The Favorite Search Engine

If you haven’t heard the name Google then you are definitely from another planet. Today Google is synonymous with the word “search”. Nowadays, plenty of people say “Google it” instead of “search it”. For a majority of the people, no other product or service is as important as Google. Founded in the year 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, it has rapidly evolved from a simple search engine at Stanford to a modern technological giant.

Today it is working on multiple products and services including driverless cars and providing internet by floating balloons in the sky. On the cusp of its 19^th anniversary, we provide you some interesting milestones of Google.

1) July 2000

Google establishes its monopoly by becoming the world’s largest search engine with an indexes capacity of around a billion. It dethrones the current reigning champion of search engines “Yahoo” from the top spot.

2) March 2004

Most people think that Gmail was launched with Google, but the truth is it was launched six years later in March 2004. Initially the service was invitation only as the release was a beta one. The general public had to wait another 3 years to experience its advanced features. Currently Gmail is the leader in email space while the followers are lagging way far behind.

3) June 2005

The year 2005 was a major milestone for Google as it released multiple products and services that proved to be a blockbuster in the coming years. The Landmark year had seen the release of Google Maps. With the help of Google Maps you can visit any part of the planet and be sure that you won’t get lost. It has made travelling fun and an exhilarating experience. Other products also launched in the same year were Google Earth, Talk and Video. It also purchased technology company Urchin which helped to create Google Analytics.

4) July 2005

“Android” the word synonymous with Smartphones today, was purchased by Google. Based on the Linux operating system it was basically designed for the touch screen devices. Today the majority of Smartphones and tablets have android as their operating system.

5) October 2008

Today most of us think YouTube as a product created by Google. But the truth is, it was purchased by Google in the year 2008. From then to now the video sharing site has seen enormous growth. Today it’s the biggest platform for video sharing leaving its competitors way far behind.

6) March 2012

Although there were many innovations and launches of products between 2008 and 2012, the launch of the Google Play store was the biggest significant event by Google in 2012. The play store has millions of apps in various categories such as games, education, entertainment, healthcare etc. It is single handedly responsible for more than a billion download of apps and installs.

7) September 2016

The year 2016 saw the launch of the smart messaging app “Allo” by Google. People were waiting for a messaging app from Google and it delivered on it. The app provides customizable emojis, stickers and doodles to make the chat interesting.

If we would put the whole list of products and services launched and offered by Google it would take plenty of pages to fill, as the innovation factory at Google continues to create exciting products year after year.

Got any other interesting Google milestone worth knowing about? Then share your views and let us know.

Which Is The Better Option React JS or React Native?

React JS is front end library developed by Facebook. It’s used for handling view layer for web and mobile apps. ReactJS allows us to create reusable UI components. It is currently one of the most popular JavaScript libraries and it has strong foundation and large community behind it.

React Native is a mobile framework that compiles to native app components, allowing you to build native mobile applications, iOS, Android, and Windows, in JavaScript that allows you to use React JS to build your components, and implements ReactJS under the hood.

Both are open sourced by Facebook.

In general the concept is the same. You write JSX on both platforms. The only difference is that the rendering mechanism that React uses is different from each other.

React JS uses react-dom implementation to render the components to the DOM. This library is actually way larger than React JS itself. React Native has their own implementation of rendering components for native platforms. 

• Both have their own rendering mechanism
• React Native has a flexbox way of styling instead of regular CSS for the web
• React Native has to be compiled to native code where ReactJS can be used directly in the DOM

The React JS Benefits

• DOM (document object model) is a viewing agreement on data inputs and outputs. React’s virtual DOM is faster than the conventional full refresh model, since the virtual DOM refreshes only parts of the page. The interesting part is, the team at Facebook wasn’t aware that partially refreshing a page would prove faster. Facebook was just looking for a way to reduce their re-build time, and partial DOM refresh was just a happy consequence. This increases performance and faster programming.
• You can reuse code components in React JS, saving you a lot of time.
• The rendering of your pages completely, from the server to the browser will improve the SEO of your web app.
• It improves the debugging speed making your developer’s life easier.
• Even to those unfamiliar with React, it is easily readable.Many frameworks require you to learn an extensive list of concepts which are only useful within the framework. React strives to do the opposite.
• You reap the benefit of all the advancements in the Java language and its ecosystem.

