Google Chrome

jksuperstar

I figured I'd poke at Google's new browser, Chrome, just for the hell of it. I've been liking many of google's products lately. And so far, I don't see much problem with viewing e-m.com. I'm guessing it'll gain users quickly, as the engine doesn't get caught up when a script or plug-in gets hung up (like java, or a slow adobe acrobat bringing your whole browser to a stop). Some of the rendering, like this edit window when a word is automatically wrapped, is odd. But it's workable, and a work in progress.

BobTheDog · Posted: Thu Sep 11, 2008 12:40 am Post subject:

I have been using it as well along with IE8.

Chrome looks about 1000 times simpler than IE8 which seems like a good idea to me.

After a few days use it seems to be chrome that I start and not IE8.

RF · Posted: Fri Sep 12, 2008 11:29 am Post subject:

Very Fast. No issues yet - I'm running it almost exclusively at home.

BananaPlug · Posted: Sat Sep 13, 2008 5:18 am Post subject: But is it evil?

Every silver lining has a dark cloud and Google's is looking more ominous. Check out this draconian legal language you may have agreed to:

x_x · Posted: Sat Sep 13, 2008 8:17 am Post subject:

google chrome is fast and a good browser, but I've always liked firefox better than any other browser, even than chrome and opera.

Acoustic Interloper · Posted: Sat Sep 13, 2008 5:22 pm Post subject: Re: But is it evil?

Inventor · Posted: Sun Sep 14, 2008 7:12 am Post subject:

Though I like some of Google's stuff like their search engine, I find them to be rather blind. They had a PC power supply initiative to save energy on PC power supplies. So twice i submitted my diode eliminator circuit that cuts inefficiency in half. Got no response. Just an email saying they were not interested.

Maybe I sounded like some kook who claims a 100 MPG carburetor or a perpetual motion machine, but the juvenile delinquents at Google could have at least asked for more information. Maybe it wasn't a software solution and all they understand is software. I dunno.

Remembering this has made me grumpy. It's cuban coffee time!

Acoustic Interloper · Posted: Sun Sep 14, 2008 7:56 am Post subject:

I had one interviewer who seemed to truly understand both computer science and software engineering, and who clearly was a lead engineer, and I think we communicated pretty well. Of course my perspective is subjective, like everybody's, but I have been working in engineering teams for most of my life, so I have some sense of rapport and information exchange. It seemed pretty good with this guy.

I also solved a research problem for someone who had done his Ph.D. in vision analysis, while interviewing at the white board. This is no crap. I sort of went into automatic writing mode at the end of a long day and drew a solution to a visual recognition problem in a system with memory constraints, then worked out a description of my diagram with his paraphrasing, and at the end of it he said, "I've being doing research on this for a long time, and asking that question of every interviewee, and I have never seen that solution before." I figured that had to clinch it. His job at Google, by the way, was ad placement. That says it all.

Also, unknown to me at the time, a former colleague whom I had recruited into Bell Labs was now a manager there, and had suggested unknown to me that they should recruit me. It didn't help. Apparently they treat their lower level managers like drones as well.

It appears to be a hive of eager bees. I guess that works as long as there's plenty of pollen and nectar to collect. Given my choice of Bell Labs Murray Hill of the old days, with its twisty maze of corridors that lead in mysterious directions, and Google's primary color scheme and studied, statistical "freshness," I'd take Murray Hill any day. Not much room for independent thought in Google as far as I can see. You can do a lot with organized statistical analysis of existing data, but every once in a while you need to dig beneath the surface of that in a non-linear manner to find/create something new, and I don't see that happening there. As far as I can tell, the only reason that Google Labs in Pittsburgh is on the CMU campus is for PR value.

The state university building where I now teach is a twisty maze of corridors that lead in mysterious directions. I like it. It's like something out of Harry Potter.

x_x · Posted: Sun Sep 14, 2008 10:06 am Post subject:

google must have an algorithm for hiring people

BobTheDog · Posted: Sun Sep 14, 2008 11:04 am Post subject:

Lets hope it is more accurate than their search one!

Acoustic Interloper · Posted: Sun Sep 14, 2008 12:03 pm Post subject:

Norman Phay · Posted: Mon Sep 15, 2008 7:59 am Post subject:

I wish they'd spend less time designing new gadgets, and more time fixing their search engine. For years now it's been ruined by search engine optimisiation. For a lot of search terms it's useless.

