Contextually Relevant Ads from Google AdSense that made me click

Today I found an ad that I readily clicked. This is an ad about weekend trip to Lonavala. Such a relevant ad and such great timing. I clicked on the ad, and it actually kept it's word of the pricing at Rs. 3568. Good job Google AdSense!

Following is the contextual ad. I did a little a little more digging, and found 2 more interesting things:

• Google AdSense click URL shows up in Chrome (on mouseover), that doesn't show up in any other browser - kind of cool
  
• Google AdSense URL is now pointing to http://googleads.g.doubleclick.net/pagead/ , while earlier it used to point to http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/ . Interesting. Obvious integration with DoubleClick; but is that some kind of 'lead generation' ?

Following is the contextual ad.

Some fun with Google Hindi translation!

Google translation for Hindi is pretty cool. I test drove it, then I got some ideas, here they are, have fun:

English: Google translation rocks!
Hindi: Google अनुवाद चट्टानों!

English: Google translation is cool!
Hindi: Google अनुवाद ठंडा है!

English: Google translation is a kick-ass product!
Hindi: Google अनुवाद एक लात-गधा उत्पाद है!

English: Google translation is a super awesome product!
Hindi: Google अनुवाद एक सुपर भययोग्य उत्पाद है!

Click here to try more stuff.

Why doesn't Google Chrome render my bullets right?

Why doesn't Google Chrome render my bullets right?

See the rendering of bullets using FF, IE7 and Chrome below:

Chrome shine for Google

I wrote a review of Google Chrome Browser for Financial Express. It appeared on page-8 of the newspaper, and is also available online at - http://bit.ly/chromefe .

Check it out.

Google Chrome Tested

I have been testing Google Chrome for last 6 hours now. Here is a short review. Overall I don’t find anything overwhelmingly amazing that would make me WOW! The Omnibox is cool, but I feel that it makes a marginal enhancement in my browsing experience. The most important thing I noticed is that – Chrome is slow; it’s slower than FireFox. I have to admit that I am so used to Firebug, that I almost view the Net-element of Firebug every few minutes, I find such a functionality missing in Chrome. I like the Chrome->Developer->Debug Javascript, but it has marginal stuff that I need. Also, check this – in Chrome, click on Developer menu, and try to shift-Windows-tabs (by alt-tab), that doesn’t work. Why has Chrome disabled my Windows-alt-tab switch? Web site seem to work normally, rendering and JavaScript seems to be working fine.

I feel that Javascript execution is very very fast. I tested a page where FF normally give a Javascript-timeout (stop, continue …), Google Chrome ran just fine and delivered me the Javascript rendering in less time than expected. I will therefore need to do more Javascript testing on Chrome.

Though I am a little concerned about the vulnerability discussed here.

More later.

Comparing Clouds: Amazon EC2, Google, AppNexus, and GoGrid

InfoWorld has an awesome article published by Peter Wayner, who compares various cloud computing services - Amazon, Google, AppNexus, and GoGrid. Read more here.

Following is an excerpt:

Google Advanced Search - now with dates!

Nice:

All models are wrong, and increasingly you can succeed without them.

Says Peter Norvig, Google's research director, as an update to George Box's maxim.

This is an awesome article about Petabyte size datasets and why correlation of data is enough, instead of finding a reason why datasets are related and building a model around it. Read some excerpts here, and full article via this link.

Excerpts from the original article:
Sixty years ago, digital computers made information readable. Twenty years ago, the Internet made it reachable. Ten years ago, the first search engine crawlers made it a single database. Now Google and like-minded companies are sifting through the most measured age in history, treating this massive corpus as a laboratory of the human condition. They are the children of the Petabyte Age.

Google's founding philosophy is that we don't know why this page is better than that one: If the statistics of incoming links say it is, that's good enough. No semantic or causal analysis is required. That's why Google can translate languages without actually "knowing" them (given equal corpus data, Google can translate Klingon into Farsi as easily as it can translate French into German). And why it can match ads to content without any knowledge or assumptions about the ads or the content.

This is a world where massive amounts of data and applied mathematics replace every other tool that might be brought to bear. Out with every theory of human behavior, from linguistics to sociology. Forget taxonomy, ontology, and psychology. Who knows why people do what they do? The point is they do it, and we can track and measure it with unprecedented fidelity. With enough data, the numbers speak for themselves.

If the words "discover a new species" call to mind Darwin and drawings of finches, you may be stuck in the old way of doing science. Venter can tell you almost nothing about the species he found. He doesn't know what they look like, how they live, or much of anything else about their morphology. He doesn't even have their entire genome. All he has is a statistical blip — a unique sequence that, being unlike any other sequence in the database, must represent a new species.

Petabytes allow us to say: "Correlation is enough."

CAPTCHA is Dead, Long Live CAPTCHA!

Interesting post on coding horror. 3 of the most well known CAPTCHA's are now broken - Google, Hotmail and Yahoo!