The React Native Benefits

• React Native comes with Native Modules and Native components that improve performance. Unlike Cordova, PhoneGap, and other cross-platform frameworks that render code via WebView, React Native renders certain code components with native API’s.
• React Native comes with all the advantages that React.js brought you. React.js focuses on a better UI, so those benefits remain.
• You don’t have to build the same application for iOS and Android, separately as React Native allows your developers to reuse the common logic layer.
• React Native’s component-based structure allows developers to build apps with a more agile, web-style approach to development than most hybrid frameworks, and without any web at all.
• If you know JavaScript, React Native will be easy to pick-up, allowing most front-end web developer to be a mobile developer. All you need to know is JavaScript, platform APIs, some native UI elements, and any other platform-specific design patterns and you’re set.
• No need to overhaul your old app. All you have to do is add React Native UI components into your existing app’s code, without having to rewrite.
• Native app development usually means inefficiency, slower time to deployment, and less developer productivity. React Native is all about bringing high speed, responsiveness, and agility of web app development along with effectual processing and best user experience to the hybrid space, to provide your users with a native app experience.

React is a framework for building applications using JavaScript. React Native is an entire platform allowing you to build native, cross-platform mobile apps, and React.js is a JavaScript library you use for constructing a high performing UI layer.

To put it in simpler terms, React is ideal for building dynamic, high performing, responsive UI for your web interfaces, while React Native is meant to give your mobile apps a truly native feel.

Python VS C++

Python and C++ are extremely different languages, and most of the differences aren’t strictly advantageous in one direction or the other. That said, for most uses, it’s easy to pick a side and make a good argument for or against particular language and implementation features. 

Python and C++ when compared with each other can lead to a lot of opinions. Each programmer will have his own opinion and we have tried to compile a few of them to give you a clear perspective. 

• Memory management: C++ doesn’t have garbage collection, and encourages use of raw pointers to manage and access memory. It differentiates between heap and stack, and it requires you to attend to values versus references. C++ requires much more attention to bookkeeping and storage details, and while it allows you very fine control, it’s often just not necessary.
• Types: C++ types are explicitly declared, bound to names, checked at compile time, and strict until they’re not. Python’s types are bound to values, checked at run time, and are not so easily subverted. Python’s types are also an order of magnitude simpler. The safety and the simplicity and the lack of declarations help a lot of people move faster. Speaking of…
• Language complexity: C++ is a beast of a language. The spec is 775 pages of language legalese, and even the best C++ developers I’ve known can be caught up short by unintended consequences in complex (or not so complex) code. Python is much simpler, which leads to faster development and less mental overhead.
• Interpreted vs compiled (implementation): C++ is almost always explicitly compiled. Python is not (generally). It’s common practice to develop in the interpreter in Python, which is great for rapid testing and exploration. C++ developers almost never do this, gdb notwithstanding.

The Essential Differences 

C++ tries to give you every language feature under the sun while at the same time never abstracting anything away that could potentially affect performance. Python tries to give you only one or a few ways to do things, and those ways are designed to be simple, even at the cost of some language power or running efficiency. 

In many cases, Python’s philosophy is an advantage because it lets you get most tasks done more easily and more quickly with less mental overhead. Of course, they also share many similarities: they’re both strongly at home in the OO paradigm; they both have a generally imperative feel with some not-entirely-comfortable functional features; they both have exceptions; they both have minimal, library-based concurrency support. 

