Webware

Google, ever eager to renovate the computing industry for the benefit of the Web and its own business, is working to link two nascent but potentially significant projects, its experimental Go programming language and its Chrome Web browser.

Specifically, the company is building a foundation to let programs written in Go run directly within a Web browser endowed with Google's Native Client software. Native Client is designed to let browser-based programs run faster than is possible with today's widely used JavaScript; though it's still in its early stages, it's built into Chrome and available as a plug-in for other browsers.

A little poking around the Go source code reveals a reference to NaCl, the abbreviated name for Native Client. And Native Client is indeed on the Go agenda, said Rob Pike, one of the five core members of the Go team, in a Wednesday interview.

"We have an embryonic implementation of the NaCl support for Go using 8g," a compiler that produces code for x86 chips such as Intel's Core line, Pike said. "It's restricted by a couple of details of NaCl's implementation, but we hope to see changes to NaCl one day that will make Go a full-fledged language in that environment."

The Native Client compiler--the tool that converts what people write into software a computer can run--is specially modified to screen out a variety of software instructions that could expose a computer to an attack from a Native Client module downloaded off the Web. And the Native Client software itself checks such modules before they run. The result, if the security approach stands up to security scrutiny, is browser-based software that runs close to the speed of ordinary software that runs natively on a PC.

Native Client has been maturing, the most recent stage being inclusion of NaCl within Google's Chrome browser, though disabled by default for now. Google is using Chrome as a vehicle to distribute other Web technology, too, including Gears, which can let people use Gmail while offline, and WebGL, which gives hardware acceleration to 3D graphics in the browser.

Go is only experimental at this stage, but Google hopes to use it to produce some of the software running on its vast array of servers. Google's scale makes even academic projects potentially commercially relevant, which is enviable to many companies who've tried to get projects off the ground.

Indeed, an episode earlier in the Go team's history is illustrative. Pike, Unix co-inventor Ken Thompson, and Russ Cox all worked on the Plan 9 operating system project that, like Unix, began at Bell Labs. (Yes, Plan 9 is named after Ed Wood's famously bad movie, "Plan 9 from Outer Space.")

Unlike Unix, Plan 9 didn't have much commercial success, although Vita Nuova does sell a version called Inferno. Getting a mainstream operating system off the ground is hard: you must convince programmers, software companies, and hardware makers to embrace it; you must convince people to use it in the real world; and you must keep pace with the evolution of entrenched operating systems.

A bit of Plan 9 lives on inside the Go project, with various Plan 9 tidbits appearing in the Go source code. Pike, though, says there's not much.

"The 6g/8g/5g compilers are almost completely new but are tied to the open-source Plan 9 compiler suite's C compilers and linker," Pike said. "That's really about it except for the obvious historical connection for some of the protagonists: Ken, Russ, and myself."

Programming languages face similar challenges as operating systems in getting off the ground: A lot of interdependent elements in the ecosystem must all be built simultaneously. It's what's known in the trade as the chicken-and-egg problem: you can't make a chicken without an egg or vice versa.

But Google makes things different for Go. It's devoting real resources to the project and believes it could be useful on its own servers to run software such as the Gmail service Web browsers tap into. It's got the chicken and the egg under its own roof.

And with the money Google could save by increasing the performance or efficiency of its servers even just a fraction of a percent, it has abundant financial incentive to make things work.

Marrying Go to browsers is just another aspect of the same issue.

Assuming Go and Native Client mature enough to be useful, Google can't mandate that Web developers embrace them; indeed, they generally haven't embraced Gears even though it can help with some Web site matters. But again, Google has a browser and some awfully big Web sites it can use to get the ball rolling.

So just how do you say "poke" in Latin? It's "puncti," according to Facebook's newest language translation. The supposedly "dead" language--O.K., so the Others on "Lost" speak it sometimes--debuted as an official translation on the social network on Friday.

"Latin has joined the more than 70 languages we've made available on the site in the past two years, including some which have launched just today--Azeri, Faroese, Georgian and Nepali," a post on the company blog by Facebook's Elizabeth Linder read. "Some of these are languages that millions of people speak across the globe. Others are dialects that specific communities use in select geographic areas. Still others are just for fun: 'Pirate' may not appeal to everyone, but for those nostalgic for the days of Blackbeard and Captain Hook, it's there for you."

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg notably studied both ancient Greek and Latin in high school; interviews have said that when he enrolled at Harvard, which he ended up dropping out of to run Facebook full-time, he considered studying classics rather than computer science.

