Google sees 'insane' demand for invites to its Google+ social network

Google has closed invitations to join its new Facebook-style social network just a day after it launched, after it received "insane" levels of demand for the service.
The search giant rolled Google+ out to a small cadre of users on Tuesday, much as it did when it launched its Gmail email service, but what was intended as a "limited" launch turned into a frenzy for invitations.

Each user was given around a dozen invitations to pass on to friends and family, in order to test the social networking capabilities of the site, and on Wednesday Google handed "thousands" more invitations to people to join the service.

However, the invitations were quickly suspended. Google's head of social, Vic Gundotra, said on the site: "We've shut down invite mechanism for the night. Insane demand. We need to do this carefully, and in a controlled way."

People unable to get their hands on an invitation that worked took to Twitter today to share loopholes which would help them gain access.

Google has made several failed attempts to launch a social networking service in the past, including Google Buzz and Google Wave, but the initial response to Google+ by those that have used it suggests it will fare much better. It is seen as the company's most serious challenge to Facebook yet. Both social networking sites do a similar job but Google+ uses a system of "circles" which makes it easier to differentiate between social groups and to filter information by audience.
However, Google played down the impact of the initial demand and said Tuesday's launch was just a preliminary roll out ahead of a bigger unveiling further down the line.
"This is the Google+ Project. We still haven't launched Google+ in its entirety. It's not that the service crashed and melted. We just want to keep it controlled," a spokesman said.

Soon Google will know what you want before you do

Amit Singhal is not a household name but a product that he fundamentally shaped certainly is.

In 2000 Singhal, a search academic, joined a very young Google and set about rewriting the technology which underpinned the nascent information engine.

For his major contribution, effectively rewriting Sergey Brin’s magic formula, and changing the way the world accesses information forever, Singhal is now known simply as a ‘Google Fellow’ - the equivalent of Jedi in Google terms and the highest honour in the Google-verse.

Eleven years on, the search guru, who was Google employee number 167 (there are now more than 25,000 staff members around the world), is still obsessed by information retrieval – the name by which search was known in academic circles until the advent of the internet in the late nineties.

However, Singhal is still frustrated with search.

Despite having just announced a raft of impressive search innovations, which include being able to ask Google questions out loud and drop in any old holiday snap into the engine in order to find out forgotten details about a trip from long ago, Singhal wants more from “his relationship with his search engine”.
When I meet him at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California, he explains excitedly: “Search still feels very one dimensional. You give us a query and we [Google] returns some results…It needs to be far more communicative. You need to be able to have a conversation with your search engine. I want my search engine to be the expert who knows me the best. It needs to know you so well that sometimes you don’t need to ask it the next question.”
That will sound ominous to plenty of people. Could an Orwellian, Big Brother-style menace be on the horizon, ushered in by this casually-dressed, laid-back scientist and his colleagues?
Singhal instantly offers assurances that Google, and all search engines, would need to be very respectful of users’ privacy when building and implementing such technologies.
However frightening the vision of a search engine which knows what a person wants to know before they even do may seem, Singhal makes a convincing case for the transformative experience it will offer users. And as ever with these disruptive innovative technology companies, seems to be offering people a solution to a problem they don’t yet know that they have.
“I still waste a lot of time when I am searching. The conversation still feels broken… Search is not as efficient as I want it to be.
“For instance, today I have a ‘to-do’ list on my phone which contains tasks like – ‘pick up a gift for my father’. The phone has a GPS system and knows where I am. It also contains my calendar, so it knows when I am free.
“Why shouldn’t a search engine, which I have built a personalised relationship with, be able to sync up all that information and tell me when I am near a shop which has a gift in it that my dad would like at a time when I am free?”
Singhal describes this type of pre-emptive relationship with a search engine as the “holy grail” but says that Google and the technologies available are not that far off this type of interaction.
However, he warns that his Google team of engineers who are making the glue needed to stick all the elements of people’s lives together in this coherent fashion, will need to be “intelligent”, otherwise it will be interruptive which is not acceptable.
“We need to make sure that the way we create this type of intuitive search is intelligent – otherwise it will just annoy people and not have the desired effect – which is to make lives easier and speed up the search for relevant information.
“Putting the finish on this type of product, which links all aspects of our lives together – is no easy feat,” he explains.
He also knows that search, which is still the core of the company and responsible for the majority of Google’s revenues, and all other products the technology giant brings out, need to represent good enough value for people not to mind paying with their data.
“When we launch a service which brings a lot of benefits to the consumer, they thrive despite all the questions surrounding users’ privacy. However, we know that if a product doesn’t give a user enough value, then we know it cannot overcome the necessary hurdles.”
Singhal admits that search has gone further than he ever thought it would in his life time. He says is getting more and more confident every day that his vision of a search engine people regularly communicate with on a two-way basis will also be realised during his career at Google, which he hopes will never end.
“I have gotten very hopeful that this type of search engine is coming. You are seeing hints of it in Google Voice search and other bits we are introducing. The conversation is finally starting to flow.”

