Use Google Web History Without Installing Google Toolbar

If you want to use Google Web History and save your browser's history on Google's servers, you generally need to go to this page and select "Enable Web History and install the toolbar". This procedure installs Google Toolbar, a plug-in available only for Internet Explorer and Firefox, and enables the PageRank feature, which displays the ranking of any site you visit while sending the URL to Google in the process.

If you use another browser or if you don't like Google Toolbar, there's an alternative way to send all the web pages you visit to Google: a script that asks Google for the PageRank of any web pages you load in your browser. To install the script you need:

* Greasemonkey, an extension for Firefox. Make sure to restart the browser before trying to add the script.
* Trixie, one of the best Greasemonkey-like plug-ins for Internet Explorer
* SIMBL and GreaseKit for Safari
* no additional software for Opera, but you need to enable the feature from Opera's interface
* Konqueror Userscript for Konqueror

The script is taken from this site, that also adapted it from other scripts. I mirrored the script to an easily-accessible location.

Once you've added the script, you only need to enable Google Web History: go to this page and select "Enable Web History and install the toolbar", but cancel the downloading process (you don't need the toolbar).

This feature only works when you're logged in to your Google Account. To disable it, remove the script from Greasemonkey or from another plug-in you've installed.

Blacklisted from Google Notebook

Many web applications have limitations that are not disclosed to users. If you happen to use an application too frequently or upload too much data, your access will be disabled. In most cases, you'll see a message that informs you about the penalty, but Google Notebook chose a different strategy: showing a 404 error message.

"Back on December 20, I wrote about my frustration with Google Notebook, which I use every day as a way to archive much of what I read online (...). For some off reason, it seemed like Google Notebook was down, and yet I could find no other description of the issue online, which made me think I must be mad," writes Ran Barton.

He received a message from Google that explained the problem. "Your account was accidentally blacklisted by a blacklisting heuristic that looked at total size of notebook information. We've revised the heuristic, so you shouldn't be accidentally blacklisted again in the future."

Google Reveals New MapReduce Stats

An updated version of Google's paper about MapReduce (available at ACM and mirrored here) provides new information about Google's scale. MapReduce is a software framework used by Google to "support parallel computations over large (...) data sets on unreliable clusters of computers". Google uses it for indexing the web and computing PageRank, for processing geographic information in Google Maps, clustering news articles, machine translation, Google Trends etc.

The input data for some of the MapReduce jobs run in September 2007 was 403,152 TB (terabytes), the average number of machines allocated for a MapReduce job was 394, while the average completion time was 6 minutes and a half. The paper mentions that Google's indexing system processes more than 20 TB of raw data. Since 2003, when MapReduce was built, the indexing system progressed from 8 MapReduce operations to a much bigger number today.

Niall Kennedy calculates that the average MapReduce job runs across a $1 million hardware infrastructure, assuming that Google still uses the same cluster configurations from 2004: two 2 GHz Intel Xeon processors with Hyper-Threading enabled, 4 GB of memory, two 160 GB IDE hard drives and a gigabit Ethernet link.

Greg Linden notices that Google's infrastructure is an important competitive advantage. "Anyone at Google can process terabytes of data. And they can get their results back in about 10 minutes, so they can iterate on it and try something else if they didn't get what they wanted the first time."

	Aug. '04	Mar. '06	Sep. '07
Number of jobs (1000s)	29	171	2,217
Avg. completion time (secs)	634	874	395
Machine years used	217	2,002	11,081
map input data (TB)	3,288	52,254	403,152
map output data (TB)	758	6,743	34,774
reduce output data (TB)	193	2,970	14,018
Avg. machines per job	157	268	394
Unique implementations
map	395	1958	4083
reduce	269	1208	2418

{ The screenshot illustrates a Google rack from 2007. I don't remember the exact source of the image, but it's likely to be a presentation. }

Obligatory Quotes

From New Yorker's "The Search Party":

"I worry about complexity. I admire Steve Jobs. He has been able to keep his products simple." (Sergey Brin)

"Microsoft is a bit of an unusual company. It doesn't seem to like any of us being successful in the technology space." (Sergey Brin)

