating an unlimited number of custom calendars to share with your collaborators.

Design your own site
I know a lot of restaurants, shops and people who would like to have a small site for their business or activity, but they can’t develop web application themselves. So the most obvious solution is to hire some professional web developer to rip them off… erhm, to create a website for them. Now it is not necessary: by setting the correct DNS parameters, you can allow users to create their own webpages using a foolproof and advanced web editor powered by Google: Google Page Creator.
I didn’t set it up on my own domain, but a preview of what you can do with Google Page Creator is available here.

Scenario

After considering all this, I came to the conclusion that what Google did can help a lot of people and at the same time prevent some evil webmaster to charge them hundreds of Euro (they really get away with it!) for basic “websites” with “three or more static pages”.
All you have to do is buy your own domain, and that can be as cheap as 8$ per year, the rest comes for free, from Google:

The best webmail interface you can possibly imagine
Nearly unlimited space for everything
A truly effective spam filter
About 25 fully-featured user account, possibly more if you ask nicely
Your own “corporate instant messenger”
Your own calendar to manage appointments, meetings etc.
An intuitive and advanced web page creator – not like Geocities

All this for free. Yes, with ads (I’m not here to discuss privacy concerns), but after all they’re not displayed on your main site.

What about Server Side technologies for my sites?

OK kid, now that would be a little bit too much, even if I can foresee some possible “Google Web Widgets” at some point. “Create your interactive and dinamic website within minutes, no programming knowledge required”… that would be great (for Google) and bad (for freelance web developers). One thing at a time, after all G(od|oogle) has the whole eternity to fulfill his Goals.

Understanding Boolean Search

h3rald@h3rald.com — Sat, 10 Dec 2005 11:57:16 -0000

These days, it is necessary to use a search engines to find the information you want. When the World Wide Web was smaller, search engines weren't an essential websurfing tool, but once the Web started growing exponentially, and hosting literally billions of documents and files, even normal searches aren't enough to find important information, especially when it is not readily available. So, I'm going to show you a more powerful way to search.Learning how to search

Imagine yourself in the shoes of someone who has never used the Internet before. That's pretty rare nowadays, but it does happen. Take my dad, for example, who recently asked me something like "Where can I find a map of the Internet?". I explained that there wasn't any such thing because the Web is too dynamic to be mappable, and that's why we use search engines.

I introduced him to Google [1], and he has since started to use search engines regularly. He didn't have much luck on his first few tries, but eventually he learned how to search properly.

Searching the web is easy (just type in a word and hit enter), but finding stuff can be tricky, especially if you don't know enough about a subject to narrow your search down. Most people (including myself) tend to find what they're looking for only after multiple searches: we start with a general item, check the results, and restrict the next search based on what we learned from the previous one. While this is generally successful, every once in a while you will find yourself oging in circles.

Let's look at a sample situation: I want to learn Ruby on Rails [2] and I want a free host to try it out. So, I go on Google and type something like:

ruby on rails free hosting

I immediately find various blog entries referring to a project that aims to offer free hosting to try out the Ruby-based framework "Rails Playground". [3] It seems to be the perfect solution - they offer, completely free, enough space to try out Rails. It's a pity they recently decided to close new account registration, so now the whole thing is useless.

Variants of the search query mentioned above bring up stuff related to Rails Playground. The project became so well-known that almost every Rails-related blog mentioned it at some point as the only place offering free hosting supporting Rails. Since it is useless now, is there a way to prevent Google (or other search engines) from displaying Rails Playground related results? Yes!

You would need something like this:

rails free hosting -playground -railsplayground

In this new query I excluded the words "playground" and "railsplayground" using a minus sign before them so I would find other results that didn't refer to the project. In the end, I didn't actually find any other free hosting that supported rails, but I did find the following:

- a company which offers free rails hosting for testing purposes (until they officially launch their service)
- a guy who offered some space on his private server for testing rails (no longer available)

Although I didn't find anything equivalent to Rails Playground, I didn't waste time either going in circles or scrolling through tons of pages trying to find something else. Actually, most people know how to exclude (or include) words in Google searches but they rarely do it. Furthermorte, most people don't know that there are many more search functions available on almost all the popular search engines. These functions, like the minus sign, are called Boolean operators.

