CiteULike: Tag google

Google's PageRank and Beyond: The Science of Search Engine Rankings

Amy Langville — 2006-08-10T16:22:34-00:00

(03 July 2006)

Why doesn't your home page appear on the first page of search results, even when you query your own name? How do other Web pages always appear at the top? What creates these powerful rankings? And how? The first book ever about the science of Web page rankings, Google's PageRank and Beyond supplies the answers to these and other questions and more. The book serves two very different audiences: the curious science reader and the technical computational reader. The chapters build in mathematical sophistication, so that the first five are accessible to the general academic reader. While other chapters are much more mathematical in nature, each one contains something for both audiences. For example, the authors include entertaining asides such as how search engines make money and how the Great Firewall of China influences research. The book includes an extensive background chapter designed to help readers learn more about the mathematics of search engines, and it contains several MATLAB codes and links to sample Web data sets. The philosophy throughout is to encourage readers to experiment with the ideas and algorithms in the text. Any business seriously interested in improving its rankings in the major search engines can benefit from the clear examples, sample code, and list of resources provided.<ul><li> Many illustrative examples and entertaining asides </li><li> MATLAB code </li><li> Accessible and informal style </li><li> Complete and self-contained section for mathematics review</li></ul>

Map-Reduce for Machine Learning on Multicore

Cheng Chu — 2008-01-30T21:14:38-00:00

(2006), pp. 281-288.

The anatomy of a large-scale hypertextual Web search engine

Sergey Brin — 2004-11-22T17:49:28-00:00

Computer Networks and ISDN Systems, Vol. 30, No. 1--7. (1998), pp. 107-117.

In this paper, we present Google, a prototype of a large-scale search engine which makes heavy use of the structure present in hypertext. Google is designed to crawl and index the Web efficiently and produce much more satisfying search results than existing systems. The prototype with a full text and hyperlink database of at least 24 million pages is available at

Fabricating a better mouthguard. Part I: Factors influencing mouthguard thinning

Del Rossi — 2007-05-19T03:50:33-00:00

Dental Traumatology, Vol. 23, No. 3. (June 2007), pp. 149-154.

Rapid communication Fabrication of nano-dot- and nano-ring-arrays by nanosphere lithography

M Winzer — 2007-08-02T21:17:34-00:00

Applied Physics A: Materials Science & Processing, Vol. 63 (1996), pp. 617-619.

We have applied the method of nanosphere lithography to fabricate arrays of nanometer-scale gold and cobalt particles. The individual cobalt particles were found to be in a single domain state as verified by magnetic force microscopy. By tuning the preparation conditions, we also successfully fabricated arrays of mesoscopic gold rings for the first time with potential application for persistent current experiments.

How Google is changing medicine

Dean Giustini — 2005-12-28T11:19:16-00:00

BMJ, Vol. 331, No. 7531. (24 December 2005), pp. 1487-1488.

The PageRank Citation Ranking: Bringing Order to the Web

Lawrence Page — 2004-12-10T12:22:03-00:00

(1998)

The importance of a Web page is an inherently subjective matter, which depends on the readers interests, knowledge and attitudes. But there is still much that can be said objectively about the relative importance of Web pages. This paper describes PageRank, a method for rating Web pages objectively and mechanically, effectively measuring the human interest and attention devoted to them. We compare PageRank to an idealized random Web surfer. We show how to efficiently compute PageRank for large...

The excitement of Google Scholar, the worry of Google Print

Marcus Banks — 2006-06-06T10:32:16-00:00

Biomedical Digital Libraries, Vol. 2 (22 March 2005), 2.

The influence of task and gender on search and evaluation behavior using Google

Lori Lorigo — 2007-02-03T17:01:18-00:00

Inf. Process. Manage., Vol. 42, No. 4. (July 2006), pp. 1123-1131.

The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture

John Battelle — 2006-11-30T20:45:21-00:00

(08 September 2005)

