The technology behind Google's great results

As a Google user, you're familiar with the speed and accuracy of a Google search. How exactly does Google manage to find the right results for every query as quickly as it does? The heart of Google's search technology is PigeonRank™, a system for ranking web pages developed by Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Stanford University.

Building upon the breakthrough work of B. F. Skinner, Page and Brin reasoned that low cost pigeon clusters (PCs) could be used to compute the relative value of web pages faster than human editors or machine-based algorithms. And while Google has dozens of engineers working to improve every aspect of our service on a daily basis, PigeonRank continues to provide the basis for all of our web search tools.

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Technology Stuffs!!!

EMIW - ROBOTS! (-_-)!!!

2. Hitachi has released a new mobile robot called the Emiew (Excellent Mobility and Interactive Existence as Workmate).

They claim it is the fastest robot to date.

It moves on wheels at 6 Km/hr (3.7 mi/hr) making it about twice as fast as Asimo.

It stands 1.3 m tall (51 inches) and weighs 70 Kg (154 lb). It can talk and has a vocabulary of 100 words. Each of its arms has 6 DOF. No info on availability or price.

Here are a few articles: Japan Times, BBC News, and OnRobo. (* NEW 06/01/05 *)

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Tech Trends of 2005

By the time you read this, I'll be in Las Vegas, Nevada, for the 2005 International Consumer Electronics Show (CES), the biggest technology trade show in North America. Continuing the trend of the past several years, CES is evolving into a show that covers both computing technologies and consumer electronics such as TV and car stereos, largely because the wider consumer-electronics world is being subsumed into the computer industry. That makes a certain amount of sense: Most of today's consumer-electronics devices resemble computers internally, and the PC world has already solved problems such as interoperability and networking. And looking forward to the technologies we're likely to see throughout 2005, I can tell you that the convergence of computing and consumer electronics is only going to continue. Let's take a look at the five tech trends that CES organizers say will be ones to watch in 2005.

Media Servers

Many people are already saving their photo and video memories to PC hard disks, and now they want to use home-networking technologies to enjoy that content—as well as other similar content, such as digital music—throughout the home. Although a home PC is a great way to acquire and manipulate digital content, a PC's typically small screen doesn't make for a great presentation. Instead, people would like to use their big-screen TV or other screens located in more comfortable rooms around the home.
The key to this scenario is a home media server, which can be a PC or other device with a large hard disk. This device stores your digital content and is connected to your other PCs and devices through the home network. Numerous manufacturers are releasing dedicated media servers, and we'll be looking at some of those solutions throughout the year in Connected Home Express. But if you're interested in using an aging or secondhand PC to create your own media server, drop me a note and I'll consider the topic for a future issue.

Portable Entertainment

Apple Computer's iPod was all the rage in 2004, but the future of portable entertainment is the smart phone, which will converge cell phone functionality with that of digital cameras, PDAs, MP3 and movie playback, video games, and other forms of entertainment. We'll even see car stereos converging with MP3 players in far more pervasive ways, including units with removable hard disks that you can synch with your home PC or media server, or units that have Wi-Fi hardware that lets you sync from the driveway.
For video, Microsoft's Portable Media Center computers only hint at the ways in which digital video on-the-go will one day become mainstream. Throughout 2005, portable DVD players will continue to outstrip portable digital video player sales by a wide margin, but these two devices will gradually merge into the same product.

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