Wisdom comes from Gunter Ollman, he notes:

CAPTCHAs were a good idea, but frankly, in today's profit-motivated attack environment they have largely become irrelevant as a protection technology. Yes, the CAPTCHAs can be made stronger, but they are already too advanced for a large percentage of Internet users. Personally, I don't think it’s really worth strengthening the algorithms used to create more complex CAPTCHAs – instead, just deploy them as a small "speed-bump" to stop the script-kiddies and their unsophisticated automated attack tools. CAPTCHAs aren't the right tool for stopping today's commercially minded attackers.

Read more here.

Google Gears and client side caching

This is getting more and more interesting. Today I read an article that explained Google Gears very lucidly.

I think, this is going to make UI coding and the design patterns still more interesting. Large parts of relatively static data can be cached on client side, data that the browser cannot cache easily, like DHTML tables. I am wondering if I can use it in my Flex 2 application.

I guess the only downside is that the user will be asked to install Google Gears on their desktop. I don't see much of a problem, since I used it for Google Reader. However, if this was used with some more critical application, I will probably think twice before I do that.

Here is an interesting code snippet, originally here:

function initializedb() { if (!window.google || !google.gears) return; try { db = google.gears.factory.create('beta.database', '1.0'); } catch (ex) { alert('Could not create database: ' + ex.message); } if (db) { db.open('gearsintro'); db.execute('create table if not exists articles' + ' ( article_id int, title varchar(255), content text )'); } showArticles(); }

RDBMS has come to the browser

Ajaxian reports:

Firefox 3 is to support SQLite for offline storage. The new alpha release tells us this and a lot more (below).

The world of the RDBMS has come to the browser, and has jumped from server to client in the Web platform.

I think this is a pretty interesting innovation. Suddenly we will have a lot more agile storage space on the client side. We can do some complex relational storage on the client side. I wonder if cookies will undergo a major transformation (like limit on cookie size etc.). I wonder if we will see nice Javascript APIs to access the RDBMS on the client side (or did I miss it; is it already there?). I wonder if Browsers will collocate some of these data, and we may see something like 'single instance storage' on the client side? I think all of this was possible even without the RDBMS, however a database on the client side makes us think the various possibilities that existed on the server side.

WSJ on Internet Advertising

WSJ has published an interesting writeup on Internet advertising:

It's becoming apparent that Internet advertising, in its myriad permutations, isn't just a new variation on traditional advertising. The ability of online advertisers to place information in highly targeted contexts in which users can click through to further information and even make purchases seems so revolutionary that it can hardly be called advertising at all. It may well be that the frequency of ad usage will generate the same data-intensive refinements that exist in the search field, yielding similar economies of scale -- and a natural monopoly.

As an investor, I love natural monopolies. Internet advertising is now a $40 billion-a-year industry with estimated 20% annual growth. I find Google at $470 a share attractive for its search business alone, with its continuing impressive growth and wide margins. These intriguing developments on the advertising side of the Internet make it even more compelling.

Google Apps - finally ...

Reported on Slashdot:

"Google Apps is adding a premium offering: a custom 10-GB Gmail box, Google Calendar, GTalk instant messenger, Writely, Google Pages, Google Custom home page iGoogle and Google SpreadSheets for $50 a year per employee. The NYTimes provides some details on competitive pricing: 'By comparison, businesses pay on average about $225 a person annually for Office and Exchange,... in addition to the costs of in-house management, customer support and hardware.

Also on TechCrunch:

Beyond competition and concerns, tonight is a good time to recognize the incredible force of innovation that Google is as well. Its nearly full-service suite of sophisticated, integrated online services is something of historic proportion. Google’s technological brilliance is only beginning to be recognized. What do I mean by that? I mean that with its powerful algorithms to analyze and contextualize information, combined with its growing catalogue of information to analyze - Google is an epoch defining company. Send the world’s business communication through Google and the machine gets a whole lot smarter.

YouTube vs. Fox + NBC + CBS

Michael Arrington reports a very interesting story on Techcrunch:

This is a rumor that just won’t die: The major television networks are considering creating a new online video service joint venture to compete with YouTube.

Here’s what we’ve heard: a few major networks want to create a YouTube competitor, and they have been seriously discussing this for months prior to the YouTube/Google deal. The technology is fairly straightforward, and would be based on Adobe’s Flash platform. The networks would then license their online rights to content to this new service, allowing users to legally watch full episodes of tv shows on the site. Simultaneous to the launch of this new service, the networks would launch massive litigation against Youtube/Google for copyright violations, forcing them to pull the content off of YouTube.

But discussions have stalled. First, Google has offered substantial payoffs to the networks to keep their content on YouTube. Second, complications over how to split revenues from advertising have lengthened discussions. Our understanding is that Viacom and Disney have dropped out of the discussions entirely, but that Fox, NBC and CBS are still trying to put a deal together.