Google Prototype:Precision Image Search

Google researchers say they have a software technology intended to do for digital images on the Web what the company’s original PageRank software did for searches of Web pages.

At the International WWW Conference in Beijing, two Google scientists presented a paper describing what the researchers call VisualRank, an algorithm for blending image-recognition software methods with techniques for weighting and ranking images that look most similar.

Although image search has become popular on commercial search engines, results are usually generated today by using cues from the text that is associated with each image.

Despite decades of effort, image analysis remains a largely unsolved problem in computer science, the researchers said. For example, while progress has been made in automatic face detection in images, finding other objects such as mountains or tea pots, which are instantly recognizable to humans, has lagged.

“We wanted to incorporate all of the stuff that is happening in computer vision and put it in a Web framework,” said Shumeet Baluja, a senior staff researcher at Google, who made the presentation with Yushi Jing, another Google researcher. The company’s expertise in creating vast graphs that weigh “nodes,” or Web pages, based on their “authority” can be applied to images that are the most representative of a particular query, he said.

The research paper, “PageRank for Product Image Search,” is focused on a subset of the images that the giant search engine has cataloged because of the tremendous computing costs required to analyze and compare digital images. To do this for all of the images indexed by the search engine would be impractical, the researchers said. Google does not disclose how many images it has cataloged, but it asserts that its Google Image Search is the “most comprehensive image search on the Web.”

The company said that in its research it had concentrated on the 2000 most popular product queries on Google’s product search, words such as iPod, Xbox and Zune. It then sorted the top 10 images both from its ranking system and the standard Google Image Search results. With a team of 150 Google employees, it created a scoring system for image “relevance.” The researchers said the retrieval returned 83 percent less irrelevant images.

Mr. Shah said there had been a number of technology demonstrations by Google Labs researchers, such as a project in 2005 that used machine learning techniques to recognize the gender of a person in an image. However, the company has been slow to deploy its research, he said.

Google movies

Just type your city name and get all movies running in theaters with show timing details.

http://www.google.com/movies

Google takes down Google Apps Engine

Google has taken down its new Google Apps Engine development tool just a day after launching a free preview.

One of the applications Google made available to developers, HuddleChat, bears a striking resemblance to Campfire, a real-time chat application form 37Signals LLC, according to several tech bloggers who called Google to task on the matter.

Jason Fried, founder of 37Signals, told ReadWriteWeb, he is disappointed that Google “stooped so low to basically copy it feature for feature, layout for layout.”

Fried added, “We thought that would be beneath Google, but maybe it’s time to reevaluate what they stand for.”

Google has not addressed the issue on its new AppEngine blog, but writes at www.huddlechat.com, “Hi, a couple of our colleagues wrote Huddle Chat in their spare time as a sample application for other developers to demonstrate the power and flexibility of Google App Engine. We’ve heard some complaints from the developer community about it and because of that we’ve decided to take it down. If you’d like to see more sample applications written on Google App Engine please check out our documentation and our App Gallery.” The entry is signed “The Google App Engine Team.”

In announcing Apps Engine on Tuesday, Kevin Gibbs, a tech lead for Google App Engine, wrote on the company’s corporate blog, “In the same way that Blogger made it easy to create a blog, Google App Engine is designed from the ground up to make it easy to create and run web applications.”

The tool was available free to the first 10,000 developers that signed up during a preview release. The App Engine Web site now cautions that space is limited and “for now you’ll have to wait.” It’s unclear whether Google reached that quota first or shut Apps Engine’s preview before reaching that number.

Ref:A news site

OpenWebDeveloper Summit:NY

The inaugural Open Web Developer Summit (April 21-22, 2008) – devoted to Google APIs, open source and all things code, from Android to the YouTube Data API – is designed to help developers with learning how best to leverage the engineering muscle of Google in their own code, on their own web sites, and in their own businesses.

At the 2-day Summit, delegates will hear from leading developers and industry experts about the impact Google’s multifaceted initiatives are having on the world of Internet technologies today and on what the future is likely to bring from Google tomorrow. Technical sessions will explore a world of web development and application-building opportunities.

April 21-22, 2008 in New York City

In the Summit, sessions will feature topics like Google Gears, Google Mashup Editor, and Google Gadgets. They will include OpenSocial, the set of common APIs for building social applications across many websites, and GWT (used for building AJAX apps in Java). Speakers will also be looking at Android, the software stack for mobile devices including an operating system, middleware and key applications.

Google Bites Microhoo Yet Again

Nielsen Online data confirms both Yahoo!’s and Microsoft’s gradual path to irrelevance in search, making it seem less likely that the two will be able to take on Big G in the long run.

According to the report, Google’s market share in the domestic search engine market continues to grow, at the expense of the fading silver and bronze medalists.

	Jan.	Feb.
Google	56.9%	58.7%
Yahoo!	19%	17.6%
MSN/Live	12.1%	11.2%
AOL Search	4.7%	5.2%
Ask.com	2.4%	2.5%

In other words, in the span of one month, Google’s market share has grown from 56.9% to 58.7%, while Microhoo’s combined stake has shrunk from 31.1% to 28.8%. It would have needed to acquire IAC’s (Nasdaq: IACI) Ask.com to stop the organic bleeding, or make a pricier purchase of Time Warner’s (NYSE: TWX) AOL, to keep pace with Google.

If a Yahoo!-Microsoft combo was good enough to reach Google’s armpit a month ago, it’s now closer to its belly button. Any lower, and we’ll have to move this analogy over to an adult website.

This is clearly a race that Microsoft won’t win, especially if it’s hitching its horse to the only other search engine within the top five to join it on the downslide. This is even before we turn to the global playing field, where Microsoft actually trails China’s Baidu.com (Nasdaq: BIDU) by a fair margin for the bronze.

Numbers fluctuate monthly, but this clearly does not bode well for either company, especially heading into next month’s quarterly report from Yahoo!, where the potential carnage could wind up being a dealbreaker.

One may also speculate that sour impressions of Yahoo! and Microsoft combining forces — a deal that was announced at the end of January — may be weighing on actual usage.

Search engine stats are important because this is where the fat online advertising margins come to party. Most of the other page views in cyberspace are tough nuts to monetize, explaining why Microsoft and Yahoo! generate far less in ad revenue than Google.

So, go figure: That fat Google kid keeps stealing Microhoo’s lunch money. What a bully!