Future script google

In less than ten years, Google has changed the world. What changes can be expected in the next ten years? “Ask Google,” instructed .net Gary Marshall . He asked, and found out something ...

Google is one of the largest companies in the world, and even until recently it was one of the most secret. Now there is no. Today, Google is eager to communicate, and until the information has become rumored, .net decided to talk to Google people in order to understand how they represent the future. Next, we’ll find out where Google is heading in the search, search engine optimization, mobile, cartographic, video, and virtual worlds. And also recall the problems that can destroy the Internet and thereby hurt everyone.

YouTube under investigation

In March, the BBC announced the opening of its channel on YouTube. Just a few days later, Viacom, a US broadcaster, sued YouTube for $ 1 billion, relying on copyright infringement. .NET was asked by Patrick Walker , the head of the EMEA Google association (Europe, the Middle East and Africa), what exactly did the BBC understand, what did it not understand at Viacom? “The BBC was really interested in the possibility of broadcasting to a more global, perhaps even a new audience for the corporation,” said Walker. “They understand that sharing your video with other users on YouTube is not self-eating. This gives the BBC continuous feedback from consumers - immediate reviews, video reviews, which helps not only to find information that is interesting to users, but also provides a choice from materials created by users. ”
The BBC channel is taking its first steps on YouTube; this is more likely a test of new territory than full-scale broadcasting. "So it is," agrees Walker. “This is a dialogue between users, owners and broadcasters. Chelsea Football Club launched its channel to show short cycles of daily news, as a result, they received such a powerful response that they had to engage in a dialogue with the YouTube audience. It makes sense to put the information you create to where users willingly create a community, rather than locking it behind a brick wall under locks and restrictions, only for users to view your website. ”
Google recently made it clear how Google Video will differ from YouTube: with the help of the first service, we will search for a video, the second will be a video portal. Say goodbye to Google Video Store: “The idea of ​​an online store is not something we have focused our strength on,” Walker says. “The main task is to make videos even more accessible to everyone, for free, without advertising.”
Turning Google Video into a search site gives some important implications. Currently, the content of the resource is easy to classify, since when creating it, users provide easily categorized metadata. However, when you index information created by other people, everything becomes more complicated. “Implementing video file search is an extremely difficult and serious task, we are constantly working on it,” says Walker. “The metadata provided by information providers is important because the tag cloud is in line with the community’s opinion - but it’s not an exact science today, but rather an art. Implementing a video search may require analyzing the audio-visual content for feature points that can provide you with more specific information about what a video file might be. ”
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Brave new world

Information created by users is important not only for video services - it is also used in Google Maps. New key features of the service were introduced in March: Local Business Center provided companies with the ability to upload non-cash coupons to the service for later printing and use by users. Search results now include photos; in the US, updated real-time traffic information tells you whether to leave home. Can we expect other Google services to be embedded in GoogleMaps?
“I think this is the area where we are at the top,” says John Hanke , director of Google Earth and Maps. “There is a serious concept and you can watch its manifestations in Google Earth - this is the concept of GeoWeb . We are moving forward from the map service and search with the results you get - the products of Google. I think we will advance the concept of a geographically organized network, so if you decide to search Google Earth and Maps, you will find what Google has done, but also geographic information that users have worked to create. ”

First life

The concept of GeoWeb is based on the use of technologies such as KML (Keyhole Markup Language). “With KML search, we will first show you what Google knows about the location, and if you are perplexed, for example, searching for pubs near this place, we will show you Google search results. But we will also show you the results generated by the user community. ” As noted by Hanke, Google has joined forces with third-party organizations, such as Panoramio for photographers. We combined photos from this service with encyclopedic articles about geographical objects from Wikipedia and Google Earth community content to create a GeoWeb layer on Google Earth. The layer is turned on by default, so everyone can see these objects. You do not see all things on Google Maps so far - online, but you can expect to include features used in Google Earth soon in Maps as well. ”
Can Google Earth ever become a web application? Only not with the current level of technology development. “With Maps, we would like to have something that responds to user actions immediately and does not require any downloads, so we are stuck with JavaScript. In addition, JavaScript does not support 3D, so if you want to implement 3D landscapes online, you need to use another programming language. In the case of Google Earth, you need to download 10 megabytes of software code, we don’t want to sacrifice Google Maps speed and put pressure on users, forcing them to download and install something before they become familiar with the application. ”
Hanke speaks about the novel Snow Crash ( article in English , article in Russian , novel in English )
and anticipation in it of “ a metaverse ” (derived from the universe — world, universe and meta — referring to a higher level; transcending, “above-the-world, metaverse”, approx. lane) —the virtual interactive world. Is Google Earth a step in that direction? “This must be a very popular topic today,” he smiles. “I think there are really two interesting things in map services. The first is the concept of GeoWeb, the second interesting thing is what I call collaborative mapping, when a community creates a map of the world in two and three dimensions. Our goal today is to create a three-dimensional model of the entire planet, where every city, every town and every village will be represented by an accurate enough model so that you can bring the map closer to the street level and look around, go to the nearest store or restaurant and see how they look, maybe even look at the menu. "
Obviously for everyone - Google believes that the future of the Internet is in mobility, at the same time Shannon Maher believes that we are not moving towards another disaster in the spirit of WAP . As the head of Google in London, Maher eats and sleeps mobile technology, in addition, he is a veteran of the WAP-wars.
“People remember how bad the WAP standard was, how bad the phones were, how hard it was to get through to a bad network with these bad phones after all these hymns in praise of bad technology — how bad we got from it,” he recalls. "So it is, the truth is that WAP technology did not allow small companies to use innovations, they refused to do this, and only large companies could try to conduct business in collaboration with communication service operators, participating in generating or using their traffic."
What has changed today? Advertising. “We are definitely confident that individual advertising aimed at individual needs can benefit the consumer as well as the manufacturer from increasing sales of advertised goods.”
More and more mobile phones support GPS, which can make advertising targeting incredibly effective, but there are also difficulties that must first be overcome. “There are privacy issues, no one should bypass them,” says Maher. “People feel how their personal information is used; There are structural problems in the industry where location data may not be available to application providers. Many telecom operators are confident that location data costs incredible amounts of money. ”
A wide range of mobile devices can also be a problem: “J2ME makes life easier, but doesn't really unite the whole world,” says Maher. “There are still a lot of important platforms that do not support J2ME and there are some that support, but differ in variations”. Search also happens in different ways. “Most of what you need in a mobile device depends on your location,” Maher points out. "If you are away from home, traveling, map services and geographic information is important to you." How about image processing? Can Maher foresee the use of phone cameras to implement Google search? “Oh, I can imagine such a situation,” he says. How long before that? “Hm,” he laughs. "May be…".
But above all, most phones are bought as phones. “A huge part of users do not know or do not want to know about the mobile Internet,” explains Maher. “It’s not easy to stimulate interest and demand so that they start thinking about the future. Our approach is to work with people that breathe digital air on top of progress, but at the same time monitor the wide availability of services through J2ME, through the network and even through SMS to novice users. ”

