engine

What do you do when you can use the Internet to data-mine a collection of billions of photos?

Find out whether cats are more popular than dogs, of course. Or whether good outdoes evil. Or the Yankees beat the Mets.

The FlickrTrends application takes advantage first of the API (application programming interface) at Yahoo's photo-sharing site, Flickr, which can show how many photos have been tagged with a particular word over a period of time. Second, it uses Google App Engine to present the relative popularity of two tags in chart form to show what's waxing and waning. … Read more

Teaching your search engine to return results more focused on your online habits and preferences is a bit easier with this Internet Explorer add-on. By clicking on its results, Surf Canyon "learns" your preferences and focuses subsequent searches accordingly.

Surf Canyon loads into the IE search field at the right end of the URL bar along the top of IE's window. Accessing it is simply a matter of selecting it from the drop-down list of search engines built into the field. It functioned well in our tests, returning results quickly. We liked that by clicking the icon … Read more

As the concept of cloud computing is becoming more familiar to people, Google is now making it easier to write programs that use it. Reporter Stephen Shankland stops by the podcast studio to talk about why a change Google made to its App Engine could dramatically increase the number of cloud-based apps on the market.

Also in this podcast: International spies hack into U.S. electricity grid; Silicon Valley venture capitalists feeling more positive; and Taiwan's Elan sues Apple over touchscreen patents used in the MacBook, iPhone, and iPod Touch.

Today's stories:… Read more

Google's App Engine, which lets developers run their Web apps on Google's infrastructure, enjoyed its one-year anniversary Tuesday. To mark the occasion, let's take a look at 15 applications from the company's Applications Gallery. (All of the apps are ordered by the category listing on the Applications Gallery.)

PrintWhatYouLike: Instead of printing out an entire Web page, PrintWhatYouLike lets you remove elements from the page that you don't want to print, set the page to a particular width, or print specific areas of a site. Even though I found this utility last night, … Read more

Corrected at 11:53 a.m. PDT. See below for details.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--In a case of converging technologies, Google App Engine took several steps toward the mainstream on its first birthday Tuesday at the same time that the concept of cloud computing in general is becoming more accepted.

Cloud computing presents applications as Internet-accessible services rather than software that runs on corporate servers or people's own PCs. It can mean anything from raw computing services that can be bolted together, as in the case of Amazon Web Services, to finished products such as the Picnik photo-editing site or SalesForce.com customer-management service. Google App Engine is an intermediate level, offering a general-purpose foundation.

Thus far, App Engine had been limited to Web applications written in the Python programming language favored internally at Google but not as much elsewhere. But on Tuesday, the top-requested App Engine feature, support for Java programs, arrived--albeit only in a preview form initially available only to the first 10,000 developers who sign up.

"It's the language of the enterprise," said Ryan Nichols, leader of product management and marketing at Appirio, a 140-person start-up that builds software for clients who want cloud computing applications. "It allows us to have a different level of conversation with our customers."

Google announced the Java support and a handful of other new App Engine features on its blog and at a Campfire One event for developers at its headquarters here. As with the regular App Engine service, use within certain limits is free, but developers must pay for heavy-duty App Engine use.

… Read more

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--Google announced Tuesday it's adding support for Java to App Engine, its service for running software on Google's own computing infrastructure.

Today, Google offers only applications written in Python, a language that's popular among the search giant's engineers but not as widely used in the outside world. Java, though, is commonplace among organizations' server software, and Java support was the top-requested feature for Google App Engine.

"I'm really excited to give you an early preview of Java language support on App Engine," Graham Spencer, a Google engineering director, said at … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--What Google did with Gmail in conventional browsers five years ago it is expecting to do again with a new mobile version of its Web-based e-mail service.

Vic Gundotra, who leads Google's mobile software and developer relations efforts, showed off the Web application "technical prototype" Friday in an onstage interview here at the Web 2.0 Expo. Google offers Gmail applications that run natively on BlackBerry and Android mobile phones, but the company clearly has high hopes for a Web-based version as well.

Building a Web interface means Google can reach more phones more easily, Gundotra … Read more

Twitter continues to fidget with the way it's implementing search on it site.

For several weeks, the company has been testing a news presentation of Twitter search among a small subset of its users. The format placed the search box high on the home page but delivered the search results on a separate page.

"It turns out that's not the awesome way to do it," Twitter co-founder Biz Stone wrote late Wednesday in a blog post.

Now Twitter is making a trial run with putting the search results directly on the home page. Wrote Stone:

We … Read more

The man who police say killed five members of his family before turning the gun on himself in Santa Clara, Calif., on Sunday was identified Tuesday as an engineer at Yahoo, according to an Associated Press report.

Devan Kalathat, who had worked at the Internet giant since 2004 as an analytics engineer, shot his 11-year-old son, Akhil Dev; his 4-year-old daughter, Negha Dev; his brother-in-law, 35-year-old Ashok Appu Poothemkandi; his sister-in-law, 25-year-old Suchitra Sivaraman; and the couple's daughter, 11-month-old Ahana Ashok, according to the report.

Kalathat's wife is the only survivor and remains in critical condition with multiple … Read more