Failed optimization probably

Uber drives are taking a longer route because of some misbehaving optimization in Google maps it seems. When a cab is booked near the main gate of Pearl Village (as shown below) the route shown to the driver is optimised one. However, when a booking is done from the far end of the society, the cabbie is shown a rather long route. A part of this way is actually a dirt road. Uber should consider feedback from its drivers regarding such cases.

GMail experience is too slow

Some time ago, I posted about the "Google" experience, where I mentioned about ease of use and speed being essential aspects of our regular usage of Google products and how Google [in my opinion] is doing it wrong by moving away from these key aspects. Here is one more incident. For the past two days, I have seen the following page a number of times.

It never happened to me before and I have been using GMail since the beginning of GMail itself. When I finally logged in successfully, I wanted to clear out my trash as it was huge. While it was deleting, it showed me the following lightbox.

It took more than 3 hours to complete the deletion of trash. I know that my trash is huge; but the time it took is way more. Overall GMail experience for me has slowed down considerably. When I create or update a filter, it takes at least 3 minutes to get back. People initially switched to Google because of its ease of use and speed; but now Google is gradually losing on those key aspects.

The "Google" experience

Earlier the "Google" experience was very simple. In the typical "Google" workflow, i.e. the workflow followed in most of its products, interfaces were uncluttered and never came in your way. However, recently they are becoming increasingly cluttered. Youtube, for example, has a lot many things on its homepage now. However, earlier it just had videos. When you go to Youtube, you want to watch videos and that was what it showed to you. Wil Wheaton calls this as a huge mistake on the part of Google. He is not alone.

Another important aspect of the "Google" experience was speed. Now I am experiencing considerable speed reduction in almost all Google products. Be it Gmail, Blogger or Youtube. They have implemented instant search but their faster search pages were much more helpful. I can always do without instant search. When I come to search page, I know what I want to search. Suggesting instantly only reduces the number of letters I type.

Next aspect of the "Google" experience is coolness. Stopping the code search facility is not cool at all. By coolness, I mean positive rapport with the open source developer. Google used to inspire developers worldwide; but it is not that cool any more. DuckDuckGo is way cooler than Google.

Semantic search is the milestone that Google and its competitors are heading for. Social sites like Facebook are becoming important because they have better results at semantic search but in a restricted domain. Same is the case with many other tools that are providing or have the potential of providing better results at semantic search in various domains. For the ads market, the better the semantic search result the higher is the increase in likelihood of the ad getting attention and being clicked. So, instead of ruining its own experience Google should work on finding ways of improving semantic search in more and more domains.

Installing Google Talk plugin in Gentoo linux

Google provides Google Talk plugin as rpm or deb packages for 32-bit and 64-bit architectures. To get it on Gentoo when you try

emerge -pv google-talkplugin

you can see that it is masked by license. It means you have to accept the license before installing. You can find all licenses at /usr/portage/licenses. To get a specific license try

ls /usr/portage/licenses | grep google

You can read the license and if you accept it then add a line to /etc/portage/package.license to reflect it. In this case, the line would be

www-plugins/google-talkplugin google-talkplugin

and in general it is:

<full package name> <license name>

Now when you try emerging it you get a message saying that the license does not allow mirroring. This is why the fetch restriction is in place. The message also tells you to download the .deb package suitable to your architecture and put it in /usr/portage/distfiles. The problem is Google provides you current version and not the version considered stable by Gentoo. Moreover, the version 1.8 which is considered stable by Gentoo is not available according a Gentoo bug [I wish I had found that out earlier].

So the 1.8 version ebuild is for those who have a copy of the older Google Talk plugin. All others have to unmask the newer version according to their architectures. I had to add the following line to /etc/portage/package.keywords.

=www-plugins/google-talkplugin-2.1.6.0 ~amd64

Now portage can fetch it for you. However, if you have already downloaded latest version of the plugin then you can use the command as root to copy it to you distfiles folder and portage will not have any checksum error either if the versions have not changed.

cp -v Downloads/google-talkplugin_current_amd64.deb /usr/portage/distfiles/google-talkplugin_2.1.6.0-1_amd64.deb

Now portage will not have to redownload the package.

Robust Firefox

Today an interesting incident occurred which reassured by trust in Firefox's robustness. Well I was downloading gentoo minimal install image in Google Chrome and after 80mb, the download speed had gone down to some bytes per second. When I started a parallel fresh download, I was getting a speed of about 60 kbps. So, I decided to try and get Chrome download the rest of the original file at about 50 - 60 kbps. I tried the following procedure:

- copy the install*.chrdownload file (i.e. the temporary file into which the file was being downloaded) into some other folder
- cancel the download
- start a fresh download
- pause it
- overwrite the new .chrdowload file with the old one

However, this trick did not work with Chrome. It was still downloading more than 100 mb as if it were the fresh download.

I opened up Firefox and applied the same procedure except for renaming the .chrdownload file to .part file and Firefox intelligently downloaded only what remained of the file completing the download in minutes.

Chromium and Firefox: a comparision

Well I have been a hard-core firefox fan for a long time. However, recently I have found some improvements on the chromium front, that are worthy of notice.

The battle started when Chromium started using Webkit and V8, one is a fast web page rendering engine and the other is a fast javascript engine. Firefox fell behind for some time; but those are old days. I shall just brief on some points of comparision between Firefox 3.6.13 and Chromium 9.0 on Arch linux x86_64.