A few words about Boolean algebra:

Boolean searches get their name from George Bool[4], the inventor of Boolean algebra[5], which is a particular algebraic structure involving three fundamental operators: AND, OR and NOT. If you attended any math class or course you should be already familiar with it. If not, here is a short summary of some of the concepts I will discuss in upcoming sections.

Using Boolean searches (rather than Boolean algebra), the expressions A, B, C, etc. can be considered words, and "A <Boolean operator B" can be considered search queries.

- A AND B: pages must contain both words A and B.
- A OR B: pages must contain either the word A or the word B
- NOT A: pages must not contain the word A

Trivial. Now let's see some more examples:

- (A OR B) AND (NOT C): here I used brackets to create nesting, which causes expressions within brackets to be carried out before the rest, so the query means: "search for pages containing either A or B but which do not contain C".

- (A OR (C AND D)) AND (NOT (F OR G)): similar but more complex than the previous: "search for pages containing either A or both C and D. Additionally, only F or G can be present, or neither of them".

In some applications, like electrical circuits, NOR, NAND and XOR operators are also used to express Not OR, Not AND and eXclusive OR. As for search engines, only some of them support the XOR operator. A XOR B means that pages can contain either A but not B or B but not B.

Boolean search and Google

After reading this you might want to try typing Boolean expressions like "(food AND for) AND (cats OR DOGS) AND (NOT birds)" into a search engine, but that won't work. A Boolean expression typed "as is" rarely works on a search engine (it isn't supported because it's considered to be not user friendly enough). Google in particular adopted a more intuitive way[6] of performing Boolean searches.

For starters, you almost always perform a Boolean search when searching something on Google simply because they decided (like most major search engines have) to automatically include the AND operator unless OR is specified.

Searching the phrase "food for dogs" actually corresponds to "food AND for AND dogs" (using the proper Boolean expression). Presumably, this was done to prevent the search engine from delivering too many (and usually inconsistent) results. The other possibility (the default in MySQL's FULLTEXT boolean search[7]) would be to use the OR operator by default. Thus, searching for "food for dogs" might deliver results about food for cats, other pets, or even food in general.

To improve the precision of their searches, Google also implements automatic exclusion for common words (like "for" in the example below). However, on occasion, a common word needs to be included in a search. To be fair,usually you will find what you are looking for, even with common words excluded. Nevertheless, to force Google to include a word, just add a plus symbol before it, like "+for".

Similarly, a minus in front of a word (rails free hosting -playground -railsplayground) forces Google to exclude a word from the search query: in other words, the minus sign is Google's version of the Boolean NOT operator.
In order to transform the Boolean expression that I used at the start of this chapter - (food AND for) AND (cats OR DOGS) AND (NOT birds) - into a proper query accepted by Google, I have to write: "food for" "cats OR dogs" -birds. The OR operator must be specified, and anything in parentheses roughly corresponds to quotation marks because Google searches for the exact phrase enclosed in the quotation marks (also evaluating an OR operator, if present).

The biggest limitation of Google when it comes to Boolean searches is the lack of support for nested expressions. Something like (food AND (NOT for)) AND (cats OR dogs) AND (NOT birds) cannot be translated into something like "food -for" "cats OR dogs" -birds because Google will not evaluate the "-" operator if it is enclosed in quotation marks. Something more complex like:

((food AND for) AND (cats OR DOGS) AND (NOT birds)) OR ((stuff AND for) AND (goats OR horses) AND (NOT (cows OR bulls)))

cannot be translated into a Google-friendly query. Normal people probably won't ever do that complicated a search, but you never know...

