Rainer Feike techblog

Today I read a lot about the new “Google Gears” project. And it makes me wonder what google is doing here. Google Gears is a mix of a runtime-environment and an API to develop applications that run online as well as offline.

At a first impression it reminds me for old battles like with “Lotus Notes” where one could synchronize online and offline data. Simple for EMails but horrible for i.e. documents and complicated database content.

So why is google joining this business? My only explanation is, that they want to support their online application market (like their google-docs and picassa) by adding strong offline and synchronization capabilities. Making web applications run offline in a browser is one more step away from a single-user desktop PC - and from the OS needed here.

With their runtime-environment, google adds like an apache, and a mySQL Server to your PC. To synchronize the data on your local PC with your host system, google suggest a online synchronization via ajax technics (see here).

I will examine this in detail later because it is interesting. But for this time, I can not see how google will handle the more complicated problems of synchronization (like missed merges, concurrency problems, huge amounts of data …).

Google ist extending their power in a very new way. They redefine searching in the internet by giving pages value depending on how many people visit the page, where they come from and how long they stay.

How do they do this? The key is their Analytics -Knowledge. Because Google-Analytics is the very best website analysis tool - best in content, best in drilling down, best in installation effort, best in cost, best in speed - everybody uses it. And because every webmaster is using Google-Analytics Google knows where the webusers go to.

By using simple statistics Google can relay on their knowledge by at least - let’s say 95%. They know how many websites exist, and they know how many websites are using Analytics. The rest is simple statistics.

So, while all the SEO’s are staring at the pagerank, Google is redesigning their search algorithm. Important is what attracts people, valuable is what keeps them staying a long time, sustaining is what makes them come back. It will be a little bit like yellow press.

In the end, I think all over valuable content for the masses will make the race to the Google Top Ten. What is still necessary to make it perfect for Google is some semantic knowledge. I am keen on Google’s next “free-of-charge” product.

In any case the losers will be msn, yahoo, altavista… they don’t have the Analytics, their search results will stay miserable.