WebD » Google

Google best guess

Akshay — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 07:46:49 +0000

It looks like Google has advanced their decision engine aspect of search. This has always been there, but was more like a command line response to specific search queries. Historically the search engine parsed a finite list of such commands for search queries like movie show times, currency conversion etc.

However, now they have now expanded this feature into the realm of providing a machine guessed answer like this:

On one hand, it would be exciting to see how search engines evolve into decision engines and thereby a content endpoint in order to gain user retention. Secondly the decision engine aspect also seems a start of fundamental battle between machine processing (prediction, modeling, AI) vs use of social graph in decision making (like how FB shows ads for things you have liked in past)

Embeddable Google Document Viewer

Akshay — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 09:00:38 +0000

Google Docs offers an undocumented feature that lets you embed PDF files and PowerPoint presentations in a web page. The files don’t have to be uploaded to Google Docs, but they need to be available online.

Here’s the code I used to embed the PDF file:

http://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/papers/google.pdf&embedded=true" style="width:600px; height:500px;" frameborder="0">

but you should replace the bold URL with your own address. As I mentioned, the document viewer works for PDF and PPT files.

Some other sites that offer similar features: Zoho Viewer, PdfMeNot.

Google Search as JSON feed

Akshay — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 08:15:59 +0000

Did you know that Google has an officially supported JSON feed of search results? Google half-way cancelled their SOAP API a while ago, but they now offer a parametrized URL that returns a JSON data set. Google says this REST approach is useful for “Flash developers, and those developers that have a need to access the AJAX Search API from other Non-Javascript environments.” This may be even simpler to use than the SOAP API. Here’s an example query:

http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/services/search/web?v=1.0&q=Paris%20Hilton

This URL format can also be adjusted to grab results from video search, book search and so on. While the URL has the word AJAX in the string and this is officially part of the Google AJAX Search API, this has nothing to do with AJAX per se, as the URL can be called from other environments, including the server side. All you need is a JSON library to parse the results (JSON means JavaScript Object Notation, though it also doesn’t require JavaScript). The Yahoo Search API already utilizes a similar approach, though it can return XML as well. The complete documentation of this Search API can be found on the Developer’s Guide of Google AJAX Search API hosted on Google Code

Collaboration – ready to take over Web 2.0

Akshay — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 13:21:47 +0000

At first there was good old email with petty 5 Mb inboxes. Then we moved to crowded chat rooms on Yahoo. All that seemed as stone age, when came a host of interactive web applications like Blogs and Social Networking applications. Initially Orkut, then Facebook and then micro blogging thru Twitter. Have you ever wondered what could be the next big Web 2.0 trend?

The answer is ‘Collaboration’. Yes, collaboration not only in its own sense, but also a collaboration of all the trends and technologies mentioned above. I know the word ‘collaboration’ sounds too ‘enterprise’ and not at all ‘social’, but as always web has once again taken us by surprise here. What I am referring is not too far fetched. Big boys like Google and Yahoo have already stepped in this domain and grand releases have already been done. Yes, check out Google Wave and Zimbra (by Yahoo, but not much talked about yet) to understand what am pointing at. Google Wave is a new tool for real-time communication and collaboration on the web, coming later this year. An official 90 minute video demo is already out for a sneak peak into this new wonderland. Don’t have 90 minutes? Have a look at my detailed post on Devil’s Workshop with 30-60 second clips highlighting the best parts of Google Wave.