All the other search engines, strategies and conclusions

There are various articles (see [8][9][10]) about how Boolean search has been implemented in various major search engines and AltaVista[11], AlltheWeb[12] and MSN Search[13] seem to support Boolean search features better than Google. All of them support the standard Boolean operators, as well as the "+" and "-" symbols, but apparently only MSN Search[13] seems to support full Boolean search queries with nesting: I actually managed to execute my previous complex example:

((food AND for) AND (cats OR DOGS) AND (NOT birds)) OR ((stuff AND for) AND (goats OR horses) AND (NOT (cows OR bulls)))

and I got some decent results. The only (understandable) exception is that I had to specify +for to have the word "for" included.

Although Boolean search is useful, it is not the only way to get relevant results as quickly as possible. Additional thinking is required to prepare a query properly. In everyday life, you won't really use heavily nested queries, simply because other methods are more effective. If you're interested in learning how to search I'd recommend a very informative article available at Waikato University[14].

I found out that a mix between making multiple search attempts and using basic Boolean queries (word exclusion in particular) can deliver pertinent results fairly readily. Suppose you've heard something regarding a person named Halley who contributes to an IT-related community and that someone mentioned the word "kernel" when talking about him, and you remember that it wasn't referring to Linux. You could come up with something like:

Halley kernel -Linux

Et voila': Halley's CyberArmy Profile[15] appears as the first search result in Google! If you typed just Halley you wouldn't have found the right one right away; you would probably get more information about the Halley's Comet or the astronomer Sir Edmund Halley. If you typed kernel Halley you'd have found something about Kernel Halley on zZine first and then on CyberArmy lower down in the search results.

Boolean search can be useful, but it must not be abused. Google's decision to implement only partial Boolean support without standard Boolean operation was probably the best choice to achieve both pertinent results and user-friendliness.

Notes and further resources
[1] Google Inc.: http://www.google.com/
[2] Ruby on Rails framework: http://www.rubyonrails.org/
[3] Ruby Playground: http://www.railsplayground.com/
[4] George Bool, Wikipedia Page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Boole
[5] Boolean Algebra, Wikipedia Page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boolean_algebra
[6] Google Help on Advanced Search: http://www.google.com/help/refinesearch.html
[7] MySQL FULLTEXT boolean search: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/fulltext-boolean.html
[8] Search engines that implement boolean search (outdated): http://searchenginewatch.com/facts/article.php/2155991
[9] Boolean Searching on the Internet: http://library.albany.edu/internet/boolean.html
[10] How to choose a search engine or directory: http://library.albany.edu/internet/choose.html#logic
[11] AltaVista Special Search Terms: http://www.altavista.com/help/search/syntax
[12] AlltheWeb Query Language: http://alltheweb.com/help/faqs/query_language#2
[13] MSN Search: http://search.msn.com/
[14] "The Assignment Process: Search Strategies": http://www.waikato.ac.nz/library/learning/g_strategies.shtml
[15] Halley's CyberArmy Profile: [/url]http://www.cyberarmy.net/~Halley/[/url]

Software Review: Google Earth

h3rald@h3rald.com — Sat, 10 Dec 2005 11:48:59 -0000

Almost every person on Earth has seen an image taken from a satellite at least once in his or her life: now imagine putting all those images together to make a sort of "patchwork world"...this is unfortunately not as simple as gluing atlas maps together, because height, resolution and orientation must be considered. However, "A computer could do all that"...and so it happened!In the beginning...

Nasa.gov has always been one of the most famous and most visited websites in history, and among the resources you can find there, besides the pictures of space-related objects and phenomena that everyone flocks to, are satellite pictures of Earth.
Perhaps one of the most wonderful things NASA did software-wise was the realization of an open source software called WorldWind: "World Wind lets you zoom from satellite altitude into any place on Earth. Leveraging Landsat satellite imagery and Shuttle Radar Topography Mission data, World Wind lets you experience Earth terrain in visually rich 3D, just as if you were really there."
A really cool thing indeed, if you ask me. So cool that people from all over the world started downloading and using it, causing problems on NASA's server for the project, which was extremely busy or even unreachable. The download is now mirrored on Sourceforge, download.com, and Wayne State University, but the server problem has to do with getting to the server to access the images. So why bother downloading if you know it doesn't actually work, regardless of the reason?