Specific advantages of Python

• Especially clean, straightforward syntax. This is a major goal of the Python language. Programmers familiar with C and C++ will find the syntax familiar yet much simpler without all the braces and semicolons.
• Duck typing. If an object supports .quack, go ahead and call .quack on it without worrying about that object’s specific type.
• Huge standard library. Just to pick some random examples, Python ships with several XML parsers, csv & zip file readers & writers, libraries for using pretty much every internet protocol and data type, etc.
• Great support for building web apps. Along with Ruby and JavaScript, Python is very popular in the web development community. There are several mature frameworks and a supportive community to get you started.

Some advantages of C++ over Python 

• runtime performance is better and more predictable
• can be used for systems programming, like an Operating System
• can target just about every known platform including embedded systems
• good way to learn low-level programming

The software development companies prefer Python language because of its versatile features and fewer programming codes. Nearly 14% of the programmers use it on the operating systems like UNIX, Linux, Windows and Mac OS. Python is a robust programming language and provides an easy usage of the code lines, maintenance can be handled in a great way, and debugging can be done easily too. It has gained importance across the globe as even computer giant Google has made it one of its official programming languages.

Are You Googled?

The Google story begins in 1995 at Stanford University. Larry Page was considering Stanford for grad school and Sergey Brin, a student there, was assigned to show him around. By some accounts, they disagreed about nearly everything during that first meeting, but by the following year they struck a partnership. Working from their dorm rooms, they built a search engine that used links to determine the importance of individual pages on the World Wide Web.

And as they say rest is history. Google has dominated our lives in the past decade or so. However, most of us are unaware of many aspects about Google.  So, today, we bring to you some amazing facts about the company that rules the world, Google.

1. Google has the largest index of websites in the world

Google has a index with more than 3 billion websites. When this index would be printed, you’d get a 130 miles high stack of paper. Google searches through all these websites in less than half a second. This also shows the importance of SEO, you’re audience will have too find you’re website between this large index of sites.

2. The original name of Google was Backrub

Later, the company wanted to change their name, that’s how the name:Google was born. After all, Google is a misspelling of the word: Googel, the mathematical term for a one with hundred zeros. This name would reflect the company’s mission to make all information accessible too the world. That worked out pretty well, don’t you think?

3. Google Rules Internet

On August 16, 2013, Google was not reachable for 5 minutes, in that time the global Internet usage was decreased by 40%. This fact shows how important Google is today. When people can not search for the website that they are looking for, people make less use of the internet.

4. 16% to 20% of all searches have never been searched before on Google

This means that Google gets millions of searches every day that have never been done before. SEO systems have to keep themselves informed of these new developments in order to remain up-to-date. A slight mistake or a discrepancy in a keyword can hamper your page ranks.

5. The first tweet from Google 

The very first tweet by Google was in Binary Code which literally meant ” I’m feeling lucky”. Today, Google has 12.2 million followers on Twitter. 

6. The First Google Storage Was Made From LEGO

Legend has it that the reason for the LEGO construction was that the Google guys needed an easily expandable, and cheap way to house 10 4 GB hard drives, and LEGO fit the bill. Whether the primary colors of the bricks used were the hues that went on to inspire the Google logo’s design is up for debate, but we’d guess it wasn’t just a coincidence.

7. Google domain was sold off by mistake

A guy bought “Google.com” domain for just $12 in 2015 when Google mistakenly put its own domain name on sale.

Google took the domain back and awarded the buyer about $6006.13, still a pretty small amount when you consider that IT’S GOOGLE, the most visited website on the internet. If you look at the amount, it is Google written in words.

The Impact Of Machine Learning

Fewer technologies are hotter than artificial intelligence and machine learning, which mimic the behavior of the human mind. And for companies embarking on digital transformations, AI and ML are being viewed as pivotal technologies for engaging customers in a better manner.

What Can Machine Learning Achieve?

The U.S. Bank had collected a wealth of customer data. And like most banks, the U.S. Bank has struggled to derive actionable insights from this data. After adapting to Machine Learning, the bank has been using Machine Learning technology to increase personalization across the bank’s small business, wholesale, commercial wealth and commercial banking units.

