E-Commerce 2.0
Brian wrote: I think
we're heading in the
right direction, but
we've still...
May. 16, 2008 02:55 AM
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Viewpoint: Is Google Growing Too Fast?
Is Google growing too fast to continue producing innovative software while maintaining the quality that's become expected of it?
By: Neil Smithline
Mar. 31, 2008 06:00 AM
Digg This!
Is Google growing too fast to continue to produce innovative software while maintaining the quality that has become expected of it? I've had some problems with their alerts and sent in comments and, excluding the automated email replies, have received no response nor has the problem been corrected. In general I would have to say I'm a fan of Google. I think that they have reached their current status through hard work and clever thinking from the top executives, to the coding monkeys, to the system administrators. Despite having had some problems with them, my most recent posting regarding them was commenting on their ingenuity. But I've had some problems with their alerts and sent in comments and, excluding the automated email replies, have received no response nor has the problem been corrected. Being that I have a relative uncommon last name, I actually have an alert for "smithline". When a match is found it is almost always me or one of my family members. Probably not a very useful trick for someone named "John Smith" but it is helpful for me. When it Google finds a new web page match, it sends me an email that looks very similar to a search results page but it just contains the new matches. For example: Notice that the title tells you what is being searched for (“smithline”), the title of the page that had a match, and an excerpt of the page with the matched string (“smithline”) highlighted. If you are at all familiar to the results of a Google search, (if not what cave have you been in) then this should all seem familiar. But for the past 6-8 weeks there have been some problems. I contacted Google the 2nd time the the problem occurred. Here is one example of it: Google News Alert for: smithline You'll notice that “smithline” does not actually appear in the selection (or in the rest of the article if you search). It is some political article referring to the stance taken by a Mr. Smith and is referring to it as the "Smith line". Even wo rse, I received this: Google News Alert for: smithlineThis has both the words “smith” and “line” but they are not next to each other and not even in order. At least they are close to each other in “Line of Smith”. Also, notice that nothing is highlighted. Even the highlighting engine of Google could not figure out what substring the search engine had matched on. But, saving the worst for last, Google News Alert for: smithlineNotice that this excerpt has neither a “smith” nor "“line”. If you go to the article, it does have those words in them but they are not even close to each other as they were in the “Line of Smith”. Besides these problems, I'm having a terrible problem with another search. One of my children has a chronic condition (minor but annoying - details withheld for privacy reasons). So I have a search for the word “adolescent” and the name of the chronic condition. This search is wholly useless. I've included two of the nine hits I received - the rest were basically the same. I have modified the search results for privacy, removed URLs to the sites to prevent this being an advertisement for them, and removed obscenities for my more genteel readers.. Google Groups Alert for: "redacted for privacy" adolescentHard to imagine how this is useful... I'm beginning to wonder if Google is growing too fast to continue to produce innovative software while maintaining the quality that has become expected of them.
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Verizon Wireless is
snubbing Google's
Linux-based Android
initiative to go with the
LiMo Foundation's mobile
Linux spec for its next
wave of mobile phones
expected next year. Along
with Verizon, Mozilla
signed up - giving the
consortium its first
major open source ISV -
and a key
Google has taken its
Postini investment and
turned out Google Web
Security for the
Enterprise, which is
supposed to protect
against spyware, viruses
and zero-hour threats in
real-time whether the
user is on the corporate
network or working
remotely like at a hotel
or in an airpor
It's only taken Borland
two years but it's
finally dumped its
CodeGear tools division,
responsible for Borland's
hereditary JBuilder,
Delphi and C++ Builder
lines as well as its new
web ventures into PHP and
Ruby, said to be used by
7.5 million developers.
Embarcadero Technologie
Microsoft, which spent $6
billion on aQuantive and
was chasing Yahoo for its
ads before it came to a
dead stop, has been
supporting - as in
helping write -
legislation in New York
and Connecticut that
would regulate the data
that companies like Yahoo
and Google collect for
target 
So how does it feel to
have witnessed one of
technology's little
miracles this week? I
mean Yahoo's stock price
successfully defying
gravity. It's as close as
any of us will ever get
to an apparition of the
Virgin Mary floating on a
cloud without any visible
means of support. App
