President Barack Obama’s speech to thousands of school children across United States will strike a chord with all parents. But the remarks could be a source of controversy and can make a tech company very unhappy – Microsoft. While fellow competitors like Google was praised high in the President’s speech to school children on Sept 8th ’09, he advised them to switch off that Xbox.

Speaking from his prepared notes, which more or less is an exact rendition of his original speech, his dig at Microsoft’s Xbox came early on:

He spoke about the role of parents and their responsibility to enable children to stay focused on the chosen track and how to get the homework done and also advised to spend very less time in front of the television or playing that Xbox.

“Turn that Xbox off” was his exact words and after forethought added, at least some of the time. The fact that Obama clearly mentioned the Xbox and not a PlayStation or Nintendo Wii did not go unnoticed and may not sit well with the company.

Most other technology brands that were mentioned in his speech received favored comments especially Apple. Obama encouraged the children to work harder to become an innovator or an inventor creating good things like the next iPhone, a new medicine or a vaccine.

He was also full of praise for other Microsoft competitors like Google, Twitter and Facebook when he mentioned that students who sat in these very seats twenty odd years ago have changed the face of communication by creating Google, Facebook and Twitter.

I noted that his speech mentioned five major brands, all of which were technology related and these inventions and creations were clubbed along with other major events of the world like Depression, World War for civil rights and landing of man on the moon.

The only other brand mention was Harry Potter books! Remarkable isn’t it?

Catch up on the President’s speech which is now available on YouTube.com

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Trust Google to come up with really spectacular and exciting stuff each time. Right from its days of Google Search, every single application at Google has been revolutionary. Google, the original search giant decided to do something better in what it is best known for - Search. So what can be “Better than the Best?” The answer came in the form of Google Caffeine. Google Caffeine is available at this URL, for you all to try out.

With the growth in competition for search engines (Bing) Google’s new strategy was to better its search engine. Google Caffeine was the result of that. Google defines this project as “A Next-Generation Architecture for Google’s Web Search” on their blog on 10th august 2009.

As the Google blog puts it:

To build a great web search engine, you need to:

• Crawl a large chunk of the web.
• Index the resulting pages and compute how reputable those pages are.
• Rank and return the most relevant pages for users’ queries as quickly as possible.

Although looking at this statement you might wonder, whats so different from the earlier Google Search we had? The answer is ‘Much Much More’.

Google Search has been recently challenged on four things by competitors Microsoft’s Bing, Twitter, Yahoo and Facebook:

1. Real Time Search.
2. Microsoft’s Bing proving to be something of almost an equal level to Google Search.
3. Partnership between Yahoo and Microsoft on Search.
4. Facebook’s interest in Real Time Search.

Google Caffeine is an attempt in the right direction by Google to answer to these challenges.

But the prime question about Google Caffeine is… Is it Better than the earlier search?

Before I answer that. Lets take a look at the points which make the Current Google Search great.

1. Accuracy - This was the most brilliant thing about Google. Even when it indexed only a few thousand or even million pages, its search results were accurate and obviously much better than the search results given by the search engines of those times.
2. Speed - With every result, Google showed you the time it had taken to come up with it. Now that was something really cool. There was absolutely no need for Google to display that, as people did not have anything to do with it. But this was a brilliant strategy on Google’s part, when initially it was trying to make its mark as a search engine. Speed impresses people when they are trying something like search and the when they saw the total time taken, it only added to the confidence people were starting to have in Google.
3. Total Web Pages Indexed - More the number of web pages indexed, more are the number of web pages returned for a particular query. And more is the number of web pages returned, easy it is for the user to find what he is looking for. And the quicker he finds out, the more satisfied he leaves from Google and more are his chances to come back to Google to search something else. Google initially indexed few thousands of pages, something which has grown phenomenally in the past years with Google now indexing more than 8 Billion Web Pages. No other website comes in comparison to the number of web pages indexed by Google.

But if there was one thing which Google didn’t address (it would be wrong to say that they failed in this) was real time search. This is what Twitter has brought up. With real time results Twitter is best for searching the current events or breaking news. Google quickly added that feature in their web results to come up with something like this:

So lets take a look at the new Google Search Engine and compare it with the current one in terms of:

1. Total web pages indexed
2. Speed
3. Accuracy
4. Real time?

1. Total Web Pages Indexed:

So I entered a simple search query : India

And this was the output

Google Caffeine Current Google

Clearly The newer Google has indexed lots more pages than the Current Google and that’s evident from the fact that its returned much much more number of results.

I went ahead and entered a complex search query: “most number of tweets on twitter”

Google Caffeine returned : 10,800,000
Current Google returned : 21,300,000

Wow, that’s reverse now! But considering this is still in beta and the Google searches for most of my test queries resulted in Google Caffeine emitting more results, I guess this should be OK.

2. Speed:

Again a simple query “Indian Cricket Council” gave me more number of results. But look at this!!!

Google Caffeine Current Google

The current Google takes 0.32 seconds to return the results and the new Google is 0.16 seconds, thats like double!!!

WoW!!

Now this is change, although I am sure it is going to be the least noticed, is the one of the best things about the new Google.

Ok, so now I entered a complex query : “who will win the ashes?”

Google Caffeine : 0.22 seconds
Current Google : 0.25 seconds

There you go, the time difference did reduce over there. It also did for some more complex queries, but again a great update in this new Google.

3. Accuracy:

Hmmm! So how do you test the accuracy of something, which is known for its accuracy.