The whole picture

Vinton J. Cerf is known as one of the fathers of the Internet. Today he is the vice president of Google and the main preacher of the Internet. He has a large number of reasons for concern about his child, not least because there is a rapid decrease in the number of Internet addresses using the IPv4 protocol.
"In the end, they will end, even with the broadcast of network addresses , which, I think, will be destructive enough for the basic architecture of the Internet," he says. “It will be very unpleasant when we distribute the last of these addresses. In 2009/2010 there will be a mess if we do not achieve progress in the implementation of the IPv6 protocol. And this introduction in the hands of Internet providers is more than anyone else. ” Cerf points out: The Chinese government and the military from the USA are planning to introduce IPv6 for the next Olympic Games, but until IPv6 is widely available for client-server systems and routers, Internet service providers will not switch to it.
Despite this, Surf is not very worried about the ever-increasing demand for video on the Internet. “I think the interests of online television (IPTV) lead us astray,” he says. “It’s more likely that people will want to download and watch videos when it’s convenient for them, rather than browse online. The network is able to manage file transfers over TCP / IP noticeably more elegantly than regulate a large number of simultaneous streams of information. ”
It is impossible to discuss video services without mentioning the net neutrality principle. Communication companies and Internet providers object: video services generate a huge demand for traffic, therefore, they assert, bandwidth is deteriorating. UK providers today use traffic shaping mechanisms to restrict BitTorrent users from dominating shared connections. So what's wrong with using a similar approach online? "This is worse than just traffic shaping," explains Cerf. “This is a limitation of the total amount of information transmitted, in contrast to the bandwidth of the traffic delivery channel. If communication companies insist on using asymmetric broadband services with limited outgoing traffic and weak incoming support, buyers simply won’t understand what they are paying for. ”
The reason for this tumultuous debate is that many broadband providers are confident that IPTV is based solely on the concept of streaming video. This is not true. “The basic idea of ​​IPTV is the ability to download a video and watch it later,” Surf explains. “The problem is that broadband providers are free to use their regulatory capabilities that underlie their intermediation in order to limit the freedom of users to choose and weaken their ability to use competing applications. The basic idea is that consumers should have the freedom to choose applications no matter how they access the Internet or who provides it to them. ”

Robots are coming

Recently, Surf shook news resources , warning that 150 million PCs could inadvertently be used by network robots sending spam or denial of service attacks. Are there any solutions for botnets? "There are partial," - Surf gives the answer. “Encryption of all traffic between computers with IPSec protocol to prohibit access to high-level protocol information, which is often the cause of such attacks; check the source IP address and reject fraud packets; use of strong authentication system in the Domain Name System; Using non-recurring passwords with authentication from both sides to identify the user. And building more secure operating systems that are resistant to attacks and invasions.
We asked Cerfa what trends and technologies will shape the Internet in the coming decade: “Mobile Internet access using Internet devices; acceleration of access via radio channels, wires or optical fiber; symmetrical broadband Internet for consumers, ”he encourages. “Internationalization of domain names; great capacity for storing information and power of computers at lower prices; home servers of various types in addition to online applications such as web servers, table editors, text editors and databases; an increasing number of devices based on Internet access. ”
Surf is also "very excited about the interplanetary spread of the Internet and its work with Nasa and Jet Propulsion Laboratory." So, in the near future, the founding father of the Internet sends his child into space!

This text is a translation of Gary Marshall's article “The future according to Google,” from .net magazine # 163, June 2007.
Separate illustrations are taken from the following sources:
Google Logo, Frank Lloyd Wright's Birthday - June 8, 2005: www.google.com/holidaylogos05.html
GoogleFlat greg.abstrakt.ch
Google Earth Earth.google.com
.net www.netmag.co.uk .

When reprinting the translation, please refer to the original and the present text.

The author of the translation will be grateful for comments, comments, corrections of possible inaccuracies and participation in the correction of the translation of the article.