Google has perhaps more than any other company become “The Internet Company.” It’s grown hand in hand with the internet and its entire business model has from the start been totally focused on the internet as a delivery platform.

And let’s face it, Google is a pretty interesting company. In fact, we think it’s so interesting that we put together this infographic with a ton of facts and figures about Google. We’ve been digging through Google’s SEC filings, news articles and the trusty old Wikipedia to get plenty of interesting data to include. We hope you like it!

Found this through one of the folks I follow on Google Buzz ... But there was no easy way to link to it from there on Posterous (or at least for me)... this is him - http://bartcollet.posterous.com/

If you've wondered why there haven't been many Gears releases or posts on the Gears blog lately, it's because we've shifted our effort towards bringing all of the Gears capabilities into web standards like HTML5. We're not there yet, but we are getting closer. In January we shipped a new version of Google Chrome that natively supports a Database API similar to the Gears database API, workers (both local and shared, equivalent to workers and cross-origin wokers in Gears), and also new APIs like Local Storage and Web Sockets. Other facets of Gears, such as the LocalServer API and Geolocation, are also represented by similar APIs in new standards and will be included in Google Chrome shortly.

We realize there is not yet a simple, comprehensive way to take your Gears-enabled application and move it (and your entire userbase) over to a standards-based approach. We will continue to support Gears until such a migration is more feasible, but this support will be necessarily constrained in scope. We will not be investing resources in active development of new features. Likewise, there are some platforms that would require a significant engineering effort to support due to large architectural changes. Specifically, we cannot support Gears in Safari on OS X Snow Leopard and later. Support for Gears in Firefox (including 3.6, which will be supported shortly) and Internet Explorer will continue.

Looking back, Gears has helped us deliver much-desired functionality, such as the ability to offer offline access in GMail, to a large number of users. Long term, we expect that as browsers support an increasing amount of this functionality natively and as users upgrade to more capable browsers, applications will make a similar migration. If you haven't already, you will want to take a look at the latest developments in web browsers and the functionality many now provide, reach out with questions, and consider how you can use these in your web applications. Gears has taken us the first part of the way; now we're excited to see browsers take us the rest of the way.

It's getting closer.

Peter Norvig

Director of research at Google

Internet search as we know it is just one decade old; by 2020 it will have evolved far beyond its current bounds. Content will be a mix of text, speech, still and video images, histories of interactions with colleagues, friends, information sources and their automated proxies, and tracks of sensor readings from Global Positioning System devices, medical devices and other embedded sensors in our environment.

The majority of search queries will be spoken, not typed, and an experimental minority will be through direct monitoring of brain signals. Users will decide how much of their lives they want to share with search engines, and in what ways.

The results we get back will be a synthesis, not just a list. For example, today if I ask 'compare approaches to nuclear fusion', the major search engines agree that a general encyclopaedia article on fusion power comes first, followed by other similar articles. A decade from now, the result will summarize the major approaches, contrast their differences, automatically translate any foreign documents into my language, and then rank the results by efficacy or place them in a table or chart as appropriate. If I then ask for 'background mathematics for fusion theory', I will get an outline for an impromptu course concentrating on the necessary complex analysis, customized to specific applications in fusion and to my level of mathematical understanding. If I stumble, the course will be readjusted to fit my needs, or perhaps the search engine will connect me to a tutor or another student in a similar plight. Interaction with search engines will be an ongoing conversation; one that is integrated with the other ongoing tasks of our lives.

One big challenge for search engines is to implement a measure of quality that is not based solely on popularity. Search engines must determine both relevance (is the item pertinent to the user's query?) and quality (is the item inherently accurate, useful and understandable, independent of the query?). Current relevance measures do reasonably well. Measures of quality require better models of the concepts and relations expressed in documents and how they relate to the reality of the world, as well as models of the trustworthiness of authors. Thus, a site that claims that the Moon landings were a hoax and seems to have a coherent argument structure will be judged to be lower quality than a legitimate astronomy site, because the premises of the hoax argument are at odds with reality. Understanding and improving these models is a key challenge for the coming decade.

via nature.com

Fascinating look into the future of search. Makes us wonder where we will all be... I originally came to this through http://ahier.posterous.com

Technology drives the astounding pace of contemporary language change, so it’s hardly surprising that most landmark words today come out of tech. That and the fact that this industry is responsible for the production of 9/10s of the world’s neologisms.

No matter what, 2009’s top words came from tech. The American Dialect Society’s word of the decade is ‘google,’ and ‘tweet’ is the ADS’s word of the year.

“Both words are, in the end, products of the Information Age, where every person has the ability to satisfy curiosity and to broadcast to a select following, both via the Internet,” said Grant Barrett, chair of the New Words Committee at the American Dialect Society.

“I really thought blog would take the honors in the word of the decade category, but more people google than blog, don’t they?” Barrett said. “Plus, many people think ‘blog’ just sounds ugly. Maybe Google’s trademark lawyers would have preferred it, anyway.”