Family Learning Center

Posts Tagged ‘Sergey Brin’

Aardvark Publishes A Research Paper Offering Unprecedented Insights Into Social Search

In 1998, Larry Page and Sergey Brin published a paper[PDF] titled Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Search Engine, in which they outlined the core technology behind Google and the theory behind PageRank. Now, twelve years after that paper was published, the team behind social search engine Aardvark has drafted its own research paper that looks at the social side of search. Dubbed Anatomy of a Large-Scale Social Search Engine, the paper has just been accepted to WWW2010, the same conference where the classic Google paper was published.

Aardvark will be posting the paper in its entirety on its official blog at 9 AM PST, and they gave us the chance to take a sneak peek at it. It’s an interesting read to say the least, outlining some of the fundamental principles that could turn Aardvark and other social search engines into powerful complements to Google and its ilk. The paper likens Aardvark to a ‘Village’ search model, where answers come from the people in your social network; Google is part of ‘Library’ search, where the answers lie in already-written texts. The paper is well worth reading in its entirety (and most of it is pretty accessible), but here are some key points:

• On traditional search engines like Google, the ‘long-tail’ of information can be acquired with the use of very thorough crawlers. With Aardvark, a breadth of knowledge is totally reliant on how many knowledgeable users are on the service. This leads Aardvark to conclude that “the strategy for increasing the knowledge base of Aardvark crucially involves creating a good experience for users so that they remain active and are inclined to invite their friends”. This will likely be one of Aardvark’s greatest challenges.
• Beyond asking you about the topics you’re most familiar with, Aardvark will actually look at your past blog posts, existing online profiles, and tweets to identify what topics you know about.
• If you seem to know about a topic and your friends do too, the system assumes you’re more knowledgeable than if you were the only one in a group of friends to know about that topic.
• Aardvark concludes that while the amount of trust users place in information on engines like Google is related to a source website’s authority, the amount they trust a source on Aardvark is based on intimacy, and how they’re connected to the person giving them information
• Some parts of the search process are actually easier for Aardvark’s technology than they are for traditional search engines. On Google, when you type in a query, the engine has to pair you up with exact websites that hold the answer to your query. On Aardvark, it only has to pair you with a person who knows about the topic — it doesn’t have to worry about actually finding the answer, and can be more flexible with how the query is worded.



• As of October 2009, Aardvark had 90,361 users, of whom 55.9% had created content (asked or answered a question). The site’s average query volume was 3,167.2 questions per day, with the median active user asking 3.1 questions per month. Interestingly, mobile users are more active than desktop users. The Aardvark team attributes this to users wanting quick, short answers on their phones without having to dig for anything. They also think people are more used to using more natural language patterns on their phones.
• The average query length was 18.6 words (median of 13) versus 2.2-2.9 words on a standard search engine.  Some of this difference comes from the more natural language people use (with words like “a”, “the”, and “if”).  It’s also because people tend to add more context to their queries, with the knowledge that it will be read by a human and will likely lead to a better answer.
• 98.1% of questions asked on Aardvark were unique, compared with between 57 and 63% on traditional search engines.
• 87.7% of questions submitted were answered, and nearly 60% of them were answered within 10 minutes.  The median answering time was 6 minutes and 37 seconds, with the average question receiving two answers.  70.4% of answers were deemed to be ‘good’, with 14.1% as ‘OK’ and 15.5% were rated as bad.
• 86.7% of Aardvark users had been asked by Aardvark to answer a question, of whom 70% actually looked at the question and 38% could answer.  50% of all members had answered a question (including 75% of all users who had ever actually interacted with the site), though 20% of users accounted for 85% of answers.

Read the whole story…

Larry and Sergey to give up voting control in Google

Google revealed a plan today for co-founder Larry Page and Sergey Brin to sell off some of their company stock, with the end result that the pair’s voting power will drop below 50 percent.

The news was revealed in a regulatory filing disclosing a plan that Page and Brin made last November to sell off about 5 million shares each. It’s described “as part of their respective long-term strategies for individual asset diversification and liquidity.” The sale, which will take place over five years, will decrease their voting power from 59 percent to 48 percent.

So Page and Brin are still going to carry a lot of weight, to say the least, but for the first time it will be possible for the other shareholders to band together and outvote them.