The alternative, until a year or so ago, was a product created by "Keyhole Corp." - I won't bother posting a link to the site, you'll read why below. Guys from Keyhole basically created a similar program that was much faster, with no server timeouts and better image resolution. Of course, they thought they could charge for it, and I believe that back in the day some people actually paid $70 for what was seen afterwards as a piece of software with a great potential that was never tapped.

Google enters the scene

"Hey, look! It works! Now let's get it and do it better!" - This is, in a nutshell, Google's policy in the last 2 years or so: they find relatively small(er) companies that produced something with potential, buy it, and they either improve and resell the product, or give it away for free, getting income from advertising. It happened before, with Picasa and Blogger, for example, and now, with Keyhole as well (for a pretty complete list of Google's acquisitions and possible future targets, have a look here).
This is not a bad thing for the end user, because often new Google-branded products are free or discounted, and Google is happy because it can still make a huge profit from it: if you ask me, that's a much better policy than Microsoft's ("Create something which doesn't work, try to patch it eventually, force people to use it"), at least from a certain point of view.

Anyhow, Google purchased Keyhole Corp. on October 27th, 2004. The next day, Google said "let's drop Keyhole's price to 30 bucks" - And Google saw that it was good.

Then everything went (almost) silent, until June 18th, 2005, seven months and one day since the acquisition of Keyhole, Google officially released a new product, called Google Earth. "Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them" [Gen. 2:1]

Welcome to a brand new world
Pseudo-biblical jokes apart, Google's new Earth can be downloaded and installed FOR FREE! Go and get it because it's interesting, but please don't click on the link I provided before because you'll find out that Google won't let you download it, because they got too many requests, so...
So that's why, also thanks to Google, I found some Major Geeks mirrors and got it from there. The file is 10 MB, so if you have 56K dial-up don't bother, because it needs at least a 128Kbps connection to run correctly. Below are the minimal system requirements, the recommended ones, and what my PC has. As you can see, processor speed actually doesn't matter if you have a good video card and a good Internet connection.

Minimal Configuration
* Operating system: Windows 2000, Windows XP
* CPU speed: Intel? Pentium? PIII 500 MHz
* System memory (RAM): 128MB
* 200MB hard-disk space
* 3D graphics card: 3D-capable video card with 16MB VRAM
* 1024x768, 32-bit true color screen
* Network speed: 128 kbps ("Broadband/Cable Internet")

Recommended Configuration
* Operating system: Windows XP
* CPU speed: Intel? Pentium? P4 2.4GHz+ or AMD 2400xp+
* System memory (RAM): 512MB
* 2GB hard-disk space
* 3D graphics card: 3D-capable video card with 32MB VRAM or greater
* 1280x1024, 32-bit true color screen
* Network speed: 128 kbps ("Broadband/Cable Internet")

h3raLd's crappy PC's Configuration
* Operating system: Windows XP
* CPU speed: Intel? Pentium? PII 350 MHz
* System memory (RAM): 256MB
* 30 GB hard-disk space
* 3D graphics card: nVidia GeForce II MX 32MB VRAM
* 1024x768, 32-bit true color screen
* Network speed: 1240 kbps

I downloaded it, installed it, and it worked fine on my PC. Please note that Google has been pretty specific regarding the compatible OSes, basically only Windows 2000/XP are supported: very old systems (Windows 95/98/Me and alike) and very new systems (Windows Server 2003, X-x64) are not meant to be able to run it. Mac users shouldn't bother trying, while Linux users will be glad to read that it's supposed to work under wine (rated "bronze").

Let's suppose you installed the program and you're running it. If you don't want to try it because you are still unsure if it's worth or not, you can have a look at this article, and in particular at the screenshots.
I found it quite easy to use, as are nearly all Google applications; the interface is quite pretty and does the job. You'll immediately notice the main panel where the world and images will be shown, then there's a bottom panel mainly used for navigation, while on the right the three main functions of the program are clearly presented in 3 tabs ("Fly to", "Local Search" and "Directions"), together with two other tabs below for adding/removing details from the map and managing your saved places and results.

As it's a Google product, one of the most handy features is the search engine. You can put in a city, town, even street or building, restaurant, or place of interest, and the program should be smart enough to find it and take you there. With the "Fly Now" feature it's possible to just center the view on one place, for example. The resulting map will be at a certain height, depending on what term you searched for. You can now zoom in or out with your mouse wheel or with the buttons provided in the navigation panel, and you'll see the map updating. This is a gradual process and depends mainly on your connection speed, but also the available RAM, the video card, and the processor speed.

As it's still a relatively new product, don't expect to find everything... or better, you can find (nearly) everything, but it might not be at the highest resolution, for example, and thus appear blurred on zoom. Currently the USA, the UK, and Western Europe are the places with the most details. In particular, in the major cities of the US you can also see a 3-D re-creation of the buildings which, even though in plain gray, actually reproduce the real shape of the element.
Furthermore, in the navigation panel you can also tilt up and tilt down the view! So the end result is a map which is half real and half virtual.
If you search for another place, you will not be taken there instantaneously, but instead Google Earth zooms out appropriately and moves around the globe to where the new place is and zooms in appropriately: a really nice effect.

Also keep in mind that you can add or highlight details on the map, like grids, roads, names, places to see, restaurants, stadiums, railroads, boundaries and borders, different types of schools, earthquake areas, and - even if the satellite maps used can be up to three years old - statistical data about Cloud Coverage and a lot of other things.

The other two functions, "Local Search" and "Directions" allow you, respectively, to perform a search restricted to the area (i.e. Trafalgar Square - London, UK) and get directions between two places, highlighting the suggested path. Also, all places you see can be saved, marked, and printed: wonderful.

Limitations and Opinions

As a Beta, Google Earth does come with limitations: as I wrote earlier, only USA, UK, and Western Europe are (almost) fully supported, but you can already get some pretty decent pictures from 200 miles up anywhere in the world. Another limitation is that since the images often come from different satellites, "patches" can be seen sometimes, where part of a picture of an area is darker or lighter than another.

However, you can't really complain about this software, because it's free and obviously Google's server seems to be always available, unlike NASA's. f you want more, Google Earth is available as a Plus edition (20$) and Pro edition (400$), with more features and support.
What of Microsoft? Well, Microsoft is said to be planning to "strike back" during this summer, with MS Virtual Earth, let's just wait and see...

The Green Bar

h3rald@h3rald.com — Fri, 09 Dec 2005 13:03:54 -0000

Since 1998 SEO experts, webmasters, and even casual users spent ages trying to figure out the magic within that small green bar... but what's really behind Google's most famous invention?If you never experienced the sensation of looking at such a green bar before, then maybe you don't know what I'm referring to; I suggest downloading and installing the Google Toolbar[1]. This IE add-on (now available for the Firefox browser) was developed by Google years ago and still remains the most common way to view a website's PageRank through a simple bar with a variable length, according to a 10 point scale.

I quietly mentioned the infamous word PageRank earlier, but what is it?
Some people think the idea of the word might come from a pun involving one of Google's co-founders (Larry Page), while others simply think it was the most obvious choice for a system which was supposed to rank pages according to importance and popularity. Anyhow, the only certain thing is that two (insert appropriate adjective here) students of Stanford University wrote a paper, in 1998, called "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine"[3], in which, they discussed some interesting ideas for developing a large scale search engine using a particular algorithm they invented, which was supposed to help delivering the most relevant results for any search query provided by a user of the service.

It is also certain that these two guys, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, eventually made an awful lot of money in the following years, developing and expanding an initially simple-looking website/web application with a funny name[4] and turning it into one of the biggest and most profitable businesses in the history of Computer Science. But let's now examine how PageRank works.

