Points to www.google.com/chrome, but I can’t see anything live there yet. In a nut-shell, here’s what Google Chrome to be:

Google Chrome is Google’s open source browser project.

As  under the name of “Google Browser”, this will be based on the existing rendering engine Webkit. Furthermore, it will include Google’s Gears project.

The browser will include a JavaScript Virtual Machine called V8,

built from scratch by a team in Denmark, and open-sourced as well so other browsers could include it. One aim of V8 was to speed up JavaScript performance in the browser, as it’s such an important component on the web today. Google also say they’re using a “multi-process design” which they say means “a bit more memory up front” but over time also “less memory bloat.” When web pages or plug-ins do use a lot of memory, you can spot them in Chrome’s task manager, “placing blame where blame belongs.”

Google Chrome will use special tabs.

Instead of traditional tabs like those seen in Firefox, Chrome puts the tab buttons on the upper side of the window, not below the address bar.

The browser has an address bar with auto-completion features.

Called ’omnibox’, Google says it offers search suggestions, top pages you’ve visited, pages you didn’t visit but which are popular amd more. The omnibox (“omni” is a prefix meaning “all”, as in “omniscient” – “all-knowing”) also lets you enter e.g. “digital camera” if the title of the page you visited was “Canon Digital Camera”. Additionally, the omnibox lets you search a website of which it captured the search box; you need to type the site’s name into the address bar, like “amazon”, and then hit the tab key and enter your search keywords.

As a default homepage Chrome presents you with a kind of “speed dial” feature, similar to the one of Opera.

On that page you will see your most visited webpages as 9 screenshot thumbnails. To the side, you will also see a couple of your recent searches and your recently bookmarked pages, as well as recently closed tabs.

Chrome has a privacy mode; Google says you can create an “incognito” window “and nothing that occurs in that window is ever logged on your computer.

” The latest version of Internet Explorer calls this InPrivate. Google’s use-case for when you might want to use the “incognito” feature is e.g. to keep a surprise gift a secret. As far as Microsoft’s InPrivate mode is concerned, people also speculated it was a “porn mode.”

Web apps can be launched in their own browser window without address bar and toolbar

Mozilla has a project  that aims to do similar (though doing so may train users into accepting non-URL windows as safe or into ignoring the URL, which could increase the effectiveness of phishing attacks).

To fight malware and phishing attempts, Chrome is constantly downloading lists of harmful sites

Google also promises that whatever runs in a tab is sandboxed so that it won’t affect your machine and can be safely closed. Plugins the user installed may escape this security model, Google admits.

This looks like a very interesting project, and I think it can’t hurt to have more competition in the browser area. Google is playing this as nicely as possible by open-sourcing things, with perhaps part of the reason to try to defend against monopoly accusations – after all, Google already owns a lot of what’s happening inside the browser, and some may feel owning a browser too could be a little too much power for a single company (Google could, for instance, release browser features that benefit their sites more than most other sites… as can Microsoft with Internet Explorer). For now, until Chrome is released in a testable version, how much of the speed, stability and user interface promises will be fullfilled – and how much of the interface you’ll be able to configure in case you don’t like it – remains to be seen.

Google AdWords service is testing a feature for advertisers to use “demographic bidding.” This means that you can specify that your ads will only be shown to,  say, women over the age of 55. Or perhaps you have an online store for men’s clothing, then you can target only men. You can also specifically exclude a certain group.

Google say they know how to target these ads because certain social networks ask their users for details such as age and gender, which are then apparently shared with Google “on a non-personally identifiable basis.” Sites like MySpace, Friendster, HotOrNot and Flirtbox are part of the Beta test. Google in their news adds that “AdWords receives this data only from publishers that have permission from users to share their data according to the site’s terms and conditions,” and disclaims that “to protect the privacy of minors, users under 18 can’t be targeted demographically.”

