Code & Cloud by Prasanna

Tag: google

  • Google flu trends

    How does this work?

    Google have found that certain search terms are good indicators of flu activity. Google Flu Trends uses aggregated Google search data to estimate current flu activity around the world in near real-time.

    Each week, millions of users around the world search for health information online. As you might expect, there are more flu-related searches during flu season, more allergy-related searches during allergy season, and more sunburn-related searches during the summer. You can explore all of these phenomena using Google Insights for Search. But can search query trends provide the basis for an accurate, reliable model of real-world phenomena?

    Google have found a close relationship between how many people search for flu-related topics and how many people actually have flu symptoms. Of course, not every person who searches for “flu” is actually sick, but a pattern emerges when all the flu-related search queries are added together. Google compared our query counts with traditional flu surveillance systems and found that many search queries tend to be popular exactly when flu season is happening. By counting how often Google see these search queries, Google can estimate how much flu is circulating in different countries and regions around the world. Our results have been published in the journal Nature.

    Try it here :Google flu trends

  • Google's Programming Language

    Go was born out of frustration with existing languages and environments for systems programming. Programming had become too difficult and the choice of languages was partly to blame. One had to choose either efficient compilation, efficient execution, or ease of programming; all three were not available in the same mainstream language. Programmers who could were choosing ease over safety and efficiency by moving to dynamically typed languages such as Python and JavaScript rather than C++ or, to a lesser extent, Java.

    Go is an attempt to combine the ease of programming of an interpreted, dynamically typed language with the efficiency and safety of a statically typed, compiled language. It also aims to be modern, with support for networked and multicore computing. Finally, it is intended to be fast: it should take at most a few seconds to build a large executable on a single computer. To meet these goals required addressing a number of linguistic issues: an expressive but lightweight type system; concurrency and garbage collection; rigid dependency specification; and so on. These cannot be addressed well by libraries or tools; a new language was called for.

  • Chrome OS

    Chrome OS is a lightweight Linux distribution based on Debian that uses a lot of open-source software: Host AP Linux drivers, PAM (an authentication mechanism), Syslinux (a lightweight bootloader), IBus (Intelligent Input Bus for Linux / Unix OS), ConnMan(Internet connection manager), XScreenSaver and other software. More on this later.

    The source code for Chrome OS is already available.

    Chrome, the foundation of Chrome OS
    – Chrome has 40 million users
    – Chrome focuses on: speed, security, simplicity
    – new stuff: Chrome for Mac/Linux and extensions

    HTML5: making the web more powerful
    – powerful web apps
    – web apps should use threads
    – offline web apps

    Converging trends
    – netbooks have an explosive growth
    – millions of users are living in the cloud

    Chrome OS:
    – instant boot
    – Chrome on Chrome OS is faster
    – every app is a web app
    – all data is in the cloud
    – browser security model

    Demo:
    – 7 seconds boot time
    – the UI is a work in progress
    – easy to access favorite apps
    – app menu
    – panels: persistent lightweight windows (example: Google Talk)
    – file browser
    – local files open in web apps (including Microsoft Office online apps)
    – native video player