Googlified

Due to the mountain of school works and (final) exams I am having toward the end of this school year, I will not be able to update this blog this week. In the mean time, you can checkout the blogs on the right (click here if you are reading this in a feed reader).

Also, I got into a car accident today, but I am fine, still in one piece, no scratches or anything. Thanks for asking. And yes, I am blowing soap bubbles in the above picture (outside of school), and yes, it is fun.

Google announced an open source contest, but this time for everyone who is not yet in university. This is a good chance for some of the younger coders to show their skills and win some t-shirts and money - or even a full paid trip to Google’s headquarters in Mountain View.

For this contest, Google works with 10 open source organizations: Apache Software Foundation, Drupal, GNOME, Joomla!, MoinMoin, Mono, Moodle, Plone, Python Software Foundation, and SilverStripe CMS

So if you are in high school and already eager to code, check out the following link to get more information:

Google today announced their financial results for the second quarter of 2007 that’s with $3.87 billion in revenue. Wow, a lot of money - to me, but that didn’t impress the Wall Street bankers/investors despite the mere 6% increase comparing to the last quarter.

Google’s stock price dropped over 7% in the after hour trading, setting it back to the mid-June level.

If you crunch numbers for a living and interested in these stuff, you can check out their Financial Release, or else you would probably want check out this PDF slideshow like me. :)

Google announced today that they will hold their “quarterly conference call to discuss second quarter 2007 financial results on Thursday, July 19, 2007 at 1:30 p.m. Pacific Time (4:30 p.m. Eastern Time).”

On a related note, GOOG closed at $543.34 today, up 0.14%.

In today’s Searchology Press Conference, Google made a couple important announcements regarding to the future of Google.

PageRank, the algorithm behind Google’s searching technology, has entered its “first stage of an upgraded ranking mechanism that automatically and objectively compares different types of information” to deliver the best results to the end users.

The way you navigate through different search results has changed greatly. On Web searches, when you enter a query, it will include navigation links next the Web on the left side of the section where it displays the number of results. Also, Google has added a new navigation bar on top of the result pages and home page of its products to help you easily navigate to one another, this includes Gmail, Video, Blog Search, Blogger, Calendar, Document, Groups, Reader, Maps, Scholar, and many others. (see screen shot above)

Beside the ones you can see now, Google launched a new service in the Google Labs, called the Google Experimental, where Google will “provides users an opportunity to try out some of the latest search experiments and innovations.” Some of the experiments available now are Timeline and Map views, where the results are sorted in a timeline and results are showed on a map alongside the results, keyboard short-cuts, and left/right hand navigation.

More coverage (Techmeme):

Behind the scenes with universal search - Official Google Blog

Universal search: The best answer is still the best answer - Official Google Blog

Google Begins Move to Universal Search - Google Press Center

Google Searchology: The Future of Search - Google Blogoscoped

Google Searchology Day: Recap Of Announcements - Search Engine Land

Google Launches New Design, Universal Search and a Site for Search Experiments - Google Operating System

Google just announced on their Google Mac Blog a new version of Google Desktop (1.01).

It comes with a long list of bug fixes, feature improvements and more settings.

Many of the early users wrote in their blogs about buggy behaviour. Let’s hope most of it got resolved and that we can see more updates soon.

Good day everyone! I am delighted to announce that we now have two, yes, two more contributors to this blog.

So now let me introduce them to you, my loyal readers. They are Teodor Filimon and Yannick Stucki. Both are huge Google Desktop fans, so huge that might scare you off - Yannick is the winner (1st place) of the Google Desktop Gadget Contest with diGGGadget and Teodor receive Honorable Mention with his Shortcut Gadget in the same contest. Yeah, you are probably using one of the Desktop gadgets they made right now. :)

That brings the average age of this blog’s authors to 17 - 1.5 higher than used to be. LOL! Also to note that this blog has became a multinational (as in four countries) blog.

Welcome to the team!

[photo by Paul Armstrong, used under a Creative Commons license]