Read the whole story…

Google Co-Founders Plan To Sell Up To 10 Million Shares Over Next Five Years

Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin plan to steadily sell off up to 10 million shares of stock over the next five years, according to an SEC filing. At today’s closing price of $550, those shares would be worth $5.5 billion if sold immediately. Although the two co-founders hold Class B shares with super-voting rights, if they sell all 5 million shares, their voting control will drop from 59 percent today to 48 percent. From the filing:

Larry and Sergey currently hold approximately 57.7 million shares of Class B common stock, which represents approximately 18% of Google’s outstanding capital stock and approximately 59% of the voting power of Google’s outstanding capital stock. Under the terms of these Rule 10b5-1 trading plans, and as a part of a five year diversification plan, Larry and Sergey each intend to sell approximately 5 million shares. If Larry and Sergey complete all the planned sales under these Rule 10b5-1 trading plans, they would continue to collectively own approximately 47.7 million shares, which would represent approximately 15% of Google’s outstanding capital stock and approximately 48% of the voting power of Google’s outstanding capital stock (assuming no other sales and conversions of Google capital stock occur).

They would continue to be the largest shareholders, but would not be able to control the outcome of any shareholder vote as they do today. They, of course, could decide to stop selling just short of losing control. They also could probably find the other 2 percent of votes if they ever need it from CEO Eric Schmidt or a collection of other Google employees and loyal investors.

The two have not yet started selling shares under the plan, but it is common for tech founders to diversify their holdings in this manner. Bill Gates and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, for instance, sold stock of the companies they founded under similar plans. By selling at regular intervals, they get to cash out and diversify their holdings without spooking investors with sudden sales.

Read the whole story…

Google’s Chrome for Mac has arrived

Google has now launched Google Chrome for Mac. Of course it’s still in beta testing, but at least it’s now out the door.

The delay in the Mac version of the Google Chrome web browser was a big disappointment for Google. Co-founder Sergey Brin stated this publicly at the Web 2.0 summit in San Francisco.

Luckily that wait ends today. Mac users can now surf the web using a faster and lighter browser, compared to Firefox. However, unlike Safari, Chrome doesn’t have a toolbar. So you would have to familiarize yourself with the complete lack of buttons at the top. The Mac version ships with themes right out of the box. So if customization is your thing, Chrome won’t disappoint you.

In addition to launching Chrome for Mac users, Google has also turned the switch on Google extensions for Windows and made them available for everyone. Previously, extensions were just available to developers. Extensions or plug-ins were one area where Chrome seriously lacked Firefox. I, for one, seriously missed the possibility to tweak Chrome and extend it to my liking, like the way I used to do with Firefox. Some of the popular extensions include Google Mail Checker, Bubble Translate, Xmarks for Chrome Beta, Google Reader, and Chromed Bird.

Read the whole story…

Sergey Brin Donates $1 Million To Organization That Helped Him Migrate To The U.S.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin has donated $1 million to the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS), the organization that played a critical role in helping his family escape anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union and migrate to the States thirty years ago.

The New York Times ran an article and interview with Brin about the donation this weekend, revealing that Sergey’s mother, scientist Eugenia Brin, is also a Director of the organization.

In the interview, Sergey Brin notes that he and his wife, Anne Wojcicki, would like to engage “more substantially” in philanthropic endeavors, acknowledging that the $1 million donation is relatively small if you consider that fact that his personal wealth is now an estimated $16 billion according to the Times. So far, the Brin family has donated over $30 million to charity, particularly to organizations who are involved with Parkinson’s disease.

Notably, Brin cites Microsoft founder and Chairman Bill Gates as an example:

Mr. Brin noted that Bill Gates, the chairman of Microsoft, was widely criticized for not giving away enough money but is now known as one of the world’s leading philanthropists. “While everyone was criticizing him, he was generating a whole lot more money for his foundation, and ultimately, when he got serious about philanthropy, he did it really well,” Mr. Brin said. “I’d like to learn from that example.”

In case you’re not familiar with the story of Brin growing up in the Soviet Union: Sergey was born in Moscow in 1973 and immigrated to the United States after moving to Paris, France for a couple of months at the age of six, when his parents found that the anti-Jew sentiments in their native country was blocking their professional careers. The Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society reportedly aided the Brins by helping them navigate the process of immigrating, helped them apply for visas and even supported them financially.

As the saying goes: what goes around, comes around.

HIAS CEO Gideon Aronoff said the gift will be used for increasing the organization’s use of technology, supporting advocacy on immigration policy, and more.

(Pic of Sergey Brin when he was only 8 years old courtesy of NY Times – also check out the video of his surprise appearance at the Web 2.0 Summit)

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Read the whole story…

On Book Settlement, Google Is Still Trying To Hold The Line

Earlier today, as Google co-founder Sergey Brin and CEO Eric Schmidt were holding forth before a dozen or so reporters in their New York City offices, a judge downtown was postponing a hearing on the Google Book settlement until November 9 to give Google and the Author’s Guild more time to change parts of the settlement. Because of opposition from the Department of Justice and others, the settlement is being amended.

