“It’s fantastic to see the hardware sitting on the surface, waiting for us to come back again,” Mark Robinson, chief of the camera science team, said in a news briefing in Washington, D.C.
The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter was launched June 18 on a mission to map the lunar surface in preparation for the planned return of astronauts to the moon in 2020. It carries instruments designed to search for ice deposits in sunless canyons and crevices; those deposits could be a source of water and rocket fuel for future moon colonists.
The cameras started clicking away in the last few weeks, as the spacecraft settled into an orbit that brought it as close to the surface as 18 miles. Over the years, Japan, China and India have all sent probes to the moon that have focused on the old Apollo sites. But the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter’s images of the hardware left behind are the sharpest yet, NASA said, resolving features as small as 3 feet wide.

The reconnaissance orbiter took pictures of five of the six landing sites, missing only that of Apollo 12, which launched on Nov. 14, 1969.
Some of the best images are of the Apollo 14 landing site, where a set of scientific instruments can be seen, along with marks in the topsoil, known as regolith, left by the astronauts walking around in their spacesuits. The pictures also show the tracks of the tool cart the astronauts towed behind them, Robinson said. Apollo 14 launched on Jan. 31, 1971.
As impressed as they were by the images, NASA officials said they expect better quality after the orbiter finishes commissioning its instruments, a process similar to tuning a new musical instrument to get the best sound. Images of the Apollo 11 landing site, for one, are expected to be twice as good in the future, officials said.
Referring to conspiracy buffs who question whether the moon landing of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin really occurred, one reporter asked if the images show the American flag planted by the astronauts. Robinson said that would be difficult to resolve from space.
“If it’s standing, it would be very, very narrow,” he said. “We might be able to see its shadow at some point.”
But he said he believed the flag was knocked over by the exhaust from the Apollo 11 lunar module’s ascent engine as Armstrong and Aldrin lifted off for the trip home. The mission ended on July 24, 1969, when the module carrying Armstrong, Aldrin and Michael Collins parachuted into the Pacific Ocean.
Aside from the curiosity value connected with the images, NASA said the pictures could be important to future moon colonists. Changes in the surface, in the form of new cratering, would help scientists understand how often a particular region on the moon is hit by rocks from space. That information would be important in designing habitats.
The lunar images can be viewed on the NASA website, at www.nasa.gov .

NASA orbiter offers images of moon landing sites

The match will be contested by Barcelona and holders Manchester United, who are the first defending champions to reach the final since Juventus in 1997, and will be looking to be the first team to retain the European Cup since Milan in 1990. This is the fifth year in a row in which the final involves at least one English team.

The Doodle Link

Cassatt often created images of the social and private lives of women, with particular emphasis on the intimate bonds between mothers and children.

And here’s the painting by Mary Cassatt.

The Doodle is based on Ida, or Darwinius, a genus of the Adapiformes from the Eocene epoch. Basically, she’s a 47 million year old fossil unveiled this week by German scientists claiming she’s the missing link to the evolution of human beings.

What makes this doodle different from most of Google previous doodles, it has sparked anger from some groups.

• The Pirate Bay is probably the most well known BitTorrent website on the web today. This Swedish-based site has been in existence since 2003 and has survived an onslaught of legal threats to try and shut it down. With over 2.8 million registered users and in excess of 1 million active torrents, The Pirate Bay is the largest file sharing database on the Internet.

MiniNova

• MiniNova is another popular BitTorrent site that has seen over 5 billion downloads since it was first launched in 2005. This large P2P file sharing website was born after the first reincarnation of SuprNova which was shutdown in 2004. It has a good search engine that has advanced search options, or alternatively you can browse through the different categories; MiniNova has over 35 music genres in its database.

IsoHunt

• A BitTorrent indexing site which moved its servers from the United States to Canada after it was temporarily shutdown in January 2007. Now IsoHunt is one of the largest file sharing websites that regularly indexes over 1 million torrents. The search feature on IsoHunt is basic and doesn’t have advanced search facilities like MiniNova but it’s simple layout makes it easy to use.

