Google recently announced via its product blogs that they have begun an effort to index the “invisible” web. The details point to perhaps a big step in the technology for indexing online content. The announcement refers to detection of online forms and filling them with suitable data so as to generate pages that could be indexed.

An excerpt from the Google Webmaster Central Blog.

In the past few months we have been exploring some HTML forms to try to discover new web pages and URLs that we otherwise couldn’t find and index for users who search on Google. Specifically, when we encounter a

element on a high-quality site, we might choose to do a small number of queries using the form. For text boxes, our computers automatically choose words from the site that has the form; for select menus, check boxes, and radio buttons on the form, we choose from among the values of the HTML. Having chosen the values for each input, we generate and then try to crawl URLs that correspond to a possible query a user may have made.

The Invisible Web refers to the part of the Internet which is unavailable for indexing to the search bots or crawlers in the normal course of indexing.

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“Halo, ya, the plane flying now ar…”

I love travelling. I like going to see new places, experience new cultures. But I absolutely loathe flying. All the fuss about turning up at least 2 hours early at the airport, the check-in queue, the security checks, the queue to get to your seat, the babies crying, and the list goes on and on and on. Why do we put ourselves through this kind of torture? Is the destination even worth it?

Well, if you think the list is bad, you can add another ‘Things you don’t look forward to when flying’ onto it. Last Monday, the European Commission had introduced a new rule regarding mobile phone usage on the aircraft while it is airborne. Yes, you heard it right. They had finally relented and said ‘Yes!’ to passengers who wants to use their mobile phones during the flight.

Before this new regulation was approved, mobile phones were strict ‘No-no’ as soon as the passengers board the plane. Mobile phones were prohibited from being used on any flights, for fears that it could interrupt the navigation system and land the plane in a technical fault. And unfortunately for me, I vaguely remember a movie in which the navigation system on the plane was disrupted by a mobile phone signal. Paranoia, I know.

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One after another, Yahoo and Microsoft are taking steps to thwart the other’s move in what could have great ramifications for the search engine and media industry, which ever way the deal swings.

A brief recap of the events follows:

January 2008

Microsoft made an unsolicited bid of $44 billion in cash and stock to acquire Yahoo! which sent the portal’s management into a drive to drum up counter offerings to prevent a takeover. Rumors spread on deals with AOL, News.corp or even a search partnership with Google.

April 2008

Microsoft fires a mail to Yahoo giving the company a deadline of three weeks to come to terms with the offering lest it be forced to take the offer directly to the shareholders. This could be adverse to Yahoo, considering its lost ground in the search market and the looming economic slowdown.

Just in

Yahoo’s reply was to ask Microsoft to up its price substantially from the present $31 per share or forget the deal. Yahoo announced an experimental test of ads delivered via Google Adsense to 3% of Yahoo search traffic. Then comes the news of Time Warner’s possible partnership with Yahoo in which the media company would get a 20% stake in Yahoo and in exchange merge its AOL operations with Yahoo’s services.

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Online file sharing is undoubtedly one of the most convenient ways to get large files across to your friends and the people who need them. Email attachments have a 20MB limit (Gmail) and that’s surely not enough, unless you split the files up and send them one at a time, but what a hassle! I rely on online file sharing to share lecture notes, slideshows and photos with my friends and family. Here are some services which I use the most:

Dropbox was created by 2 MIT students back in 2007. Although they are now a three-man team. Its aim is to simplify file sharing, but it also has a lot of cool features besides the ol ‘upload-and-share’. It is still in private beta but you can get an invitation to join from getdropbox.com

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It seemed like the era of P2P might come to an end after all, in the near future. The Japanese ISPs have apparently agreed to disconnect any users that they detected to be using any P2P (peer-to-peer) program such as BitTorrent, BearShare, and Japan’s very own Winny.

They did have a go with an attack on P2P users a couple of years back, but the Japanese government told them that their plans could backfire and they could be violating the piracy law if they (the ISPs) went spying on the Internet usage of their users. With that, the plan was abandoned.

Just in case you are wondering (or for the new Internet users out there) but peer-to-peer files sharing software is a software that allows users to share files among themselves. Users that are sharing the same network will be able to download files if their peers have them and needless to say, this has created “headaches” for a lot of parties as they cannot control their product or materials from being passed around the globe, losing out on royalty and license payments.

Users are already able to find any kind of files from the Internet, even more so from the peer-to-peer file sharing network. File types from music to movies, from books to published research papers; these are all readily available to be shared on the network. For FREE!

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