If you pick your books by their popularity--how many and which other people are reading them--then know this about The Search: it's probably on Bill Gates' reading list, and that of almost every venture capitalist and startup-hungry entrepreneur in Silicon Valley. In its sweeping survey of the history of Internet search technologies, its gossip about and analysis of Google, and its speculation on the larger cultural implications of a Web-connected world, it will likely receive attention from a variety of businesspeople, technology futurists, journalists, and interested observers of mid-2000s zeitgeist. This ambitious book comes with a strong pedigree. Author John Battelle was a founder of The Industry Standard and then one of the original editors of Wired, two magazines which helped shape our early perceptions of the wild world of the Internet. Battelle clearly drew from his experience and contacts in writing The Search. In addition to the sure-handed historical perspective and easy familiarity with such dot-com stalwarts as AltaVista, Lycos, and Excite, he speckles his narrative with conversational asides from a cast of fascinating characters, such Google's founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin; Yahoo's, Jerry Yang and David Filo; key executives at Microsoft and different VC firms on the famed Sandhill road; and numerous other insiders, particularly at the company which currently sits atop the search world, Google. The Search is not exactly the corporate history of Google. At the book's outset, Battelle specifically indicates his desire to understand what he calls the cultural anthropology of search, and to analyze search engines' current role as the "database of our intentions"--the repository of humanity's curiosity, exploration, and expressed desires. Interesting though that beginning is, though, Battelle's story really picks up speed when he starts dishing inside scoop on the darling business story of the decade, Google. To Battelle's credit, though, he doesn't stop just with historical retrospective: the final part of his book focuses on the potential future directions of Google and its products' development. In what Battelle himself acknowledges might just be a "digital fantasy train", he describes the possibility that Google will become the centralizing platform for our entire lives and quotes one early employee on the weightiness of Google's potential impact: "Sometimes I feel like I am on a bridge, twenty thousand feet up in the air. If I look down I'm afraid I'll fall. I don't feel like I can think about all the implications." Some will shrug at such words; after all, similar hype has accompanied other technologies and other companies before. Many others, though, will search Battelle's story for meaning--and fast. --Peter Han What does the world want? According to John Battelle, a company that answers that question -- in all its shades of meaning -- can unlock the most intractable riddles of both business and culture. And for the past few years, that's exactly what Google has been doing. Jumping into the game long after Yahoo, Alta Vista, Excite, Lycos, and other pioneers, Google offered a radical new approach to search, redefined the idea of viral marketing, survived the dotcom crash, and pulled off the largest and most talked about initial public offering in the history of Silicon Valley. But The Search offers much more than the inside story of Google's triumph. It's also a big-picture book about the past, present, and future of search technology, and the enormous impact it is starting to have on marketing, media, pop culture, dating, job hunting, international law, civil liberties, and just about every other sphere of human interest. More than any of its rivals, Google has become the gateway to instant knowledge. Hundreds of millions of people use it to satisfy their wants, needs, fears, and obsessions, creating an enormous artifact that Battelle calls "the Database of Intentions." Somewhere in Google's archives, for instance, you can find the agonized research of a gay man with AIDS, the silent plotting of a would-be bombmaker, and the anxiety of a woman checking out her blind date. Combined with the databases of thousands of other search-driven businesses, large and small, it all adds up to a goldmine of information that powerful organizations (including the government) will want to get their hands on. No one is better qualified to explain this entire phenomenon than Battelle, who cofounded Wired and founded The Industry Standard. Perhaps more than any other journalist, he has devoted his career to finding the holy grail of technology -- something as transformational as the Macintosh was in the mid- 1980s. And he has finally found it in search. Battelle draws on more than 350 interviews with major players from Silicon Valley to Seattle to Wall Street, including Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin and CEO Eric Schmidt, as well as competitors like Louis Monier, who invented AltaVista, and Neil Moncrief, a soft-spoken Georgian whose business Google built, destroyed, and built again. Battelle lucidly reveals how search technology actually works, explores the amazing power of targeted advertising, and reports on the frenzy of the Google IPO, when the company tried to rewrite the rules of Wall Street and declared "don't be evil" as its corporate motto. For anyone who wants to understand how Google really succeeded -- and the implications of a world in which every click can be preserved forever -- THE SEARCH is an eye-opening and indispensable read. "Battelle has written a brilliant business book, but he's also done something more... All searchers should read it." -Walter Isaacson, CEO of the Aspen Institute "This book ought to be called 'The Answer.' As usual, John Battelle delivers insightful, thought-provoking, and essential reading." -Seth Godin, author of All Marketers Are Liars and Purple Cow "Nobody, and I mean nobody, has thought longer, harder, or smarter about Google and the search business than John Battelle." -John Heilemann, author of Pride Before the Fall "A must read for anyone endeavoring to understand one of the most important trends of this generation.'" -Mary Meeker, Managing Director, Internet Analyst, Morgan Stanley "Battelle has... figured out why "search" is so damned important to the future of everything digital. Even more impressive, he's actually managed to turn the subject into a compelling analog story. -John Huey, editorial director, Time inc. "A terrific book." --L. Gordon Crovitz, Dow Jones

Mashups mix data into global service

Declan Butler — 2006-01-05T03:29:49-00:00

Nature, Vol. 439, No. 7072. (04 January 2006), pp. 6-7.

The Google file system

Sanjay Ghemawat — 2008-01-09T07:44:48-00:00

SIGOPS Oper. Syst. Rev., Vol. 37, No. 5. (December 2003), pp. 29-43.

Use of Google as a diagnostic aid: bias your search.

M Taubert — 2007-01-25T22:50:06-00:00

BMJ, Vol. 333, No. 7581. (16 December 2006)

Googling for a diagnosis--use of Google as a diagnostic aid: internet based study.

H Tang — 2006-12-05T04:03:28-00:00

BMJ, Vol. 333, No. 7579. (2 December 2006), pp. 1143-1145.

