Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance Update

On January 13, 2011 the Yahoo & Microsoft Search Alliance Team has accomplished a new milestone. According to Yahoo’s announcement they have moved one step ahead with transition of some Yahoo search backend functions to Microsoft search platform. This team has just completed the organic search process for three major countries Australia, Brazil & Mexico.

Yahoo has also announced to continue their efforts for quality transition with worldwide publishers & advertisers.

Keep visiting this blog to find more updated information.

Browse Google Maps to Find Friends Hotpot Activity

Google Hotpot is a local recommendation engine where you and your friends can discover, rate and review your favorite places.

On January 11, Google has made an announcement that Google Maps home page will now show the hotpot activities.

To see it, just login to your Google Account and visit Google Maps. You will see that the left panel which used to blank formerly; is now showing latest hotpot activities of your friends. It shows how effectively Google is utilizing this space in Google Maps Home Page.

You can also see the friend’s hotpot activities, when you search on Google Places.

But this new feature is in its beta version. You can see some changes along with time. Visit Google Maps today to find the places recommended by your friends.

Google Partners with Edgenet for High Quality Product Data

Google has taken an initiative to show high quality product data, it will help you for finding products offline in local stores. Google has also recently launched a new shopping website named Boutiques.com. You can browse more products with additional improvements in Google Product Search. There are also product listing ads which are open for US advertisers since last November.

In short, there are lot of improvements in Google Product Search and Product Advertising by Google. Now you can get more detailed data through Google’s Partnership with Edgenet.

Edgenet is a leading product content collection company to drive first time offering to manufacturers and suppliers. Edgenet has described its relationship with Google in following words…

“This service delivers complete and correct product information to help consumers find the products they’re looking for on Google.com and Google Product Search…….. Ensuring that shoppers have access to accurate and complete product data will improve the online shopping experience, and help consumers, retailers and suppliers”

This product data quality will ensure product content meets and standards which are set by Google. You can simple check a product page to find more information.

 

This high quality product data has also impacted organic search results on Google. A search result page for Canon digital camera will now look like below.

You can see the product search images in the center of the page while product listing ads are on the right of the page.

I am sure that this improved Product Search will help you in finding your product quickly.

Google Architecture Overview

In this post, I will tell you how the whole Google Search Engine system works.  You can see the complete Google functioning in below figure.

This is a high level Google Architecture; several distributed crawlers are used for downloading web pages from the web. URLserver sends list of urls to the crawlers. Then crawler fetches the web pages and sends them to the storeserver. Then the storeserver compresses the fetched web pages and stores them in a repository. Each web page has a associated id number which is called docID. docID is assigned when any url is parsed from a web page. The indexer part reads the repository, uncompresses and parses the documents. The documents are converted into hits (i.e. set of word occurrences).  The indexer then distributes these hits into various set of barrels.

The indexer parses all the links in web pages and stores important information in an anchors file. The file contains all information regarding a link.

The URLresolver takes data from anchors file & convert relative urls into absolute urls, then turn them into docIDs. URLresolver also generates links database, which is used to calculate page rank of all documents.

The sorter takes barrelts data and resorts them by wordID and create an inverted index.

The sorter generates list of wordIDs and offsets into an inverted index. A program called DumpLexicon takes this list together with the lexicon produced by the indexer and generates a new lexicon to be used by the searcher. The searcher is run by a web server and uses the lexicon built by DumpLexicon together with the inverted index and the PageRanks to answer queries.

Referred by: The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine