Google intros Chrome

So, this is verrrryy interesting - after being a robust partner of Mozilla/Firefox for so many years, Google has decided to launch their own browser - Google Chrome (link should be up soon). If that didn't surprise you in itself, apparently Chrome is going to be based on Webkit, the same engine used by Apple's Safari! Like I said, verrrryy interesting indeed.



This can only be bad news for Mozilla, since they make most of their money from their relationship with Google, who now competes with them!

On the other hand, I think this is great news for web users as Google's investment should serve to hasten advancement of browser and web standards.

Windows only for now, Mac and Linux versions should be forthcoming.

UPDATE: If you're technically inclined, this cool toon tells you a lot more about what Google is trying to do and what's different.

Looking under the hood of Google search

Amit Singhal of Google has a very interesting post explaining "Technologies behind Google ranking" over at the Official Google Blog.

It's quite eye opening about the myriad things that happen to make every Google search operation happen. Here's an excerpt -

"Synonyms are the foundation of our query understanding work. This is one of the hardest problems we are solving at Google. Though sometimes obvious to humans, it is an unsolved problem in automatic language processing. As a user, I don't want to think too much about what words I should use in my queries. Often I don't even know what the right words are. This is where our synonyms system comes into action. Our synonyms system can do sophisticated query modifications, e.g., it knows that the word 'Dr' in the query [Dr Zhivago] stands for Doctor whereas in [Rodeo Dr] it means Drive. A user looking for [back bumper repair] gets results about rear bumper repair. For [Ramstein ab], we automatically look for Ramstein Air Base; for the query query [b&b ab] we search for Bed and Breakfasts in Alberta, Canada. We have developed this level of query understanding for almost one hundred different languages, which is what I am truly proud of."

House of cards - Radiohead's new video

So, Radiohead has a new video out and it's making waves because it doesn't use any cameras in the regular sense. Instead it uses some kind of 3-D scanner technology which uses lasers to create 3-D imagery.



That in itself would be pretty cool but they worked with Google (I don't know how Google does it but they get involved in all these neat things) to share a lot of the "making of" information. There's a web-based 3-D Viewer available that you can use to manipulate the video. Because its just data, you can see it at any angle. Very very cool! Check it out.