Post adaptation, if a customer searched on the U.S. Bank’s website for information about mortgage loans, a customer service agent can follow up with that customer the next time they visit a branch. It also helps U.S. Bank find patterns humans might not see.

A simple change that was observed was that the software can recommend agents to call a prospective client in a particular industry on Thursday between 10 a.m. and 12 p.m. because they are more likely to pick up the phone. It can also put a calendar invite into the agent’s calendar to remind them to call the candidate the following Thursday.

Such capabilities get to the core of what many financial services organizations are trying to do; cultivate a 360-degree view of customers to recommend relevant services in the moment.

The industry is transforming from a world that was describing what happened or what is happening to a world that is more about what will or should happen. It is all about staying a step ahead, anticipating customer needs and a suitable channel to communicate with them.

How Facebook Utilizes Machine Learning

Facebook uses Machine Learning in quite a few ways! The People You May Know feature is an implementation of ML. If you browse for a certain product in E-Commerce websites, Facebook will show an ad related to that product on your news feed. That is implemented using Machine Learning as well. The list of Suggested Friends that you see when you join Facebook is based on your current workplace or school or college. That uses Machine Learning as well.

A vivid example of Facebook using Machine Learning is mentioned below:

• Open an image in facebook and right click for Inspect Element or F12.
• Then check the Inspector tab. You can see the html code for that image. If not, search for .spotlight class.
• Check the alt element content. It will give a general description of the image: no of persons, whether they/he/she are sitting, standing, laughing etc.

Understanding Google Page Ranks

Consider all the web pages in the world as nodes of a graph. All the hyperlinks i.e mentions of a website on another website as the edges.

Now, Google Page Rank basically ranks the web pages . So, a generic score needs to be assigned to every web page upon which they’ll be ranked. This score is dependent on the web pages that point it with a factor of alpha and a constant term with a factor of beta. The computations are made and the scores are computed till no further change in scores can be obtained.

PageRank is a ranking system designed to find the best pages on the web. A webpage is good if it is endorsed by other good webpages. The more webpages link to it, and the more authoritative they are, the higher the page’s PageRank score.

If one webpage links to a lot of webpages, each of its endorsements count less than if it had only linked to one webpage. That is, when calculating PageRank, the strength of a website’s endorsement gets divided by the number of endorsements it makes.

Note that this ranking is recursive, to put it more simply, the PageRank score of one webpage depends only on the structure of the network and the PageRank scores of other webpages.

Page Rank algorithm gives weight to every incoming link a web page gets, every incoming link increases Page rank, while links from pages with high page rank have high weight and matter more, links from pages with just a few outgoing links matter more.

Page Rank does not include relevance information, so incoming links from pages that have nothing to do with the page will increase page rank. However, Page Rank is only a very small portion of what determines search results. Trust rank algorithm influences search results more, since it takes into consideration how likely the site is to be trustworthy and not give irrelevant outgoing links.

In layman’s terms, all this enabled through Machine Learning, where in Google utilises its capabilities and build up a database and ranks it accordingly which enables users to access the better websites rather than the mediocre ones.

Machine Learning Is A Huge Asset 

Thinking about the future, machine learning will make its biggest mark in helping workers and businesses to more efficiently use time and gain a deeper understanding of their data. There is so much industry knowledge locked away in PDFs, medical files ,and even cookbooks. Tapping into this data, being able to organize, process and assimilate years of unstructured data points will accelerate the acquisition of knowledge, reducing the time to innovation and unearthing of new ideas. 

Adapt Machine Learning In Your Business Or Fall Behind.

Youtube – The Internet Leader

Youtube has been Internet’s favorite since a long time. It rakes in a lot of money and a lot of us underestimate the power of Youtube when it comes to advertisement and making money. A good understanding will make you realize the power of Youtube.

To begin off, we bring some amazing Youtube Facts that you might be unaware of.

