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Orkut

ORKUT is a social networking service which is run by Google and named after its creator, an employee of Google - Orkut Büyükkökten. The service states that it was designed to help users meet new friends and maintain existing relationships. Orkut is similar to other social networking sites. Since October 2006, Orkut has permitted users to create accounts without an invitation. Orkut is the most visited website in Brazil and second most visited site in India. The initial target market for Orkut was the United States, but the majority of its users are in India and Brazil.[1] In fact, as of May 2008, 53.86% of Orkut's users are from Brazil, followed by India with 16.97% [2] and 23.4% of the traffic comes from Brazil, followed by India with 18.0%.[3] Unlike hi5 and Friendster, it is not a popular website in the United States of America and Canada.

Originally hosted in California, on August 2008 Google announced that Orkut will be fully managed and operated in Brazil, by Google Brazil. This was decided due to the large Brazilian user base and growth of legal issues.



Orkut

The new Orkut interface
URL http://www.orkut.com/
Slogan Who do you know?
Alexa rank #13
Commercial? yes
Type of site Social Network Service
Registration required
Available language(s) multilingual
Owner Flag of the United States Google
Created by Flag of Turkey Orkut Büyükkökten
Launched January 2004
Current status Active

Contents


  • 1 History
  • 2 Features
    • 2.1 Scrapbook
    • 2.2 Communities
    • 2.3 Other miscellaneous features
    • 2.4 Orkut Redesign
    • 2.5 Orkut Applications
  • 3 Criticism
    • 3.1 Flooders and fake profiles
    • 3.2 Hate groups
    • 3.3 State Censorship
    • 3.4 Privacy
  • 4 Funny Error Message
  • 5 Security and safety
    • 5.1 Hacking accounts and communities with XSS
    • 5.2 MW.Orc worm
    • 5.3 HTTPS Not Obvious
    • 5.4 Session Management and Authentication Issues
    • 5.5 W32/KutWormer
    • 5.6 Other Attacks
    • 5.7 Private Album Hack
    • 5.8 Social Engineering
  • 6 Legal Issues
    • 6.1 Brazil
    • 6.2 India

History

Orkut was launched in January 2004 by search company Google, as the brainchild of Orkut Büyükkökten, a Turkish software engineer, who developed it as an independent project while working at Google. In late June 2004, Affinity Engines filed suit against Google, claiming that Orkut Büyükkökten and Google based Orkut on inCircle code.[8]

Originally, its membership was by invitation.[9]. By April 2008, Orkut's user base numbered at around 120 million, next only to MySpace.

Features

A user first creates a "Profile", in which the user provides "Social", "Professional" and "Personal" details. Users can upload photos into their Orkut profile with a caption. Users can also add videos to their profile from either YouTube or Google Video with the additional option of creating either restricted or unrestricted polls for polling a community of users.

Scrapbook

"Scrapping" is popular among the Orkut community as a form of offline and online communication. In December 2007, the ability to pop up alerts immediately when a scrap is received was added, adding instant messaging-like capabilities to Orkut.

Communities

Another feature of Orkut are "Communities". Anyone with an Orkut account can create a community on anything. One can post topics, inform users about an event, ask them questions or just play games. There are more than one million communities on Orkut with topics ranging from pizza to pasta. The first five communities on Orkut were started within 24 hrs of the site's launch. There were a total of 47,092,584 communities on Orkut as per March 24, 2008 4:25PM IST (+5:30 GMT). With the recent addition of the search topic feature in the communities, some Orkut communities become the in fact source for the website links to movies, e-books etc.

Other miscellaneous features

Members can make groups to join friends according to their wishes. Further, each member can become fans of any of the friends in their list and can also evaluate whether their friend is "Trustworthy", "Cool", "Sexy" on a scale of 1 to 3 (marked by icons) and is aggregated in terms of a percentage. Unlike Facebook, where a member can view profile details of people only on their network, Orkut allows anyone to visit anyone's profile, unless a potential visitor is on your "Ignore List" (This feature has been recently changed so that users can choose between showing their profile to all networks or specified ones). Importantly, each member can also customize their profile preferences and can restrict information that appear on their profile from their friends and/or others (not on the friends list). Another feature is that any member can add any other member on Orkut to his/her "Crush List" and both of them will be informed only when both parties have added each other to their "Crush List".

When a user logs in, they see the people in their friends list in the order of their logging in to the site, the first person being the latest one to do so.[10] Orkut's competitors are other social networking sites including MySpace and Facebook. Ning is a more direct competitor, as they allow creation of Social Networks which are similar to Orkut's communities.

There is a birthday reminder on the homepage of each user, which shows upcoming birthdays of that user's network friends.

Orkut users can decide the countries from which they want to get friends requests from. Or the person sending request has to verify the email address of the another person.

Orkut Redesign

On Friday, August 24, 2007, Orkut announced a redesign. The new UI contains round corners and soft colors including small logotype at upper left corner. The redesign has been announced on the official Orkut Blog.

By Thursday, August 30, 2007, most users on Orkut could see changes on their profile pages as per the new redesign. On the 31st, Orkut announced its new features including improvements to the way you view your friends, 9 rather than 8 of your friends displayed on your homepage and profile page and basic links to your friends' content right under their profile picture as you browse through their different pages. It also announced the initial release of Orkut in 5 new languages: Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Tamil, and Telugu. Profile editing can take place by clicking the settings button under your profile photo (or alternatively, click the blue settings link at the top of any page).