Deus ex machina
Google's co-founders kindly provided a short text summing up their innovative (and perhaps secret) technology[5]. In particular, one paragraph seems to offer a brief and simple explanation of how PageRank works:

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important", weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important."

The first time I read this paragraph, I really experienced a feeling of admiration and ecstasy for these two enlightened minds who decided to bestow their priceless gift on the World Wide Web: a system which gives every page the due importance through a democratic system. Isn't it wonderful?

Of course there's (much) more to it than a short paragraph, and obviously this explanation wasn?t enough for those people (webmasters, SEO experts, kids creating their online family albums, etc.), who gradually became more and more interested in knowing further details about the system, hoping that it would have improved their placement in Google's search results.

Indeed, PageRank contributed to label some sites as important and gradually the number of ?PageRank 10? websites[6] began to rise, but generally remaining a prerogative of important names of the IT industry (Microsoft, Apple and obviously Google itself, for example). But how did such sites achieve that? How did the green toolbar grow so much for them and not as much for your grandma's personal webpage?

Soon enough, theories and speculations produced an approximation of the algorithm[7], which is generally thought to be an acceptable model to understand how the system works.

Take the following equation:

PR(A) = (1-d) + d (PR(T1)/C(T1) + ... + PR(Tn)/C(Tn))

Where:

PR(A) - The PageRank value of a certain page
PR(Tn) - The PageRank value of all pages linking to A
C(Tn) - The number of links present on page Tn
d(... - "damp factor", thought to be 0.85

It now appears clear that the PageRank of page A depends on the number of pages linking to it. Furthermore, important factors taken into consideration are the quality of such pages (i.e. whether they have a high PageRank themselves or not) and the number of links present on each page, which causes the vote to be divided equally among them.

This is, in a nutshell, how PageRank is supposed to work. This is obviously a simple model, and there's actually a more mathematical/probabilistic approach[8] which goes beyond the scope of this article and requires some notions of probability theory.

Considerations and opinions
With this model in mind, it's now possible to understand how (in a very simplified way) Google works: each month Google spiders search the web, and follow links from a page to another, keeping track of the "votes". PageRank is then calculated for every page and updated. This process normally takes a lot of time and, as a matter of fact, PageRank seems to be updated only every 4 months nowadays: these trimester updates normally causes a page to increase its rank by one (or more if you're lucky) level on the bar, or in some cases, lower it in the same way.

By taking a closer look at the formula proposed above, you'll notice that the maximum value of PR(A) is by no means equal to 10, as it depends on how many pages link to A and how many outbound links there are on such pages. As a matter of fact, people started speculating on the nature of the scale used for PageRank: on the toolbar it ranges from 0 to 10, while in reality a PageRank 10 (take Microsoft.com for example) should correspond to some millions in practice.

The most accredited theory is that the PageRank displayed on the green bar is the result of a sort of correspondence between real values and such 0 to 10 scale. Also, people suggested that such scale is in fact a base 5 (or 6) logarithmic scale. This would explain for example why it takes much longer to acquire PageRank 7 from PageRank 6 than acquiring PageRank 3 from PageRank 2.
For the non-mathematical minds, a logarithmic scale is a succession of numbers NOT incremented by "1" or a fixed quantity, but by an always-growing exponential factor: taking a base-10 logarithmic scale, values of 1,2,3 would correspond respectively to 10^1, 10^2 and 10^3 (10, 100, 1000).

For a long time Google seemed to use PageRank as an important factor for getting first places in search results, and it's still partly true: if you search for the keyword "Italy" you're likely to find some high PR sites as first results.

This resulted in all the possible forms of speculations: webmasters started asking money for publishing links on high PR pages, and similarly SEO experts started adopting various infamous tactics to obtain a high PageRank for their customers: this includes, for example, link farms[9].

It's now clear that what is was believed to be a solution relying on the uniquely democratic nature of the web turned out to be a complete failure in that sense, because the very basis of the concept is wrong. Sad, but true, the WWW is by no means democratic at all.

