Picasa 3.0 beta: Yet another release by Google

Google announced the availability of Picasa 3.0 beta, a way in which you can personalize the photos you post on the web. Along with Chrome, the latest browser Google released few days ago, Picasa seems to be getting an equal amount of attention. For those who are already familiar with earlier versions of Picasa, the latest release brings a load of new features that you've long been waiting for.

Picasa's latest release also comes with upgrades to cousin, Picasa Web albums, which is a two year old technology according to Google, which brings together some millions of users sharing billions of photos online. Upgrades to Picasa Web Albums, adds several new features including name-tags, and explore. Two innovating introductions making organization rather simplified.

As seen in this video that shows a glimpse of several new features added, Picasa 3.0 gives you the ability to do quite a deal of photo editing including dust and scratch removal, improving colour and brightness, picture re-sizing, red eye reduction, text insertion and many more. And, the most interesting part is that all of these features, that normally are only a part of expensive professional photo editing software now comes at zero cost, you having only to download and install the software.

As a proud user of Picasa since its first release, I'm quite happy on the amount of effort Google has put in their latest introduction. The software has helped me better organize my photographs with having to pay virtually nothing for a great deal of functionality.

Google Chrome: The latest Toy

Google, adding yet another cool addition to what they call software, introduced Chrome releasing the beta version for MS Windows systems (chrome 0.2), on 2nd September 2008. The new open source browser is told to serve as a faster alternative to Mozilla Firefox once done, and since its inception seems to be. Geared around simplicity and innovation, Chrome introduces some of the most coolest features in browsing while using a little amount of screen real-estate and consuming a way little memory when compared to the bulky giant Firefox.

The lately introduced Open Source Browser uses a heavy amount of the Apple WebKit and Mozilla Firefox core, according to this introduction to the browser. Among some of the innovations Chrome brings for you is its advanced Java Script engine that provides a much better experience when running bulky Java Script dependant sites such as Google's very own Gmail, which Firefox is having a lot of problems with when it comes to memory and performance.

Google explains how chrome can be used in this most creative comic book approach they have taken. Chrome has brought about a wonderful and pleasing experience to browsing, including the ability to do most day-to-day web tasks efficiently and simply without bothering the overall performance of your PC. They are hoping to introduce the Linux and MacOS versions shortly and are hoping to embed into it some really cool and fancy additions while keeping it simple and small.

There are still some minus points with the beta version of Chrome, which might be in beta for quite a long time according to what most believe as in Gmail which has been in beta for ages, keeping Google from assuring things will go well as expected instead of that it should work always. Many complain that the ability to view larger pdf files and some occasional hangs in the application sort of needs a thorough investigation.

To me, Firefox starts up faster than Chrome on Windows, but loads pages a bit slower, having also needed to keep in mind that FF3 adds a lot of your time in storing bookmarks and organizing history, which Chrome seems to do as well, but, in a slightly different and efficient manner. Performance wise Chrome outweighs FF3, as it being extremely lightweight and virtually un-noticed by other applications.

Google's 1 trillionth Index

Google marked another milestone in search engine history on last Friday. Two of it's Web Infrastructure Team engineers claimed that they've realized that the Google's spider finally crawled the trillionth web page. Indexing about 26 million pages in 1998, 1 billion pages in 2000, Google's back-end grew to something like 8 billion indexes by 2006. However, it didn't take that long for it to reach the 1 trillion mark.

This can mean many things, and one could wonder whether Google just made up this story. But, however, considering websites that dynamically generate pages, ever increasing blog-o-sphere, and several other feed publishing sites are continuing to increase even at this very moment. As the two engineers from Google adds the size does matter, but it depends on how you define it. Thus, if not all those 1,000,000,000,000 are useful to you that would not mean there are that many indexes.

Apparently, the trillionth page had just one word according to this article. And, that might be a good reason to accept the fact that the trillion might be still on the way. Thomas Claburn sees this as a mere trait to stay in the lead of it's competition. This is in fact evident in the post made by the Google's engineers as they add that the most significant achievement is them being certain that they have the most comprehensive index.

To me, Google suffices even it has a trillion pages indexed or whatever, as long as it returns results that I expect for my search. So far I should say that it does a good job relatively, and is one of the good search engines out there.