BitTorrent.am

• BitTorrent.am was launched in 2007 and has quickly risen through the ranks to become one of the most popular P2P file sharing websites. There are over 600,000 torrents indexed on BitTorrent.am with the music category boasting over 45 different genres.
  Website

Torrent Portal

• Torrent Portal has an excellent user-friendly interface with good advanced search facilities. A search cloud is also provided so you can see what other users have searched for. Torrent Portal’s BitTorrent database indexes over 1.4 million torrents which makes it popular with downloaders.

BTJunkie

• BTJunkie is an advanced BitTorrent search engine. It uses a web crawler (similar to Google) to search for torrent files from other torrent sites and store it in its database. It has over 2,180,000 active torrents and about 4,200 torrents added daily (compared to runner-up Torrent Portal with 1,500), making it the largest torrent site indexer on the web. Btjunkie is the 7th most popular bittorrent site as of 2008.

Demonoid

• Demonoid is a website and BitTorrent tracker created by an anonymous Serbian known only by the pseudonym “Deimos”. The website indexes torrents uploaded by its members. It was the second largest and is the most popular semi-public tracker for over a year, the 499th most popularly ranked website in December 2008 according to Alexa, and had an estimated 3 million peers in September 2007. The site went offline on November 9, 2007 due to alleged legal threats from the Canadian Recording Industry Association. On April 11, 2008

myBittorrent

• myBittorrent is an automated website, using the Google API to find BitTorrent websites on the internet. These websites are then crawled by bots and information about their files saved to the myBittorrent.com database. This is an automated process and myBittorrent.com has no control over what is indexed.

Seedpeer

• Seedpeer is known as one of the most popular torrent sites. The site started out in August 2005 as Meganova and later on in 2007 it was renamed to seedpeer.

ShareReactor

• ShareReactor is an index site for files on the eDonkey network and Torrent files . ShareReactor does not host any files; instead, the links it contains are accessible through an eDonkey network and BitTorrent client. The site was taken down by Swiss Police on March 10, 2004 due to the suspicion of breach of copyright and trademark laws. After a long downtime of nearly two years and six months, the site returned online under new ownership. However nearly two months after its return it once again closed down due to lack of popularity. ShareReactor delivers links that can be used together with a P2P client program that understands eD2k links or torrent files. On December, 2008 the site was reopened once more brought back to life with help from the Pirate Bay team.

Suprnova.org

• Suprnova.org is a Swedish (formerly Slovenian) based website which distributed torrents for various music and video files, computer programs and games. Started in late 2002 by Andrej Preston (known as Slonček, Slovenian for “little elephant”) and for a while considered the most popular BitTorrent search engine, Suprnova.org closed in late 2004 after legal threats. The site operators supported the development of the eXeem BitTorrent client software, deeming a fixed website too difficult to operate in the present legal climate. On August 2, 2007, the domain name was donated to The Pirate Bay, who relaunched the site on August 21, 2007.

FlixFlux

• FlixFlux is a specialist torrent search site for films. The site was originally launched in mid 2006 with a basic search facility, and a list of new film releases. The site was relaunched in December 2006 with a complete redesign, and many new features.

Torrentz

• Torrentz is a torrent meta-search engine based in Sweden (run by an admin, who goes by the name Flippy) that indexes torrents from various major torrent sites like Mininova, Demonoid, and The Pirate Bay.

YouTorrent

• YouTorrent is a BitTorrent search engine which allows parallel searches on different torrent search engines. As of April 14, 2008, YouTorrent changed from searching all torrent sites to only sites which provide licensed, certified content.

Here’ a short list of ways to make money online..

Contextual advertising

• Contextual advertising is one of the most popular method of monetizing the web. You earn every time a viewer or a visitor clicks on the ads on your site. Earnings will depend on the amount the advertiser is willing to pay for every click (PPC) or impressions made {CPM). The more visitors you have the more likely you will be able to earn. Click here to learn more…

Revenue sharing

• Revenue Sharing Website allows registered members of the website to share the revenue made by the site, With this model you can almost start immediately without any overhead. All you need to do is to contribute to site. It can be Forum postings, Article submissions and many more.. click here to learn more…

Ad Space

• Not the Ad space on a billboard, but something similar, only instead of a high visibility and high traffic areas. It’s a high traffic websites or a high pagerank (PR) website. Unless you have a good traffic and high PR, you will have a hard time to attracting advertisers. But there are services that can help you sell ad space, click here to learn more…

