Mark Gilbert’s Blog

Google’s URL indel has now hit one trillion for the first time. 26 million was the size of their first index in 1998, with 1billion being reached in 2000. The Google Blog has a nice write up of how they manage to achieve this feat. Makes for an interesting read.

Back then [In 1998], we did everything in batches: one workstation could compute the PageRank graph on 26 million pages in a couple of hours, and that set of pages would be used as Google’s index for a fixed period of time. Today, Google downloads the web continuously, collecting updated page information and re-processing the entire web-link graph several times per day

Cheers

Tonight I browsed to my usual Google homepage to be presented with a rather unusual sight, Google had turned the lights out, the Google homepage result is shown below.

Google users in the United Kingdom will notice today that we “turned the lights out” on the Google.co.uk homepage as a gesture to raise awareness of a worldwide energy conservation effort called Earth Hour. As to why we don’t do this permanently - it saves no energy; modern displays use the same amount of power regardless of what they display. However, you can do something to reduce the energy consumption of your home PC by joining the Climate Savers Computing Initiative.

On Saturday, March 29, 2008, Earth Hour invites people around the world to turn off their lights for one hour – from 8:00pm to 9:00pm in their local time zone. On this day, cities around the world, including Copenhagen, Chicago, Melbourne, Dubai, and Tel Aviv, will hold events to acknowledge their commitment to energy conservation.

Given our company’s commitment to environmental awareness and energy efficiency, we strongly support the Earth Hour campaign, and have darkened our homepage today to help spread awareness of what we hope will be a highly successful global event.

How green can you be? The UK’s carbon footprint is over 500 million tonnes of CO2 per year. Individuals account for 45% of this. Calculate your carbon footprint and find out how you can reduce it by turning off unused lights and other carbon-reducing actions.

I like to think I do my little bit, I don’t drive a huge car, I turn off lights when not in use and try to make sure TV’s are not left on standby. I suppose I could do more with regards to powering my computer off when not in use, but then it does already sleep when I’m away from it.

Here’s a good question, what’s the craziest thing you’ve done to save the environment? Answers in the comment section.

Cheers

Yesterday Google purged it’s search index of reportedly over 40,000 links to sites containing malware. Over the last few months Sunbelt, the company that produces the Counterspy application, have been tracking the sites and the SEO techniques these sites have been using to get themselves to the top of the Google ranks.

There is some nice dissection of the malware links over at the Sunbelt blog.

The SEO side of things was done using a bot net to post thousands upon thousands of link in forums and comment systems to the dodgy sites in question, which is what nailed them the top Google ranks.

The malware at the heart of it all is called “Scam.Iwin” by Sunbelt, which turns infected PCs into zombie units to join the bot net and post all the needed links to crack the Google Page Rank algorithm.

So let this be a lesson to all of you, keep your machines patched and anti-virus software updated on a regular basis. Personally for Windows users I would have to recommend Kaspersky Internet Secuirty, it really seems like the best product going. High detection and removal rates, and I speak from experience when talking about it, I’ve used it at work on machines and it is leagues ahead of Norton or McAfee.

Cheers