News- Google keeping the wolf from Firefox' door
The Mozilla Foundation's deal with Google is playing a crucial role in helping the non-profit organisation challenge Microsoft with its Firefox browser.
Following an agreement reached last year, Firefox includes Google as the default option for users wanting to search the Web directly, and also has its default start page hosted by Google. Markham didn't reveal full details of the Foundation's deal with Google. More..
News- Sun partners with Google
Google and Sun Microsystems are to share technologies and distribute each other's systems around the world. Under the terms of the agreement announced last night, Sun will include the Google Toolbar as an option in its downloads of the Java Runtime Environment, and discuss ways of promoting and enhancing the OpenOffice.org system.
Network innovation is vital to the evolution of the global economy, says Sun chief executive, Scott McNealy. More..
News- Google Wants Your Gadgets
Until Nov. 1, the Mountain View, Calif.-based corporation is seeking submissions from students at colleges and universities nationwide in an effort to find the brightest ideas for the Google Gadget Awards. A gadget is a desktop or Web-based program that executes a specific function, such as a calendar or a clock. Yahoo and Apple offer similar programs, known as widgets.
Judges with some celebrity in the tech and academic world, including the president of Stanford University and the editor in chief of Wired magazine, will rate gadgets in seven categories, which include "Best Overall Gadget" and "Gadget Most Likely to Help You Get a Date."
Winners receive a trophy and recognition garnered from a winner's list posted on Google's home page. More..
Interesting facts about Google
- Google began as a research project in January, 1996 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two Ph.D. students at Stanford University, California.They hypothesized that a search engine that analyzed the relationships between websites would produce better results than existing techniques (existing search engines at the time essentially ranked results according to how many times the search term appeared on a page).
- The name "Google" originated from a misspelling of "googol" which refers to 10100 (a 1 followed by one-hundred zeros).
- Google's services are run on several server farms, each consisting of thousands of low-cost commodity computers running stripped-down versions of Linux.
- Google's corporate philosophy is based on many casual principles including, "You can make money without doing evil", "Focus on the user and all else will follow" and, "Work should be challenging and the challenge should be fun." . More..
- Every Google engineer is encouraged to spend 20 percent (20%) of their work time on projects that interest them. Some of Google's newer services, such as Gmail, Google News and orkut, originated from these independent endeavors.
- Google has a tradition of creating April Fool's Day jokes - such as Google MentalPlex, which allegedly featured the use of mental power to search the web. In 2002, they claimed that pigeons were the secret behind their growing search engine. In 2004, they featured Google Lunar (which claimed to feature jobs on the moon) and in 2005. Some thought the announcement of Gmail in 2004 around April Fool's Day (as well as the doubling of Gmail's storage space to two gigabytes in 2005) was a joke, though it turned out (in both cases) to be a genuine announcement.
- Google has recently formed a partnership with Sun Microsystems to help share and distribute each other's technologies. As part of the partnership Google will hire employees to help the open source office program openoffice.org.
(Ref: Wikipedia )