That gives you tips and information about optimizing your website with Google adwords:

Website Optimizer is a free and self-service tool. Without extensive experience or resources, you can run multivariate experiments on landing page content, including headlines, promotional copy, and images. Complete the steps below and sign-up to participate in our beta test. We can only invite a small number of advertisers at this time, but hope to open the tool to all Advertisers over the coming months.

While Website Optimizer is integrated into AdWords, it tests all traffic to your site – including traffic from your AdWords ads, Google search results and any other source of traffic to your site.
It’s located here Website Optimizer – Adwords – Google If anyone is already in don’t hesitate to drop me a line.

Hard to believe Google which is now the world’s largest single online marketplace  came on the scene only a little more than 8 years ago, back in the days when Amazon and Ebay reigned supreme. So how did Google become the world’s single largest marketplace?

Well, the short answer is “the Semantic Web” (whatever that is – more in a moment). While Amazon and Ebay continue to have average quarterly profits of $1 billion and $1.8 billion, respectively, and are successes by any measure, the $17 billion per annum Google Marketplace is clearly the most impressive success story of what used to be called, pre-crash, “The New Economy.”

Amazon and Ebay both worked as virtual marketplaces: they outsourced as much inventory as possible (in Ebay’s case, of course, that was all the inventory, but Amazon also kept as little stock on hand as it could). Then, through a variety of methods, each brought together buyers and sellers, taking a cut of every transaction.

For Amazon, that meant selling new items, or allowing thousands of users to sell them used. For Ebay, it meant bringing together auctioneers and auction buyers. Once you got everything started, this approach was extremely profitable. It was fast. It was managed by phone calls, emails, and database applications. It worked.

Enter Google. By 2002, it was the search engine, and its ad sales were picking up. At the same time, the concept of the “Semantic Web,” which had been around since 1998 or so, was gaining a little traction, and the attention of an increasing circle of people.

So what’s the Semantic Web? At its heart, it’s just a way to describe things in a way that a computer can “understand.” Of course, what’s going on is not understanding, but logic, like you learn in high school:

If A is a friend of B, then B is a friend of A.

Jim has a friend named Paul.

Therefore, Paul has a friend named Jim.

Jim has a friend named Paul.

Therefore, Paul has a friend named Jim.

Using a markup language called RDF (an acronym that’s here to stay, so you might as well learn it – it stands for Resource Description Framework), you could put logical statements like these on the Internet, “spiders” could collect them, and the statements could be searched, analyzed, and processed. What makes this different than regular search is that the statements can be combined. So if I find a statement on Jim’s web site that says “Jim is a friend of Paul” and someone does a search for Paul’s friends, even if Paul’s web site doesn’t have a mention of Jim on it, we know Jim’s considers himself a friend of Paul.

Other things we might know for sure? That Car Seller A is selling Miatas for 10% less than Car Seller B. That Jan Hammer played keyboards on the Mahavishnu Orchestra’s albums in the 1970s. That dogs have paws. That your specific model of computer requires a new motherboard and a faster bus before it can be upgraded to a Pentium 18. The Semantic Web isn’t about pages and links, it’s about relationships between things – whether one thing is a part of another, or how much a thing costs, or when it happened.

The Semweb was originally supposed to give the web the “smarts” it lacked – and much of the early work on it was in things like calendaring and scheduling, and in expressing relationships between people. By late 2003, when Google began to seriously experiment with the Semweb (after two years of experiments at their research labs), it was still a slow-growing technology that almost no one understood and very few people used, except for academics with backgrounds in logic, computer science, or artificial intelligence. The learning curve was as steep as a cliff, and there wasn’t a great incentive for new coders to climb it and survey the world from their new vantage.

The Semweb, it was promised, would make it much easier to schedule dentist’s appointment, update your computer, check the train schedule, and coordinate shipments of car parts. It would make searching for things easier. All great stuff, stuff to make millions of dollars from, perhaps. But not exactly sexy to the people who write the checks, especially after they’d been burnt 95 times over by the dot-com bust. All they saw was the web – the same web that had lined a few pockets and emptied a few million – with the word “semantic” in front of it.