Simple search results like “India” or even “Twitter” did not reveal much although I did find out that there is a slight toggling in the search results for “Google News” results, “Google Pictures” results and “You Tube” results.

Nothing great!!!

So I entered a complex term like “what is the future of search”

Again, although the number of web pages returned and the time taken were impressive enough with Caffeine, I didnt find much difference in the output of results.

Simply toggling of the web pages is what I would call it.

Like for example with the above search query

As the first result :

Google Caffiene had :
Official Google Blog: The future of search

10 Sep 2008 … One answer is clear: search engines of the future will be better in part because they will understand more about you, the individual user. …
googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/09/future-of-search.html - Cached - Similar -

Current Google had :
Future Search - The Method - What is Future Search?

Future search is a PLANNING MEETING that helps people transform their capability for action very quickly. The meeting is task-focused. …
www.futuresearch.net/method/whatis/index.cfm - Cached - Similar -

This same result is found in the Google sandbox as the second result

Future Search - The Method - What is Future Search?

Future search is a PLANNING MEETING that helps people transform their capability for action very quickly. The meeting is task-focused. …
www.futuresearch.net/method/whatis/index.cfm - Cached - Similar -

Again more complex queries did not reveal much change and looks like there is no significant change when it comes to altering of web pages in the results.

Maybe being in the beta stage, probably this feature is not implemented to the fullest. May be?

4. Real Time:

Real time is the current hot topic among internet users. Twitter started all this. With a simple question “What are you doing?” Twitter single handedly put real time search on the map when it started indexing its tweets.

Almost immediately Google put an “Show Options” link on its search result page, giving the users option to look at queries that were old by some hours, days or months.

But when talking about Google Caffeine you can see the “Real Time” results embedded into the heart of the algorithm.

Clearly Google Caffeine is much better than the current Google Search when it comes to displaying real time results like breaking news and current event.

A good thing in the right direction makes this new tweak victorious in Google Caffeine.

Here is a quick output of the above comparisons :

Comparison:

1. Total web pages indexed
Winner: Google Caffeine

2. Speed
Winner: Google Caffeine

3. Accuracy
Winner: Not much difference, but still expecting the obvious change from Google Caffeine

4. Real time?
Winner: Google Caffeine

Conclusion:

So overall, Google Caffeine is a much better product than the current Google Search. Keeping the latest trends in internet and competition in mind, Google has come up with a better product and its certainly posing as a challenge to Bing, Twitter and Facebook.

More Resources on Google Caffeine:

1. Google Caffeine: Google’s New Search Engine Index
2. Google Caffeine Test Suggests Too Much Emphasis on Real-Time Indexing
3. Is Google Caffeine Faster?
4. Google Caffeine Search Index & Algorithm Update
5. Google Building Bing-Killer Search Engine
6. Google Caffeine: A Detailed Test of the New Google
7. Google’s Caffeine May Cause Corporate Jitters
8. More info on the Caffeine Update
9. Google Caffeine Wakes Me Up
10. Google Caffeine: A Comprehensive Analysis

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It was announced this afternoon that Facebook has started a new search tool which, was being tested previously, though I am not able to see it yet. This comes in answer to the fact that the search on Facebook was completely out of hand and didn’t provide the best features.

A blog on Facebook threw light on this matter and it said that you can now search content of the last thirty days which includes status updates, photos, notes, videos, links etc shared by other friends of yours on Facebook. If people have chosen to make certain contents visible to everyone, then you will be able to view such contents whether or not you are a friend of theirs.

Now, all that you have to do is search for what you want to find by entering the keyword in the upper right search box available on all pages and all relevant information will show up. There is a filter too that will allow you to view pages on of your friends or those of everyone else.

Don’t you think it would be fun to know maybe your friend’s dinner plans or restaurant opinions by just typing ‘dinner’ in the search box? Search for anything now on Facebook.

It was also announced earlier this day that Facebook has acquired Friendfeed, a service that provides best tools for sharing online. As the news goes, Friendfeed was actually rejected by Twitter earlier and Facebook seized this opportunity to buy this instead. The search tool on Friendfeed is indeed remarkable and each of the tools provided will make Facebook look like Twitter, in fact much better, if I should say.

With Friendfeed employees and founders joining Facebook in senior roles, we can expect such revolutionary changes making Facebook better accessible, providing it all the tools necessary and also the looks.

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Twitter has been planning things in a pretty nice way and along with this certain documental evidences also reveals that it is the company focusing onto pure success. They are clear about the way they have been travelling and at the same they are pretty eager, curious and even ambitious of what comes over in the future.

Apart from this there are more details which are floating about of the relationship of Twitter with other big companies including Google, Microsoft and hopefully Yahoo too. When all these discussions and merging is taking place, the company itself is afraid of the competition and also whether they would destroy the growth of Twitter along the path.

Tech Crunch brought about the documents which resulted up in the spread of the great news of the delicate dance of Twitter with the other giants. When the real hot question that comes out is whether it is good to open up the documents which are to be kept confidential. It still remains to be so as the news has let out a huge buss.

The documents which were produced include that of the executive meetings conducted by Twitter during the month of February and June in the year 2009. Even though the sources say that the major issue of negotiation between the giants including Microsoft and Google was sensed out, there are even more things which can be sniffed over.

Apart from this entire boom coming up, Facebook has also shown its interest in merging up with this growing company. The discussion is on the go even though Facebook might turn out to be the perfect killer for Twitter.

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