Search

How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture.


By John Battelle

This book is big picture about the past, present and future of search technology and the enormous impact it's starting to have on market, media and about every other sphere of human interest and how it has become gateway to the instant knowledge. Battelle calls it database of intentions : the aggregate results of every search ever entered, and every result list ever tendered and every path taken as result.Link by link,click by click, search is building possibly the most lasting, ponderous and significant cultural artifact in the history of human kind.In the second chapter, author discusses about how search engine works like the main pieces - crawl, the index, the runtime system or query processor and related software that connects user's queries to the index and some alogorithms.The author gives some insight into who searches the web,why, where and when and how search economy works based on paid ads. The author give history of search from Archie days and then Alta-vista, Excite, Yahoo, AOL, MSN and Google days which is quite interesting. The author has detailed chapter on how Google is born and how it emerged and survived in internet era and how it prospered from zero to billion dollar company in 2000-2004 period.Author has discussed about search, privacy issue and PATRIOTIC ACT in separate chapter.The book also gives information on search engine optimization(SEO),white hat SEO, black hat SEO and search engine marketing. The last chapter is equally interesting where author talks about perfect search and future of search , how it can be made more intelligent,clickstream, semantic web and can we give sentence like query or time bound query to search and idea about vertical engines - federated and domain specific like Global Spec and can we build sort of artificial intelligience into search ?
Overall it is informative book giving depth and breadth to an area we really do not think that much about.

The Present

By Spencer Johnson

The Gift that Makes You Happy and Successful at Work and in Life

For over two decades, Spencer Johnson has been inspiring and entertaining millions with his simple yet insightful stories of work and life that speak directly to the heart and soul.The Present is an engaging story of a young man's journey to adulthood, and his search for The Present, a mysterious and elusive gift he first hears about from a great old man. This Present, according to the old man, is "the best present a person can receive." Later, when the boy becomes a young man, disillusioned with his work and his life, he returns to ask the old man, once again, to help him find The Present.The old man responds, "Only you have the power to find the Present for yourself." So the young man embarks on a tireless search for this magical gift that holds the secret to his personal happiness and business success.It is only after the young man has searched high and low and given up his relentless pursuit that he relaxes and discovers the present —and all of the promises it offers.
The Present will help you focus on what will make you happy and successful in your work and in your personal life. Like the young man, you may find that it is the best gift you can ever give yourself - our present.

World Is Flat

by Thomas L. Friedman

In this book" world is flat" , the author demystifies this brave new world for readers allowing them to make sense of the often bewildering global scene unfolding before their eyes.In the opening chapter author describes why the great challenge of our time will be to absorb these changes in ways that do not overwhelm people but also do not leave them behind.The author researched that there are ten forces that flattened the world.

1. Flattener 1 : When the Berlin wall came down and open the new window.

The fall of the Berlin wall unleashed forces that ultimately liberated all the captive people of the Soviet Empire,but it actually did so much more.It tipped the balance of power across the world towards those advocating democratic,free market oriented governance and away from those advocating centrally planned economies.For some this was unwelcome transformation,because communism was great system for making people equal,author describes by giving various example how the fall of the wall flatten the alternatives to free-market capatalism.This period from 11/9 to the mid-1990s led to huge advance in personal empowerment, even if computer networks were of limited capabilities.

2.Falttener 2: 8/9/1995 When the Netscape went Public

This next phase of flattening was to go from PC based computing to internet based computing.The killer applications that drove this new phase were e-mail and Intenet Browsing .Netscape alongwith PC boom and launch of windows 95,set off an explosion in demand for all things digital and sparked the Internet boom and people began looking
at everything digitized-data,inventories,commerce,books,music,photos. This led to the dot-com stock bubble and massive overinvestment in the fiber optic cable needed to carry all the digital information. It was actually the coincidence of the dot-com boom and the Telecommunications Act of 1996 that launched the fiber optic bubble which allowed local and long distance companies to get into each other's business and enabled all sorts of competition head-to-head.This phase from PC-Windows phase to Netscape Browsing-email phase enabled more people to communicate and intract with each other and changed the way we do business.

3. Flattener 3 : Workflow Software
For the world to get flat, all your internal departments -sales, marketing, R&D, manufacturing, billing and inventory etc, had to become interoperable, no matter what machines or software each of them running and all of your system needs to be interoprable with all other systems of other companies, that is where XML, SOAP, WEBServices and workflow softwares, came as quiet revolution. Author has given various examples like the way PayPal operates, way DELL, IBM does business to
share and exchange information.

4. Flattener 4: Open Sourcing.
Free software movement,emergence of Apache, GNU, Linux, repository like CVS and projects like wikipedia and how it changed the world. Author also described the serious challenges it poses to big global players like Microsoft and others and what their thoughts are about free software with respect to innovation culture.

5. Flattener 5 : Y2K and OutSourcing
In this chapter author described India at length and how America became the buyer of India's brainpower and how outsourcing revolution began with GE coming over to India and later Texas Instruments and how other American companies started to discover that they could draw on India's brainpower right in India itself.Author described how Y2K
fueled it further globalization.

6.Flattener 6 : OffShoring
The author describes that on Dec 2001, with China joining WTO, gave boost to another form of collaboration - Offshoring and how ever since the world started running faster and faster. Offshoring process began in the range of industries -from textiles to consumer electronics to furniture and how other developing countries like Malaysia, Thailand, Ireland, Mexico, Brazil etc joined the offshoring pool and created a process of competitive fattening. The author has given numerous examples from China and Japan and how they are reshaping the flattened world.

7. Flattener 7: Supply-Chaining.example of Wal-mart and how they are shrinking the world.
8.Flattener 8 : Insourcing .Here the example of smart way UPS operates and helps flattened the world.
9. Flattener 9: In-forming Yahoo,web search
10 Flattener 10 :Digital Steroids like wireless, digital audio,video,streaming media on single platform.

The issues like Glocalization -culture issues and adptability to the flattened world is discussed, how companies are coping with it is detailed. Also, the most important the issue of security and challenges of the complex world in flattened world like do we feel secure today that the world in which we are living is as safe and sound as it was before flattening era??

Testing and Quality Assurance for Component-Based Software

By Jerry Zeyu Gao,H.S. Jacob Tsao and Ye Wu
This book covers concepts and fundamentals for component based software testing,validation methods for software components and component based programs,strategies for black box and white box testing and integration,regression and performance testing of component based software.
The book starts with detail description of differences between reusable software module and software component which people often misunderstand and challenges involved in testing component based programs since the source code is not available to the end users from vendor.The author describes additional testing and validation tasks necessitated by the additional explicit requirements regarding interoperability, portability, usability, reusability.
The author describes issues in testing and validation tasks resulting from the criticality of component quality, in terms of functionality, performance, interface, interoperability, and portability, due to the high potential of widespread reuse in diverse application and operational environments. The last chapters are devoted to certification and standards for software components.