Affiliate Marketing

• You earn by referring or selling products, earnings will vary and will depend on the action taken. With this model you don’t even need a website, you can use emails, and many other methods, click here to learn more…

Paid Blogging

• Get paid for blogging. Write about web sites, products, services, and companies and earn cash for providing your opinion and valuable feedback to advertisers. If you have good writing skills then this is for you. Click here to learn more…

Freelancing

• Freelancing or Outsourcing, If you are skilled enough you can easily make money here. There are a lot of sites where you can sign up as a freelancer and bid on projects. click here to learn more…

Sell Online

• Buy and Sell products online, with so many tools online you can even start selling immediately. Click here to learn more.

Paid to surf (Get paid to)

• You earn by clicking banners, ads, doing surveys, reading emails and many more. It may sound simple and anybody can do it, click here to learn more…

Accordingly it was a volunteer project by a group of employees who wanted a better way to collect educational contents uploaded to YouTube by colleges and universities.

via techcrunch

The overall number of videos watched online in the US in January climbed 4 percent from the previous month to 14.8 billion, with YouTube viewing accounting for 91 percent of that growth, comScore reported Wednesday.

Google-owned websites, predominantly YouTube, ranked at the top of the US online video heap with 6.4 billion snippets watched during the month, according to comScore.

Fox Interactive Media, which owns online social-networking service MySpace, had the second highest number of videos viewed – 552 million.

Yahoo! online destinations were third with 374 million videos watched, the industry tracking group reported.

Approximately 147 million US Internet users watched an average of 101 online videos each in January, with 102 million of those people using Google-owned sites, according to comScore.

AFP: YouTube topped 100 million US viewer mark in January: comScore

The four core buildings, totaling 506,317 ft² (47,038 m²), were built for and originally occupied by Silicon Graphics (SGI). The office space and corporate campus is located within a larger 26-acre (110,000 m2) site that contains Charleston Park, a 5-acre (20,000 m2) public park; improved access to Permanente Creek; and public trails that connect the corporate site to Shoreline Park and the Bay Trail. The project, launched in 1994 to reclaim a former industrial brownfield, was a creative collaboration between SGI, STUDIOS Architecture in San Francisco, SWA Group of San Francisco and Sausalito, and the Planning and Community Development Agency of the City of Mountain View. The objective was to develop in complementary fashion the privately-owned corporate headquarters and adjoining public greenspace. Key design decisions placed parking for nearly 2000 cars underground, enabling SWA to integrate the two open spaces with water features, shallow pools, fountains, pathways, and plazas. The project was completed in 1997. The ASLA noted in 1999 that the SGI project was a significant departure from typical corporate campuses, challenging conventional thinking about private and public space.

The former SGI facilities were leased by Google beginning in 2003. In June 2006, Google purchased some of Silicon Graphics’ properties, including the Googleplex, for $319 million.

Since the buildings are of relatively low height, the complex covers a large area. The interior of the headquarters is furnished with items like shade lamps and giant rubber balls. The lobby contains a piano and a projection of current live Google search queries. The facilities include a gym (Building 40), free laundry rooms (Buildings 40 and 42), two small swimming pools, a sand volleyball court, and eleven cafeterias of diverse selection. Google has even installed replicas of SpaceShipOne and a dinosaur skeleton.

In late 2006 and early 2007 the company installed a series of solar panels, capable of producing 1.6 megawatts of electricity. At the time, it was believed to be the largest corporate installation in the United States. About 30 percent of the Googleplex’s electricity needs will be fulfilled by this project, with the remainder being purchased. About one third of the panels will be in the form of “solar trees” mounted on poles above parking lots, with the remainder placed on rooftops.

The solar panel project went online on 18 June 2007. As of 21 June 2007 Google has installed over 90% of the 9,212 solar panels that comprise the 1.6 megawatt project.

