Google's Forecast For A Speedier Internet
Friday, December 15, 2006
Google is currently the top search engine company in the
industry, both in terms of market share and technology. To
reach the top spot in an Industry which analysts predict could
balloon in to a multi-billion dollar one, it took a Google that
has an abundant supply of innovation, great foresight and to a
big extent, a stealthily-developed arsenal of one the best and
most advanced Search Engine Technology the whole Industry has
ever seen (or not seen, since Google is trying its best to keep
competitors in the dark about the true extent and power of their
biggest weapon - their clusters of datacenters). Although
they're at the front of the pack right now, Google and its army
of engineers are in no way sitting on their laurels. Innovation
is what brought them where they are now, and innovation is
definitely what they're continually using to bring the company
forward. Google's engineers are continually working on ways to
improve their search engine's performance and to give
additional features that will enhance user experience.
Although it could be very easy to miss because of its sheer
simplicity, speed is one of the key reasons why Google is
number one. They understood early on that in order to provide a
top-notch user experience, search results must be delivered to
the user in the shortest time possible. Even when on a dial up
connection, Google has designed its search engine in such a way
that the web search results appear in a snap. One might say that
Google has perfected the speed aspect of search engine results
delivery, but displaying the list of results is just half of
the story. What happens when a user clicks on the result is
also an important component in the overall experience of the
search engine user. Google therefore wants to improve on the
Internet for the user searching for information. Improving the
speed of the Internet for the users is also important to
Google's other mission: to bring software applications that a
user uses from the desktop to the web. The idea of network
computing is something that is not entirely new, but it is only
lately that we are seeing a start (albeit still slow and not
without its own share of challenges) towards the right
direction. Products like Gmail, Google spreadsheets, Google
Calendar and Writely are testament to this Company mission.
So now we know that Google wants to deliver a user experience
in a much faster way than what the current Internet technology
has to offer. Now we move on to the how question. Or, how
Google intends to improve the speed at which information is
retrieved and delivered to the user.
We'll start with what Google is doing now to address the
problem of speed, moving on later on the company's future
plans, clues of which can be found in the company's patent
applications.
Web page pre-fetching is one method that is generally used in
increasing the speed at which a web page is accessed and Google
is using it in now in its search engine. Users using Firefox
browser to search Google may have already felt the effect of
pre-fetching without them knowing it. Google currently
pre-fetches the top items in the list of search results
especially if the algorithm has determined that it is most
likely to be clicked by the user. Pre-fetching a web page means
that the browser will download a web page to the user's computer
even before the user has clicked on the link to it such that
when the user actually clicks the link, the page is loaded
quickly from user's computer memory.
The Google web accelerator is another Google product that aims
to speed up the Internet experience for the users. It speeds up
the speed of Internet users on broadband using a desktop
component and dedicated Google servers to cache content and
compress certain data before it is sent to the user GWA also
uses a more aggressive pre-fetching feature that works not only
on Google search result pages but also on other pages that the
user is using.
The Google web accelerator and the page pre-fetching feature of
the Google search engine are two methods currently being used by
Google in bringing a speedier Internet experience to the user,
but there are a lot more that Google is doing in its labs to
make the Internet even faster, or more specifically in some
cases, the speed at which information is delivered to the user.
Search being the second most popular activity done by users on
the Internet, speed improvements on information retrieval and
delivery is an important improvement on the user experience of
many Internet users.
"Predictive information retrieval" and "anticipated query
generation and processing in a search engine" -two patent
applications by the search company, says a lot about how Google
aims to improve the search experience by hinging on one thing:
anticipating and predicting what the user is looking for. The
focus of the patent application mentioned is returning search
results faster and more personalized for the user.
The search engine that Google wants to develop will capture the
keyboard characters as they are entered by the user, then sends
partial queries to the Google servers that are actually
predicted by an algorithm based on what it thinks that the user
is actually looking for. This prediction is based on a list of
words found on one or more dictionaries which can differ from
one user to user. The search engine can therefore predict what
you are looking for based both on what other people are looking
for and a personalized profile that Google can make out of what
it knows about the user. This can include the user's search
history or other factors. Google can then display the list of
suggested keywords to the user and in some cases, actual search
results. Predictive information retrieval when perfected will
make searching experience speedier for the user, and will
smartly optimized the work being done by the search engine.
Google has a lot to gain in a speedy Internet, that's why it's
also investing a lot of money and engineer time towards this
goal. Whatever Google delivers to the table to improve the way
users use the Internet, it is a sure win for its users and
customers. In the same way that we don't know how we managed to
live in a world of dial up connection now that we're on
broadband, we might be surprised in what the future will be
offering in harnessing more the speed potential of the
Internet.
About The Author: http://www.theinternetone.net
posted by Dennis Cheesman @ 7:41 AM,
