Webstractions - Web Development & Design News

Scott Kingery writes about GDSPlus, which allows you to specify what extensions the Google Desktop Search (GDS) tool will index. This includes the ability to add new text extensions not yet supported by Google, such as:

• .XML
  
• .log (mIRC and Trillian)
  
• .cs, .vb (Visual Studio .NET source code files)
  
• .frm, .bas, .cls (Visual Basic 6 source code files)

Basically, any ASCII text document can be now be indexed by allowing you to specify the file extensions of those documents. This does not add additional support for other filetype like Adobe PDF documents in other words. Additionally, you can also remove support for any of the extensions that Google included and you do not want indexed.

GDSPlus can be downloaded for free at http://www.trivex.net/

This software does not come with an installer, so it is important that you follow instructions in the readme.txt file. The installation process calls for clearing your current Google Desktop data, editing a Windows Registry entry and then reindexing your hard drive.

Be forewarned, GDSPlus is a replacement for your GoogleDesktopCrawl.exe and GoogleDesktopIndex.exe files from Google. The current version of GDS is v.100504 and should be the only version of Google Desktop Search Beta available right now.

If Google updates GDS in the future, then you will more than probably have to get your update from GDSPlus instead of Google if you want to continue to have the extra filetype support. It may come to pass that Google will add this functionality into GDS in the future though.

While GDSPlus only supports text filetypes and does not add other types (Google will have to do that), Scott has noticed that you can still index the filenames of other filetypes such as .wav, .rar, .png, etc. It does not index the contents of the files, just the filenames themselves.

'nuf said, here is the official Gmail Known Bugs list.

VIA: Aimless Words

Some of you may remember this classic line uttered by Dan Aykroyd in a Saturday Night live skit many years ago. It seems that every twenty years or so that classics tend to re-emerge, and none could be so closer to this again as this classic blog post from one of the most ignorant sluts on the Internet today.

Janeth, you ignorant slut. You have bashed me in public long enough with hundreds of petty arguments and fabrications that are so far-fetched that even Jon Lovitz would be envious. You might remember Jon on SNL in his "lieing guy" character.

It seems that I and a friend of mine are the number one topics of conversation on two fora, Janeth's Freaks on Mushrooms and Phil de Crepid's SEO Front Shop, full of puppets-on-strings-like members who seem to believe everything that they are told. If it were not for us, they would not have any entertainment for their troops and the post count would be considerably lower. It is quite humorous reading, and I encourage you all to have a look see here and here.

Actually I feel kind of privileged to be getting more net-time from these two than Jill Whalen, one of my favorite all-time SEO Bitches. I should be thanking them for all this free publicity. Thanks, you anal retentive shitheads.

Keep it coming guys, I need a good laugh every now and then. God knows you ain't got anything else going for you right now. Phil has milked that fucking PR paper of his long enough and needs new material. Janeth, the "Queen of I agree posts", does not have a single original thought in that pea-brain of hers. And Fathom, what is up with this guy? I used to have a lot of respect for him. Now he is reduced to the same child-like behavior of the other two and rumor has it that he is covertly going back into WebProWorld and deleting his past posts.

Robin Good Marjolein Hoekstra, an independent writer who contributes to the Robin Good network says she prefers a new paid-for browser, iRider, over Firefox and its extensions. For a nominal fee of $29 USD, she considers it to be money well spent.

This is not the first time that I have heard this. Andilinks, a member of the Band of Gonzos forum, has tried iRider out already and came to the same conclusion. That conclusion is that it beats Firefox hands down in many departments.

The one feature that both Andi and Marjolein highly acclaimed was the sidebar navigation. Much akin to tabbed-browsing, this has more advanced features that tabbed browsing cannot provide. The sidebar is visually appealing by showing you thumbnail shots of the websites you are visiting. The navigation panel will let you instantly know whether a page is done downloading, whether you have visited a page or not, allows you to "pin" a page for future use (pinned pages are retained from one iRider session onto the next) and at which level the link was opened.

iRider is an Internet Explorer based product. iRider claims that they have plugged several security holes in their browser that currently plague other versions of IE. They also offer highly detailed technical support to secure your browser even further.

With security issues aside however, being an IE-based browser, iRider will accept any IE plugins that you may have grown attached to or just cannot do without. One such plugin, Pluck, which turns your IE into a full fledged newsreader has no comparative extension available in Firefox (Sage does not even come close).

UPDATE: I erroneously reported that Robin Good recommended iRider. The article actually was written by Marjolein Hoekstra, an independent writer who contributes to the Robin Good network.

