Archive for the ‘Google App Engine’ Category
MENLO PARK, California (Reuters) – A start-up led by former star Google engineers on Sunday unveiled a new Web search service that aims to outdo the Internet search leader in size, but faces an uphill battle changing Web surfing habits.
Cuil Inc (pronounced “cool”) is offering a new search service at www.cuil.com that the company claims can index, faster and more cheaply, a far larger portion of the Web than Google, which boasts the largest online index.
The would-be Google rival says its service goes beyond prevailing search techniques that focus on Web links and audience traffic patterns and instead analyzes the context of each page and the concepts behind each user search request.
“Our significant breakthroughs in search technology have enabled us to index much more of the Internet, placing nearly the entire Web at the fingertips of every user,” Tom Costello, Cuil co-founder and chief executive, said in a statement.
Danny Sullivan, a Web search analyst and editor-in-chief of Search Engine Land, said Cuil can try to exploit complaints consumers may have with Google — namely, that it tries to do too much, that its results favor already popular sites, and that it leans heavily on certain authoritative sites such as Wikipedia.
“The time may be right for a challenger,” Sullivan says, but adds quickly: “Competing with Google is still a very daunting task, as Microsoft will tell you.”
Microsoft Corp, the No. 3 U.S. player in Web search has been seeking in vain, so far, to join forces with No. 2 Yahoo Inc to battle Google.
Cuil was founded by a group of search pioneers, including Costello, who built a prototype of Web Fountain, IBM’s Web search analytics tool, and his wife, Anna Patterson, the architect of Google Inc’s massive TeraGoogle index of Web pages. Patterson also designed the search system for global corporate document storage company Recall, a unit of Australia’s Brambles Ltd Continued…
Google – the genial web host?
Posted on: April 9, 2008
- In: Air | genial | Google | Google APIs | Google App Engine | Moore's Law | Silverlight | web host
- Leave a Comment
Last night Google launched a beta of what it calls the Google App Engine – a service which will host developers’ web applications.
“So what?” I hear you ask.
Well, more than 10,000 people signed up in less than 24 hours to the beta and it’s an important sign about the direction that Google is going as a company.
And my use of the word “host” is a bit misleading – sorry – the Google App Engine enables developers to run their applications on Google’s infrastructure.
Google will offer the CPU cycles, the server space and the bandwidth – the whole shooting match, in effect – to developers. They will also offer use of Google APIs for e-mail, signing in and signing out of users etc.
There’s no doubt that hosted services, from web applications to programs we associate mainly with desktop computing, are the future.
From productivity programs to gaming experiences – it’s all shifting into the cloud.
I was at an event at the Game Developers Conference earlier this year and Raph Koster shocked some fellow gaming luminaries when he pointed out that Flash would soon have the graphical flexibility and capability of games consoles from just a few years ago.
Increased bandwidth, the evolution of tools like Air and Silverlight, and broadband penetration coupled with Moore’s Law is combining to make the future of computing something we’ll experience down the pipe and not necessarily hosted on our own machines.
So Google’s plunge into this makes sense. It wants to be a part of this future.
But more interesting will be what Google says it will be able to do with the applications and resultant data that it will host on our behalf, on the behalf of developers and companies.
Google could help drive standards not just for the web as we understand it today, but for each and every device that is being connected to the net now and in the coming years – from TVs to cars, from fridges to mobile internet devices.
For companies like Amazon and Salesforce.com, it means big competition in this marketplace right now.
But longer term I hope Google’s entry into this will help turn the web into a truly open, cross platform space.
Some fears have already been expressed. Jack Schofield at the Guardian has queried if hosting your app on Google’s infrastruture might well leave you open to being bought by the firm in one simple swallow – after all, your entire application already fits inside the Google empire if it’s on their servers.
So big bad corporation tries to swallow web development and developers? Or brave new frontier for web development?
You decide.
- In: Google | Google App Engine | Head | Jumps | Web Services
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With Google App Engine
Michael Arrington
195 comments »
Our live coverage of the Google App Engine launch event is here (Update: we’ve built and launched a test application here).