OBJECTIVE: To determine how often searching with Google (the most popular search engine on the world wide web) leads doctors to the correct diagnosis. DESIGN: Internet based study using Google to search for diagnoses; researchers were blind to the correct diagnoses. SETTING: One year's (2005) diagnostic cases published in the case records of the New England Journal of Medicine. CASES: 26 cases from the New England Journal of Medicine; management cases were excluded. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURE: Percentage of correct diagnoses from Google searches (compared with the diagnoses as published in the New England Journal of Medicine). RESULTS: Google searches revealed the correct diagnosis in 15 (58%, 95% confidence interval 38% to 77%) cases. CONCLUSION: As internet access becomes more readily available in outpatient clinics and hospital wards, the web is rapidly becoming an important clinical tool for doctors. The use of web based searching may help doctors to diagnose difficult cases.

Expert googling: best practices and advanced strategies for using google in health sciences libraries.

AS Ripple — 2006-12-16T13:24:03-00:00

Med Ref Serv Q, Vol. 25, No. 2. (2006), pp. 97-107.

Google is the search engine of choice for most Internet users. For a variety of reasons, librarians and other expert searchers do not always use Google to its full potential, even though it provides capabilities not possible in traditional bibliographic databases and other search engines. Applying expert searching principles and practices, such as the use of advanced search operators, information retrieval strategies, and search hedges to Google will allow health sciences librarians to find quality information on the Internet more efficiently and effectively.

Hacking Exposed 5th Edition (Hacking Exposed)

Stuart Mcclure — 2006-06-23T15:28:18-00:00

(19 April 2005)

A lot of computer-security textbooks approach the subject from a defensive point of view. "Do this, and probably you'll survive a particular kind of attack," they say. In refreshing contrast, Hacking Exposed, Second Edition talks about security from an offensive angle. A Jane's-like catalog of the weaponry that black-hat hackers use is laid out in full. Readers see what programs are out there, get a rundown on what the programs can do, and benefit from detailed explanations of concepts (such as wardialing and rootkits) that most system administrators kind of understand, but perhaps not in detail. The book also walks through how to use the more powerful and popular hacker software, including L0phtCrack. This new edition has been updated extensively, largely with the results of "honeypot" exercises (in which attacks on sacrificial machines are monitored) and Windows 2000 public security trials. There's a lot of new stuff on e-mail worms, distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, and attacks that involve routing protocols. The result of all of this familiarity with bad-guy tools is a leg up on defending against them. Hacking Exposed wastes no time in explaining how to implement the countermeasures--where they exist--that will render known attacks ineffective. Taking on the major network operating systems and network devices one at a time, the authors tell you exactly what Unix configuration files to alter, what Windows NT Registry keys to change, and what settings to make in NetWare. They spare no criticism of products with which they aren't impressed, and don't hesitate to point out inherent, uncorrectable security weaknesses where they find them. This book is no mere rehashing of generally accepted security practices. It and its companion Web site are the best way for all of you network administrators to know thine enemies. --David Wall Topics covered: <ul><li>Security vulnerabilities of operating systems, applications, and network devices <li>Administrative procedures that will help defeat them <li>Techniques for hacking Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows Me, Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000, Novell NetWare, and Unix <li>Strategies for breaking into (or bringing down) telephony devices, routers, and firewalls</ul> The seminal book on white-hat hacking and countermeasures... Should be required reading for anyone with a server or a network to secure. --Bill Machrone, PC Magazine "The definitive compendium of intruder practices and tools." --Steve Steinke, Network Magazine "For almost any computer book, you can find a clone. But not this one... A one-of-a-kind study of the art of breaking in." --UNIX Review Here is the latest edition of international best-seller, Hacking Exposed . Using real-world case studies, renowned security experts Stuart McClure, Joel Scambray, and George Kurtz show IT professionals how to protect computers and networks against the most recent security vulnerabilities. You'll find detailed examples of the latest devious break-ins and will learn how to think like a hacker in order to thwart attacks. Coverage includes: Code hacking methods and countermeasures New exploits for Windows 2003 Server, UNIX/Linux, Cisco, Apache, and Web and wireless applications Latest DDoS techniques--zombies, Blaster, MyDoom All new class of vulnerabilities--HTTP Response Splitting and much more

A Theory of Framing and Opinion Formation in Competitive Elite Environments

Dennis Chong — 2007-11-12T18:13:32-00:00

Journal of Communication, Vol. 57, No. 1. (2007), pp. 99-118.