On September 4, 2007, Orkut announced another new feature. You can now see an "Updates from your friends" box on the homepage, where you'll get real-time updates when your friends make changes to their profiles, photos and videos. Moreover, in case you want to keep some things on your profile private, Orkut has added an easy opt-out button on the settings page. Scraps (popularly word for messages in orkut) was also HTML-enabled letting users now interact in a more interesting manner.

On November 8, 2007, Orkut greeted its Indian users Happy Diwali in a very special way, by allowing them to change their Orkut look to a Diwali-flavored reddish theme.

On April Fools' Day 2008, Orkut temporarily changed its name on its webpage to yogurt, apparently as a prank.

On 2nd June 2008, Orkut has launched its theming engine with a small set of default themes.[11] along with this PHOTO tagging has also finally arrived at orkut.

Orkut Applications

On 16th April, 2008, Orkut began rolling out applications to everyone in India and then in phases to the rest of the world.[12] Currently, the number of applications in the application directory stands at 287 (as of 19 July 2008).

Criticism

Flooders and fake profiles

As with any online social networking community, a number of fake and cloned profiles exist on Orkut.[13] Due to the large number of users, and the deactivation of the jail system, the profiles were often left unremoved or, when removed, recreated easily. These profiles are normally created to troll, to spam, to flood or just for fun. It is not hard to find users owning more than one profile, with some stating they own hundreds.

In 2005 invisible profiles, communities and topics started to appear in Orkut. This could be achieved by using HTML escaping codes and 1x1 pixel photos to fool the engine behind the site.[14] This hole was later fixed, and currently there is a lower limit on profile image dimensions.

In August 2005 a freeware program was made in Delphi called Floodtudo ("tudo" in Portuguese means "everything" - this was developed by a Brazilian) specifically for flooding Orkut. It quickly spread through the users and was easily downloadable (the most common Floodtudo versions were 1.2, 1.5, 2.0 and 2.2). As this program was massively used by thousands of spammers, a big spam wave struck Orkut in September and October 2005.

As the flooding of Orkut was becoming out of control, the developers implemented some features in order to stop this. These features included not allowing two or more verbatim topics or scrapbook entries to be submitted, forcing the user to wait before posting another topic or scrapbook entry, and the usage of captchas, whenever a scrap entry is hyperlinked. They gave more rights to community moderators as well, so that users can be banned outright instead of relying on the developers to remove them.

Hate groups

There has recently been controversy revolving around the use of Orkut by various hate groups. Virulent racists and religious fanatics allegedly have a solid following there. Several hate communities focused on racism, Nazism and white supremacy have been deleted due to guideline violation.

In 2005, various cases of racism were brought to police attention and reported on in the Brazilian media.[citation needed] In 2006, a judicial measure was opened by the Brazil federal justice denouncing a 20-year-old student accused of racism against those of African ancestry and spreading defamatory content on Orkut.[15] Brazilian Federal Justice subpoenaed Google on March 2006 to explain the crimes that had occurred in Orkut.[16]

Anti-religion, anti-national, and anti-ethnic hate groups have also been spotted. Recently an Indian court has issued notices to Google on some of the groups. The Mumbai Police are seeking a ban on Orkut post objections raised by political groups. Groups denigrating various political leaders and celebrities have also emerged. Also in a reported case of 2005, racist groups have been reported. They were anti-Tamil groups. No names have been revealed yet.

State Censorship

Orkut was very popular in Iran, but the website is now blocked by the government. According to official reports, this is due to national security issues, and Islamic ethical issues about dating and match making. To get around this block, sites such as orkutproxy.com (now defunct) were made for Iranian users. Other websites such as Yahoo! Groups and Google Groups have communities dedicated to receiving updates on the newest location of Iran's Orkut proxy. Though it was once possible to bypass governmental blockage of Orkut, the site has closed its HTTPS pages on all anonymous proxies. Now it is almost impossible for ordinary users to visit this site inside Iran.[neutrality disputed] Many other sites have been published in Iran since Orkut's blockage, using the same social-networking model - examples include MyPardis, Cloob and Bahaneh. Of course, these websites run a high risk of being blocked as well, so they have their own censorship policies to meet Iran's unwritten regulations and rules of filtering.

In August 2006, United Arab Emirates followed the footsteps of Iran in blocking the site. This block was subsequently removed in October 2006. On July 3, 2007, Gulf News revisited the issue, publishing complaints from members of the public against Orkut communities like "Dubai Sex", and officially bringing the complaints to the attention of the state telecom monopoly Etisalat [17]. The ensuing moral panic resulted in a renewed ban of the site by Etisalat by July 4, 2007 [18], still in effect despite Google's promise to negotiate the ban with the UAE [19]. Saudi Arabia is another country that has blocked access to Orkut, while Bahrain's information ministry is also under pressure to follow suit [20].

Privacy

Earlier in Orkut it was allowed for anybody to view any one's pictures, videos as well as scraps. But this gave promotion to the people who started misusing the photos and videos and placed them on the internet with fake details. Many of them were vulgar, especially pictures of women. Moreover the scraps could be read easily.