"While I wholeheartedly respect Marjolein in-depth reporting and viewpoint, I have personally never stated that I would toss USD $29 to have iRider replace my FireFox.

I am a strong supporter of moving away from the IE platform, so while I must bow to iRider useful innovations, I look forward to having those same features without having to depend on IE."

My apologies Robin.

ICANN has announced that it has entered final negotiations for implementing two new top-level domains, .travel and .post. This final process can still take months.

In addition to .travel and .post, proposals for new TLDs include .xxx, .jobs, .asia and .eu. The status of the other applicants is still pending however.

Yahoo! has an eye on the "big eye" of CBS MarketWatch. Yahoo! currently provides financial news and information through its Yahoo! Finance channel. This move could gain several subscription-based products if they could buy MarketWatch, it also would turn them into a content provider. To date, Yahoo! has merely been disseminating information from other content providers.

Google chief executive Eric Schmidt says that Google has plans to release a version of its desktop search tool for computers running on the Mac operating system. He did not set a timetable for a Mac version of Google Desktop, saying it had to be rebuilt from the ground up because of the fundamental differences between the Mac OS and Windows.

So far Google has not targeted any other operating system other than Windows. This will be the first time Google will move away from that trend.

UPDATE: Nathan Weinberg of InsideGoogle dug a little deeper on this story, and it is basically a non-story. The report from Reuters (et. al.) was taken out of context and highly exaggerated.

What Schmidt actually said was "yes and no", that a Mac version would require a new project from the ground up, and that while Google would like to, it wasn't planning anything.

When the news hit that a vulnerability in the Gmail login that could allow attackers to hijack their accounts, it was all over the Internet. Just as quickly as the news was getting around, Google has fixed the security flaw.

"Google was recently alerted to a potential security vulnerability affecting the Gmail service. We have since fixed this vulnerability, and all current and future Gmail users are protected," Google spokesman Nathan Tyler said.

An investigation by Google found that only a handful of Gmail users were victimized, the source close to the Mountain View, California-based company said.

People love to hand out Gmail invites like candy. Screw that. That is too easy. Lets have some fun with these invites!

First person that can tell me what this is (that is the easy part) and what it is actually "pointing at" will get a Gmail invite.


<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<Placemark>
  <name>Here is a kml file for you</name>
  <View>
    <longitude>-122.0836513298948</longitude>
    <latitude>37.42228634135405</latitude>
    <range>637.0999999999299</range>
    <tilt>-3.180872743978974e-011</tilt>
    <heading>-0.0007160463744580959</heading>
  </View>
  <visibility>1</visibility>
  <styleUrl>root://styles#default</styleUrl>
</Placemark>


America Online, Microsoft, EarthLink and Yahoo are teaming again to turn up the heat on spammers.

The companies, which make up the Anti-Spam Alliance, announced that they've each filed new lawsuits in U.S. Federal Court against senders of unwanted computer messages. The companies filed suits in the states of Washington, Georgia and California accusing defendants of violating the federal Can-Spam Act, along with other state and federal laws.

Ever notice that freshdate tag in the Google SERPS is sometimes one day earlier than the actual date in the cached version of that page? This is because the timestamp of the cached version is simply Greenwich Mean Time (GMT -0 hours). The freshdate tag is based on Pacific Standard Time (GMT -8 hours). There will be an 8 hour window where the date will not overlap.

VIA: Zorgloob

Labels: repub

A mozillaZine member, wig_out_on_me, offers up a Windows Registry file that will create a Desktop namespace for Firefox similar to the way Internet Explorer, My Computer and the Recycle Bin shortcuts are set up. This namespace provides for a context menu with Profile Manager, Safe Mode, etc. included on it. Any shortcuts created from this namespace will retain the added context menu items which is handy for the Quick Launch toolbar.


VIA: Gemal's Psyched Blog

Labels: Firefox, repub

America Online says it will start bundling McAfee antivirus software for free into its proprietary service and no longer charge a subscription for it.

AOL is not alone in offering antivirus software, Yahoo and MSN both offer antivirus and anti-spyware features in their premium service packages.

Of course, AOL will probably need the antivirus software for their new AOL Browser which is based on Internet Explorer.

From MozillaZine Talkback:

"'Today we have our first Firefox 1.0 candidate builds available for testing. You can get these test builds from FTP. If you've already downloaded 1.0 PR (the 'feature complete' preview) and you're not really interested in testing and bug reporting, then you should probably stick with 1.0 PR for a couple more weeks and upgrade when we release the official Firefox 1.0.