Public opinion often depends on how elites choose to frame issues. For example, citizens’ opinions about a Ku Klux Klan rally may depend on whether elites frame the event as a free-speech issue or a public safety issue. Past research has focused largely on documenting the size of framing effects in uncontested settings. By contrast, there has been little research on framing in competitive environments in which individuals receive multiple frames representing alternative positions on an issue. We take an initial step toward understanding how frames work in competitive environments by integrating research on attitude structure and persuasion. Our theory of framing identifies the key individual and contextual parameters that determine which of many competing frames will have an effect on public opinion. ZhaiYao Yo yak Resumen Una Teoria del Framing y la Formacion de Opinion en Contextos Competitivos de Elite La opinion publica depende a menudo de como las elites eligen encuadrar ciertos asuntos. Por ejemplo, las opiniones de los ciudadanos acerca del mitin del Ku Klux Klan dependen de como las elites encuadren esta informacion, ya sea como un asunto de libre expresion o como un asunto de seguridad publica. Las investigaciones previas se han concentrado en documentar extensamente la envergadura de los efectos del framing en escenarios incontestados. En contraste, ha habido pocas investigaciones sobre el efecto del framing en contextos competitivos en los cuales los individuos reciben multiples encuadres representando posiciones alternativas sobre un asunto. Tomamos un paso inicial hacia el entendimiento de como estos encuadres funcionan en un contexto competitivo mediante la integracion de investigaciones sobre la estructura actitudinal y la persuasion. Nuestra teoria del framing identifica los parametros individuales y contextuales claves que determinan cual de los varios encuadres en competencia tendra un efecto en la opinion publica. Abstract Framing- und Meinungsbildungstheorie in konkurrenzbetonten Eliteumgebungen Die offentliche Meinung hangt oft davon ab, wie ein Thema von Eliten geframt wird. Beispielsweise konnte die Meinung der Burger uber ein Ku Klux Klan Treffen davon beeinflusst sein, ob Eliten diese Veranstaltung als eine Thematik der freien Meinungsausserung oder der offentlichen Sicherheit rahmen. Forschungsaktivitaten haben sich bislang eher darauf konzentriert, das Ausmass eines Framing-Effekts in eindeutig zuordenbaren Situationen zu dokumentieren. Im Gegensatz dazu gibt es wenig Forschungsbemuhungen, die Framing-Effekte in konkurrenzbetonten Umgebungen untersuchen, in denen Individuen verschiedenen Frames aufgrund unterschiedlicher Positionen zu einem Thema ausgesetzt sind. Mit diesem Artikel unternehmen wir einen ersten Schritt hin zu einem besseren Verstandnis von Frames in konkurrenzbetonten Umgebungen, indem wir Ansatze zur Einstellungsstruktur und Persuasion integrieren. Unsere Framing-Theorie identifiziert die individuellen und kontextualen Hauptparameter, die daruber entscheiden, welcher der konkurrierenden Frames einen Effekt auf die offentliche Meinung haben wird. Resume Theorie sur le cadrage et la formation de l‘opinion dans des environnements concurrentiels d'elite L’opinion publique est souvent tributaire de la maniere dont les elites choisissent de cadrer les enjeux. Par exemple, l‘opinion des citoyens a propos d’une manifestation du Ku Klux Klan peut dependre du cadrage opere par l'elite, selon que celui-ci montre l'evenement comme un enjeux de liberte d‘expression ou de securite publique. Dans le passe, la recherche a focalise largement sur le fait de documenter l’importance que revetent les effets du cadrage dans des contextes denues de confrontation. Par contraste, peu de recherches ont porte sur le cadrage dans des environnements concurrentiels ou les individus composent avec une multitude de cadrages traduisant diverses positions en regard d‘une situation donnee. Nous effectuons une premiere demarche en vue de comprendre le fonctionnement des cadres dans les environnements concurrentiels, en integrant la recherche sur la structuration de l’attitude et la persuasion. Notre theorie du cadrage identifie les principaux parametres individuels et contextuels qui determinent lesquels des nombreux cadres concurrents exerceront un effet sur l‘opinion publique.

Counter Hack Reloaded : A Step-by-Step Guide to Computer Attacks and Effective Defenses (2nd Edition) (Prentice Hall Series in Computer Networking and Distributed Systems)

Edward Skoudis — 2006-06-23T15:31:31-00:00

(23 December 2005)

In defending your systems against intruders and other meddlers, a little knowledge can be used to make the bad guys--particularly the more casual among them--seek out softer targets. Counter Hack aims to provide its readers with enough knowledge to toughen their Unix and Microsoft Windows systems against attacks in general, and with specific knowledge of the more common sorts of attacks that can be carried out by relatively unskilled "script kiddies." The approach author Ed Skoudis has chosen is effective, in that his readers accumulate the knowledge they need and generally enjoy the process. The best part of this book may be two chapters, one each for Windows and Unix, that explain the essential security terms, conventions, procedures, and behaviors of each operating system. This is the sort of information that readers need--a Unix person getting into Windows administration for the first time needs an introduction to the Microsoft security scheme, and vice versa. A third chapter explains TCP/IP with focus on security. With that groundwork in place, Skoudis explains how (with emphasis on tools) attackers look for vulnerabilities in systems, gain access, and maintain their access for periods of time without being discovered. You'll probably want to search online resources for more specific information--Skoudis refers to several--but this book by itself will provide you with the vocabulary and foundation knowledge you need to get the details you want. --David Wall Topics covered: How black-hat hackers work, what tools and techniques they use, and how to assess and improve your systems' defenses. The author explains how Windows, Unix, and TCP/IP can be exploited for nefarious purposes, and details a modus operandi that's typical of the bad guys.

