Google’s distributed search model is at the foundation of the Internet giant’s current dominance in search. In the video below, one of Google’s founders, Sergey Brin, speaks at length about his company. You’ll need to turn the volume up on this one.

It should come as no surprise, therefore, that Google is rejecting claims of patent infringement made in a lawsuit brought by the Jarg Corporation, a Massachusetts-based technology company.

In this video, Brad Fallon of FreeInlineReport.com reports on ICANN’s decision to remove the five trial period of owning a domain name. Brad notes that the decision followed Google’s move to block AdSense from websites less than five days old.

From the video notes on YouTube:

Following Google’s decision last week to block AdSense from web sites less than five days old, it looks like ICANN is removing the five day trial period for owning a domain name. This would stop the practice that was abused by “Domain Tasters” — people who take out a name for four days, put up Google ads, collect the money from the ads, and then cancel the name before they have to pay for it.

Van Jacobsen knows networking. After all, he is is one of the primary contributors to TCP/IP, the protocol that underlies the modern Internet.

This Google TechTalk features Jacobsen describing the concept of data-centric or content-centric networking. The central principle of data-centric networking is that a given communications network should enable data retrieval from where ever it exists, similar to the P2P model, as opposed to references a specific, physical location for retrieval.

Watch the video below to learn more.

Google’s Matt Cutts has long since become the blogosphere’s “go to guy” for information on SEO and webmaster guidelines. WhatIs.com’s Word of the Day today, phantom page, has a link to his commentary on detecting undetectable webspam, for instance. I like the term “webspam,” incidentally, as it neatly describes spamming the entire web, as opposed to individual inboxes or SMS gateways. The video below features Matt Cutts debunking five different SEO myths. The video is from 2006 but is still quite relevant.

While it’s true that there are many other SEO bloggers and a burgeoning industry in search engine marketing, none are quite so well placed within the search engine giants nor so willing to share best practices and commentary. Thanks for your contributions to the Web community, Matt.

Now is your chance to join Project Virgle, the first permanent human colony on Mars.

In 2008, April Fools’ Day Jokes are everywhere. Here’s a roundup list of some of the best/worst of the lot.

Gday, MATE, from Google Australia. Future search! A great follow-up from the company that has brought us Google MentalPlex and PigeonRank technologies, along with openings for Googlelunaplex on the moon and a smart-drink called GoogleGulp! MATE™ stands for Machine Automated Temporal Extrapolation.

Google’s prank in the US, Google Custom Time, involves messing about with time as well, utilizing “an e-flux capacitor to resolve issues of causality (see Grandfather Paradox).” Send your emails back in time! Amaze your friends!

YouTube links will RickRoll you. All of the featured videos for YouTube UK and YouTube Australia link to aRick Astley video. If you aren’t familiar with RickRolling - it’s when someone puts a link on website to something, but it actually takes you to a music video of Rick Astley’s ‘ Never Gonna Give You Up.’

TechCrunch sues Facebook for $25 million in Statutory Damages. You have to get to the end before the jokiness shows up. Can you tell Michael is a lawyer?

Shakespeare Ghost Writer. Because everyone needs the bard.

Pay Per Tweet from Problogger. This one spawned some pretty funny reactions on Twitter when it was announc

Even our friends over at CNET are getting into the fun, reporting that TechCrunch has acquired TigerBeat and renamed it CrunchKids.

Watch out, however, as there’s a major backlash brewing in the blogosphere. ValleyWag’s Paul Boutin captured the zeitgeist quite succintly in Your April Fools’ Prank Sucks:

April Fools’ Day in tech has devolved over the past two decades into lazy online hoaxes… Worse, the goal is no longer in-house camaraderie, but Internet publicity. Some companies notify the press of their hoaxes a week early, in hopes of securing coverage. We thought about running their emails as they came in, just to pop their bubbles. But there’s no laugh in giving away an unfunny joke. Look, if you want attention, why not ship a real product? That seems easier.

Anil Dash elaborated further, stating that Your April Fools’ Day Joke Continues to Suck.

Ouch. Ok, guys. We get it. But I’m still laughing. I’ve even posted a prank played upon me from last year on the right, a well-implemented foiling of my desk and everything on it.

If you’re hungry for more, there are some hoary classics out there, like John C. Dvorak’s Drunk Modeming and April Fools’ Phone from Penn & Teller. WhatIs.com’s joke for the day was Electricity over IP , if you missed it. Michael Morisey had some fun at Cisco’s expense over at SearchNetworking.com, too. Make sure to read Cisco re-thinks Layer 8 networking with green components to learn about The Human-Like Network.

Slashdot is having a merry time with an April Fools’ Day Prank Roundup thread that includes a five pranks you can build in the office, Wired’s top 10 practical jokes for nerds, Lifehacker’s Top 10 harmless geek pranks and Jack Shafer’s guide over at Slate.com on how to protect yourself from the media’s prankish habits. Jack linked to the Top 100 April Fools’ Day Hoaxes Of All Time, which shouldn’t be missed.

The folks over at /. did miss a few, however.

• ReadWriteWeb posted 10 Places to Get Fooled on April 1st
• Ask Metafilter is collecting suggestions for great office pranks
• PCWorld has a list of the 10 Ten April Fools’ Day websites, many of which you’ll see above

Unfortunately, I have work to do (a host of new definitions, naturally) but Patrick Altoft is liveblogging April Fools’ Day 2008. Just check in with him to see what’s new. April Fools’ Day on the Web is doing a great job of cataloging new pranks as well.

***
UPDATE: I couldn’t resist. Thanks to a tweet from Dan Sandler, I learned about the announcement of a Legend of Zelda movie.

UPDATE: I think this one takes the cake for most chutzpah, given that both parties are publicly traded: Infoworld announces that Microsoft and Yahoo! have agreed on a buyout price.

UPDATE: And as the day comes to a close, Wikipedia’s entry for April 1, 2008 has over 158 different hoaxes and jokes that were made in the news media, in sports, in video games, on websites, on television, in podcasts, and on the radio.

I bet my friend Brian’s favorite is the report from Chicago Public Radio that “Major League Baseball has retroactively awarded the 1945 World Series title to the Chicago Cubs, due to an alleged ineligible playere appearing on the roster of the Detroit Tigers.”

Personally, I can’t wait to get my hands on some Spazztroids to munch on while I queue up my Betamax to HD-DVD Converter to watch old episodes of the Muppet Show. (Thanks, Thinkgeek!) I hope they can distract me from the USB Pregnancy Test I’m giving my PC.

This Google Tech Talk addresses each of the new features in the upcoming standard for C++. You can read more about them in depth at the Wikipedia entry for the new standard, C++0x.

In this line of work, I can’t help but encounter an awful lot of IT buzzwords. I even write a newsletter dedicated to picking the latest and greatest of ‘em. Thankfully, one of the guiding principles of WhatIs.com has always been to decode the tech jargon and spin and explain what something is, who invented it, how it works and why it might be important. Some concepts, like Web 2.0 or SOA, can be a bit tricky to tackle, nearly defying definition. That brings me to the subject of this post: cloud computing. The meme isn’t from just one company or tech visionary trying to gain momentum, either.

Google’s Eric Schmidt is talking about cloud computing, in the context of search and advertising networks — and in the wake of a (predicted) partnership with Apple as the good folks at Cupertino revamp a somewhat tired .Mac offering before the iPhone debuts, it’s not hard to see why.

George Gilder (one of those tech visionaries, without a doubt) thinks the desktop is dead and extols the coming age of the Internet cloud in the pages of Wired, certainly no stranger to cyber-utopian manifestos. In “Information Factories,” he makes quite a case for the upcoming “Petabyte Age”:

We’re all petaphiles now, plugged into a world of petabytes, petaops, petaflops. Mouthing the prefix peta (signifying numbers of the magnitude 10 to the 15th power, a million billion) and the Latin verb petere (to search), we are doubly petacentric in our peregrinations through the hypertrophic network cloud.

Dell has established a cloud computing page for data centers, capitalizing on the trend.
Amazon.com takes it one step further, offering up the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, or Amazon EC2, “a Web-based service that allows business subscribers to run application programs in the Amazon.com computing environment. The EC2 can serve as a practically unlimited set of virtual machines.” Jason Kolb thinks that this is an important idea to track, one that will “completely change the face of hosting and how we look at servers. “

I can’t help think cloud computing is simply utility computing repackaged in a more attractive (if gauzy) name. Tech evangelists, marketers and CEOs may prefer to talk about computing resources “in the cloud” rather than as humdrum “utilities.”

For reference’s sake, WhatIs.com defines utility computing as:

…a service provisioning model in which a service provider makes computing resources and infrastructure management available to the customer as needed, and charges them for specific usage rather than a flat rate. Like other types of on-demand computing (such as grid computing), the utility model seeks to maximize the efficient use of resources and/or minimize associated costs.

The word utility is used to make an analogy to other services, such as electrical power, that seek to meet fluctuating customer needs, and charge for the resources based on usage rather than on a flat-rate basis. This approach, sometimes known as pay-per-use or metered services is becoming increasingly common in enterprise computing and is sometimes used for the consumer market as well, for Internet service, Web site access, file sharing, and other applications.

What do you think? Is on-demand computing from the likes of Google, Apple, Dell and Amazon the future of the Web? Or is it an outgrowth of the utility computing that Sun and HP have been experimenting with for some time? (The Wikipedians seem to agree, at least today, that utility computing = cloud computing). Will small businesses and organizations eventually never buy or see the servers they use, nor need to worry about supporting that expensive hardware ? Is “the cloud” just hype — or do we need to write up a definition?

I’ll admit it: I’m a frequent Googler. I Google from the office, when I need to research new terms for WhatIs. I Google from home, when I need information about events, people, tide charts or news. These days, I’m Googling from the car and train as well, enabled by the handheld attached to my belt on an o-so-slow GPRS connection, using my MDA as a sort of primitive Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. That’s rather useful, of course, when I need to determine the number from which the meaning of life, the universe, and everything could be derived.

Some time ago, however, I started to be considerably smarter about my Googling, as I realized that with just a bit of syntax ahead of my search terms, I could make much better use of the search field. These additional words are called “operators,” for my semantically-obsessed fellow travelers. They make life easier. Following is my short list of favorite Google search field hacks. If you have some of your own that I missed, please let me know in the comments so that we all can become more efficient Googlers too.

Google Phonebook: I particularly love this one. I stopped using the white pages because of this very feature. Just type in “phonebook: ” and then a name, comma, zipcode. I’m a “victim” of fixed-mobile substititution, so there’s no danger of revealing my digits to the world here in an example. If I did have a landline, however, you’d find it that way. It’s also possible to reverse engineer the lookup by entering a phone number, revealing the attached adress. For those a bit freaked out by this ability, it’s worth noting that you can request that your name be removed ,

Google Weatherman: While I look to NOAA.gov for all-things-meteorogical, if I just want to know whether to grab a jacket, sweater or shorts, typing in weather: zipcode is perfectly effective. For instance, here’s the weather in lovely Needham Heights, Massachussetts today.

Google Movies: I adore this feature. Just enter “movie: zipcode” to get a list of theaters and showtimes near you, with links to showtimes with available tickets and reviews. This stripped down, entirely textual results page is especially useful and usable when I’m mobile.

Google Dictionary: This is spectacularly relevant to my work, given that I write definitions for WhatIs.com. If you’d like to see all of the entries for a term, simply type “define: term” and you’ll be presented with a list of hyperlinks and short summaries. Try define: blog for a comparison of takes on that hotly contested term, for instance.

Google Site Search: While searching the entire Web is undeniably useful, sometimes you just want to look through one Web site, like, say, WhatIs.com. Just type in site: domain name search term (like site: WhatIs.com geek) and you’re off and running.

Google University: Just as you can restrict search to a specific site, you can also focus on certain domain names, like .edu. If you’re a developer, for instance, you could enter [ruby tutorial site:.edu] Of course, these days you can also just use Google Scholar.

Google for Media: Looking for ebooks on Java? Paste the following syntax into your search field:

-inurl: (htm|html|php) intitle:”index of” +”last modified” +”parent directory” +description +size +(.pdf) “Java”

If you replace .pdf with other extensions and Java with a different keyword, you can also find all kinds of other media out there too, though it’s worth noting that relevant intellectual property laws still apply to your actions.

As I wrote initially, this is only a short list the tweaks that I actually use with any frequency. For more information, see Google Blogoscoped’s post about using special syntax or Google’s list of operators, including a printable search cheatsheet.

To be fair, we discovered Google Desktop years ago. The recent introduction of Google Desktop for Mac, however, caught our attention and led us to revisit the application.

Desktop search itself is nothing new either, of course. Google Desktop has, in its Windows incarnation, been the subject of both security concerns and accusations of spyware.

In fact, recent patch vulnerabilities and a generalized need to lock or secure Google Desktop (read expert Matt Schwartz’s tips on how to tame Google Desktop, if you’re curious) have left enterprise and individual users somewhat cautious about inviting the desktop search engine (DSE) onto their hard drives.

We can’t whole-heartedly recommend it because of these concerns, though the end user experience of many of our geeky early-adopting friends has been positive.

Now, Mac users have the same choice, though as most will immediately protest, OS X’s fourth generation (10.4, aka Tiger) has long had such an engine already built-in, appropriately named Spotlight.

We’ll leave it to you to compare the two, though the Unoffical Apple Weblog (TUAW) has done if for you in this excellent review of Google Desktop for Mac that contrasts the feature sets of the two engines.

If you use other Google apps on your Mac, notably Gmail, Google Desktop may be worth your time. ArsTechnica’s Jacqui Cheng offers a generally positive hands-on review of Google Desktop for Mac as well.

In the latest installment in our continuing exploration of “Google Office,” we submit Google Notebook as our latest discovery.

Google Operating System, a blog that unofficially tracks the latest and greatest Google announcements, posted recently about how to use Google Notebook to create shared “living documents,” similar to a wiki, that can be updated with information as you find it searching on Google.

Create a Notebook first and then as you find relevant results, click “Note this” and your link will be added to the page. You can make a notebook public or let your family, friend, coworkers or clients know that the document is available for browsing.

Take a brief tour of Google Notebook here before downloading, if you like. Google Notebook is also available as a Firefox extension.

Chrisn Sherman has posted a closer look at Google Notebook over at SearchEngineLand, comparing the feature-set to competitors like Furl, Yahoo’s MyWeb, Microsoft’s Live Toolbar and Ask’s MyStuff. Michael Arrington noted a number of similarities between Google Notebook and deli.cio.us in a post over at TechCrunch, including a number of screenshots of both products.

Do you use Google’s Gmail for freemail? Did you know that you can use those 2 GB of free storage space as an online hard disk, similar to Apple’s iDisk? You can enable this functionality in a number of ways.

Gdisk is open source software that turns your Gmail into an easily accessible online storage vault. Gdisk can be downloaded for free from SourceForge.net — but only for Mac users.

Have no fear! Gmail Drive offers similar functionality for Windows users.
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Google Alerts are “email updates of the latest relevant Google results (Web, news, etc.) based on your choice of query or topic. Some handy uses of Google Alerts include monitoring a developing news story, keeping current on a competitor or industry, getting the latest on a technology or event or keeping tabs on your favorite sports teams.”

Amit Agarwal offers a quick Google Alerts tutorial on his blog if you’re interested in learning more.

Google has done it again. As useful as millions have found Gmail freemail to be, it’s even better now: users can now access Gmail through their mobile phones, as described by this press release. Simply point your phone’s Web browser to gmail.com/app on a Java-enabled mobile phone and download the application. It’s quite fast, with pre-loaded messages, easy scrolling, reduced but useful keystrokes for reading, composing and searching and even features attachment support that automatically resizes to the phone. You’ll need to check the requirements for Gmail Mobile first, crucially J2ME, but if you’re a Gmail user, this is pretty cool.

As former Speaker of the U.S. House of Represenatives Tip O’Neill once said, “All politics is local.” Perhaps with that in mind, the Google Earth Blog has announced that Google Earth has geared up for future U.S. elections by adding “U.S. Elections Guide” and “U.S. Congressional Districts” information layers. Once you’ve downloaded the most recent version of Google Earth, you’ll be able to select layers that will display the boundaries of voting districts, local polling places, campaign finance data, links to candidates Web sites, news and other information related to the election. The layers are not available through Google Maps, so you’ll have to have access to a PC able to run Google Earth. (Hat tip to Slashdot.org and Greg Sterling at SearchEngineWatch.com.)