"How many people do you think had embarrassing information about them disclosed yesterday because of some cookie? Zero. It never happens. Yet I'm sure thousands of people had their mail stolen yesterday, or identity theft." (Sergey Brin)

"There are almost three billion mobile phones worldwide, and Schmidt expects a billion more in the next four years. If the phones use Google software to sell advertising, Schmidt thinks that over time it is 'mathematically possible for Google to become a one-hundred-billion-dollar corporation.' Two vital markets are television, which is 'easily attainable,' and mobile phones, which are 'more personable' and more 'targetable' than most advertising. To achieve this goal, Google would need to claim ten per cent of all global advertising, which now amounts to just under a trillion dollars."

"What sets Google apart, Schmidt told me in another conversation, is that although people like him always assumed that 'Google would be an important company, the founders always assumed that Google would be a defining company.' He remembers a day in 2002 when he walked into Page's office and Page started to show off a book scanner he had built. 'What are you going to do with that, Larry?' Schmidt recalls asking. 'We're going to scan all the books in the world,' Page replied. Eventually, Google began to do just that."

Headers and Footers in Google Docs

The latest version of Google Docs lets you add headers and footers in your documents. Just go to the Insert tab and click on the appropriate link. Google Docs still doesn't provide support for pagination, so you can't add any information about the number of pages in your header or footer. In fact, there doesn't seem to be a way to enter dynamic content.

In November last year, Zoho Writer added a special view for pagination and more advanced headers & footers. While the page view is still read-only, Zoho gives some idea of your document's layout. In Google Docs, the only way to see an estimation for the number of pages is to select File / Word count.

If you try to print a Google Document, you'll have another surprise: Google will export your document to PDF without mentioning that or adding a link to a PDF reader. In the print settings you finally have the option to add page numbers, but make sure there's no conflict with your document's header or footer.

An Unfulfilled Wishlist

In December 2006, I posted a list of the Google features I wanted to see in 2007 and you added 273 comments with even better ideas. Very few of your wishes were fulfilled in 2007:

* Using your own domain at Blogger.
* Ability to search feeds in Google Reader.
* An orkut redesign! Who came up with that hideous colour scheme and those pathetic-looking buttons? And the silly bevel effect added to all photos looks ridiculous!
* IMAP in Gmail
* A presentation app for Google Docs
* Google Talk on your Google Personalized Homepage
* More and better "mobile" versions of Google services
* How about the ability to open (in Docs & Spreadsheets) a Doc or Spreadsheet that is sent to you as an attachment to your Gmail account?
* GPS support in Google Maps for mobile phones
* Google Desktop for Mac and Linux
* I want Google to make their own Wikipedia.

The most frequently requested features and services were:
* GDrive (Google online storage)
* synchronization with mobile devices and Outlook for Google Calendar, Gmail Contacts
* task management (To-Do lists)
* Google Operating System (Linux-based)
* project management tools
* a lot of updates for Google Talk (Mac/Linux versions, groups, phone calls)
* Google web hosting

GDrive continues to be in the works, but it should be launched this year, according to a WSJ article. Google Calendar should add a task management feature, while the synchronization with mobile devices is currently limited to Blackberries. Google Talk will either completely move online or surprise us with some major new features; Google Operating System, project management and web hosting don't seem to be in Google's plans. The conclusion is that Google still has a lot of things to add from the wishlist for 2007.

A Search Engine from Every Collection of Links

So you've found a great web page that lists a lot of interesting links about a certain topic and now you're ready to explore them, but you don't have enough time to read everything. A good option would be to create a custom search engine, but it's too time-consuming. A faster way is to create a custom search engine on-the-fly from all the links included in the page you've found. That means you'll have a search engine restricted to all the domains, subdomains and web pages linked from your page.

For example, del.icio.us search results pages are a good place to obtain a list of authoritative sites on a topic like AJAX. Once you have the del.icio.us URL, paste it at Google's on-the-fly search engine factory and enter your query.


Other good starting points could be: Wikipedia articles, other wikis, directories, scholar papers, pages with many references etc. Maybe Google should create a separate search engine for pages that have a lot of external links related to a topic (like these pages).