A few weeks ago, we posted about the Live PageRank calculator. Things have been a-happenin’ since then, and there is now a LivePR Firefox extension available that displays the Live PageRank value for the webpage you are currently browsing. Nifty little tool indeed.
The PageRank value in the Google Toolbar is just a snapshot of what was in the Google index when they decided to export it from their index into the Toolbar. This export process happens roughly every three months, and the last update was made 19th October 2005. So another update should be just around the corner.
You may be curious if your PR will change, and hopefully for the better. A new tool that shows you the actual, current PageRank value used by the Google index is available, the Live PageRank calculator. Check it out.
Happy New Year!
Best Wishes from the Broadband Internet Speed test!
May 2006 be a year of high speed Internet access for all of you!
The long awaited 1.5 version of the popular open source web browser Firefox has been released. More information in the release notes.
From the “What’s new”:
- Automated update to streamline product upgrades. Notification of an update is more prominent, and updates to Firefox may now be half a megabyte or smaller. Updating extensions has also improved.
- Faster browser navigation with improvements to back and forward button performance.
- Drag and drop reordering for browser tabs.
- Improvements to popup blocking.
- Clear Private Data feature provides an easy way to quickly remove personal data through a menu item or keyboard shortcut.
- Answers.com is added to the search engine list.
- Improvements to product usability including descriptive error pages, redesigned options menu, RSS discovery, and “Safe Mode” experience.
- Better accessibility including support for DHTML accessibility and assistive technologies such as the Window-Eyes 5.5 beta screen reader for Microsoft Windows. Screen readers read aloud all available information in applications and documents or show the information on a Braille display, enabling blind and visually impaired users to use equivalent software functionality as their sighted peers.
- Report a broken Web site wizard to report Web sites that are not working in Firefox.
- Better support for Mac OS X (10.2 and greater) including profile migration from Safari and Mac Internet Explorer.
- New support for Web Standards including SVG, CSS 2 and CSS 3, and JavaScript 1.6.
- Many security enhancements.
Download english version for Windows, MacOS X and Linux. Other languages available too.
Google has been buying lots of dark fiber, a cheap commodity in the post Internet bubble era. According to Robert X. Cringely, Google is now putting together a Data-Center-in-a-box, cheap enough to be placed on virtually every street corner of the world, interconnected with all that previously unlit fiber.
So why buy-up all that fiber, then?
The probable answer lies in one of Google’s underground parking garages in Mountain View. There, in a secret area off-limits even to regular GoogleFolk, is a shipping container. But it isn’t just any shipping container. This shipping container is a prototype data center. Google hired a pair of very bright industrial designers to figure out how to cram the greatest number of CPUs, the most storage, memory and power support into a 20- or 40-foot box. We’re talking about 5000 Opteron processors and 3.5 petabytes of disk storage that can be dropped-off overnight by a tractor-trailer rig. The idea is to plant one of these puppies anywhere Google owns access to fiber, basically turning the entire Internet into a giant processing and storage grid.
While Google could put these containers anywhere, it makes the most sense to place them at Internet peering points, of which there are about 300 worldwide.
Cringely goes on about Google Web Accelerator, world wide Internet TV using Google infrastructure and how Google will own Web 2.0 with no competitors worth mentioning (Micro-who-now?).
Interesting read no doubt.