BobTheDog · Posted: Mon Sep 15, 2008 8:19 am Post subject:

Basically search engines have become fast and inaccurate with a bias towards shopping and commerce.

For me google is now good for shopping and basically not a lot else. I used to use it for technical searches and it was fantastic, now for me this is hopeless.

We really need something like the Semantic Web to take off so we can filter out results we are not interested in, we need more metadata!

I have worked with free text engines for years now for Asset Management type stuff mostly using Intermedia or as it is now named Oracle*Text, this is a pretty powerful text search engine and is pretty nifty considering the power it offers especially in searching xml and linking to relational data for range type searches, but now we have customers of these systems who are saying we want a google based search engine as it is much better, it takes a lot of time to get them to realise that google search doesn't offer the same functionality even though is seems bloody obvious to us.

BobTheDog · Posted: Mon Sep 15, 2008 8:28 am Post subject:

Also around 20 years ago I worked on developing a FreeText search engine which at that time worked on DEC kit, this also could link free text data to relational data running on sybase.

I now wish I had taken this further, at the time I remember telling people I worked with that this sort of thing was useful only in a niche market. What a tosser I was!

Antimon · Posted: Mon Sep 15, 2008 12:53 pm Post subject:

Do you have any examples of something that Google has problems finding but still is there? Usually when my searches end up empty I assume that there are no such pages Embarassed

I find most stuff I'm after though. A great deal of searches on musical topics direct me back here at electro-music.com. Very Happy

/Stefan

BobTheDog · Posted: Mon Sep 15, 2008 1:08 pm Post subject:

I find the main problem with google is returning pages that do not contain all the search terms rather than not finding pages that do.

Rykhaard · Joined: Sep 02, 2007 Posts: 1290 Location: Canada

Blue Hell · Posted: Mon Sep 15, 2008 3:27 pm Post subject:

And then you can use +word when word must be present and -word when word must not be present in the documents found .. this sometimes helps a bit as well.

BobTheDog · Posted: Mon Sep 15, 2008 11:38 pm Post subject:

Yep I use these.

Acoustic Interloper · Posted: Tue Sep 16, 2008 5:03 am Post subject:

Their page ranking is mostly based on link counts and not at all on an individual's subsequent follow-thru after searching. When I interviewed I brought up profiling user search habits, but they claimed not to collect user info. It wouldn't be hard to do this anonymously and store on the user's own machine. I think this would help in some cases -- basically emulate the special search tricks that users use in getting to what they really want.

Guess they weren't too interested.

jksuperstar · Posted: Tue Sep 16, 2008 5:28 pm Post subject:

Horse crap they don't do profiling. In unrelated emails, I've seen google ads show topics that had nothing to do with the content of *that* page, but definitely content of previous emails & searches.

If you happen to have a google account, you can enable the History function, which will amazingly show you all the searches you've done in the past. Nice to find something that worked for you 5 days ago, but not nice to think you're being followed. Supposedly, there's an option to clear all this history permanently, but with Google's admission that privacy on the internet is not plausible, I doubt that clear permanently means what I would want it to mean.

Irregardless, I still use their services for non-private information. For that stuff, I think it doesn't matter who one uses. And I think it's good practice to separate accounts on separate servers for private vs. non-private contacts.

x_x · Posted: Tue Sep 16, 2008 9:40 pm Post subject:

I do use Google everyday, I must say I like some of their products. The search engine can find a lot of interesting stuff with some basic tricks.
try
intitle:"index.of" search term (file type)

Google code search is also very cool.

I have my own server but I still use Gmail for email, which I like. Privacy isn't of much concern for me, I know they have bots that analyze the content of emails. But I really don't care.

Their social network "Orkut" is horrible, and I still think it would be a good idea to implement a voting system based on the search results of the terms. Another thing they could do better is to make an algorithm to detect "Google bombs".

I just saw a demo of their open source cellphone operating system Android which looks good. They are offering 10 million USD for the best app developed for it.

Uncle Krunkus · Posted: Wed Sep 17, 2008 3:54 am Post subject:

I've had google.com.au as my home page for years, but I'm thinking of getting rid of it. Over the last six months or so it has become soooo sloooow. I fire up IE and it then takes about 10-15 secs for google to load as my home page! I can't understand what would possibly slow it down so much.