Currently privacy covers such features as scraps (separately read and write access), videos, photoalbums, testimonials, applications. The following privacy levels are currently available to users: friends/friends of friends/everyone in the network. The user can limit visibility of her/his profile to a certain region or group of regions (that's what is called "network"); in this case outside of these regions no user information is available.

Initially, the common opinion was that out of the two major countries, only users in India will be interested in privacy on orkut, while Brazil, being a very open society, will not need it. In reality, the percentage of users choosing to hide their data is the same in India and Brazil. The only difference is that in Brazilian sector of there is a community "Quer privacidade? Sai do orkut" ("want privacy? get out of orkut") against other people's privacy.

Funny Error Message

Funny Orkut Error Message
Funny Orkut Error Message

Bad, bad server. No donut for you. Unfortunately, the orkut.com server has acted out in an unexpected way. Hopefully, it will return to its helpful self if you try again in a few minutes. It's likely that the server will behave this way on occasion during the coming months. We apologize for the inconvenience and for our server's lack of consideration for others.

This is a common error message when the Orkut server encounters heavy traffic. In this way Orkut developers show their sense of humor.

Security and safety

Hacking accounts and communities with XSS

On January 1, 2005 a Brazilian hacker called Vinícius K-Max attacked Orkut, stealing community ownership rights, using a cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability [21] [22]. Eventually, various phishing sites were developed with the intent of stealing other people's accounts and communities.

In December 2007, hundreds of thousands of users accounts were affected, using another XSS vulnerability and a worm. A user's account was affected when the user simply read a particular scrap containing an embed which caused the user to automatically become a part of a community on the site, without approval. The affected user's account was then used to send this scrap to everyone present in the user's friend list thereby creating a sort of a huge wave.

MW.Orc worm

On June 19, 2006 FaceTime Security Labs' security researchers Christopher Boyd and Wayne Porter discovered a worm, dubbed MW.Orc.[23]

The worm steals users' banking details, usernames and passwords by propagating through Orkut. The attack was triggered as users launched an executable file disguised as a JPEG file. The initial executable file that causes the infection installs two additional files on the user's computer. These files then e-mail banking details and passwords to the worm's anonymous creator when infected users click on the "My Computer" icon.

The infection spreads automatically by posting a URL in another user's Orkut Scrapbook, a guestbook where visitors can leave comments visible on the user's page. This link lures visitors with a message in Portuguese, falsely claiming to offer additional photos. The message text that carries an infection link can vary from case to case.

In addition to stealing personal information, the malware can also enable a remote user to control the PC and make it part of a botnet, a network of infected PCs. The botnet in this case uses an infected PC's bandwidth to distribute large, pirated movie files, potentially slowing down an end-user's connection speed.

The initial executable file (Minhasfotos.exe) creates two additional files when activated, winlogon_.jpg and wzip32.exe (located in the System32 Folder). When the user clicks the "My Computer" icon, a mail is sent containing their personal data. In addition, they may be added to an XDCC Botnet (used for file sharing), and the infection link may be sent to other users that they know in the Orkut network. The infection can be spread manually, but also has the ability to send "back dated" infection links to people in the "friends list" of the infected user.

According to statements made by Google, as noted in Facetime's Greynets Blog, the company had implemented a temporary fix for the dangerous worm.[23]

HTTPS Not Obvious

In and around April 17, 2007 users began reporting that secure (https) access to the Orkut login server was no longer available.

In fact, Google had changed the main login page to http delivery to improve efficiency, but the actual login remained secure using https in an iframe [24]. This information had not been well-published by Google, and did not give the users the reassurance of seeing the "secure connection" padlock in the browser. On July 17, 2007, a revised login page, which is delivered via https, addressed these issues.

Session Management and Authentication Issues

On June 22, 2007 Susam Pal and Vipul Agarwal published a security advisory on Orkut vulnerabilities related to authentication issues.[25] The vulnerablities are considered very dangerous in cybercafes, or in the case of man-in-the-middle attack as they can lead to session hijacking and misuse of legitimate accounts.[26] The vulnerabilities are not known to be fixed yet and therefore pose threat to the Orkut users.

A week later, on June 29, 2007 Susam Pal published another security advisory which described how the Orkut authentication issue can be exploited to hijack Google and Gmail sessions and misuse the compromised account of a legitimate user under certain conditions.

Joseph Hick performed an experiment on the basis of the advisories published by Susam Pal, to find out how long a session remains alive even after a user logs out.[27] His experiment confirmed that the sessions remain alive for 14 days after the user has logged out. It implies that a hijacked session can be used for 14 days by the hijacker because logging out does not kill the session.[28]

W32/KutWormer

On December 19, 2007, a worm written in Javascript started to cause havoc. Created by a Brazilian user, it automatically made the user join the virus related community and infect all friends' scrapbooks with copies of itself.

The worm is spreading through Orkut’s recently introduced tool that allows users to write messages that contain HTML code. The ability to add Flash/Javascript content to Orkut scraps was only recently introduced.[29][30] on March 3, 2008 W32/Scrapkut.worm was found. The worm attempts to spread itself by sending orkut users scraps that contains the link to the worm itself.Aliases Downloader.Banload.ONK (GRISoft) TR/Dldr.Orkut.A (Avira) Trojan-Downloader.Win32.Banload.auf (IKARUS) Trojan.DL.Win32.Banload.dzm (Rising) W32.Scrapkut (Symantec)


Other Attacks

Private Album Hack

In December 2007 a Brazilian hacker with the pseudonym "Rodrigo Lacerda" published a script that allowed users to scrape other people's private photos. The exploit consisted of generating album photo urls, due to their simple structure. See e.g. [1]

Social Engineering

Attacks on orkut using social engineering never stop. Among these the easiest kind is to offer a user to enter a script into the browser's address area, to "improve performance".

