Archive for the ‘Find’ Category
It looks like a team of UC Berkeley researchers led by mechanical engineering professor Xiang Zhang (pictured) have found a way to squeeze light into tighter spaces than ever though possible, which they say could lead to breakthroughs in the fields of optical communications, miniature lasers, and optical computers.
The key to this new technique, it seems, is the use of a “hybrid” optical fiber consisting of a very thin semiconductor wire placed close to a smooth sheet of silver, which effectively acts as a capacitor that traps the light waves in the gap between the wire and the metal sheet and lets it slip though spaces as tiny as 10 nanometers (or more than 100 times thinner than current optical fibers).
That’s apparently as opposed to previous attempts that relied on surface plasmonics, in which light binds to electrons and allows it to travel along the surface of metal, which only proved effective over short distances.
While all of this is still in the theoretical stage, the researchers seem to think they’re on to something big, with research associate Rupert Olten saying that this new development “means we can potentially do some things we have never done before.
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The deep web is a term referring to all the kinds of pages that are live on the web, but not indexed in search engines for some reason or other. For instance, traditionally search engines mostly follow links in HTML, but from what we know they don’t understand JavaScript (yet) or submit forms. Now Google announced that they have started to experiment with submitting forms for some “high quality sites” by entering words picked from the site into the form’s text boxes, and by selecting different radio buttons, select boxes or checkboxes. Then when the Googlebot determines that web pages found in the results to that submission are valid, “interesting” and unique, they may add them to their search results index.
Google notes that they only do this form submission for “GET” forms. A form using GET results in a parametrized URL like example.com/show?foo=bar. The guidelines for webmasters are that a GET request should never actually change data on the server, like trigger a user registraton or something; for such things, webmasters should use POST, which the Googlebot will not submit. Google also note that they “omit any forms that have a password input or that use terms commonly associated with personal information such as logins, userids, contacts, etc.” Plus, Google say that pages they find will not reduce the PageRank of other pages on the site.
With this move, Google digs a bit deeper than before which may result in more relevant results for searchers, and a smaller “deep web.” And if webmasters misconfigure their scripts or robots.txt files so their site goes against net standards, it may also result in a bit of new confusion for some. On the other hand, this move by Google also has the potential to help webmasters who have such misconfigurations, especially those who aren’t very knowledgeable about web accessibility or SEO, and who don’t put up crawlable links to all their sub-pages (and in reverse, if Googlebot continues to be smarter about what it crawls, in the long run some web developers may also see less incentive to remove small inaccessibilities on their site).
[Thanks Miss Universe! Sketch drawn by MMOArt.]
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