think differently big

The Mobile Market: Google, Apple, Microsoft, Motorola

Horace Dediu’s article in HBR.org and his latest podcast are a must read-listen for everyone interested in the mobile market:

When it took its approach to mobile software, Google made a big bet that smartphones and tablets were sufficiently mature and thus could be built in a way that didn’t require Google owning all points of the value chain. For the last year it seemed that Google bet right. Android was very quickly adopted by licensees to the point that it achieved nearly 50% share in smartphone shipments last quarter.

However, lately, cracks began to appear in the strategy.

Google vs Bing Search

Facts:

1. Google sets up a set of fake results that afterwards show up in Bing results

   1. Each of the fake results returns only 1 result
   2. There’s no mention of how many such fake results have been tested and was the percentage of those showing up in Bing
   3. For some of the fake results, Bing is trying to suggest other searches. Google does not.

2. Microsoft is using clickstream information as one of the ranking algorithm parameters.

   Questions:

   1. Isn’t Google toolbar collecting similar data for the same purpose?
   2. What are the major differences in clickstream collection between the two toolbars?

3. Google accuses Microsoft for “copying” Google’s search results.

My thoughts:

1. If these were fake searches with a single result, there are big chances that the information available through the clickstream was the only available.

2. The fact that Bing tries to suggest other related searches while Google is not doing it makes me think that:

   • not only point 1) above is true
   • but also that Microsoft’s statement of using thousands of parameters is also true (nb: nothing unnexpected here. I think the last search engine using a single set of parameters disappeared 20+ years ago)

My conclusion(s):

1. Google is starting to forget the “Don’t be evil part” and goes after each of its competitors in any way they can imagine (Apple, Microsoft).
2. After leading the search market for 10+ years and owning this market with a very comfortable percentage, Google is starting to feel that competitors are up to something.

Speculation:

The fact that Google accusses such a young competitor makes me think that Google has hit a wall in its attempt to improve its current algorithms and so it starting to fear its competitors.

Disclaimer: This represent a personal perspective on the subject.

Google App Engine Updates

I haven’t upgraded the Python Google App Engine in a while and now I’m trying to catch up with the latest changes.

Version 1.4.0

• The developer who uploaded an app version can download that version’s code using the appcfg.py download_app command. This feature can be disabled on a per application basis in the admin console, under the ‘Permissions’ tab. Once disabled, code download for the application CANNOT be re-enabled.

• Size and quantity limits on datastore batch get/put/delete operations have been removed. Individual entities are still limited to 1 MB, but your app may batch as many entities together for get/put/delete calls as the overall datastore deadline will allow for.

  I think this was previously set to 500.

• The total size of Memcache batch operations is increased to 32 MB. The 1 MB limit on individual Memcache objects still applies.

  I have an extension which allows storing larger objects into Memcache.

• URLFetch allowed response size has been increased, up to 32 MB. Request size is still limited to 1 MB.

• For the Task Queue, developers can specify task retry_parameters in their queue.yaml.

  More details here. The new retry_parameters supports the following additional options:

  • task_retry_limit
  • min_backoff_seconds
  • max_backoff_seconds
  • max_doublings
  • task_age_limit

• The deadline for Task Queue and Cron requests has been raised to 10 minutes. Datastore and API deadlines within those requests remain unchanged.

• Task Queue has been officially released, and is no longer an experimental feature. The API import paths that use ‘labs’ have been deprecated. Task queue storage will count towards an application’s overall storage quota, and will thus be charged for.

• Developers can now enable Warmup Requests. By specifying a handler in an app’s app.yaml, App Engine will attempt to send a Warmup Request to initialize new instances before a user interacts with it. This can reduce the latency an end-user sees for initializing your application.

  More details here.

Version 1.4.1

• The deadline for offline URL Fetch API requests for Python and Java have been increased to a maximum of 10 minutes. The default deadline for offline URL Fetch requests remains the same.

  This refers to URL Fetch requests sent from cron jobs and tasks. (see this)

  According to this: “You can set a deadline for a request, the most amount of time the service will wait for a response. By default, the deadline for a fetch is 5 seconds. The maximum deadline is 10 seconds.”

• During application creation, developers can choose between two Datastore configurations: High Replication or Master/Slave. See this.

• You can set your application’s datastore to read-only mode in the Admin Console. Any writes attempted while the app is set to read-only will throw a CapabilityDisabledError. This feature can be helpful for migrating or copying data between two applications. See read-only mode.

• The Datastore Admin tool has been updated to allow copying of one app’s datastore to another. The destination app must have the Remote API enabled. See docs.

Others

• You can use the Python standard libraries urllib, urllib2 or httplib to make HTTP requests. When running in App Engine, these libraries perform HTTP requests using App Engine’s URL fetch service, which runs on Google’s scalable HTTP request infrastructure.

The Almighty Google Search

If these dime-store scrapers were doing so well and generating so much traffic on the back of our content – how was the rest of the web faring? My enduring faith in the gravitational constant of Google had been shaken. Shaken to the very core.

codinghorror.com

1. If you are Wikipedia, you have a special flag in Google Search.
2. If you are StackOverflow, you may get a couple of Google people to look into the issue.

But what if you are any of the other thousands of millions of websites or just a blog?

I guess from Google’s perspective it’s some sort of a win-win situation:

• the reader is still getting the content they’ve searched for
• Google makes money from the ads sold on the sites copying content

Google is only forgetting the last part of this equation: the content producers.

Google App Engine and Deployment Times

Just a follow up to Google App Engine and its Status reports.

Current status: everything OK

Deployments: not quite OK

In fact, deployments not at all OK

It becomes clearer and cleared why Google App Engine doesn’t speak too often about SLAs. It’s not that Google cannot go down, but at least make sure your status report is accurate and stop your PR from pushing BS all around.

Google App Engine and Its Uptime

Following screenshots should speak for themselves:

System status: No errors or service disruption

Still access☞ http://appengine.google.com/ results in 500 errors

That’s high availability and trustworthy monitoring tools on Google App Engine.

Update: This was a temporary issue. But it doesn’t seem to show up in the monitoring dashboard.