Legal Issues

Brazil

On August 22, 2006, Brazilian Federal Judge José Marcos Lunardelli ordered Google to release Orkut user’s information of a list of about two dozen Brazilian nationals, believed to be using Orkut to sell drugs and involved in child pornography by September 28. The judge ordered Google to pay $23,000 per day in fines until the information is turned over to the Brazilian government. The information the government is requesting would also be used to identify individuals that are spreading child pornography[31] and hate speech, according to the Brazilian government. As of September 27, 2006 Google has stated that they will not release the information, on the grounds that the requested information is on Google servers in the U.S. and not Google servers in Brazil, and is therefore not subject to Brazilian laws. In March 2008, the Minister of Justice broke the accounts, and the locked albums became opened only to the advocates. There is a possibility of Orkut erasing the pornographic accounts/profiles.

India

Of late, the number of Indians on Orkut has been increasing rapidly. On October 10, 2006, the Bombay High Court's Aurangabad bench served a notice on Google for allowing a hate campaign against India.[32] This referred to a community on Orkut called 'We Hate India', which initially carried a picture of an Indian flag being burned and some anti-India content.[33]

The High Court order was issued in response to a public-interest petition filed by an Aurangabad advocate. Google had six weeks to respond. Even before the petition was filed, many Orkut users had noticed this community and were mailing or otherwise messaging their contacts on Orkut[citation needed] to report the community as bogus to Google, which could result in its removal. The community continues to exist and had spawned several 'We hate those who hate India' communities.

Prior to the 60th Independence Day of India, orkut's main page was revamped. The section which usually displayed a collage of photos of various people, showed a stylized orkut logo. The word orkut was written in the Devanagiri script and was colored in the Indian national colours. Clicking on the logo redirects to a post by the orkut India Product Manager, Manu Rekhi,[34] on the orkut internal blog. There has also been some media outcry against Orkut after a couple of youngsters were apparently lured by fake profiles on the site and later murdered.[35]

On November 23, Bombay High Court asked the state government to file its reply in connection with a petition demanding a ban on social networking site, Orkut, for hosting an anti-Shivaji Web community.[36]

Recently, the Pune rural police cracked a rave party filled with narcotics.[37] The accused have been charged under anti-narcotic laws, the (Indian) Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropics Substances Act, 1985 (NDPS). Besides the NDPS, according to some media reports, the police were deliberating on the issue of charging the accused under the (Indian) Information Technology Act, 2000 perhaps because Orkut was believed to be one of the mode of communication for these kind of drug abuses.[38]

The Cyber police in India have entered into an agreement with Orkut to have a facility to catch and prosecute those misusing Orkut since the complaints is in a rising stage.


Google Health

Google Health is a personal health information centralization service by Google. The service allows Google users to volunteer their health records -- either manually or by logging into their accounts at partnered health services providers -- into the Google Health system, thereby merging potentially separate health records into one centralized Google Health profile.

Volunteered information can include "health conditions, medications, allergies, and lab results".[1] Once entered, Google Health uses the information to provide the user with a merged health record, information on conditions, and possible interactions between drugs, conditions, and allergies.[2]

The Google Health logo

The Google Health logo

Contents


  • 1 Privacy concerns
  • 2 Price and income
  • 3 History
  • 4 Architecture
  • 5 Partners
  • 6 Competitors

Privacy concerns

Google Health is an opt-in service, meaning it can only access medical information volunteered by individuals. It does not retrieve any part of a person's medical records without his or her explicit consent and action.[1] However, it does encourage users to set up profiles for other individuals. [2]

According to its Terms of Service, Google Health is not considered a "covered entity" under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996; thus, HIPAA privacy laws do not apply to it.[3].

In an article covering Google Health's launch, the New York Times discussed privacy issues and said that "patients apparently did not shun the Google health records because of qualms that their personal health information might not be secure if held by a large technology company."[4] Others contend that Google Health may be more private than the current "paper" health record system because of reduced human interaction.[5]

Post-launch reactions to Google's stance that it is not a covered entity have varied. Some have been very negative, like the comments of ha.ckers.org blogger Robert "RSnake" Hansen[6] and those of Nathan McFeters at ZDNet[7]. Others, including Free/Open Source Software Healthcare activist Fred Trotter, argue that a personal health record service like Google Health would be impossible if it were HIPAA covered.[8]

Price and income

Google Health, like many other Google products, is free to use for consumers. Unlike other Google services, however, Health currently contains no advertising.[9] Google has not revealed how it plans to make money with the service, but a Wall Street Journal article says that Google "hasn't ruled [advertising] out for the future."[10]

History

Google Health has been under development since mid-2006. In 2008, the service underwent a two-month pilot test with 1,600 patients of The Cleveland Clinic.[4]

As of May 20, 2008, Google Health has been released to the general public as a service in beta test stage.