But if you think that Google is about to cave in any major way, think again. Schmidt offered the following synopsis of the situation during the press conference: “We thought we were doing something appropriate. We were sued by a bunch of publishers, and now it has come before a judge. We don’t want to change it unless we need to.” (The “it” being the settlement).

Brin had already brought up the settlement at the very beginning of the meeting. It was obviously on his mind. He mentioned that the hearing was going on as he spoke. “Generally, that is something I am very proud of,” he said, “to make the world’s books accessible.”

Google has scanned million of books to make them searchable, and was subsequently sued by the Author’s Guild for violating copyrights. They settled. Now, the objections to the settlement center mainly around one part dealing with so-called “orphan works” (out-of-print books still under copyright, but whose owners are unknown). The settlement gives Google blanket protection against any future copyright lawsuits regarding any of these books.

Google’s competitors think that is unfair. “It doesn’t seem right that you should kind of get a prize for violating a large series of copyrights,” Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos told a conference audience n June. The Justice Department also doesn’t like it and signaled it would oppose the settlement.

Which leaves us where we are today, with Google and the Author’s Guild renegotiating minor changes to try to satisfy the judge who needs to approve the settlement. Schmidt argued today that while the settlement is not perfect, it is worth trying to save: “The goal is to get all the books available and make sure the authors are compensated. The settlement was not a total solution, it was the best we could do.”

He also made the case that it will be good for consumers. “The scenario that is in front of us is probably the best outcome for someone who is looking for information that is not otherwise available,” he said.

Brin was equally defiant. His attitude seemed to be that Google has gone to great lengths to digitize millions of books, and if competitors don’t like that they should scan their own books. “The companies that are making objections about out of print books,” he said, “are doing nothing for out-of-print books, like Microsoft and Amazon. I guess they scanned 15 books.” They’ve actually scanned a little more than that, but the bigger point is that they don’t have any economic incentive to scan them. Nobody wants to buy these books (hence, they are out of print). But they are valuable in the aggregate to a search engine.

Schmidt noted that if they did not like the settlement, they should “make an alternative proposal that solves the problem.”

I asked how hard would it be to extend the terms of the settlement to other book digitizers so that everyone would benefit equally. “It would be legally impossible,” Brin stated. “You are looking at this as an either/or. [Our settlement] does not preclude other settlements, and will make legislation more likely. The companies complaining now, if they were engaged in the digitization process we were doing, digitizing 10 million books, there would be nothing stopping them from achieving the same thing.”

Does that sound like someone who is about to give in?

Photo credit: Flickr/Rob Milsom

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Read the whole story…

Schmidt: “We Have Not Yet Found The Evil Room.”

Earlier today, Google’s Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt held an informal press conference of sorts (see my live notes), touching upon pretty much everything under the Google sun. One issue that kept on coming up was Google’s growing power in general. Google touches so many parts of the Web and our lives that concerns are rising that Google will use its power and all the knowledge it collects about us inappropriately.

Every time the suggestion came up that Google’s power is too pervasive, Schmidt knocked it down: “If we went into a room and were exposed to evil light and came out and announced evil strategies, we would be destroyed. The trust would be destroyed.”

He was, of course, speaking metaphorically (about the room, not the trust). “We have not yet found the evil room on our campus,” Schmidt assured everyone in the room (which was a bright and cheery conference room above Chelsea Market,not dimly lit or evil at all). Later on, he prefaced another discussion of the (hypothetical) evil room by saying, “There are many reasons why we will not be like Microsoft.” Maybe he thinks the evil room is on Microsoft’s campus.

Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land pressed Schmidt on the fact that “you seem to have data other people cannot get because you give away free tools.” Google knows not only what you are searching for, but if you use Google Analytics, it knows about the traffic to your site, and if you use Google Checkout it knows about what you are selling. Isn’t there a closed loop here, he asked, where Google gives away free products, and then collects all the data which makes its search engine smarter?

Neither Schmidt nor Brin addressed the question of whether or not Google uses data from its non-search products to improve search in this manner, but Schmidt rejected the idea that customers are locked in. “There is no closed loop,” he said, “there are competitors and we make it possible for you to get out.”

Brin elaborated on this notion, pointing out that the entire source code for its new Chrome operating system is open sourced. Schmidt picked up on that and argued that Google’s open nature will protect it from the evil room (which doesn’t exist anyway):

“Today we have zero market share in Chrome OS because it is not shipping. Imagine a scenario where we got to 80% market share with a free product, which I think is unlikely. Let’s say we go into the evil room and decide to start charging. A competitor would be able to take the code that we had and continue to offer our business model, while our new business model runs us into the ground. That is why open source provides a protection.”

