Google Archive

Google just couldn’t let Adobe have the acquisition spotlight for a minute. Today Google has announced the acquisition of ReCaptcha, the maker of a new style of captcha software. If you are new to the term “captcha”, it’s those annoying boxes that are typically attached to forms to make sure you are a human and not some sort of robot or alien life form.

Google notes that the acquisition could help with their OCR scanning projects for Google Books and the Google News archive search. From the acquisition announcement, “Having the text version of documents is important because plain text can be searched, easily rendered on mobile devices and displayed to visually impaired users. So we’ll be applying the technology within Google not only to increase fraud and spam protection for Google products but also to improve our books and newspaper scanning process.”

Apparently ReCaptcha powers the human verfication for over 100,000 websites. We use the service on our job posting form.

Adam Ostrow at Mashable has more on the acquisition and what it could mean for Google Books. Additional coverage on Google Blogoscoped.

Google shares are up nearly 2% today (I doubt this acquisition has anything to do with the increase).

Update: Andrew Parker has more information about the founder of ReCaptcha, Luis von Ahn. Parker notes that this is the second acquisition by Google of a technology founded by von Ahn.

Over the past few weeks I’ve been keeping track of the different ways each Google service handles login procedures. I would have thought that once I am “cookied” by a Google service that all services would authenticate my session in the same manner — this is not the case. Below are some of the Google services and what happens when I attempt to load the service assuming that I am already cookied.

• Gmail – takes me right into my mailbox with no login screen
• Google Checkout – forces me to enter my password each time but displays my username
• Feedburner – takes me directly into the my main list of managed feeds
• Google AdSense – displays a login page but the login box is missing and a “waiting” note and then I am taken directly into my account
• Google AdWords – takes me directly to my management screen
• Google Webmaster – displays a similar screen to Google AdSense but I am forced to click the login button but am never prompted for a password
• iGoogle – takes me directly to my customized home page
• YouTube - clicking upload takes me directly to the upload screen
• Google Reader – takes me directly to my RSS feeds
• Orkut - takes me directly to my account management page
• Google Groups – takes me to my groups management page
• Google Docs – takes me directly to my documents management page
• Google Calendar – takes me directly to my calendar
• Blogger – forces me to login using my Google account information

At first I was thinking that it’s great that Google forces me to enter my password when I want to process orders for my startup in Google Checkout. But if that’s the case, shouldn’t Google AdSense follow the same authentication pattern? What about Google Docs and Calendar – documents in both of those services could be just as sensitive as financial information in Google Checkout/AdSense or AdWords.
Read the rest of this entry »

We are receiving reports that Google’s mail service, Gmail, is down. Our tests from the CenterNetworks International Headquarters shows that it is unreachable. The time of our tests was 3:54pm Eastern Time. We will continue to update this post with additional announcements as they become available. Google’s Apps Status Dashboard shows an outage for Gmail although they state it’s for a “small subset of users”.

I use Yahoo Mail for the majority of my email although today I decided to send emails about apartments using my Gmail account. I guess I will be homeless if Google doesn’t get it working soon! :-P

Update: 5:00 PM Eastern – Google has provided an update on their blog about the service outage. They say that the team is working on the issue but there are no details on the cause or expected recovery time.

The following message is displayed on some loads:

Server Error
The server encountered a temporary error and could not complete your request.
Please try again in 30 seconds.

As always, please report in if Gmail is down where you are.

While you wait for Gmail to return to service, check out all the ways Google tracks you online.

Guhmshoo put together a cartoon that I thought was interesting. The cartoon suggests that while we are celebrating our independence here in the U.S., worldwide we are all celebrating our dependence on Google.

James Thomas discussed his life without Google – could you do it?

Guhmshoo also recently revealed who he is and why he picked an alias to use when posting his cartoons.

Happy 4th of July to everyone in the U.S.!

The post below was originally posted on the Zoho blog and is authored by Zoho CEO Sridhar Vembu.

Inevitable comparisons are made between the hugely enthusiastic developer response (including from us at Zoho) to Google Wave yesterday with the relatively tepid reponse to Microsoft’s new search engine Bing. The real interesting contrast to us, as independent software developers, is the way developers responded to Silverlight as opposed to the reaction yesterday to Google Wave. Both Silverlight and Wave are aimed at taking the internet experience to the next level. To be perfectly honest, Silverlight is a great piece of technology. Google Wave, as yet, is not much more than a concept and an announcement.

It is easy to dismiss all this with “Oh, the press just loves to hype everything Google, and loves to hate Microsoft,” but that cannot explain why even competitors like us are willing to embrace Google’s innovations, but stay away from perfectly good innovations from Microsoft, such as Silverlight?

It comes down to one word: karma. Microsoft just has so much bad karma in this industry that I cannot imagine a company like us trusting them on much of anything. Take Silverlight: Microsoft pledged that they will always support Silverlight on Mac and Linux, and on browsers other than IE. Do you really, really believe their promise? Let’s recap some ancient history here: Microsoft used to have IE for Solaris and even had a beta of IE for Linux. That was when IE was way behind Netscape and was trying to catch up. Once Netscape was safely vanquished, Microsoft’s commitment to support IE on other platforms vanished. In fact, Microsoft intentionally pulled IE on other platforms, because it was clear to them that making the web experience suck on other platforms was a way to keep Windows firmly entrenched. I am glad they adopted that strategy, because that strategy eventually paved the way for Firefox (and Safari and Chrome …), and together those browsers have rendered the operating system utterly irrelevant. Apple’s resurgence – based on design prowess, not platform dominance – and Vista’s failure, have demonstrated that convincingly.

Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday for a brief moment, lots of tech bloggers removed the twitter auto-post function and replaced it with excitement over the Google Wave announcement. I’ve read posts that say Google Wave will replace the Web as we know it and then I read posts that say nearly the opposite. I am just wondering, did anyone else immediately think that Google Wave looks nearly identical to Microsoft Outlook?

For reference, the main blue color in Outlook is #e3efff and in Google Wave the main blue color is #c9e2fc. Google Wave has pretty pictures too. I think if you add the Xobni plugin into Outlook, the screenshots get even closer.
Read the rest of this entry »

This seems to have been a tough week for Google and their servers. Twice this past week Google News was down. Google noted that the issues apparently had to do with planes and backed-up Web traffic. Now I’ve been noticing for a while now that YouTube isn’t acting correctly. Many pages don’t load, videos are displaying an error message and the search function provides the error message displayed below.

As usual, please report in if you are experiencing issues with YouTube (or any other Google service). I hope they can get everything fixed so that we can watch more cat videos!

The last YouTube outage occured on April 23rd. At least Twitter is up and stable.