Architecture

Google Health's API is based on a subset of the Continuity of Care Record.[11]

Partners

Google Health can currently import health information from the following partners: The Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, The Cleveland Clinic, Longs Drugs, Medco Health Solutions, Quest Diagnostics, RxAmerica, Walgreens, SafeMed, and Healthgrades.[12]

Competitors

Google Health is a personal health record (PHR) service whose primary competitors in the United States are Microsoft's HealthVault and the open-source Indivo project. There are numerous other open-source and proprietary PHR systems, including those that compete outside the United States.



Google Finance

Google Finance is a website launched on March 21, 2006 by Google. The service features business and enterprise headlines for many corporations including their financial decisions and major news events. Stock information is available, as are Adobe Flash-based stock price charts.

Google launched a revamped version of their finance site on December 12, 2006, featuring a new homepage design which lets users see currency information, sector performance for the U.S. market, and a listing of top market movers along with the relevant and important news of the day. A top movers section was also added, based on popularity determined by Google Trends. The upgrade also featured charts containing up to 40 years of data for U.S. stocks, and richer portfolio options.

Google Book Search


Google Book Search is a tool from Google that searches the full text of books that Google scans, OCRs, and stores in its digital database. The service was formerly known as Google Print when it was introduced at the Frankfurt Book Fair in October 2004. When relevant to a user's keyword search, up to three results from the Google Book Search index are displayed above search results in the Google Web Search service (google.com). A user may also search just for books at the dedicated Google Book Search service. Clicking a result from Google Book Search opens an interface in which the user may view pages from the book as well as content-related advertisements and links to the publisher's website and booksellers. Through a variety of access limitations and security measures, some based on user-tracking, Google limits the number of viewable pages and attempts to prevent page printing and text copying of material under copyright.





Google Book Search
This image is a candidate for speedy deletion. It may be deleted after Monday, 10 March 2008.




Google Book Search screenshot
Developed by Google
OS Any (web based application)
Type Online Library Book Search
Website http://books.google.com/


The Google Book Search service remains in a beta stage but the underlying database continues to grow. Google Book Search allows public-domain works and other out-of-copyright material to be downloaded in PDF format. For users outside the United States, though, Google must be sure that the work in question is indeed out of copyright under local laws. According to a member of the Google Book Search Support Team, "Since whether a book is in the public domain can often be a tricky legal question, we err on the side of caution and display at most a few snippets until we have determined that the book has entered the public domain."

Many of the books are scanned using the Elphel 323 camera[3][4] at a rate of 1,000 pages per hour.[5] The rapidity of the scanning precludes checking the pages. Hence, some pages are not scanned or are scanned in such a fashion as to make them unreadable.[6][7][8][9]

As of 2006, Google has not revealed how many books they have already scanned. Google did say that it is scanning more than 3,000 books per day, a rate that translates into more than 1 million annually.[10] The entire project may exceed US$ 100 million.[11]. As of March 2007, The New York Times reported that Google has already digitized one million volumes at an estimated cost of US$5 million.

Microsoft started a similar project, Live Search Books, in late 2006 [12] which ran until May 2008, when the project was abandoned.

Contents

  • 1 Timeline
    • 1.1 2004
    • 1.2 2005
    • 1.3 2006
    • 1.4 2007
    • 1.5 2008
  • 2 Google Books Library Project participants
    • 2.1 Initial partners
    • 2.2 Additional partners
  • 3 Opposition and perceived shortcomings

Timeline

2004

  • December 2004—Google signaled an extension to its Google Print initiative known as the Google Print Library Project.[13] Google announced partnerships with several high-profile university and public libraries, including the University of Michigan, Harvard (Harvard University Library), Stanford (Green Library), Oxford (Bodleian Library), and the New York Public Library. According to press releases and university librarians, Google plans to digitize and make available through its Google Book Search service approximately 15 million volumes within a decade. The announcement soon triggered controversy, as publisher and author associations challenged Google's plans to digitize, not just books in the public domain, but also titles still under copyright.

2005

  • November 2005—Google changed the name of this service from Google Print to Google Book Search.[14] Its program enabling publishers and authors to include their books in the service was renamed "Google Books Partner Program" (see Google Library Partners) and the partnership with libraries became Google Books Library Project.

2006

  • August 2006—The University of California System announced that it would join the Book Search digitization project. This includes a portion of the 34 million volumes within the approximately 100 libraries managed by the System.
  • October 2006—The University of Wisconsin-Madison announced that it would join the Book Search digitization project along with the Wisconsin Historical Society Library. Combined, the libraries have 7.2 million holdings.[15]

2007

  • January 2007—The University of Texas at Austin announced that it would join the Book Search digitization project. At least one million volumes will be digitized from the University's 13 library locations.
  • March 2007—The Bavarian State Library announced a partnership with Google to scan more than a million public domain and out-of-print works in German as well as English, French, Italian, Latin, and Spanish.[16]
  • May 2007—A book digitizing project partnership was announced jointly by Google and the Cantonal and University Library of Lausanne.[17]
  • May 2007—The Boekentoren Library of Ghent University will participate with Google in digitizing and making digitized versions of 19th century books in the French and Dutch languages available online.[18]
  • June 2007—The Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC) announced that its twelve member libraries would participate in scanning 10 million books over the course of the next six years.[19]
  • July 2007—Keio University became Google's first library partner in Japan with the announcement that they would digitize at least 120,000 public domain books.[20]
  • August 2007—Google announced that it would digitize up to 500,000 both copyrighted and public domain items from Cornell University Library. Google will also provide a digital copy of all works scanned to be incorporated into the university’s own library system.[21]
  • September 2007—Google added a feature that allows users to share snippets of books that are in the public domain. The snippets may appear exactly as they do in the scan of the book or as plain text.[22]
  • September 2007—Google debuts a new feature called "My Library" which allows users to create personal customized libraries, selections of books that they can label, review, rate, or full-text search.[23]
  • December 2007—Columbia University was added as a partner in digitizing public domain works.[24]