Most of Facebook's translations have been "crowdsourced" by users. Latin was a volunteer effort, too, according to the blog post, which must have been quite the operation considering the likes of Cicero and Ovid probably didn't use the term "news feed" colloquially.

"To students of Latin, the availability of the language on Facebook may be just what's needed to narrow the distance between themselves and the venerable language," Linder's post wrote. "While students of 'living languages' practice on subtitled films and in conversation groups, on vacations and with exchange students, Latin scholars soak in rare living breaths of their studied language, satisfying themselves with the occasional legal phrase, nursery plant, benediction or school motto."

Conveniently, that ubiquitous Facebook term "status" is the same in English and in Latin.

Google on Monday announced that it had added nine new languages to its Translate service.

Included in the update (which actually went live early last week) are Afrikaans, Belarusian, Icelandic, Irish, Macedonian, Malay, Swahili, Welsh, and Yiddish. This brings the total number of languages the service is able to translate to 51.

Like other Google Translate updates, these changes will eventually go out to other services where the machine translation is used, including Google Friend Connect, Google Talk, Gmail, and most recently Google Docs. However, the new languages have not shown up on any of those services just yet.

In late June, Google pushed out an alpha version of Persian translating to meet the needs of increased activity around the Iranian presidential elections. The company continues to note that Persian translations, along with some of these latest additions, will not be as precise as translations to and from some more widely used languages; it will take time to get the quality up to the same level as its Spanish, German, and French translations, which were the first to be offered.

Identify is a small, experimental Firefox extension that quickly analyzes a contact's user name to pull up biographical information, and grab links to their profiles on other social services. For instance, if I were to use it on Rafe Needleman's Twitter profile it would be able to tell me what other services he's using, like FriendFeed, Facebook, Last.fm, and more. The same thing would happen if I checked from his profile on one of those other sites, too.

At least that's how it's supposed to work. It did better on some of my friends than others. A lot of how well the extension can do depends on the two tools it's using to get the job done: Yahoo Query Language and Google's Social Graph API, the latter of which only discovers connections when they're both public and in its index. Creator Madgex has married the two tools together to quickly figure out where the profiles are and provide links directly to them.

The entire process only takes a few seconds, and works via a keyboard shortcut, Alt+i on PCs and Ctrl+i on Macs. This is easy to remember--unless you're going back and forth between machines.

An alternate to using services like this is to take someone's full user name and run it through a name checking service like the recently-reviewed KnowEm and Namechk. If they've got the same user name across multiple sites, this takes some of the gopher work off your plate.

If you like Google's translate service but want something that can do the same phrase in multiple languages at once and in real time, the Nice Translator is worth checking out.

This simple application uses Google Translate to do the heavy lifting. It lets users type in any phrase, in any language, then translates it into one of the other 34 available languages as they type.

The site works fairly well on mobile devices, including the iPhone, though not as well as Google's own mobile-translation page despite its one-language-at-a-time limitation.

[via FriendFeed]

SpeakLike uses quick automatic translation and human translators to break down language barriers over instant messaging.

It appears like an ordinary chat application as you type. Choose which languages you want to speak in. You can see what you're typing in your own language and what the other person is seeing translated. If a word or phrase is more complex, SpeakLike will go to a human translator and make sure it's accurate. The company says the more you use it the smarter it becomes and the faster it will return results in the future.

You can also add more than one person and language to the chat. Bonus: SpeakLike says it can automatically translate slang, idioms, and even instant-messaging shorthand. No word on whether it translates LOLcats.

UPDATE: Google representatives informed CNET News.com on Thursday that this "internal issue with Google Translate" has been fixed.

Gawker has unearthed a rather odd bug in the Google Translate software: its English-to-Spanish translator converts the name of the actor Heath Ledger, who died tragically on Tuesday, to the name of another actor--Tom Cruise. So if you enter in "I will miss Heath Ledger," Google Translate will come back with "Voy a perder Tom Cruise."

This looks like a simple bug in the system, perhaps the work of a bored Googler somewhere in the world. It only affects the English-to-Spanish translation; translations from English into other languages leave "Heath Ledger" intact, and "Tom Cruise" remains "Tom Cruise" in a Spanish-to-English translation. And the bug only appears to apply to the name "Heath Ledger," as substituting a number of other actors' names (Owen Wilson, John Travolta, Russell Crowe, Jake Gyllenhaal) also fails to yield "Tom Cruise."