1. PayPal’s Role in YouTube’s Creation

YouTube was created by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim in 2005. The three founders knew each other from working together at another Internet start up, PayPal. In fact, Hurley designed the PayPal logo after reading a Wired article about the online payment company and e-mailing the startup in search of a job. YouTube was initially funded by bonuses received following the eBay buy-out of PayPal. You could argue that if there was no PayPal, there would be no YouTube.

2. YouTube’s Origins as a Dating Site

The founding trio didn’t come up with the YouTube concept straight away. Legend has it that YouTube began life as a video dating site dubbed “Tune In Hook Up,” said to be influenced by HotorNot. The three ultimately decided not to go that route. The inspiration for YouTube as we know it today is credited to two different events. The first was Karim’s inability to find footage online of Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction,” and the second when Hurley and Chen were unable to share video footage of a dinner party due to e-mail attachment limitations.

3. The First Ever YouTube Video

The first video to ever be uploaded to YouTube isn’t a classic by any means. Shot by Yakov Lapitsky at the San Diego Zoo it shows co-founder Jawed Karim in front of the elephant enclosure going on about long trunks. It has, nonetheless, racked up a very healthy 4,282,497 views since its online debut on April 23, 2005.

4. Statistics

We spend around 2.9 billion hours on YouTube in a month — over 325,000 years. And those stats are just for the main YouTube website , they don’t incorporate embedded videos or video watched on mobile devices.

5. Mobility

YouTube has over a billion users and a majority of them are watching videos on their mobile device, a testament to the rising popularity of smartphones as internet connectivity on cellular networks is improving.

6. The Code For Gangnam Style

Psy’s Gangnam Style is the definition of viral in practical terms and currently sits north of 2.8 billion views on YouTube, making it the highest watched YouTube video ever.

YouTube had a 2, 147, 483, 647 view counter limit in its code and Gangnam Style was going viral and looked like it’ll cross that threshold. The coder’s at the company quickly changed the code before Psy broke YouTube’s counter.

The Power Of GitHub

If you are a software engineer and have a notion that your degree is enough to get a job now, it is time that you change your mindset before it is too late! Trends are showing that in the forthcoming years, hiring software developers would not be the same as they were in past. The entire world is becoming “open” to all and nothing is private anymore. This is where online version control systems like GitHub is essential and would shape your career in near future.

Getting to know GitHub

Git is a command line tool and hub is the central repository hosting service where the developers can store their source codes and programs written in varied languages. They can make continuous changes in the code, keep a track of the same made by others, thus come up with modified versions at a regular interval. Several developers like you can simply collaborate with others, download newer modified versions, make changes and upload the new one which can be seen and accessed by your collaborators. Here are few ways you can make use of it:

·       Enhance product quality

The entire world is making a paradigm shift, including staunch closed source patrons like Microsoft. Hence, you can have your code being seen and reviewed by an entire community of programmers all across the world, if you post your code in GitHub. This would help you to understand the flaws in your project and hence can solve them alone with their assistance to create a better version of the software.

·       Knowledge base

GitHub is a valuable knowledge repository. This means that you can also get to know about the projects of the other software developers, which would surely be an exchange of knowledge for both of you. You can also discuss about your project with the other person and take help from him/her to modify your code in case you are stuck with some dependency issues or conflicts.

·       Better version control

GitHub keeps every version that you have modified which means every iteration you do, the previous one can be a supporting document for you! There are change-logs which keep a track of what exact changes have been made and thus you can lookback at your faults if needed.

·       Incredible integration

There are lots of integration options with GitHub and you can integrate your code with platforms like Google cloud or Amazon, for your own benefits. You can use services like Code climate which can simply track your own feedback as well as can deliver your code in over 200 programming languages. Hence you as a software engineer can establish your command over coding in a much better way in comparison with others.

Even if you are a non programmer and have a team that is involved in projects that need constant modifications, you can use GitHub for your own version control management. However, GitHub only offers such system and repos upon an additional cost that you have to bear on a monthly basis. Any ways, which good things come free today? So embrace GitHub and enhance your programming career.