2008

  • May 2008 - Microsoft tapers off and plans to end its scanning project which reached 750,000 books and 80 million journal articles [25]

Google Books Library Project participants

The number of participating institutions has grown since the inception of the Google Books Library Project;[13] The University of Mysore has been mentioned in many media reports as being a library partner.[26][27] They are not, however, listed as a partner by Google.[28]

Initial partners

  • Harvard University, Harvard University Library, Harvard + Google
  • University of Michigan, University of Michigan Library, Michigan + Google
  • New York Public Library, New York Public Library + Google
  • University of Oxford, Bodleian Library, Oxford + Google
  • Stanford University, Stanford University Libraries (SULAIR), Stanford + Google

Additional partners

Other institutional partners have joined the Project since the partnership was first announced.

  • Bavarian State Library, Bavaria + Google, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek + Google (in German)
  • Columbia University, Columbia University Library System, Columbia + Google
  • Committee on Institutional Cooperation, CIC + Google
  • Complutense University of Madrid, Madrid + Google, Complutense Universidad + Google (in Spanish)
  • Cornell University, Cornell University Library, Cornell + Google
  • Ghent University, Ghent University Library/Boekentoren, Ghent/Gent + Google
  • Keio University, Keio Media Centers (Libraries), Keio + Google (in English), Keio + Google (in Japanese)
  • National Library of Catalonia (Biblioteca de Catalunya). Biblioteca de Catalunya (BNC) + Google (in Catalan)
  • Princeton University, Princeton University Library, Princeton + Google
  • University of California, California Digital Library, California + Google
  • University of Lausanne, Cantonal and University Library of Lausanne/Bibliothèque Cantonale et Universitaire/BCU + Google (in French)
  • University of Mysore, Mysore University Library, Mysore + Google
  • University of Texas at Austin, University of Texas Libraries, Texas + Google
  • University of Virginia, University of Virginia Library, Virginia + Google
  • University of Wisconsin-Madison, University of Wisconsin Digital Collection, Wisconsin + Google

Opposition and perceived shortcomings

Google Book Search remains controversial.

While librarians hail the initiative for its potential to offer unprecedented access to what may become the largest online corpus of human knowledge,[29][30] the publishing industry and writers' groups have criticized the project's inclusion of snippets of copyrighted works as infringement. The Authors Guild of America[31] and Association of American Publishers[32][33] have separately sued Google, citing "massive copyright infringement." Google claims its project represents a fair use, and is the digital age equivalent of a card catalog with every word in the publication indexed.

Hand digitization, University of Michigan
Hand digitization, University of Michigan

Some European politicians and intellectuals have criticized Google's effort on "language-imperialism" grounds, arguing that because the vast majority of books proposed to be scanned are in English, it will result in disproportionate representation of natural languages in the digital world. German, Russian, and French, for instance, are popular languages in scholarship; the disproportionate online emphasis on English could shape access to historical scholarship, and, ultimately, the growth and direction of future scholarship. Among these critics is Jean-Noël Jeanneney, the president of the Bibliothèque nationale de France[34] In June 2006, a French publisher announced its intention to sue Google France.[35] In 2006 a previously-filed German lawsuit was withdrawn.[36]

In March 2007, Thomas Rubin, associate general counsel for copyright, trademark, and trade secrets at Microsoft, accused Google of violating copyright law with their book search service. Rubin specifically criticized Google's policy of freely copying any work until notified by the copyright holder to stop.[37]

Siva Vaidhyanathan, associate professor of Media Studies and Law at the University of Virginia has published the opinion,[38] that the project poses a danger for the doctrine of fair use, because the fair use claims are arguably so excessive that it may cause judicial limitation of that right.[39]

Google licensing of public domain works is also an area of concern [40], Google apparently is claiming a restrictive 'No-Commercial use' term in respect of the PDF electronic versions it provides, as well as using digital watermarking techniques with them. Some published works that are in the public domain, such as all works created by the U.S. Federal government, are still treated like other works under copyright, and therefore locked after 1922.[41]

While Google Book Search has digitized large numbers of journal back issues, its scans do not include the metadata required for identifying specific articles in specific issues. This has led the makers of Google Scholar to start their own program to digitize and host older journal articles (in agreement with their publishers).




Google search tips

                                        I never knew that Google search can be used as calculator, currency converter or height and weight unit converter. Today I’ve discovered few Google search technique and I would like to share those technique with you. Look at the few useful search technique and you’ll get the answer “Why Google is the superior search engine?”.

Google search as calculator

You can enter math expression in Google search box to get the calculated result. For example, you can put the following expression in the Google search to find result of the calucation.

