Google's Brin: Time to speed up the web
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In a conversation at Google's I/O developer event in San Francisco on Wednesday, Brin pointed out how software gets twice as slow every 18 months — an effect he named 'Page's Law', after his partner Larry Page and in an ironic reversal of Moore's Law. Brin committed Google to bucking this trend: "I want to break this law. I want to make software increasingly fast," he told an audience of reporters.
Brin, whose company launched the ambitious Google Wave collaboration platform a day after his remarks, looked back at how things have changed for web-application development since the early days of Google. Describing the development of Gmail as a web application, he discussed the internal debate inside the company about building it as a JavaScript application, and the arguments about whether it was even possible. Now he thinks the debate is over, and the web-development model is becoming dominant.
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"Clearly browsers have been improving, and programming models have improved too. Nobody asks today 'Can you have this on the web?' But we still have a long way to go, particularly in respect to performance," he said.
Google's development of its own browser, Chrome, is part of that work on performance. Chrome's speed boosts and HTML 5 support are now being used in Google's products, including Google Wave. As a consequence, Brin remains excited about Google's tools and future. "You'll be seeing applications that were science fiction 10 years ago popping up," he said.
Brin could not avoid talking about search, and he sketched out some ideas for the future. First, he noted that the underlying mechanisms of search engines have not changed much, but that users have become more demanding as searching has become part of everyday life.
"People's expectations of search engines have increased and, at same time, questions are more complex. That's why we're seeing more success from smart techniques."
He described those increased expectations and more complex queries as drivers for Google, and talked about how what those 'smart techniques', including automated synonym searches, are showing good results.
There is more to come, he hinted. "We'll see some surprises in the next few years," he said.
Sidestepping controversy, Brin talked about the relationship between Google and newspapers in the same terms as the relationship it has with all its content providers. He pointed out that without content from news sources and other websites, there'd be nothing to search — and that Google has paid out over $6bn to other web sites through its AdSense program.
Admitting that traditional print media faces hard times, he emphasized Google's neutral attitude to different business models for content providers, from free to subscription. Brin suggested that it would take time for print media to find the right business model for the online world, joking about when Google first attempted to make money from advertising.
"The very first attempt we tried, we found relevant books on Amazon and linked to them, using the Amazon affiliate programme. We made enough to cover pizza for the team that developed it," he said.
Brin expects print media to have to go through several iterations until it finds the right model, just like Google's advertising business, which took time to get critical mass and become a sustainable business.
Brin remained optimistic about the future for traditional media online, saying: "Newspapers deliver very valuable content to the world. If you take the time to figure out business models and build up the basis of advertisers or whatever, you'll also have a strong sustainable business."
This article was originally posted on ZDNet UK.
Talkback Most Recent of 4 Talkback(s)
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sci-fi applications list
i want to see at least a couple of examples of the mentioned application that were sci-fi 10y ago and that will suddenly become non-sci-fi because of the faster web.
pupkin_z1st Jun 2009 -
No sense
It doesn't make sense to make everything in web. Who really enjoys playing 3D game in a web page? Google wants to replace everything by its strong point. But it is not the right strategy.
Gladiatorcn1st Jun 2009 -
Well, let's take a look:
Well, let's take a look at what happened:
-We started with ASM. Fast language on systems that these days would be considered painfully slow. But, it's a 1:1 matching with machine code. And it's as fast as you can get.
-We started adding more instructions. CISC was victorious. Hello increased compiler complexity. Hello increased complexity of generated code in higher level languages.
-We moved to compiled languages. A lot easier to read, but at a price: One instruction in a compiled language doesn't match one instruction on a compiler. Complexity is often hidden under single statements.
-We started using OOP and recursion. Both are fantastic ways to make a little bit of high level code become a pure mess in machine code.
-We added interpreted languages to the mix. Now it takes many lines of code to do what used to take one line of code. JIT made it a bit better, but it's still nowhere near as efficient as a fully optimized compile, and the JIT adds to the memory requirements.
-We started adding functional languages and other paradigms to the mix. More ways to add overhead with incredible ease.
-Now we're combining several languages in one system: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, etc. Now we have not one but several interpreters competing for memory and CPU.
-And oh, yeah, we decided to jump onto what has become the world's largest network. Hello online crime, and hello a lot of extra code needed to secure everything.
-We write a lot of stuff in XML now. Goodbye efficient, fast file formats and protocols, hello extra space and power needed for a parser.
JavaScript? It's a super high level language that can manipulate other languages. It's so far from how the machine works that it's incredible that it works at all.
You want to reverse the trend? Really?
The trend is, quite frankly, because we decided that we preferred high level languages and protocols over low level languages. As simple as that.
The problem isn't really that we haven't been trying to be fast. The problem is, quite simply put, a tradeoff between high level languages and low level languages. We've decided to abstract everything away.
. . . and the price for abstraction is performance. You can't reverse the trend unless you stop abstracting everything away so much.
CobraA11st Jun 2009 -
RE: Google's Brin: Time to speed up the web
Nice post about Google Brin. I get enough information about testking 70-642. Thanks for your this beneficial information.
jack skellington5th Jun 2009
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