Semantics vs. Syntax, Fight at 9

The semantics of something is the meaning of it. Nebulous stuff, but in the world of AI, the goal has long been getting semantics out of syntax. See, the trillion dollar question is, when you have a whole lot of stuff arranged syntactically, in a given structure that the computer can chew up, how do you then get meaning out of it? How does syntax become semantics? Human brains are really good at this, but computers, are dreadful. They’re whizzes at syntax. You can tell them anything, if you tell it in a structured way, but they can’t make sense of it, they keep deciding that “The flesh is willing but the spirit is weak” in English translates to “The meat is full of stars but the vodka is made of pinking shears” or suchlike in Russian.

So the guess has always been that you need a whole lot of syntactically stable statements in order to come up with anything interesting. In fact, you need a whole brain’s worth – millions. Now, no one has proved this approach works at all, and the #1 advocate for this approach was a man named Doug Lenat of the CYC corporation, who somehow ended up on President Ashcroft’s post-coup blacklist as a dangerous intellectual and hasn’t been seen since. But the basic, overarching idea with the Semweb was – and still is, really – to throw together so much syntax from so many people that there’s a chance to generate meaning out of it all.

As you know, computers still aren’t listening to us as well as we’d like, but in the meantime the Semweb technology matured, and all of a sudden centralized databases – and Amazon and Ebay were prime examples of centralized databases with millions of items each – could suddenly be spread out through the entire web. Everyone could own their little piece of the database, their own part of the puzzle. It was easy to publish the stuff. But the problem was that there was no good way to bring it all together. And it was hard to create RDF files, even for some programmers – so we’re back to that steep learning curve.

That all changed – suprisingly slowly – in late 2004, when with little fanfare, Google introduced three services, Google Marketplace Search, Google Personal Agent, and Google Verification Manager, and a software product, Google Marketplace Manager.

Ezra Gottheil, an analyst at Technology Business Research Inc., noted that while Microsoft is busy going after Google’s search market, Google is using the billboard campaign it go after Microsoft’s bread-and-butter Office suite.
“Each company is targeting the other right now,” said Gottheil. “They’re laying the groundwork for what they both see as an inevitable collision in the future. Right now, neither company is deriving much revenue from its presence in the other’s space… Microsoft is more vulnerable because they must cannibalize some of their current application revenue to expand their application market, where Google only has to maintain a rough technical equivalence with Microsoft to maintain its search franchise.”
Google’s ad campaign and Microsoft’s deal with Yahoo are just the latest moves in this ongoing fight between industry giants.

In June, Microsoft unveiled its new search engine, Bing, an update to its far-from-beloved Microsoft Live Search. And with Microsoft’s advertising power and a lot of media attention behind it, Bing has shown strong numbers just out of the gate. But with only 8.23% of the market, Bing has done little more than nibble away at Google share, which is just over more than 78% of the search market.

StatCounter CEO Aodhan Cullen described Bing’s progress in the market as “steady, if not spectacular.”
For its part, Yahoo two weeks ago unveiled a beta of its newly overhauled homepage, whose promised features include the ability to integrate with social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and Myspace. The changes are an apparent attempt to recapture some of the hip cachet the site had during its heyday.
The problem for Microsoft and Yahoo is that despite their efforts, Google still looms far ahead of both. And Google is aiming its sights on the enterprise.
Last month, Google took the training wheels off several key hosted Google Apps offerings that have spent years in beta-test mode. The beta label came off some main Google Apps services, including Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Talk and Google Docs.
Analysts were quick to note that it’s a move geared to making Google Apps more appealing to enterprise users. With similar intent, Google this year also has come out with offline access and support for BlackBerry and Outlook users.