Examples:

(30+45)+5^2
((30+45)+554)^2



Google search tips for Currency conversion

you can use keyword like “1 USD in AUD” or “1 singapore money in japanese money” to find the currency difference using Google search.

Examples :


1 USD in thailand money
1 singapore money in australian money


Using Google search as Dictionary

You can use the Google as a dictionary as well. Just you have to type the keyword as “define:keyword” in google search box and you’ll get the meaning of that word.

Examples:

define:intelligent
define:blog



Google search tips to find time of a city or country

You can use “time” keyword followed by name of the city or country to find the current time of that country of city in Google search. 

Examples :

time kathmandu
time new york



Google Search tips for Unit conversion

You can use the following kind of examples to convert the various unit of height and weight.

Examples:

1feet in meter
1feet in cm
1kg in pounds



Google search

                                      Google search is a Web search engine owned by Google, Inc., and it is the most used search engine on the Web. Google receives several hundred million queries each day through its various services.

The domain google.com attracted at least 135 million U.S. visitors in May 2008.

Contents

1 The search engine 
1.1 PageRank
1.2 Search results
1.3 Non-web sources of data
1.4 Google optimization
1.5 Uses of Google
1.6 Google dance
2 Functionality 
2.1 Search syntax
2.2 Query expansion
2.3 "I'm Feeling Lucky"
2.4 Search engine features
2.5 Error messages
3 International 
3.1 Languages
3.2 Domain names 
3.2.1 Cybersquatting
4 Search products

The search engine

 
PageRank
Main article: PageRank

Google's algorithm uses a patented system called PageRank to help rank web pages that match a given search string. The PageRank algorithm computes a recursive score for web pages, based on the weighted sum of the PageRanks of the pages linking to them. The PageRank derives from human-generated links, and correlates well with human concepts of importance.

The exact percentage of the total of web pages that Google indexes are not known, as it is very hard to actually calculate it. Previous keyword-based methods of ranking search results, used by many search engines that were once more popular than Google, would rank pages by how often the search terms occurred in the page, or how strongly associated the search terms were within each resulting page. In addition to PageRank, Google also uses other secret criteria for determining the ranking of pages on result lists, reported to be a number over 150.[3]

Search results

Google not only indexes and caches web pages but also takes "snapshots" of other file types, which include PDF, Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, Flash SWF, plain text files and much more.[4] Except in the case of text and SWF files, the cached version is a conversion to (X)HTML, allowing those without the corresponding viewer application to read the file.

Users can customize the search engine, by setting a default language, using the "SafeSearch" filtering technology and set the number of results shown on each page. Google has been criticized for placing long-term cookies on users' machines to store these preferences, a tactic which also enables them to track a user's search terms and retain the data for more than a year. For any query, up to the first 1000 results can be shown with a maximum of 100 displayed per page.

Non-web sources of data

Despite its immense index, there is also a considerable amount of data in databases, which are accessible from websites by means of queries but not by links. This so-called deep web is minimally covered by Google and contains, for example, catalogs of libraries, official legislative documents of governments, phone books, and more.

Google optimization
Main article: Search Engine Optimization

Since Google is the most popular search engine, many webmasters have become eager to influence their website's Google rankings. An industry of consultants has arisen to help websites raise their rankings on Google and on other search engines. This field, called search engine optimization, attempts to discern patterns in search engine listings, and then develop a methodology for improving rankings.

As Google's algorithms and results have gained the trust of web users, commercial websites will profit from subverting these results by artificially inflating their rankings. Some search engine optimization firms have attempted to inflate specific Google rankings by various artifices, and thereby draw more searchers to their client's sites. One of Google's main challenges has been to weaken some of these attempts by reducing the ranking of sites known to use them.

Search engine optimization encompasses both "on page" factors (like body copy, title tags, H1 heading tags and image alt attributes) and Off Page Optimization factors (like anchor text and PageRank). The general idea is to affect Google's relevance algorithm by incorporating the keywords being targeted in various places "on page", in particular the title tag and the body copy (note: the higher up in the page, the better its keyword prominence and thus the ranking). Too many occurrences of the keyword, however, cause the page to look suspect to Google's spam checking algorithms.

The Google webmaster guidelines were published for website owners who would like to raise their rankings when using legitimate optimization consultants.[5]

Uses of Google

A corollary use of Google—and other Internet search engines—is that it can help translators to determine the most common way of expressing ideas in the English language (and other languages). This is generally done by doing a 'count' of different variants, thereby establishing which expression is more common. While this approach requires careful judgment, it does improve the ability of non-native translators to use more idiomatically correct English expressions.

Google dance

Google dance refers to the period of time when Google indices are tuned. This will often cause both a fluctuation in index size as well a significant change in a web site's search result position.

"Google Dance" also refers to the annual party at the Googleplex during the Search Engine Strategies San Jose conferences.

Functionality
 
Image of definition link provided for many search terms.

The Google search engine has many intuitive features making it more functional. This could have played a role in making it as popular as it is today. Google is one of the top ten most-visited websites today[6]. Some of its features include a definition link for most searches including dictionary words, a list of how many results you got on your search, links to other searches (e.g. you misspelled something, it gives you a link to the search results had you typed in the correct search), and many more. It is unknown whether functionality, speed, or luck brought it its peak status.