Google won’t be getting to 80% market share in desktop operating systems anytime soon. Even its Chrome browser seems to be barely making a dent, although Schmidt disputed that notion as well. When I asked him if Steve Ballmer was wrong to call the Chrome browser’s market share a “rounding error,” Schmidt said, “I don’t respond to Steve Ballmer questions. Next question?”

(Photo credit: Flickr/Typicalgenius)

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Read the whole story…

Google Wave Starts Rolling, Picks Up Over 100,000 New Riders

When Google Wave was unveiled at Google I/O back in May, we noted that it was one of the most ambitious projects we’ve ever seen. Started as a side project in Google’s Sydney, Australia offices, it had the potential to significantly alter the way online communication was carried out. And Google was betting big on it. Google’s VP of Engineering Vic Gundotra devoted the entire keynote of day two of I/O to the project, and no less than Google co-founder Sergey Brin showed up to talk about it afterwards.

Ambitious as Wave was, there were still some rough edges. We were granted access to the developer’s preview shortly after Google I/O, and it was clear that while the basic frame of all this great promise was there, there were no shortage of bugs to be ironed out. And that’s exactly what the Wave team has been doing the past four months, developer Lars Rasmussen tells us. And now they feel the product is ready to be given to a much bigger audience, as they will open it up to over 100,000 new users today.

To be clear: This is not a public launch. Wave is still not ready for that yet, Rasmussen emphasizes. Instead, Google has looked over the applications that were filed over the past four months to test out the service and is handing out invites to users who expressed interest early, and also made it clear that they were willing to test software that still contained bugs. Unfortunately, not everyone that expressed interest will get an invite today, but Rasmussen assures us that more will be coming on a regular basis, provided that everything goes well with this expanded test.

This 100,000+ user test is focusing on three groups: The public users who signed up early to test, developers, and a select group of Google Apps users. The last group will be kept very small, and the team expects it will only go out to select schools in the Sydney area so that the team can do some hands-on work with students and faculty that use the product. The first two groups, the developers and the public, will make up the core audience of Wave now, after these past months of being available only to a select group of developers.

But the key to Wave is interaction, which the team knows. As such, they are also giving every user that gets an invite today, 8 other invites to hand out to friends. That should expand the test even further very rapidly. But no, those friends will not get invite codes to hand out as well.

I sat down and used Google Wave for the first time in weeks yesterday, and the ride is definitely smoother. While there are no shortage of new features that the team is dreaming up and is eager to begin work on, they have been solely focused on fixing bugs, making things faster, and improving the usability. “It will crash less, which is pretty flashy,” Rasmussen jokes.

Also undergoing a lot of changes has been the API. And that’s a big part of what else will be launching alongside these new invites: Featured Extensions.

While Wave is a product, the larger goal for the project is to make it into a communications platform. And that means they’re going to need third-party developers on board, working to build stuff on top of Wave. That work is already well underway, and Google plans to highlight several extensions that have already been built and are in working order. These include a Suduko game (that you play entirely inside Wave in real-time with your friends), a Ribbit conference call gadget, a weird and fun video chat gadget by 6rounds (we’ve covered them here), and a trip-planning gadget by Lonely Planet.

Each of these gadgets takes only two clicks on install, and you can begin using them socially within Wave. Bigger picture: There are also large companies working on their own Wave ideas for how to use the communications tool. These include companies like Salesforce.com, we’re told.

Google is also moving Wave out of its sequestered sandbox site and into the wave.google.com domain where it will permanently reside. Because of this, users who get invites will now also be able to sign up with their actual email addresses (previously, you had to create a new special Google Wave addresses). This will give you access to your Gmail contact list, which Wave will automatically scan to find other Wave users you may know.

As Google so often likes to say these days, Wave will work on all modern browsers. That means, Chrome, Safari (3 and 4), and Firefox 3.5 and up. Yes, Wave will work on Internet Explorer, but if you visit the page in that browser, you will be asked if you would like to install ChromeFrame, Google’s hilarious alternative to downloading another web browser (if you must keep IE for some reason).

Wave works okay in IE, but in IE with ChromeFrame, it’s extremely fast, Rasmussen says.

So when will we see a full launch of Wave? While the team declined to give a specific time-table, they did say that it will definitely be 2010, and alluded to the fact that it should be the first half of 2010. They also noted that one key next step will be to provide support for other languages. Right now, Chrome is English-only, even though it has tools built in that translate its content to any other language.

So check your inboxes for those Wave invites. And if you know of friends using it, hit them up for an invite as well.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Read the whole story…