Counter Hack: A Step-by-Step Guide to Computer Attacks and Effective Defenses

Ed Skoudis — 2006-05-24T12:54:42-00:00

(23 July 2001)

In defending your systems against intruders and other meddlers, a little knowledge can be used to make the bad guys--particularly the more casual among them--seek out softer targets. Counter Hack aims to provide its readers with enough knowledge to toughen their Unix and Microsoft Windows systems against attacks in general, and with specific knowledge of the more common sorts of attacks that can be carried out by relatively unskilled "script kiddies." The approach author Ed Skoudis has chosen is effective, in that his readers accumulate the knowledge they need and generally enjoy the process. The best part of this book may be two chapters, one each for Windows and Unix, that explain the essential security terms, conventions, procedures, and behaviors of each operating system. This is the sort of information that readers need--a Unix person getting into Windows administration for the first time needs an introduction to the Microsoft security scheme, and vice versa. A third chapter explains TCP/IP with focus on security. With that groundwork in place, Skoudis explains how (with emphasis on tools) attackers look for vulnerabilities in systems, gain access, and maintain their access for periods of time without being discovered. You'll probably want to search online resources for more specific information--Skoudis refers to several--but this book by itself will provide you with the vocabulary and foundation knowledge you need to get the details you want. --David Wall Topics covered: How black-hat hackers work, what tools and techniques they use, and how to assess and improve your systems' defenses. The author explains how Windows, Unix, and TCP/IP can be exploited for nefarious purposes, and details a modus operandi that's typical of the bad guys. Preface My cell phone rang. I squinted through my sleepy eyelids at the clock. Ugh! 4 a.m., New Year's Day. Needless to say, I hadn't gotten very much sleep that night. I picked up the phone to hear the frantic voice of my buddy, Fred, on the line. Fred was a security administrator for a medium-sized Internet Service Provider, and he frequently called me with questions about a variety of security issues. "We've been hacked big time!" Fred shouted, far too loudly for this time of the morning. I rubbed my eyes to try to gain a little coherence. "How do you know they got in? What did they do?" I asked. Fred replied, "They tampered with a bunch of Web pages. This is bad, Ed. My boss is gonna have a fit!" I asked, "How did they get in? Have you checked out the logs?" Fred stuttered, "W-Well, we don't do much logging, because it slows down performance. I only snag logs from a couple of machines. Also, on those systems where we do gather logs, the attackers cleared the log files." "Have you applied the latest security fixes from your operating system vendor to your machines?" I asked, trying to learn a little more about Fred's security posture. Fred responded with hesitation, "We apply security patches every three months. The last time we deployed fixes was?um?two-and-a-half months ago." I scratched my aching head and said, "Two major buffer overflow attacks were released last week. You may have been hit. Have they installed any RootKits? Have you checked the consistency of critical files on the system?" "You know, I was planning to install something like Tripwire, but just never got around to it," Fred admitted. I quietly sighed and said, "OK. Just remain calm. I'll be right over so we can start to analyze your machines." You clearly don't want to end up in a situation like Fred, and I want to minimize the number of calls I get at 4 a.m. on New Year's Day. While I've changed Fred's name to protect the innocent, this situation actually occurred. Fred's organization had failed to implement some fundamental security controls, and it had to pay the price when an attacker came knocking. In my experience, many organizations find themselves in the same state of information security unpreparedness. But the situation goes beyond these security basics. Even if you've implemented all of the controls discussed in my Fred narrative above, there are a variety of other tips and tricks you can use to defend your systems. Sure, you may apply security patches, use a file integrity checking tool, and have adequate logging, but have you recently looked for unsecured modems? Or, how about activating port-level security on the switches in your critical network segments to prevent powerful, new active sniffing attacks? Have you considered implementing non-executable stacks to prevent one of the most common types of attacks today, the stack-based buffer overflow? Are you ready for kernel-level RootKits? If you want to learn more about these topics and more, please read on. As we will see throughout the book, computer attacks happen each and every day, with increasing virulence. To create a good defense, you must understand the offensive techniques of your adversaries. In my career as a system penetration tester, incident response team member, and information security architect, I've seen numerous types of attacks ranging from simple scanning by clueless kids to elite attacks sponsored by the criminal underground. This book boils down the common and most damaging elements from these real-world attacks, while offering specific advice on how you can proactively avoid such trouble from your adversaries. We'll zoom in on how computer attackers conduct their activities, looking at each step of their process so we can implement in-depth defenses. The book is designed for system administrators, network administrators, and security professionals, as well as others who want to learn how computer attackers do their magic and how to stop them. The offensive and defensive techniques laid out in the book apply to all types of organizations using computers and networks today, including enterprises and service providers, ranging in size from small to gigantic. Computer attackers are marvelous at sharing information with each other about how to attack your infrastructure. Their efficiency at information dissemination about victims can be ruthless. It is my hope that this book can help to even the score, by sharing practical advice about how to defend your computing environment from the bad guys. By applying the defenses from this book, you can greatly improve your computer security and, perhaps, we'll both be able to sleep in late next New Year's Day.

