Is This a Good Idea? A replacement for Google?

May 10, 2009

In ancient times, the Greeks sought guidance from the trancelike ravings of the ethylene-snorting priestess Pythia at Delphi. Today, we’ve become similarly enamored of the wisdom spewed forth by Google, the dominant search engine on the Web.

The human race now does about 235 million Google searches per day, in search of information on vital subjects ranging from Oprah Winfrey’s fried-chicken giveaway to the truth about bird-eating spiders. But just as the Greeks were dependent upon priest intercessors to translate Pythia’s streams of gibberish, so are we reliant upon our own ability to come up with search terms that suitably cajole Google’s all-powerful PageRank algorithm into summoning forth pages of links to Web sites where, hopefully, we’ll be able to find the information we are seeking.

But what if there were an easier, more direct way? What if we simply could ask the Web a question, and receive an answer?

Keep reading! There's more....

Which Energy Independence Plan is Better — T. Boone Pickens or Google? Part 2

November 04, 2008

If you think it’s odd that a Texas oilman is proposing a plan to build massive wind farms to wean the U.S. from its dependence upon fossil fuels, consider this: He’s got competition from an even more unlikely player — a company that isn’t even in the energy industry. I’m talking about none other than Google, the search engine, online advertising and video giant that is currently angling to take over the software world with its Google Chrome browser and suite of cloud-computing applications.
(Here’s my previous blog on that subject.)

As it turns out, Google does alternative energy, too. Or rather, it wants to, in a big way. In October, the company unveiled its ambitious, multi-trillion dollar plan for weaning the U.S. away from the burning of coal and oil for electrical power and cutting the use of petroleum to power cars and trucks by nearly 40 percent by 2030. Jeffery Greenblatt the Princeton-trained researcher whom Google recently hired as its climate and energy technology manager, explains:

Google's proposal will benefit the US by increasing energy security, protecting the environment, creating new jobs, and helping to create the conditions for long-term prosperity. Some of the necessary funds will be public, but much of it will come from the private sector — a typical approach for infrastructure and high technology investments.

Here’s how Google would have us do it. In contrast with Pickens’ plan, which relies entirely upon wind power and converting vehicles to natural gas, the Internet behemoth would attack the problem from multiple angles.

Cloud Computing With Google Chrome?

September 12, 2008

Hurricane … er, tropical storm Hanna probably was a bit of a disappointment to those of you who are extreme weather junkies, but storm-force winds or no, the brief downpour that we had in the Washington, D.C., area managed to knock out my little corner of the electrical grid. So I’m been compelled to camp out in the coffee shop of a nearby Borders bookstore and contend for one of the precious few three-prong outlets that are available for recharging the laptops and cell phones of the uprooted, information-starved horde. But enough of one man’s lament. Let’s turn instead to a more universal — or nearly so — problem: Microsoft Windows.

Believe it or not, there is a logical thread here, because Windows has a lot in common with the weather. Like the latter, everybody complains about the most kludgy, temperamental and ubiquitous of operating systems, while knowing full well that there’s nothing we can do about it. As I’ve written about previously, those woes have been exacerbated by the coming of the dreaded Windows Vista, with its annoying habit of continually asking permission to perform functions, its demands that we download new drivers for peripherals, and its capricious-at-best compatibility with software that doesn’t have “Microsoft” on the label. OK, so we could join the fringe that has defected to the Mac OS, but that would mean overcoming our aversion to expensive, unnaturally white computers, buying all new software and possibly even getting WWSJD (“What Would Steve Jobs Do?”) vanity license plates.

But now, there’s another possibility, a tantalizing vision of a future in which Windows — or the Mac OS — might no longer matter. A world in which we not only won’t have to worry about whether our software is compatible with our OS, but in which we won’t ever have to install any software again, period. A world in which we’ll be able to do just about everything we need, from updating a spreadsheet to editing digital photos, inside the borders of a platform-agnostic browser. I’m talking about cloud computing, in which software will actually run on distant Internet servers, rather than our PCs.