Is Google Asking The Wrong Question With Social

Today’s soft-launch of Google’s new social galaxy, Google+, raises one interesting question: Can Google, a massive, multinational, cash-rich, consumer technology company with multiple successful productivity applications and services, take its dough out of the oven and bake a social network into their bread?
Over the past year, Google has undergone some big changes. Chief Executive Eric Schmidt stepped down. Co-founder Larry Page stepped in, reshuffling the deck and tying employee bonuses to creating a successful social experience. The result seems to be a slick-looking yet potentially Wave-like confusing constellation of social “circles,” “huddles,” “hangouts,” and ”sparks” that could, theoretically, lay the foundation for new, more nuanced social networks to form. In the middle of all the reactions to today’s release, I believe it’s important to step back and ponder whether Google is focusing its efforts on the wrong problem, and in doing so, to investigate a potentially better fit that coincides with the company’s own DNA.
What made Google “Google” was its groundbreaking PageRank technology that allowed us to search the web more efficiently. Powered by a mandate to organize the world’s information online, Google trained all of us over more than a decade to tune our online search behavior to entering in keywords and symbols. As obvious as that seems today, this is not how humans as a species are wired to search for new information. Before the Internet, most “search” was conducted through offline directories and by the time-honored evolutionary tradition of asking questions. “Where would you recommend I stay on my trip to Hawaii?” “What dish did you order at that new restaurant in the hotel?” “Where can I get the best deal on that hotel?” Google has elegantly stripped down these queries and trained us to, instead, enter the following text in a search box: “Hawaii + hotel deal” or “Hawaii + restaurant + popular dish.”
Now, that might be how some geeks actually ask questions in real life, but this is not how we are wired to search. We are most accustomed to asking questions as an extension of our own curiosities. And while Google keyword search is incredibly efficient, the content it points us to is unfortunately declining in quality. There’s been enough debate about the proliferation of run-of-the-mill and high-end content farms, so I won’t beat that drum. The bottom line is that although it’s never been easier to search online, it’s getting harder and harder to find exactly what we’re looking for because there are perverse incentives to not only create, but also promote, keyword-optimized content.
The alternatives, however, don’t provide a clear path yet either. The idea of shifting search back to questions isn’t new. Ask tried it, as did Yahoo! Answers. More recently, companies like Aardvark (acquired by Google), Fluther (acquired by Twitter), Formspring, Quora, and AnyAsq are picking up where the 1.0 versions left off, each taking a slightly different tack and growing in slightly different ways. On Formspring and AnyAsq, users can invite the audience to ask them direct questions, provide answers to the ones they want to, and then remain searchable for others to peruse. On Quora, users can pose questions within topics or, if the question has already been asked, to search within the site for the answer, assuming someone has provided one. No doubt, Google and Twitter were thinking about capturing questions when they acquired the Aardvark and Fluther teams, respectively

Google launches +1 button worldwide

The +1 buttons have been displaying next to search results and ads in the United States over the last few weeks and are now available worldwide. The Telegraph is one of 5 UK publishers to partner with Google for the launch. You can find the +1 buttons with other share tools to the right and at the bottom of articles.

In a blog post announcing the launch, Dan Friedman of Google said:

“We expect that personal annotations will help users know when your ads and organic search results are relevant to them.”

To start using the buttons, click the +1 icon on the right-hand side of all Telegraph articles. You will then be prompted to sign in with a Google account. Each time you click on the button, the article will be saved to your Google profile and your contacts will start to see your preferences in search results.

If you want more information about exactly how the button will work you can watch this video

Google’s Microsoft moment? American authorities begin major antitrust probe

 google is set to face extensive formal and long-running investigations into its dominant position in the online search market, reports say.

America’s Federal Trade Commission is to serve official requests to the company for information over the next few days and is likely to ask for information from companies that have dealt with the search giant later.

The civil antitrust probe is not the first that Google has faced, but it is likely to be the most extensive to date. Previous investigations have been largely limited to the company’s purchases of other businesses.

This inquiry, however, will relate to search advertising, the fundamental business that had made Google a mulit-billion pound company. At the heart of the investigation will be the allegation that Google manipulates its search results to direct disproportionate amounts of traffic to its own sites, such as YouTube. Google has always prided itself on the purity of the algorithm that powers search results. It claims that it makes manual adjustments solely to improve the service for consumers.

The case has clear echoes of antitrust probes into Microsoft in the Nineties, which saw the company pay millions of pounds in fines and prevented from apparent plans to dominate huge swathes of the IT sector. Google, however, will benefit from changed laws, and from the difficulty of proving that Google abused its powerful position, rather than simply providing a service that millions of businesses and consumers choose to use every day. The company said that users can easily switch to other services. It handles more than two-thirds of US searches online and four out of every five web searches across Europe.

Google introduces the Chromebook

Google releases an advert for Chromebook as it prepares to venture into the laptop market with the launch of its own operating system, Chrome OS. Google has unveiled the first two computers that will use its own operating system, Chrome OS. Made by Samsung and Acer, the devices will launch in seven countries including the UK on 15 June.

Google’s Chrome OS is based on the Chrome web browser that is now used by 160m people around the world. Its aim is to encourage people to use web-based applications.

Chromebooks promise a sleeker browsing experience as Google claim they have built their new operating system around the premise that the user can acheive everything online.

Indeed the Chromebook sales hype promises "nothing but the web" and Sergey Brin, Google’s co-founder, has described it as “a new model of computing”.

Google reaches 1 billion users

Google and the various websites it owns were used by more than a billion people for the first time in May. The landmark figure, revealed in new data from ComScore, shows an 8.4 per rise year on year.

Microsoft remained the second most popular destination with 905 million unique visitors in May. This was up approximately 15 per cent over the year, but Facebook rose by 30 per cent to 714 million unique users.

Yahoo, which was overtaken by Facebook in October, saw an 11 per cent yearly rise to 689 million users.

A “global measurement panel” of 2million users helps ComScore to compile its estimates, and the data is then refined with page-view data it receives from more than 90 of the 100 publishers of web content. Google is one of the few publishers that does not contribute. The company declined to comment.

When ComScore first measured traffic, in 2006, Google had slightly fewer than 500million unique users per month, with Microsoft taking the top spot with 539 million. The addition of users to Gmail and Google has also been helped by the company’s purchase of video site YouTube.