Google’s Project 10 to the 100th–a contest celebrating the company’s 10th anniversary–asked participants in September 2008 to submit ideas that could help change the world. Google is giving the five winners a collective $10 million to fund their projects. However, because there were more than 150,000 submissions, Google is still deliberating between 16 newly-released finalists. [...]

Iterative ranking methods predate Google’s PageRank algorithm for ranking the importance of Web pages by nearly 60 years, according to “PageRank: Stand on the shoulders of giants,” a new study by University of Udine computer scientist Massimo Franceschet. He says economist Wassily W. Leontief discussed an iterative method for ranking industries in a 1941 paper, [...]

In a sweeping Internet freedom speech, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called for a global Internet free of censorship in response to claims that hackers targeted Chinese human rights activists’ Google accounts. The U.S. State Department has sent a formal request to the Chinese government asking for a review of the claims. Clinton also [...]

Google has threatened to withdraw from China following a computer network attack targeting its email service and corporate infrastructure. Google claimed to have proof suggesting that “a primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists,” while noting that at least 20 other large firms have been targeted by [...]

Google developers Lars and Jens Rasmussen have released a limited preview of an open source messenger called Wave. Users must be invited to test the application, but can then send five more invitations to friends. Wave conversations can be edited like Wikipedia Web pages, with a log tracking who has made what alterations and when. [...]

Google Fast Flip is a new service designed to make it easier for users to read newspaper and magazine articles by facilitating the viewing of articles from dozens of major publishers. Readers can flip through the articles as rapidly as they would the pages of a magazine. “Browsing news on the Web is much slower [...]

Google engineers are experimenting with interfaces for Android mobile phones that can be operated without any visual attention. At the Google I/O annual developer’s conference, research scientist T.V. Raman demonstrated an adaptive, circular interface for phones that provides audio and tactile feedback. Raman says Google is building a user interface that goes beyond the screen. [...]

The growth of the Web has facilitated a revolution in translation technologies that are primarily based not on language rules but on vast volumes of text translated by humans into different languages. For example, Google’s Translate project can instantaneously translate text among 41 languages. Google research director Peter Norvig’s vision for Google Translate is to [...]

Physicist Stephen Wolfram says the goal of his free Wolfram Alpha program, which will be available to the public starting in the middle of May, is to “make expert knowledge accessible to anyone, anywhere, anytime.” Wolfram’s computational knowledge engine was recently demonstrated at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. It is designed to [...]

Parallel SQL databases perform up to 6.5 times faster than Google’s MapReduce data-crunching technology, concludes a new research paper by Microsoft technical fellow David DeWitt and Vertica Systems chief technology officer Michael Stonebraker. The paper, “A Comparison of Approaches to Large-Scale Data Analysis,” will be published by ACM in the June 29-July 2 issue of [...]