It'd all be pretty funny were it not for the terrible circumstances surrounding Ledger, 28, who was found dead after an apparent overdose of sleeping pills; there's nothing tasteless about it, thankfully, but cracking jokes or hinting at Scientology conspiracies just doesn't seem all that fitting. We've contacted Google for comment. But we're guessing that this won't be a very pressing issue for Mountain View.

It's clear that a lot of work went into Mango's compendium of online language lessons. If the choice of 13 languages doesn't impress you, how about the fact that more than 100 lessons constitute each course, and between 70 and 150 slides or more add up to a single lesson? Or how about conversational lessons appearing in their own alphabet, with AJAX pronunciation pop-ups to reinforce the visual and phonetic learning combo?

To begin, choose a language from among Asian and Romance languages (or Pig Latin) for English speakers, or English lessons in Spanish and Polish. Like most language software, Mango shows and plays conversations between two people in a variety of social relationships. The next hundred or so slides dissect and recombine the conversation line by line and word by word until you've become familiar with the phrases by dint of repetition if not actual absorption. Each ensuing level builds on skills learned in the last.... Read more

My first thought when stepping into the Powerset offices: "Overfunded." The company, which aims to create a better search engine than Google, already has some of the search giant's trappings: fancy offices (though rented), a game room, and a victor's arrogance. Yet if the Powerset team can pull off what it's set out to do, it will indeed revolutionize search and the way people use the Web, not to mention its economics.

Only natural

Powerset is "natural language search." What that means is that instead of searching the Web based on keywords, like Google does, it searches on meaning. Powerset understands what a search query means, and it understands what every sentence it has indexed is about, too. The company's shining example (which is getting a little old) is this: If you enter the query, "politicians who died from disease," Powerset will return a list that begins, "Edward Heath," with the supporting snippet from Wikipedia, "Sir Edward heath died from pneumonia." It says this because it knows that Heath was Prime Minister of England (and thus a politician), and that pneumonia is a disease.

Understanding Web content this way is, as they say, nontrivial. Powerset acquired an exclusive license to a 35-year-old Xerox research exercise called XLE, which does the job. Powerset COO Steve Newcomb told me that recent breakthroughs in both the XLE algorithms and in technology (the predictable Moore's Law) have made it economically feasible to index the Web for meaning.

(Newcomb said it took a year and a half of negotiating to strike the license deal with PARC, Xerox's research arm spinout. The deal includes provisions that prevent any other company--like Google--from getting access to the technology even if the other company acquires Xerox or PARC.)

Building a semantic index, as opposed to simply a semantic search query parser, is fundamentally new and different, and if Powerset can pull it off, it will make Web searches more accurate and useful. No longer will users have to experiment with subtle variations in search queries to get useful results. Slight differences in wording that mean the same thing will pull up the same results. Also, Powerset technology enables the display of results that are more readable than Google's: Powerset highlights passages that answer the query, instead of simply flagging keywords that match.

The hype curve

Am I skeptical that this will work? Of course. For the past several months, Powerset has been slowly peeling back layers of its work, trying to stay just ahead of the building sentiment that it's more hype than reality. The demo is impressive, to be sure. But Whatsit-style queries are just one kind of search. And to date, no outsiders have been turned loose on Powerset's engine. Only Powerset execs drive during the public demos.

That changes in September, when Powerset will launch PowerLabs, a special site for early Powerset testers that will unleash the search technology on limited corpuses of knowledge, like Wikipedia. After a few months of beta testers banging on the algorithm--and Powerset tweaking its engine--it will shut down PowerLabs, turn its technology loose on the Web itself for a few months, and then launch Powerset proper.

Compute-bound

Powerset's search technology is more expensive to run than Google's. It takes more computing power to parse semantics than to simply index, and nearly 20 percent of Powerset's ongoing budget is spent on compute resources, Newcomb told me. That's an awful lot for a Web startup, and although the price of compute cycles keeps dropping, Powerset's technology will always cost more than other search engines.

So it remains to be seen how Powerset will make a buck, even if it is better than Google. Perhaps Google Adwords on Powerset's highly precise search results will be do the trick. I believe there is margin to spare in Google's advertising business, so even though Powerset queries are more expensive than Google's, the economics might work. Powerset can also be turned loose on corporate databases for the big bucks. Imagine what it could do for lawyers.

See also:

• ZDNet: Powerset: The natural language search mashup platform.
• TechCrunch: various stories on PowerSet.