Automatic Meaning Discovery Using Google

Rudi Cilibrasi — 2004-12-22T12:39:20-00:00

(21 December 2004)

We propose a new method to extract semantic knowledge from the world-wide-web for both supervised and unsupervised learning using the Google search engine in an unconventional manner. The approach is novel in its unrestricted problem domain, simplicity of implementation, and manifestly ontological underpinnings. We give evidence of elementary learning of the semantics of concepts, in contrast to most prior approaches. The method works as follows: The world-wide-web is the largest database on earth, and it induces a probability mass function, the Google distribution, via page counts for combinations of search queries. This distribution allows us to tap the latent semantic knowledge on the web. Shannon's coding theorem is used to establish a code-length associated with each search query. Viewing this mapping as a data compressor, we connect to earlier work on Normalized Compression Distance. We give applications in (i) unsupervised hierarchical clustering, demonstrating the ability to distinguish between colors and numbers, and to distinguish between 17th century Dutch painters; (ii) supervised concept-learning by example, using Support Vector Machines, demonstrating the ability to understand electrical terms, religious terms, emergency incidents, and by conducting a massive experiment in understanding WordNet categories; and (iii) matching of meaning, in an example of automatic English-Spanish translation.

Web search for a planet: The Google cluster architecture

LA Barroso — 2005-07-28T12:52:30-00:00

Micro, IEEE, Vol. 23, No. 2. (2003), pp. 22-28.

Amenable to extensive parallelization, Google's web search application lets different queries run on different processors and, by partitioning the overall index, also lets a single query use multiple processors. to handle this workload, Googless architecture features clusters of more than 15,000 commodity-class PCs with fault tolerant software. This architecture achieves superior performance at a fraction of the cost of a system built from fewer, but more expensive, high-end servers.

Bigtable: A Distributed Storage System for Structured Data

Fay Chang — 2006-11-08T12:02:38-00:00

OSDI '06 (November 2006), pp. 205-218.

Bigtable is a distributed storage system for managing structured data that is designed to scale to a very large size: petabytes of data across thousands of commodity servers. Many projects at Google store data in Bigtable, including web indexing, Google Earth, and Google Finance. These applications place very different demands on Bigtable, both in terms of data size (from URLs to web pages to satellite imagery) and latency requirements (from backend bulk processing to real-time data serving). Despite these varied demands, Bigtable has successfully provided a flexible, high-performance solution for all of these Google products. In this paper we describe the simple data model provided by Bigtable, which gives clients dynamic control over data layout and format, and we describe the design and implementation of Bigtable.

The anatomy of a large-scale hypertextual Web search engine

Sergey Brin — 2004-11-22T00:17:30-00:00

Computer Networks and ISDN Systems, Vol. 30, No. 1-7. (April 1998), pp. 107-117.

In this paper, we present Google, a prototype of a large-scale search engine which makes heavy use of the structure present in hypertext. Google is designed to crawl and index the Web efficiently and produce much more satisfying search results than existing systems. The prototype with a full text and hyperlink database of at least 24 million pages is available at http://google.stanford.edu/ To engineer a search engine is a challenging task. Search engines index tens to hundreds of millions of web pages involving a comparable number of distinct terms. They answer tens of millions of queries every day. Despite the importance of large-scale search engines on the web, very little academic research has been done on them. Furthermore, due to rapid advance in technology and web proliferation, creating a web search engine today is very different from three years ago. This paper provides an in-depth description of our large-scale web search engine -- the first such detailed public description we know of to date. Apart from the problems of scaling traditional search techniques to data of this magnitude, there are new technical challenges involved with using the additional information present in hypertext to produce better search results. This paper addresses this question of how to build a practical large-scale system which can exploit the additional information present in hypertext. Also we look at the problem of how to effectively deal with uncontrolled hypertext collections where anyone can publish anything they want.

Hyperlink analysis on the world wide web

Monika Henzinger — 2006-04-12T15:13:19-00:00

(2005), pp. 1-3.

We give a short survey of the use of hyperlink analysis in web search engine ranking and sketch other applications of hyperlink analysis in the web space.

Google news personalization: scalable online collaborative filtering

Abhinandan Das — 2007-05-10T19:42:19-00:00

(2007), pp. 271-280.

Automatic Meaning Discovery Using Google

Rudi Cilibrasi — 2008-02-15T17:23:13-00:00

(2004)

We have found a method to automatically extract the meaning of words and phrases from the world-wide-web using Google page counts. The approach is novel in its unrestricted problem domain, simplicity of implementation, and manifestly ontological underpinnings. The world-wide-web is the largest database on earth, and the latent semantic context information entered by millions of independent users averages out to provide automatic meaning of useful quality. We demonstrate positive...

Random sampling from a search engine's index

Ziv Bar-Yossef — 2006-06-05T13:16:59-00:00

(2006), pp. 367-376.

The Google file system

Sanjay Ghemawat — 2005-08-21T12:10:11-00:00

(2003), pp. 29-43.

Google Scholar: A source for clinicians?

J Henderson — 2007-09-18T15:49:17-00:00

CMAJ, Vol. 172, No. 12. (7 June 2005), pp. 1549-1550.

Bigtable: a distributed storage system for structured data

Fay Chang — 2008-06-17T11:56:22-00:00

(2006), pp. 15-15.