Firefox:
- It is very stable. I have not seen it crash for over a year now.
- With AdBlock Plus by Wladimir Palant, I can easily get rid of ads as well as unwanted iframes, images etc.
- With Ghostery, I can easily get rid of tracking sited too.

Chromium:
- Its is stable for use but not as stable as Firefox.
- It does not work with a number of sites. I have been posting such sites since when it was in version 4. Even in recent versions (8.0 and 9.0) there still are sites that don't work well with it.
- It however works fine with those sites that are tailored to work with Internet Explorer and not on Mozilla Firefox.
- AdBlock or Ghostery are not completely supported on Chromium yet.

Improvement for Google Instant

Today, while using Google Instant, I noted that if the query included "site" specification, Instant does not work. Any query of the following form fails with Google Instant.

<search text> site:<site where the search text is to be looked up>

Increased spam in my gmail inbox

For about a month, I had been noticing increased spam in my gmail account. Gmail used to be known  for its spam filters. People used to advise to redirect other mails to gmail so that spam is filtered out well. However, things seem to be changing. I am posting a few spam email ids.

From	Reply-to
mabanks@ic.sunysb.edu	inf22@msn.com
elcytchandy@hotmail.com	jdetwiler1@comcast.net
info@winner.com	instantclaims@live.co.uk
ibgranny@sbcglobal.net	marutisuzukijobs2011@live.com
g-karen@sbcglobal.net	g-karen@sbcglobal.net
jilani@pasteur.fr	cox16@live.co.uk
hana.jilani@pasteur.fr	mic_04@live.com
jilani@pasteur.fr	cox16@live.co.uk
info@videocon.com	info@video-con.co.cc
rallahiq@insurebc.ca	mic_04@live.com
osirodjohnson@gmail.com	inf44@live.com
info@live.in	marutisuzuki.recruit2011@gmail.com

It is interesting to note the high frequency of "inf" and "live.com" terms in the email addresses. It is also interesting to note how most of them have their "to" email addresses pointing to "undisclosed-recipients:;" and talk about lotteries worth £500,000,00 in the United Kingdom. They also include phone numbers from United Kingdom.

Search Engine Blacklisting extension

Recently, Jason Chen released an Chrome extension to blacklist spam websites in search engine results.

The extension is under active development and is for testers now. As far as I remember, there have been tools for this by McAfee and AVG. However, I believe that such blacklisting should be done at the server side. It is funny sometimes how search engines like Google have fake sites topping their results.

Native SDK

Recently, I had been looking into image editting on the client side. I figured it can be done on the server side; but impractical. I am certain I shall have to figure out a way of doing it on the client side. Javascript seemed to be the only option and I didn't want to do javascript as it wont be fast. However, when I found about native client sdk, I thought "This is exactly what I needed."

Insecure gmail POP

Recently, after a long time (about a month time) I accessed gmail through pop. Interestingly, I found many older mails being pushed to me. Those mails were supposed to be deleted by gmail as I had selected "delete gmail's copy after sending" option. It seems like gmail just marks them as deleted; but keeps them for deletion at idle time. This is okay as long as gmail deletes them in time. However, when I accessed my mail after a month, I got mails that dated about 6 months back.

The insecurity lies in the fact that if my password is compromised, the person shall have access to mails that I thought I had deleted. Even if I notify my contacts about my password compromise, the person shall still access vital information from those past mails if he attempts POP access.

Google can surely improve on this

Even Google has downtime

misuse of SEO

Gradually as Google has risen, so has the popularity of SEO. However, along with them, misuse of SEO has also risen substantially. I remember a few months back I was looking for some organization and the organization's webpage was listed in Google's second page while related articles and some unnecessary pages were listed on the first page.

Obviously, you can argue that those articles were more important the page of the organization. Well since I dont have any screenshots I can't prove much. You have the choice of not trusting me in that case. However, I could not find much important materials in the webpages pointed to by the links on the first page.

Such instances of hoax results are uncommon; but their number is growing. One of the major reasons is misuse of SEO. Recently, I found another instance of SEO misuse. The tags on the article and the content are obviously unrelated.

Google depends heavily on SEO techniques. I hope it improvises on this soon.

The changing web

We all know the web is changing and along with it our lives as well (though the extent and kind of change is determined by the our own decisions). While surfing I found this. I was impressed to see the way it responded to mouse gestures. The design is intuitive. Developments like these are welcome. They make proper use of the power of current technologies. I could see Google's philosophy playing a role. The interface was not coming in the way.

Open publication - Free publishing - More windows 7

Google's spam control blocks Google alerts

With Peter Norvig as the Director of Research, Google Brain is no surprise.

Google changed the definition of beta

Google changed the definition of beta just like it has done for many other things. From the beginning it has become a centre of innovation in software. Google has shown the way to capture the market when open source software was gaining momentum. Google uses a nice business strategy with a place for open source in it. It is interesting to note that Google supports Firefox, yet launches its own Chrome browser.

I have been critical of the the incorrect use of 'beta' for about two years now, but mostly offline. However, recently I found a discussion at Slashdot supporting my ideas. That inspired me to write this blog. I like the line about getting out of jail for free.

'Beta' means it may change without warning. Well then a number of Google applications tell us at the first page that they are likely to change without warning and we are supposed to tread ahead at our own risk. However, they do it with flair: the 'beta' tags usually blend nicely with the background. Thereby, most of the users become mere beta testers for Google - a novel way to get intelligent testers at a large scale, as required for web applications.