New Google Search – First Run and the Results (The Caffeine Project)

The next version of Google is almost ready. The months’ long secret project code named Caffeine is available for testing. It runs on next generation infrastructure and in Google’s own words

It’s the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions.

The new version as of now runs under the current version and you will not notice any major differences.  But if you look from a research or analysis angle certainly you will find great differences. (Forget the UI). Try the new Google though: http://www2.sandbox.google.com

Here are the results:

1. For almost all searches the new engine is at least 40% faster
2. With fastness comes more results, approximately more than 10% more coverage.(Indexing)
3. Page Rank for many searches show obvious changes. Relevant searches have moved on top pushing irrelevant ones down south. Check your site for the page rank and be ready for the new Google Search.
4. 

Cute FeedDemon is not so cute now

My favourite feed reader FeedDemon is not so cute now. Reason –>The synchronization have shifted from Newsgator to Google.

What this means to you is:

You cannot synchronize your accounts to NewsGator and Google Reader is the official backend synchronization option. Though initially I was surprised by Google Reader’s robustness, all my tempo immediately died down when I saw an Ad in the left side bottom of the newsgator main window.

It’s annoying to see an Ad continuously in some program like Reader were we put our eyes most of the day . But it’s great gain for Google as it has got a fantastic facelift for it’s reader with FeedDemon’s desktop option.

What’s still ON?

1. NewsGator will continue to develope & update FeedDemon (for free as usual)
2. FeedDemon synchronization ends by 31st August. –>You should move to Google Reader if you want synchronization.

Procedure described by FeedDemon guys is for switching the Synchronization is:

Gmail goes offline – Now access your Google Mail even without internet

GMail goes ga ga.  Now you can access your GMail offline even when you don’t have internet. The only requisite is that you should have Google Gears installed for your browser.

Here are the Steps to activate your Offline GMail account

1. Sign in to Gmail and click ‘Settings’.
2. Click the ‘Labs’ tab and select ‘Enable’ next to ‘Offline Gmail’.

3. Click ‘Save Changes.’
4. In the upper righthand corner of your account, next to your username, there will be a new ‘Offline’ link. Click this link to start the offline synchronization process.

5.”Install offline access for Gmail” will pop up. Click Install. This will install Google Gears also and re-start your browser.

6. Based on your email volume, Offline Gmail will download email that is newer than 5 years old excluding Spam & Trash.

TIP:

1.To evade browser restart you can install Google Gears from http://gears.google.com/.
2. Google Chrome browser have Gears already installed.

What can you do in offline Gmail

1. You can do everything except sending & receiving new mails.
2. If you compose and press send, the mail will be sent when you connect it to the internet.

How do I know if Gears is installed on a computer I am using?

1.Visit the page http://gears.google.com/. That page will clearly tell you whether Gears is installed or not.
2. Check the Add/remove programs

Flaky connection mode</strong

An interesting feature is the useful flaky connection mode, by this you can:
1.Access the mail that’s stored locally on your computer, regardless of your connection status.
2.This makes it much faster to read and send mail, while you’re on a slow or flaky connection.
3.Your account will continue to sync in the background when it’s able to do so, with no disruption to your experience.

WARNING

Chrome – Google’s first step towards Web OS?

Chrome is designed as a Multi Process Architecture keeping in mind the increasing complexity of the web applications. It has several advantages instead of running the whole browser as a single process with several threads.

Today’s browsers try to act smart much like a little operating system. Indeed it runs several (heavy?)applications inside the browser like in Firefox we have FTP, Torrent, IRC, etc.

Browser must attempt to keep each web apps with JavaScript, Flash, Silverlight, Java etc independent of each other so that if one has a bug and crashes it must not close the browser itself. Chrome is designed to spawn multiple instances of Chrome.exe for each tab or site exactly for this reason.

Chrome uses the open source WebKit rendering engine, which is also used by Apple’s Safari web browser.

Since it runs multiple processes Google Chrome can have its own Task Manager. You can access the Google Chrome Task Manager with SHIFT+ESC or a right click on the browser’s title bar.  This Task Manager lets you track resource usage for each web app and plug-in, rather than for the entire browser.  You can kill any web apps or plug-ins that has crashed, without having to restart the entire browser.

Chrome spawns 3 entirely different architectural processes to manage the browsing.

1. Browser Process: Similar to underlying OS it co-ordinates and takes care of interaction with all peripheral devices as well as file interactions. It directs Renderer and Plu-ins to behave in the designed way. It doesn’t do any rendering.
2. Renderer Process: As the name suggests. Many renderer process are created to manage each web app. And the most interesting point is that each renderer runs in a separate sandbox with no access to OS files. If any suspicious activity is noticed in a renderer browser kills that PID.
3. Plugin Process : Manages the plugins like Flash, Adobe Reader etc.

For each website you visit a new process (renderer) is created. This means an additional chrome.exe in your Windows Task Manager. All this chrome.exe is aggregated and categorized in the Google Chrome Task Manager.

If you open a site from another site’s JavaScript only one renderer will be spawned. Also only one renderer per one domain since inter communication between the different apps of the same domain cannot happen if different PIDs are used. For example if you are signed in yahoo mail, you have to re-sign in for accessing yahoo answers.

In short,

Strategy

1.    By using different processes for each site a robust application can be run in each Tab.

2.    This implies Google can go ahead and create apps with more functions making things breezier.

So, it’s the beginning of the Web OS as the future will be fully loaded with more on web side.

Is Google the early Bird?

How to run two or multiple instances of Google Talk accounts at the same time?

Many a times you wanted to use two of your GTalk or GMail accounts simultaneously in the comfort of Google Talk. Here are the many ways available to do that:

Step 1: Find out where you have installed Google Talk. Usually  ”C:Program FilesGoogleGoogle Talkgoogletalk.exe”.

Step 2: Easily copy this by right clicking on GTalk icon on desktop OR in the Start menu > Programs and go to Properties >Shortcut > Target.

Step 3:Create a Shortcut on the desktop with the following address: “C:Program FilesGoogleGoogle Talkgoogletalk.exe” /nomutex

Step 4:Now open how many instances of Google you want by clicking on the newly created shortcut.

Alternatively:

Win OS

1. Use Pidgin -the multi messenger client and create any number of google talk accounts simultaneously.
2. Use Digsby – like Pidgin + you can even add social networking accounts in Digsby.
3. Centericq -Text Mode
4. Kopete

Unix/Linux

1.     Kopete

2.     Miranda

3.     Trillian

4.     Centericq -Text Mode [ rpm/deb/tar formats ]

5.     Digsby

Mac OS X