MapReduce: Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters

Jeffrey Dean — 2005-12-08T17:08:27-00:00

OSDI '04, pp. 137-150.

MapReduce is a programming model and an associated implementation for processing and generating large data sets. Users specify a _map_ function that processes a key/value pair to generate a set of intermediate key/value pairs, and a _reduce_ function that merges all intermediate values associated with the same intermediate key. Many real world tasks are expressible in this model, as shown in the paper. Programs written in this functional style are automatically parallelized and executed on a large cluster of commodity machines. The run-time system takes care of the details of partitioning the input data, scheduling the program's execution across a set of machines, handling machine failures, and managing the required inter- machine communication. This allows programmers without any experience with parallel and distributed systems to easily utilize the resources of a large distributed system. Our implementation of MapReduce runs on a large cluster of commodity machines and is highly scalable: a typical MapReduce computation processes many terabytes of data on thousands of machines. Programmers find the system easy to use: hundreds of MapReduce programs have been implemented and upwards of one thousand MapReduce jobs are executed on Google's clusters every day.

An analytical comparison of approaches to personalizing PageRank

T Haveliwala — 2005-04-18T14:20:36-00:00

(2003)

PageRank, the popular link-analysis algorithm for ranking web pages, assigns a query and user independent estimate of "importance" to web pages.

Web Search for a Planet: The Google Cluster Architecture

Luiz Barroso — 2006-10-24T08:41:15-00:00

IEEE Micro, Vol. 23, No. 02. (March 2003), pp. 22-28.

The anatomy of a large-scale hypertextual Web search engine

Sergey Brin — 2008-07-18T17:03:37-00:00

Building a customised Google-based collocation collector to enhance language learning

Shesen Guo — 2006-10-30T00:27:11-00:00

British Journal of Educational Technology, Vol. 0, No. 0. (0000), pp. ???-???.

Search Technologies for the Internet

Monika Henzinger — 2007-07-27T10:16:44-00:00

Science, Vol. 317, No. 5837. (27 July 2007), pp. 468-471.

About 20% of the world's population uses the Web, and a large majority thereof uses Web search engines to find information. As a result, many Web researchers are devoting much effort to improving the speed and capability of search technology. 10.1126/science.1126557

Automatic ontology population by googling

G Geleijnse — 2008-01-30T10:01:45-00:00

(2005)

We discuss a method to populate ontologies with the use of googled text fragments. We populate an ontology by the use of hand-crafted domain-specific relation patterns, which can be seen as a generalization of Hearst patterns. The algorithm described uses instances of some class returned by Google to find instances of other classes. A case study on populating an ontology on the movie domain is presented as an illustration of the method. We present the algorithm in detail and discuss the...

Statistical Machine Translation for Query Expansion in Answer Retrieval

Stefan Riezler — 2007-12-12T09:23:05-00:00

(June 2007), pp. 464-471.

Weakly-supervised discovery of named entities using web search queries

Marius Pacsca — 2008-03-13T19:16:23-00:00

(2007), pp. 683-690.

Google Maps Hacks

Schuyler Erle — 2005-09-27T17:43:05-00:00

(01 December 2005)

The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture

John Battelle — 2005-09-11T07:45:34-00:00

(08 September 2005)

What does the world want? According to John Battelle, a company that answers that question -- in all its shades of meaning -- can unlock the most intractable riddles of both business and culture. And for the past few years, that's exactly what Google has been doing. Jumping into the game long after Yahoo, Alta Vista, Excite, Lycos, and other pioneers, Google offered a radical new approach to search, redefined the idea of viral marketing, survived the dotcom crash, and pulled off the largest and most talked about initial public offering in the history of Silicon Valley. But The Search offers much more than the inside story of Google's triumph. It's also a big-picture book about the past, present, and future of search technology, and the enormous impact it is starting to have on marketing, media, pop culture, dating, job hunting, international law, civil liberties, and just about every other sphere of human interest. More than any of its rivals, Google has become the gateway to instant knowledge. Hundreds of millions of people use it to satisfy their wants, needs, fears, and obsessions, creating an enormous artifact that Battelle calls "the Database of Intentions." Somewhere in Google's archives, for instance, you can find the agonized research of a gay man with AIDS, the silent plotting of a would-be bombmaker, and the anxiety of a woman checking out her blind date. Combined with the databases of thousands of other search-driven businesses, large and small, it all adds up to a goldmine of information that powerful organizations (including the government) will want to get their hands on. No one is better qualified to explain this entire phenomenon than Battelle, who cofounded Wired and founded The Industry Standard. Perhaps more than any other journalist, he has devoted his career to finding the holy grail of technology -- something as transformational as the Macintosh was in the mid- 1980s. And he has finally found it in search. Battelle draws on more than 350 interviews with major players from Silicon Valley to Seattle to Wall Street, including Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin and CEO Eric Schmidt, as well as competitors like Louis Monier, who invented AltaVista, and Neil Moncrief, a soft-spoken Georgian whose business Google built, destroyed, and built again. Battelle lucidly reveals how search technology actually works, explores the amazing power of targeted advertising, and reports on the frenzy of the Google IPO, when the company tried to rewrite the rules of Wall Street and declared "don't be evil" as its corporate motto. For anyone who wants to understand how Google really succeeded -- and the implications of a world in which every click can be preserved forever -- THE SEARCH is an eye-opening and indispensable read.