Google isn’t just talking about hosting applications in the cloud any more. Tonight at 9pm PT they’re launching Google App Engine (Update: The site is live), an ambitious new project that offers a full-stack, hosted, automatically scalable web application platform. It consists of Python application servers, BigTable database access (anticipated here and here) and GFS data store services.
At first blush this is a full on competitor to the suite of web services offered by Amazon, including S3 (storage), EC2 (virtual servers) and SimpleDB (database).
Unlike Amazon Web Services’ loosely coupled architecture, which consists of several essentially independent services that can optionally be tied together by developers, Google’s architecture is more unified but less flexible. For example, it is possible with Amazon to use their storage service S3 independently of any other services, while with Google using their BigTable service will require writing and deploying a Python script to their app servers, one that creates a web-accessible interface to BigTable.
What this all means: Google App Engine is designed for developers who want to run their entire application stack, soup to nuts, on Google resources. Amazon, by contrast, offers more of an a la carte offering with which developers can pick and choose what resources they want to use.
Google Product Manager Tom Stocky described the new service to me in an interview today. Developers simply upload their Python code to Google, launch the application, and can monitor usage and other metrics via a multi-platform desktop application.
More details from Google:
Today we’re announcing a preview release of Google App Engine, an application-hosting tool that developers can use to build scalable web apps on top of Google’s infrastructure. The goal is to make it easier for web developers to build and scale applications, instead of focusing on system administration and maintenance.
Leveraging Google App Engine, developers can:
Write code once and deploy. Provisioning and configuring multiple machines for web serving and data storage can be expensive and time consuming. Google App Engine makes it easier to deploy web applications by dynamically providing computing resources as they are needed. Developers write the code, and Google App Engine takes care of the rest.
Absorb spikes in traffic. When a web app surges in popularity, the sudden increase in traffic can be overwhelming for applications of all sizes, from startups to large companies that find themselves rearchitecting their databases and entire systems several times a year. With automatic replication and load balancing, Google App Engine makes it easier to scale from one user to one million by taking advantage of Bigtable and other components of Google’s scalable infrastructure.
Easily integrate with other Google services. It’s unnecessary and inefficient for developers to write components like authentication and e-mail from scratch for each new application. Developers using Google App Engine can make use of built-in components and Google’s broader library of APIs that provide plug-and-play functionality for simple but important features.
Google App Engine: The Limitations
The service is launching in beta and has a number of limitations.
First, only the first 10,000 developers to sign up for the beta will be allowed to deploy applications.
The service is completely free during the beta period, but there are ceilings on usage. Applications cannot use more than 500 MB of total storage, 200 million megacycles/day CPU time, and 10 GB bandwidth (both ways) per day. We’re told this equates to about 5M pageviews/mo for the typical web app. After the beta period, those ceilings will be removed, but developers will need to pay for any overage. Google has not yet set pricing for the service.
One current limitation is a requirement that applications be written in Python, a popular scripting language for building modern web apps (Ruby and PHP are among others widely used). Google says that Python is just the first supported language, and that the entire infrastructure is designed to be language neutral. Google’s initial focus on Python makes sense because they use Python internally as their scripting language (and they hired Python creator Guido van Rossum in 2005).
Update: Here is Guido van Rossum at the launch event talking about App Engine:
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CrunchBase Information
Google
Website:
google.com
Location:
Mountain View, California, United States
Founded:
January 1, 1998
IPO:
August 19, 2004
Google primarily provides search and advertising services, which together aim to organize and monetize the world’s information. In addition to its dominant search engine, it offers a plethora of tools and platforms including its more popular… Learn More
Guido van Rossum
Website:
www.python.org/~guido
Companies:
Google, Zing
Guido is the author of the popular Python programming language. The Python community refers to him as the BDFL (Benevolent Dictator For Life), a title straight from a Monty Python skit.
He moved from the Netherlands to the… Learn More
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