The release candidates include about 250 bug fixes since Firefox 1.0 PR and we'd appreciate any feedback around any of those areas. With this release, we're also featuring Mozilla Foundation builds for up to two dozen locales (slowly trickling in. if you don't see your language, try back in a bit.) If you do find regressions from the Preview Release, please file bugs in Bugzilla and nominate them as Firefox 1.0 blockers using the 'blocking-aviary1.0?' flag on the bug. Thanks for your help in testing Firefox!'"

The Release Candidate is about one week behind schedule, as mentioned in the Firefox Roadmap, but they have accomplished one of their goals in reducing The List. There are just a handful that remain and those are newly discovered bugs in the software.

They are not too much in want for testers either. Last glance at the tally, there have been over 6.5 million downloads of Firefox Preview to date.

Labels: Firefox

While probably not a totally exhaustive document on Google Desktop Search, Scott Kingery's GDS Tips is pretty darn close. It covers the basics thru some of the more obscure features of GDS.

Scott has gleaned information from various sources, such as the Google Desktop Search Group, and compiled all of that into one handy page.

In the DHTML Lab section of WebReference, they introduce their first maintenance release of Popup Calendar. They have added better navigation bar styling and the ability to clear read-only input fields. Also included, new functionality that enables you to separate form elements to display any combination of a user-selected date, month and year.

This is a stunning piece of code that you will just have to see for yourself.
(Click on the to access the calendar features)

Labels: repub

Svein Høier and Jon Hoem have put together an excellent tutorial on video blogging with Blogger. The tutorial includes template code changes and php/javascript code to launch a dynamic pop-up window for your video, as well as, general tips about video compression.

Once your template changes are made, posting the video is a snap. Enter the path to the video in your URL Link text box (this can be activated in your Blogger Settings), then upload your video via an attachment.

It dawned on me that you could also use this as a method for doing simple image blogging as well. By using this technique, you could just as easily have pop-up windows for your images.

VIA: Weblog Tools Collection

Labels: blogging

Just browsing around the net and came up with these interesting sites dealing with Photoshop. Tutorials, tip, tricks ranging from beginning to advanced. A little bit for everybody. Enjoy!

• Janee's Photoshop Tutorials, Courses in Photoshop
  
• Tutorial Outpost
  
• Good-Tutorials.com
  
• PhotoshopCAFE
  
• Photoshop Tips & Tricks
  
• Photoshop Tutorials
  
• PurePhotoshop Tutorials & Articles
  
• Free Adobe Photoshop Tutorials
  
• 80Four Adobe Photoshop Tutorials, Video Tutorials
  
• CreativePro Photoshop Articles
  
• Photoshop for Photographers
  

If you have any to share, just drop them in a comment or two or three.

UPDATE: Oct 20, 2004

• Studio-X Photoshop Tutorials
  
• Axialis Tutorials
  
• HeathRowe Photoshop Tutorials
  
• Photosjop Tips & Learning
  
• TeamPhotoshop Tutorials & Tips
  
• DesignsByMark PS Tips & Tutorials
  
• Grafika PS Tutorials (Czech)
  
• BioRust PS Tutorials
  
• CBT Cafe PS Tutorials & Articles
  
• Photoshop Lover

UPDATE: Oct 23, 2004

• Creative Bits: PS Tips Blog
  
• 3 Simple Improvements (Greg Roberts)
  
• Planet Photoshop Tutorials
  
• Computer Darkroom (Misc Tutorials)
  
• DevCo Photo Tutorials
  
• Nebulus Designs PS Tutorials
  
• Phong PS Tutorials
  
• Eyewire PS Tips & Tutorials
  
• Think Dan PS Tutorials (Index listing)
  
• Magic Pixel PS Workshop

UPDATE: Oct 27, 2004

• Digital Photography Tutorials
  
• Informit Photoshop Articles
  
• The Makeshift Miracle Tutorials
  
• The Slimarillion
  
• Shanzcan Photoshop Tutorials
  
• Photoshop Brushes Tutorials
  
• GrafX Design PS Tutorials
  
• Pegaweb Web Design & PS Tutorials
  
• RetouchPRO Tutorials
  
• Carl Volk's Photoshop Tips

Labels: repub

A Google press release announces that they have just purchased Keyhole Corp.