Another complaint against PageRank was that new sites took ages to acquire respectable PageRank and therefore appear on the top of search results, no matter how wonderfully they were written. This is still partly true, as anyone can notice by searching Google, but the algorithm itself is continuously being tweaked both for stopping spammers and link farms, and also to favour those sites which provide relevant and appropriate content and are not up to some dodgy trick; I must admit that the situation is gradually getting better.

Case Study: ItalySimply.com and h3raLd.com
I'm now going to discuss my own personal experience with PageRank applied to my two websites, ItalySimply[10] and h3raLd Labs[11]. While the second one is not currently advertised or promoted, because at the moment I don't have enough time for other web developing projects, with the first one I tried to follow a SEO Strategy trying to acquire PageRank and good placement in search engines.
You can see the result yourself: ItalySimply acquired PageRank 5 and h3raLd PageRank 4: not bad at all considering they are both two relatively new websites, ItalySimply being officially born in August 2004 and h3raLd Labs actually had some serious content from April 2005 on.

For ItalySimply, I even experienced a period of PageRank 0 which lasted about 2 months: although according to Google all websites should have at least PR1, PR0 is used to penalize some unusual behaviour which in my case was a 302 - Temporarily Moved redirect which was necessary to redirect users to a subfolder of the server. Later on I learned how this can be interpreted as a dodgy redirection by search engines[12], and why I was penalized by Google for this with a PR0. After noticing the mistakes, I immediately started a strategic link campaign; obtaining links from some good sites (also with high PR) related to mine, and PageRank for ItalySimply began to grow, from 0 to 3, then 4, and just recently 5.

At the same time, I re-designed h3raLd.com and noticed that it acquired PR1, because it was already listed in Google and didn't get any vote from other sites. I then decided to put a link to h3raLd Labs on every page of ItalySimply, which are now ranging from PR5 to PR2.

The result was an immediate growth of h3raLd.com in terms of PR, which reached an acceptable 4 without any link swapped, banner displayed on behalf of other sites, or anything as such.

The difference between the two sites though is much bigger than 1 point on PR, in terms of placement in search results: ItalySimply has some relatively interesting content and various pages, and it ranks good enough on MSN and Yahoo, and even Google, to an extent; h3raLd.com has just 4 pages and doesn't seem to appear at all in search engines, unless you search for something like "h3raLd". Again, this is a proof that nowadays PR doesn't mean immediate placement on the top of search results.

Final Considerations
Although PR is by no means the unique factor to determine search engine placements, it's still certainly important as a co-factor. As I said, it's still extremely difficult for a new page with low PageRank to place before a high-ranked one. Surely, if I decided to put something more interesting on h3raLd.com I would get better results than buying a new domain and creating a new site: old sites with high PR are still naturally inclined to rank better than new ones. Got that? Now, all you need to do is buy a really stupid domain name and create some pages for it, then think about it like a bottle of whisky; let it age for a while making it get some respectable rank: when you have a clever idea you'll have your ready-made place to promote it!

In Google we trust!

Sources and related links:

[1] Google Toolbar, http://toolbar.google.com/
[2] Stanford University, http://www.stanford.edu/
[3] Lawrence Page and Sergey Brin, "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine", Computer Science Department, Stanford University, http://www-db.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html
[4] Google, http://www.google.com/
[5] Google Technology, http://www.google.com/technology/
[6] List of PageRank 10 sites, http://www.searchenginegenie.com/pagerank-10-sites.htm
[7] Ian Rogers, "The Google Pagerank Algorithm and How It Works", IPR Computing Ltd. http://www.iprcom.com/papers/pagerank/index.html
[8] Pagerank, Wikipedia page, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pagerank
[9] Link Farm, Wikipedia Page, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_farm
[10] ItalySimply - Italy Real Estate Services and Relocation Help, http://www.italysimply.com/
[11] h3raLd Labs - Freelance Web Development, http://www.h3rald.com/
[12] "The Rundown on 301 and 302 redirects", September 10th, 2004,
http://www.rankforsales.com/seo-articles/301-and-302-domain-name-redirects.html