Google Instant has been launched in India.
“In just one week, we saw an increase in the relative number of search sessions starting on the Google homepage, likely because they want to use Instant. Google Instant currently only works on the Google homepage and results page, not in other places such as browser search boxes, the Google Toolbar, and the Chrome Omnibox. As people have learned about Google Instant, many seem to be searching more on the homepage in order to use the feature.
We are thrilled to be bringing Google Instant to India, and we look forward to hearing what you think.” – blog.
Note: At the time of writing this, we didn’t see the implementation live on Google India domain.
Facebook & LBS Patent
Facebook has been granted a patent that could have a long term impact on several startups betting on locations.
Here are the details (main points highlighted).
Systems and methods for automatically locating web-based social network members
Systems and methods for automatically locating web-based social network members are provided. According to one embodiment, contact content including an associated GPS identifier and status for web-based social network members located at or near the same location automatically appears on a GPS-enabled device. A further exemplary system includes a GPS-enabled device configured to receive a GPS identifier and a status representing a location and a current state for a web-based social network member, a processing module that associates the received GPS-identifier and the received status, and a communications module that sends the associated GPS-identifier and status to a server comprising a web-based social network database. Contact content in a web-based social network database record in the web-based social network database is updated to include the associated GPS identifier and status for the web-based social network member [details].
On a similar note, Google Latitude has now enabled tracking friends from the website.
Facebook has also launched couple of new features – ability to download your data, and a revamped ‘Groups’.
Twitter Gets a New Search
Back to Lucene!
About 6 months ago, we decided to develop a new, modern search architecture that is based on a highly efficient inverted index instead of a relational database. Since we love Open Source here at Twitter we chose Lucene, a search engine library written in Java, as a starting point.
Our demands on the new system are immense: With over 1,000 TPS (Tweets/sec) and 12,000 QPS (queries/sec) = over 1 billion queries per day (!) we already put a very high load on our machines. As we want the new system to last for several years, the goal was to support at least an order of magnitude more load [source].