Location

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Google was co-founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were students at Stanford University and the company was first incorporated as a privately held company on September 4, 1998. The initial public offering took place on August 19, 2004, raising US$1.67 billion, making it worth US$23 billion. Google has continued its growth through a series of new product developments, acquisitions, and partnerships. Environmentalism, philanthropy and positive employee relations have been important tenets during the growth of Google, the latter resulting in being identified multiple times as Fortune Magazine’s #1 Best Place to Work. The unofficial company slogan is “Don’t be evil”, although criticism of Google includes concerns regarding the privacy of personal information, copyright, censorship and discontinuation of services. According to Millward Brown, it is the most powerful brand in the world.

Trivia

• “Googol” is the mathematical term for a 1 followed by 100 zeros. The term was coined by Milton Sirotta, nephew of American mathematician Edward Kasner, and was popularized in the book, “Mathematics and the Imagination” by Kasner and James Newman. Google’s play on the term reflects the company’s mission to organize the immense amount of information available on the web.
• They have found in user testing, that a small number of people are very typical of the larger user base. They run labs continually and always monitoring how people use a page of results.
  The name ‘Google’ was an accident. A spelling mistake made by the original founders who thought they were going for ‘Googol’
• The prime reason the Google home page is so bare is due to the fact that the founders didn’t know HTML and just wanted a quick interface.
• The infamous “I feel lucky” is nearly never used. However, in trials it was found that removing it would somehow reduce the Google experience. Users wanted it kept. It was a comfort button.
• Infact it was noted that the submit button was a long time coming and hitting the RETURN key was the only way to burst Google into life.
• Due to the sparseness of the homepage, in early user tests they noted people just sitting looking at the screen. After a minute of nothingness, the tester intervened and asked ‘Whats up?’ to which they replied “We are waiting for the rest of it”. To solve that particular problem the Google Copyright message was inserted to act as a crude end of page marker.
• On Jan 31, 2009, between 6:30 a.m. PST and 7:25 a.m. Google flags every search results with the message “This site may harm your computer”.
• Google announces a $125 million deal that settles a lawsuit with publishers that had sued it over its book search. Not only does it put the search feature in the clear, but it may see Google become a major retailer of out-of-print books.
• Orkut is very popular in Brazil. Orkut was the brainchild of a very intelligent Google engineer who was pretty much given free reign to run with it, without having to go through the normal Google UI procedures, hence the reason it doesn’t look or feel like a Google application. They are looking at improving Orkut to cope with the loads it places on the system.
• Google makes changes small-and-often. They will sometimes trial a particular feature with a set of users from a given network subnet; for example Excite@Home users often get to see new features. They aren’t told of this, just presented with the new UI and observed how they use it.
• They use the 20% / 5% rules. If at least 20% of people use a feature, then it will be included. At least 5% of people need to use a particular search preference before it will make it into the ‘Advanced Preferences’.
• Gmail was used internally for nearly 2 years prior to launch to the public. They discovered there was approximately 6 types of email users, and Gmail has been designed to accommodate these 6.
• They listen to feedback actively. Emailing Google isn’t emailing a blackhole.
• Employees are encouraged to use 20% of their time working on their own projects. Google News, Orkut are both examples of projects that grew from this working model.

Products

• See Google Pruducts

Videos

Other Information

• Founded  Menlo Park, California (September 4, 1998)
• Founder(s) Sergey Brin, Larry Page
• Headquarters  Googleplex, Mountain View, California, United States
• Area served  Worldwide
• Key people  Eric E. Schmidt, (Chairman) & (CEO), Sergey Brin (Technology President), Larry Page (Products President)
• Industry  Internet, Computer software
• Market cap  US$ 96.472 Billion – At market close on January 22, 2009
• Revenue  ▲31.3% US$ 21.796 Billion (2008)
• Employees  20,222 – December 31, 2008

Competitors

• Yahoo!
• Ask.com
• Microsoft Live Search

Links

• About Google – Links to numerous Google resources.
• Product descriptions – Categorized listing with links.
• More Google products – A variety of Google tools.
• Google Press Center – News and public information.
• Executive Management – Our executives and board of directors.
• Corporate Addresses – Locations around the world.
• Investor Relations – Financial and corporate governance information.
• Ten things – Our philosophy.
• Help page – Support for Google products.
• Jobs at Google – Positions available in many locations.
• Contact us – Links to various business units.
• Official Site: Philanthropic Branch Google.org
• Website  Google.com

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