Posts Tagged ‘Google’
The team for the low-profile social network reports it is busily updating to keep up with open-source changes.
Google’s Orkut social networking site has been beset with bugs lately, leading the company to apologize for spotty service.
Orkut is an online community intended to make participants’ social life more active and stimulating. The Orkut engineering team is working to address recent issues with the site, said Eduardo Thuler, Orkut product manager at Google, in a blog post on Friday. He cited issues related to the frequent updating of open source software as a factor.
“First, Orkut is based on open source software that is subject to frequent updates, which we then pull and merge into the Orkut code tree. A result is that this can sometimes makes bugs harder to discover and fix. We accidentally began overwriting user app preferences, which resulted in the activity updates not getting posted, but this has now been fixed,” Thuler said.
“The Orkut engineering team has been hard at work addressing some recent issues and we would like to provide a status update and apologize for the inconvenience our spotty service may have caused you,” he said.
Google also has had to deal with getting viewer and owner information via data pipelining, a process that broke. The company was working to fix this as of Friday, according to Thuler.
If you’re paranoid about snoops discovering your Web search terms and results, you’ll have to start pointing your browser to another URL to use Google encrypted search.
The search giant announced in a blog post on June 25 that its encrypted search service moved fromhttps://google.com to https://encrypted.google.com.
The encrypted search, which gives a user the option to use SSL to prevent packet sniffing, was moved to accommodate “better serve our school partners and their users,” Dave Girouard, president of Google Enterprise says in the blog post.
Previously, school administrators — or anyone else, for that matter — who wanted to block encrypted searches at https://google.com would also block Google authenticated services such as Google Apps for Education.
Why would schools want to block encrypted searches? Using the service “creates an obscured channel between a user’s computer and Google,” which allows students to bypass a school’s content filter, Girouard said.
That makes it harder to block adult content, a policy of many schools.
Google’s change should make it easier for school IT staff to comply with the Children’s Internet Protection Act, which requires schools to implement measures to address minors accessing “inappropriate matter,” among other things.
Google will now let users add personal photos to the background of the traditionally minimalist search page, Google announced in a blog post Thursday.
In what is perhaps a transparent effort to out-feature Microsoft Bing, Google is ditching its boring white background and letting users upload their own photos. TheMicrosoft Bing search site features a different, Microsoft-chosen background picture every day.
Users are given three methods for customization–they can upload a photo from their computer, they can choose a photo from their Google-run Picasa photo album, or they can choose a photo from the public Picasa photo album. The feature is not yet available to all users, but Google said it plans to roll out the feature for U.S. users over the next few days.
To change your Google background photo: click on the link in the lower left corner of the Google search page (if you do not see this link, the feature has not been added to your Google yet).
Will a big hulking image on the search page background affect Google’s load time, though? No, Google assured InformationWeek in an email, the load time will not be affected.
According to a Google spokesperson, “The homepage does not load any slower. With or without a background image, the Google search elements show as quickly as before, allowing users to search just as quickly as without the new feature. We make this possible by post-loading the photo — we load the search elements first and then load the picture into your browser cache and show it as soon as it is available. Meanwhile you can already perform your search.”
So it looks like Google is dedicated to user personalization–either that, or they looked at Bing and decided that perhaps minimalism isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. If you really enjoy Google’s traditional search page, don’t worry–you can still use it.
Google’s Marissa Mayer, vice president of search products and user experience, suggests that users start tweeting snapshots of their new Google search pages, using the Twitter hashtag #myGooglepage. I won’t get started on how even Google thinks you should tweet instead of “buzzing.”
[source:PCWorld]
A report today suggests technology giant Google Inc. is phasing out the use of Microsoft’s popular operating system, Windows, on corporate computers because of concerns with security.
According to the Financial Times, Google is no longer offering new employees the option to use Windows-based computers, instead pushing the use of Apple’s Mac OS X operating system or the open-source Linux.
While the Financial Times suggests the hacking in China back in January led a push for a quicker switch-over, it’s likely that Google also want to move away from using Microsoft’s operating system – given they’re working on their own, Chrome OS, and are competitors against the company.
“We’re not doing any more Windows. It is a security effort,” one Google employee anonymously told the Financial Times.
Google was unavailable for comment on the matter, but it seems that employees are able to use Windows only on their personal laptops – and not on their Google-supplied desktop computers. For those wanting to use Windows on their corporate desktops, permission apparently needs to be gained from Google’s chief information officer, Ben Fried.
With the company’s own Chrome OS due out later this year, and Google being such a “open-source” focused company, it makes sense not to push Windows onto their corporate computers. It’s unclear how this will affect company development for the Windows platform, but with many Google products desktop-based, it shouldn’t have disastrous results.
A little more than 30 years ago, Toru Iwatani helped himself to a slice of pizza and looked down at what was left. What he saw inspired one of the world’s most recognized video games: Pac-Man, first released in Japan on May 22, 1980, by Namco.
On Friday, Blinky, Pinky, Inky and Clyde were back, this time as guest stars on the Google home page, trolling along the search engine’s iconic logo. (For those who subscribe to iGoogle, click on the “Classic” home page option on the upper right-hand corner to see the game.)
Google has twiddled with its logo hundreds of times before (about 700 times, in fact). The first time was in 1999 when Google’s founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin put a wooden stick man behind the logo as a tongue-in-cheek way of saying they’d be out of the office attending the Burning Man festival. You can read a history of Google Doodles here.
One of our favorites appeared this April Fool’s Day, when Google changed the logo to read “Topeka,” in response to the Kansas city’s mock attempt to change its own name to Google, Kansas, in a bid to become a super-fast experimental Internet hub for Google.
Google’s Pac-Man homage, however, is the company’s first playable logo. In place of the usual “I’m Feeling Lucky” button below the search field, it says “Insert Coin.” (Clicking the button twice lets you play Ms. Pac-Man.)
While players don’t have to fork over any quarters, some are playing the game on their boss’ dime — the game seems to have become as addictive on the Web as it was 30 years ago.