Physics the google way

David Ward — 2006-12-07T16:58:47-00:00

(21 Nov 2004)

Are we smarter now than Socrates was in his time? Society as a whole certainly enjoys a higher degree of education, but humans as a species probably don't get intrinsically smarter with time. Our knowledge base, however, continues to grow at an unprecedented rate, so how then do we keep up? The printing press was one of the earliest technological advances that expanded our memory and made possible our present intellectual capacity. We are now faced with a new technological advance of the same magnitude--the internet--but how do we use it effectively? A new tool is available on Google (<a href="http://www.google.com">this http URL</a>) that allows a user not only to numerically evaluate equations, but to automatically perform unit analysis and conversion as well, with most of the fundamental physical constants built in.

Finding Scientific Gems with Google

P Chen — 2006-04-20T13:17:44-00:00

(18 Apr 2006)

We apply the Google PageRank algorithm to assess the relative importance of all publications in the Physical Review family of journals from 1893--2003. While the Google number and the number of citations for each publication are positively correlated, outliers from this linear relation identify some exceptional papers or "gems" that are universally familiar to physicists.

The egalitarian effect of search engines

Santo Fortunato — 2005-11-27T04:40:53-00:00

(1 Nov 2005)

Search engines have become key media for our scientific, economic, and social activities by enabling people to access information on the Web in spite of its size and complexity. On the down side, search engines bias the traffic of users according to their page-ranking strategies, and some have argued that they create a vicious cycle that amplifies the dominance of established and already popular sites. We show that, contrary to these prior claims and our own intuition, the use of search engines actually has an egalitarian effect. We reconcile theoretical arguments with empirical evidence showing that the combination of retrieval by search engines and search behavior by users mitigates the attraction of popular pages, directing more traffic toward less popular sites, even in comparison to what would be expected from users randomly surfing the Web.

Science in the web ageStart your engines

Jim Giles — 2005-11-30T19:43:01-00:00

Nature, Vol. 438, No. 7068. (30 November 2005), pp. 554-555.

Google's MapReduce programming model -- Revisited

Ralf Lammel — 2007-12-20T18:37:33-00:00

Science of Computer Programming, Vol. 70, No. 1. (1 January 2008), pp. 1-30.

Google's MapReduce programming model serves for processing large data sets in a massively parallel manner. We deliver the first rigorous description of the model including its advancement as Google's domain-specific language Sawzall. To this end, we reverse-engineer the seminal papers on MapReduce and Sawzall, and we capture our findings as an executable specification. We also identify and resolve some obscurities in the informal presentation given in the seminal papers. We use typed functional programming (specifically Haskell) as a tool for design recovery and executable specification. Our development comprises three components: (i) the basic program skeleton that underlies MapReduce computations; (ii) the opportunities for parallelism in executing MapReduce computations; (iii) the fundamental characteristics of Sawzall's aggregators as an advancement of the MapReduce approach. Our development does not formalize the more implementational aspects of an actual, distributed execution of MapReduce computations.

Google Maps Application Development

Michael Purvis — 2006-07-09T03:31:01-00:00

(14 August 2006)

Google Maps Application Development is the first book to comprehensively introduce Google's popular mapping application programming interface (API). The author team has considerable experience building Google Maps-driven applications, and they cover all aspects of the API. They show you how to create practical, location-based applications that encourage users to interact with the service, add their own information, and dynamically mark up maps. The book begins with a series of fundamental examples to help you quickly gain familiarity with the API. Then you'll soon be building highly interactive and dynamic mapping applications with the help of the PHP scripting language. You'll learn how to "tag" and interact with maps in order to foster a community-driven experience. And you will discover how to take advantage of third-party geocoding services such as Yahoo geocoding and geocoder.us, as well as use the U.S. Census Bureau's TIGER/Line data to host the service internally.

Hacking Google Maps and Google Earth (ExtremeTech) (ExtremeTech)

Martin Brown — 2006-07-09T03:30:30-00:00

(19 July 2006)

This one-of-a-kind resource contains 500 pages of jaw-dropping hacks, mods, and customizations. These include creating mashups with data from other sources such as Flickr, building a space station tracker, hacking Maps with Firefox PiggyBank, and building a complete community site with Maps and Earth. Now you can map out locations, get driving directions, zoom into any point on the globe, display real time traffic, and much more.

Google makes data free for all

Declan Butler — 2005-11-23T18:52:40-00:00

Nature, Vol. 438, No. 7067. (23 November 2005), pp. 400-401.

PADS: a domain-specific language for processing ad hoc data

Kathleen Fisher — 2006-06-02T14:56:56-00:00

Vol. 40, No. 6. (June 2005), pp. 295-304.