Search syntax

Google's search engine normally accepts queries as a simple text area, and breaks up the user's text into a sequence of search terms, which will usually be words that are to occur in the results, but may also be phrases, delimited by quotations marks ("), qualified terms, with a prefix such as "+", "-", or one of several advanced operators, such as "site:". The Google Help Pages document all of these additional queries.

Google's Advanced Search web form gives several additional fields which may be used to qualify searches by such criteria as date of first retrieval. All advanced queries transform to regular queries, usually with additional qualified terms.

Query expansion

Google applies query expansion to the submitted search query, transforming it into the query that will actually be used to retrieve results. As with page ranking, the exact details of the algorithm Google uses are deliberately obscure, but certainly the following transformations are among those that occur:
Term reordering: in information retrieval this is a standard technique to reduce the work involved in retrieving results. This transformation is invisible to the user, since the results ordering uses the original query order to determine relevance;
Common words, also called stop words, are selectively dropped, although they are still used in phrases and when they are qualified by the "+" prefix[1];
Stemming is used to increase search quality by keeping small syntactic variants of search terms[2];
There is a limited facility to fix possible misspellings in queries.

"I'm Feeling Lucky"

Google's homepage includes a button labeled "I'm Feeling Lucky". When a user clicks on the button the user will be taken directly to the first search result, bypassing the search engine results page. The thought is that, if a user is "feeling lucky", the search engine will return the perfect match the first time without having to page through the search results.

According to a study by Tom Chavez of "Rapt", this feature costs Google $110 million a year as 1% of all searches use this feature and bypass all advertising.[7]

Search engine features

Besides the main search engine feature of searching for text, the search engine can also be used as a calculator, base, unit and currency converter, dictionary and many other useful tools.

Error messages

Some searches will give a 403 Forbidden error with the text

"We're sorry... ... but your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application. To protect our users, we can't process your request right now. We'll restore your access as quickly as possible, so try again soon. In the meantime, if you suspect that your computer or network has been infected, you might want to run a virus checker or spyware remover to make sure that your systems are free of viruses and other spurious software. We apologize for the inconvenience, and hope we'll see you again on Google."

followed by a CAPTCHA prompt.

The screen was first reported in 2005, and was a response to the heavy use of Google by search engine optimization companies to check on ranks of sites they were optimizing. The message may also be triggered by high volumes of different searches from a single IP address. The block is removed after a day.[citation needed]

International

Google is available in many languages and has been localized for many countries[9].

Languages

Afrikaans

Albanian
Amharic
Arabic
Armenian
Azerbaijani
Basque
Belarusian
Bengali
Bihari
Bosnian
Breton
Bulgarian
Cambodian (Khmer)
Catalan
Chinese (Simplified)
Chinese (Traditional)
Corsican
Croatian
Czech Danish
Dutch
English
Esperanto
Estonian
Faroese
Filipino
Finnish
French
Frisian (West)
Galician
Georgian
German
Greek
Guarani
Gujarati
Hebrew
Hindi
Hungarian
Icelandic Indonesian
Interlingua
Irish
Italian
Japanese
Javanese
Kannada
Kazakh
Korean
Kurdish
Kyrgyz
Laothian
Latin
Latvian
Lingala
Lithuanian
Macedonian
Malay
Malayalam Maltese
Marathi
Moldavian (Romanian)
Mongolian
Nepali
Norwegian
Norwegian (Nynorsk)
Occitan
Oriya
Pashto
Persian
Polish
Portuguese (Brazil)
Portuguese (Portugal)
Punjabi
Quechua
Romanian
Romansh Russian
Scots Gaelic
Serbian
Serbo-Croatian
Sesotho
Shona
Sindhi
Sinhalese
Slovak
Slovene
Somali
Spanish
Sundanese
Swahili
Swedish
Tajik
Tamil
Tatar
Telugu
Thai Tigrinya
Tonga
Turkish
Turkmen
Twi
Uighur
Ukrainian
Urdu
Uzbek
Vietnamese
Welsh
Xhosa
Yiddish
Yoruba
Zulu


The interface has also been made available in some languages for humorous purpose:
Klingon
Bork, bork, bork!
Elmer Fudd
Hacker (actually leetspeak)
Pig Latin

Domain names

In addition to the main URL Google.com, Google owns 160 domain names for each of the countries/regions in which it has been localized.[9] As Google is an American company, the main domain name can be considered as the U.S. one though the gTLD .com can be used by any company in the world (not only those from the United States). Google.us does exist but is only a redirection to google.com because dot-US is by far less common than dot-com in the United States. An example is Google.ca or Google Aus.
List of domain names

Cybersquatting

Some domain names unregistered by Google are currently squatted:
Google.by (Belarus), the correct URL is google.com.by
Google.cm (Cameroon), common mis-typing of google.com (there is no localized version for Cameroon)

Search products
 List of Google products

In addition to its tool for searching webpages, Google also provides services for searching images, Usenet newsgroups, news websites, videos, searching by locality, maps, and items for sale online. In 2006, Google has indexed over 25 billion web pages, 1.3 billion images, and over one billion Usenet messages.[citation needed] It also caches much of the content that it indexes. Google operates other tools and services including Google News, Google Suggest, Google Product Search, Google Maps, Google Co-op and Google Desktop Search.

There are also products available from Google that are not directly search-related. Gmail, for example, is a webmail application, but still includes search features; Google Browser Sync does not offer any search facilities, although it aims to organize your browsing time.
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