With the Keyhole software and an Internet connection a user can enter an address or other location information which accesses the database and takes them to a digital image of that location on their computer screen. The interactive software then give users many options, including the ability to zoom in from space-level to street-level, tilt and rotate the view or search for other information such as hotels, parks, ATMs or subways. Unlike traditional mapping technologies, Keyhole creates a dynamic 3D interface for geographic information.

Keyhole is probably most famous on CNN when they do the "fly-by shots" that are composed of animated images from satellites and airplanes.

"With Keyhole, you can fly like a superhero from your computer at home to a street corner somewhere else in the world - or find a local hospital, map a road trip or measure the distance between two points," said Jonathan Rosenberg, vice president, Product Management. "This acquisition gives Google users a powerful new search tool, enabling users to view 3D images of any place on earth as well as tap a rich database of roads, businesses and many other points of interest. Keyhole is a valuable addition to Google's efforts to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."

There is a price reduction in the Keyhole 2LT, effective immediately, from $69.95 to $29.95.

Adam Kalsey has a handy online tool to create those little buttons that everyone is so fond of. The tool uses Bill Zeller's button maker script which is written in PHP, so you could host this application yourself with without much trouble.

UPDATE: It does not appear that the script is available on Bill's site.

VIA: Band of Gonzo Forums

Labels: blogging, css, repub

As the Google Blog entry says, "It's not that all you know about Google is wrong; it's just that, most likely, all you know isn't all there is to know."

I guess this is true. For instance, they have a neat little "cheat sheet" and this is the first time that I laid eyes on Google Catalogs. Man, how did I miss that one.

Microsoft is planning to release in December new software designed to secure instant messaging and other communications within big companies.

What all is Microsoft debuting that month now? New Search Engine and Desktop Search, now Instant Messaging on a corporate scale.

In a not so related article, Microsoft released on Tuesday a preview version of new tools intended to make it easier for companies to create custom Web applications.

Microsoft released a "community technology preview" version of modeling tools, formerly code-named Whitehorse, to be included in Visual Studio 2005 Team System, an upcoming addition to Microsoft's line of developer packages that focuses on enterprise developers.

While the phpBB folk will probably snicker at this a little, it is no laughing matter. Hackers have compromised the download server for the open source PostNuke content management system, redirecting users to malicious code in place of the .zip download of the PostNuke program. The hacked code was distributed for more than 32 hours before PostNuke site maintainers addressed the security breach.

PostNuke users who installed a zip archive downloaded between 11:50 pm Sunday night and 8:30 a.m. today face a serious threat. All data submitted during the installation - including the server name, database credentials, admin name and password - were likely sent to the hackers. In addition, "in one file there was code allowing a malicious user to execute any shell command on the web server."

The PostNuke team is advising users who may have installed the compromised files to reinstall the code, and immediately change their database details, including username, password and the name of the database if possible.

VIA: Netcraft

Yep, apparantly it is true, the Bush Campaign Website, GeorgeWBush.com, is rejecting web requests from outside of the United States. It is a wonder that Russell Beattie is not all over this yet.

Jacob Rosenberg blogs an entry into today's Yahoo!Search blog to expose some of the more useful (and lesser known) features of Yahoo! News.

He gives examples of advanced search queries to over 7,000 Yahoo! News sources. You can filter your content based on Location, News Source, Category, Language, and News Type. You can even compose your own advanced search by using the above search commands or use their advanced news search page.

There is also a new xml button on the News Search result page, in which you can now turn any search into a fresh full-blown RSS 2.0 feed.

"For example hurricane location:florida gets you your own ongoing feed of hurricane news from Florida. The only restriction is that the source parameter doesn't work in RSS mode, and some providers may choose to opt out of RSS results."

This is probably the best new feature of all. You can roll your own news feed.

Labels: repub

SEbasic has some great suggestions for simple Blogger template changes you can make to optimize them for better rankings. He has complete sample code all laid out for you to paste into your templates. Worth a peak!

Labels: repub

One of the interesting technical challenges that every search engine comes up against is identifying duplicate content. Super-geek, Greg Linden, learns of a whitepaper from his friend Jeff Dean who co-authored (along with Krishna Bharat, Andrei Z. Broder and Monika Rauch Henzinger) a paper (PDF) on this very topic.

"The paper analyzes the performance of several techniques for detecting mirrors, from simple approaches like the similar IP address or hostname to more complicated and quite clever analysis of the link structure of sites. The paper concludes that a content-based approach (called 'shingles' in the paper) works well but that a combination of several approaches works best."

