Google’s motto is ‘Don’t be evil’. However, it is looks like anything and everything else imaginable is pretty much fair game

Nowadays, with a skyrocketing stock price, Google Inc. is the most engaging tech firm in this millennium. The firm is so active that it is hard to keep track of everything it does. Can you imagine how hard it is to handle many complex research projects? A difficult comes for a $167 billion company with 19,000 employees that trying to invent something new in many untouchable sectors. Who would have thought a search site company would get involved in laying a fiber-optic undersea cable between the Japan and U.S.?

Michael Gartenberg, an analyst of JupiterResearch, for one, is not put off by the wide range of directions the company has taken and occasional miscues. According to Gartenberg, the whole Google kingdom started as a research project, and it is a core in Google’s DNA to try and discover new things and figure out how to monetize them. Moreover, he said, “When you have a market cap like they do and the cash cow in the guise of paid search, they can keep experimenting. You need the financial wherewithal to support these projects, and plenty of smart people to carry them out. Google does not seem short on either”.

Rumors and Truth

There are some updates of Google’s most interesting projects, including some new details about energy initiatives, language translation, Android and a new facial recognition search technology. Moreover, the Web is rife with rumors about clandestine Google projects. Therefore, need to dig the company’s secretive to know more about what is really going on.

Android

Although the “gPhone” never materialized, Google has been planning something better: an operating system for phones called Android. It is partly a direct competitor to Microsoft’s Windows Mobile and partly an experiment in open-source development. Recently, Google held a contest for third-party developers to create innovative apps for Android. There are about 1,700 programmers took up the challenge.

Street View on an Android phone suddenly becomes much more powerful because its enable us to use it when we are standing on a street corner, trying to find an address.

Examples from the contest include way-finding apps that tap into the handheld’s GPS chip. One application lets users find a taxi based on where they are. Another app lets users find their friends’ locations and enable them to find out what they are doing and lets them create plans with them, with all the information tracked in real time. Some of these apps sound a bit theoretical at this point. The platform and phones will ship in the second half of 2008. However, Google did post a PDF that shows the top 50 winners in the first round of the challenge, along with screenshots.

According to Erick Tseng, Android product manager, it is a massive shift in thinking from the phone dictating what we can do to the device being open to any kind of content, service, provider and media. Moreover, he added, “There are clear benefits to the ecosystem, not just for the users, but also developers, carriers, providers”. Whatever phone we use today, think about the difficulty of getting content. Android has unfettered access to content. We never have to think about whether we are on this service or the provider I cannot get certain content.

On the other hand, Charles Golvin, a Forrester Research Inc. analyst covering Android, said, “I think the Android platform is a long-term play, and its short-term hiccups are no surprise. Google is intent on reaching consumers wherever they can, and it’s clear that, while Internet use on mobile phones is still limited, it is the next venue where Google can expect to interact with its customers.”

Facial Recognition Search

Nowadays, when we type “Paris Hilton” at Google.com, you will find images that other users have tagged. Yet tagging is a tedious process. At Flickr.com, for example, many images are left untagged, making it impossible to find them by searching. The more images stored without tags, the harder it is to find them. However, with Google’s new facial recognition technology, all these things will get easier and easy to find untagged images. Unlike the technology used for biometrics, where we can pass through a security checkpoint when a video camera confirms our identity, this image search is purely for finding the info that we want.

According to Shumeet Baluja, a Google research scientist, what Google did for text, Google’s researchers want to do for vision. They want to make images just as searchable and accessible as text. Can we imagine this scenario? Five years from now, when all of our digital photos are stored online, we decide what we want to search for pictures of our grandmother. With Google facial recognition technology, we might start with a source scan that measures the distance between the eyes, arrangement of nose, ears, eyes and other data. Just in seconds, we find every image we have ever uploaded and any image stored anywhere online.

Language Translation

Translation has been an important idea of research for years, especially as part of search engines such as Alta Vista. Google has made progress with the vast number of languages it has made available for translation, including Arabic, Russian and the recent addition of Hindi. Another innovation is in researching the rules applied to machine translation based on cultural phenomena of languages that requires a great deal of computer processing.

According to Franz Och, a Google machine translation research scientist, the more rules used, the better the quality of the translation. If we want to perform an English-to-Hindi translation, for example (which has a small subset of the language pairs [matching words] of French or Spanish) the smaller the language, the more important machine translation becomes. Finnish is a challenging language because of the morphology. One word could have all kinds of information inherent to it. Other language translations are more complicated because there are so many differences between the languages. Nice languages with historic roots and similarities are easier, like French to English.

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