Labels: repub

An excellent find from Gary Price that may give us a glimpse of what the new MSN Search will look like. The interface is chock full of little goodies, of which, the most impressive is a set of slider switches that you can use to manipulate certain "ranking weights".

Gary discovered this interface when he noticed a new URL in the cache link at the Tech Preview site. The URL pointed to http://cc.msnscache.com/.

To access the sliders, click on the label +Search Builder. which will drop-down a tabbed interface. Next, click on Results ranking and you will see the sliders.

Unfortunately, the sliders do not work in Firefox. These may be ActiveX components and will probably only work in Internet Explorer.

I am wondereing what the "cc" sub-domain stands for. Perhaps "carbon copy" or "cache copy"?

A new Google Desktop "phishing" exploit is being reported by Netcraft.

Salvatore Aranzulla, an Italian journalist who discovered the exploit, says "The flaw allows attackers to target users of the Google Desktop application and modify the contents of search pages by injecting scripts located on external servers. Such cross site scripting attacks provide attackers with a means of obtaining information under the guise of a reputable domain."

Aranzulla has published details about the new vulnerability on his web site, where he includes some example exploits (Italian). Inexperienced users may be susceptible to phishing attacks like this one. Experienced users may become suspicious of it however.

This exploit is similar but seperate to the exploits discovered earlier in which one Google had known about for two years. That exploit was not severe enough until the release of Google Desktop prompted them to look at it again.

What I can ascertain from Aranzulla's example (it is in Italian), is that this exploit will probably need an update in the software itself. The previous exploits could be fixed at the Google Website. Aranzulla is recommending removal of the software.

So far there has been no response from Google.

RustyBrick finds a WMW post where a member had conducted a normal search at Google, at the top of the page, you would find a line of text that read IMAGE RESULTS FOR 'KEYWORD PHRASE'. When you click on that link, it would take you to where you would go if you would click on the 'image' tab.

GoogleGuy Says "You know us; we're always testing out different little UI changes.."

Meanwhile, over at Zorgloob, they reveal that a search for flower will show Froogle results at the top of the page.

This seems to be permanent feature in the Google results now.

There is a rumor floating around that Nathan will be Brad Fallons guest on Search Engine Radio tomorrow (Tuesday) morning at noon, EST (9 am PST). The show will run for one hour.

"This should prove to be fun and stressful", Nathan says, "I'll, of course, be talking about Google, but the field is wide open ... I've done radio before, but never a guest, always a host, so I think I might enjoy this. That, or make a complete fool of myself."

If you want to ask Nathan a question, you can call in at 1-888-327-0061 at the time of the show. Good luck Nathan!

UPDATE: Nathan's interview has been postponed for at least two weeks.

I tell ya, if it t'aint one thing, 'tis another. You would think that some people have better things to do with their time.

Not too long ago, GoogleGuy broke his silence over at Webmaster World and made mention of a new document.

"... if you didn't notice, Rob Pike is answering questions over at Slashdot:

http://interviews.slashdot.org/interviews/

Rob only joined Google a year or so ago, but I'm really glad we have him--I read his book a long time back. For the folks that like to read papers from Google, here's a systems one that Rob mentions:

http://labs.google.com/papers/mapreduce.html

I think it's pretty cool that Google keeps writing stuff like the GFS paper and the MapReduce paper; not too many other search engines are talking about their systems."

MapReduce is a programming model and an associated implementation for processing and generating large data sets. Users specify a map function that processes a key/value pair to generate a set of intermediate key/value pairs, and a reduce function that merges all intermediate values associated with the same intermediate key. Many real world tasks are expressible in this model, as shown in the paper.

In that newly released paper there is evidence of Google using this process on its production index in August of 2003. The next major update in that index appeared in November of 2003, the Florida Update.

"One of the most significant uses of MapReduce to date has been a complete rewrite of the production indexing system that produces the data structures used for the Google web search service. The indexing system takes as input a large set of documents that have been retrieved by our crawling system, stored as a set of GFS files. The raw contents for these documents are more than 20 terabytes of data."

Eric Baillargeon who discovered this passage is wondering if this is all coincidence.

One graph in the document shows the significant growth in the number of separate MapReduce programs checked into their primary source code management system over time, from 0 in early 2003 to almost 900 separate instances as of late September 2004.

"MapReduce has been so successful because it makes it possible to write a simple program and run it efficiently on a thousand machines in the course of half an hour, greatly speeding up the development and prototyping cycle. Furthermore, it allows programmers who have no experience with distributed and/or parallel systems to exploit large amounts of resources easily."

It is very evident in the graph that Google has sharply increased its usage of MapReduce since February of 2004, which coincided with another update at that time, Brandy.

Also, from this point in time, numerous backlink updates have taken place. I am assuming that MapReduce may have had something to do with new instances of it being introduced into parts of the source code that addresses this.

I don't think it is a matter of coincidence, as Eric mentioned, it is now a matter of record. MapReduce is now part of Google and understanding the mechanics of it will soon be discussed in many a forum from this time forward.

The Associated Press announced (via USA Today) that Yahoo and Adobe Systems have joined forces to tap each others' customers and put Web search features into Adobe's Acrobat Reader software. This is Yahoo's latest maneuver against Google and Microsoft in the fight to put its own search service and Web access on as many desktops as possible.

Initially, the toolbar will feature links to Yahoo products and services as well as to Adobe's Web-based subscription service, which converts documents into the Adobe P.D.F. (for Portable Document Format) file format.

Later, the companies said, the toolbar will add features like the ability to quickly convert Web-based content into Adobe P.D.F. files. Yahoo search will also be built into a future version of the Acrobat Reader, permitting users to search for more information from within the document without going through the extra step of launching a Web browser.

Through the magic of the Internet Archive via their Wayback Machine, we can look back at Google and "what a wild strange trip its been".

From the very simplistic design on 11-11-1998 you will see that they had a mere 25 million pages (soon to be much bigger) in the Google Search Engine Prototype. Then there is the "might work some of the time" Alpha Google (1-25-1999). Uck ... gag me! Glad this design went into the waste basket.

Fast forward to 04-23-1999 and they are wanting to know if you feel lucky! Well, do ya? Special Stanford and Linux searches are part of more Google...

Lets move way ahead to 05-11-2000 and see that Google was voted Best Search Engine by Yahoo Internet Life. Secretly they are still saying that, I'll bet.

At or around this time, you can get Google Buttons, three Google Web Search Plans including the Gold Plan for $2000 a year, they are hiring, and Google goes wireless.

Advancing on to 09-19-2000, you will see the hallmark Google as we know it today (with minor changes). Not much change in the layout over the last four years. They have added more tools, yes. But Google seemed to settle on what was going to be at this point in time.

Thanks to SEbasic for inspiration on this article.

UPDATE: Gary Price stopped by in the comments to let us know that he has a page of Google Milestone Pages which include Backrub (1997), Google's First Press Release (1999) and links to key documents and patents.

Google Desktop Proxy (GDP) is a java program that provides access to your Google Desktop search service from remote machines. The software is provided by Project Computing in a precompiled Java JAR file. The Java source code is also being made available.

Google Desktop was designed with a built-in web server which binds to your PC's TCP/IP loopback interface and can only be accessed by requests originating from your PC. No other machines can send search requests to your Google Desktop search engine. Google Desktop Proxy allows you that access however.

This program is a very simple proxy. A browser or other program on another computer can open a connection to this program which passes the request through to the Google Desktop web server on the same machine as the proxy. Because it is on the same machine, the Google Desktop web server processes the request and passes the result back to the proxy which in turn sends it back to the originating requestor.

There are some bugs with this software that still need to be ironed out. Also, it has no authorization support, so use at your own risk.

Thanks to John for pointing to this.

A passage in a New York Times article (or via Washington Post) that sums up Google's strategic plan pretty well.

"Several financial analysts said on Thursday that they were still trying to understand what the company's business would be over a longer period because the company has kept much of its strategy closely held, even after going public.

'We can't adequately answer the question of whether the company's stock is overvalued until we can tell what the company is,' said David M. Garrity, a financial analyst with Caris & Company, an investment firm in New York.

However, he added that the broader underlying outline is that the company intends to use software technology made available freely to its customers to drive traffic and that could be a model that would be difficult for rivals like Microsoft to compete against.

'Google is making a mockery of existing technology solutions, to wit, Microsoft,' he said."

We don't know what Google is going to do, but we know how they are going to do it.

Thanks to Bill Holmes for the tip.

CNET News.com is reporting that Microsoft has set a firmer date for the release of its desktop search software.

During its earnings call with financial analysts, Microsoft said an MSN-branded tool would be made available before the end of 2004. The tool and an algorithmic Web searching engine will be in beta testing by year's end, a representative said.

Microsoft first demonstrated the technology for its own desktop search tool at a financial analysts' conference in July. At the time, MSN executive Yusuf Mehdi woul