The Do Nots For A Software Developer

Do you own a dream venture and wish to catapult it to the greatest heights? If that’s an ardent desire nurtured by you, app development or software creation will emerge as the first thing to do. Software development happens to be an intensive process that involves quite a few necessary steps. You have to avoid critical errors in the process thus building robust and dynamic applications.

Software development errors can turn out to be costly and affect the overall performance of the application. It’s here that you need to avoid making these mistakes thus creating interactive, dynamic, and feature-rich software applications.

Identifying errors and avoiding them

Since software development projects involve huge investments, it is imperative to identify errors and avoid them. Here are some of the mistakes you should know about:

1. Poor communication with stakeholders

You must know the underlying reasons for building the application. Why are you creating a software app in the first place? Most of the times, these things aren’t clear to the developer. Poor and inadequate communications can give rise to clunky UI, costly revisions, and rejections by consumers.

What to do: Developers should prepare a comprehensive plan and start working on it. From choosing the templates to incorporating the right methodologies, everything has to be in place.

2. Don’t undermine planning phase

It is important to comprehend the scope of software development, and you just can’t ignore that. Ignoring the planning phase will prove to be the biggest error.

What to do: Calculate the total time involved in the project along with methods and strategies. That will help you get a crystal clear idea of the entire process.

3. Excessive use of Cloud

Businesses don’t use hard drives for data storage anymore. Going by the current trends, everything takes place on the Cloud. Excessive and uncontrolled use of Cloud technology can affect the overall performance of an application.

What to do: Work out a plan that suits your app development needs, feature requirements, service plans, and suppliers. Extensive Cloud usage won’t yield positive results.

4. Ignoring Quality Assurance

Q&A happens to be the most important segment of software development. You have to check the quality assurance before launching the app in the market. Otherwise, significant errors might pop up during operations.

What to do: Test the software before offering it to the consumers. It’s not judicious to eliminate coding tests, reviews, and test planning.

More mistakes on the way

While these four mistakes emerge as the most crucial ones, there are others you can’t afford to miss:

5. Compromising on UX

Your software application happens to be for users. Compromising on UX won’t be the right thing to do.

6. Bloated features

Choose the framework, check out the features, and then plan the app development process. That will ensure improved UX.

7. Excluding analytics

Without analytics or performance tracking tool, it won’t be wise to create a software application. Your application will fail to perform in the long run.

Signing off

Operational errors are common and can happen anytime. However, the problem is in the mindset at times, and that’s where developers need to be careful. The following discussion will surely shed some light on this topic!

Why Google Firebase Is The Best Option?

No matter which industry you belong to, having a scalable, intuitive, and interactive app seems to be the need of the hour. Since consumers perform more than half of their tasks with the help of mobile apps, it has become imperative to build strong business applications. It’s right here that you need a robust, scalable, and dynamic framework for web application development. Google’s Firebase emerges as a remarkable option, which can ensure a unified and integrated platform for dynamic mobile apps.

Understanding Firebase

If you wish to build portable and customizable business apps, Firebase will prove to be the best option. It’s a must-have for business app development and allows real-time database integration. As a result, when a user updates anything in the database, the other users get notified automatically. Powered by Google’s innovative features, Firebase ensures automatic application configuration. You won’t have to think much about the app’s performance, once it is running on Firebase.

Every business venture will wish to expand their follower-base and increase profits, and that’s where they need the right framework. Firebase happens to be the best option for quite a few reasons. Here are some of the advantages that will compel you to use this innovative framework!

1. Built-in analytics

Firebase’s analytics dashboard is a unique and innovative one. It’s available for free and can report a whopping 500 event types. Since the dashboard gives you crystal clear ideas of user behavior, you can optimize the application for better performances. Check out the key features of this analytics, and that will help you comprehend the benefits of using Firebase:

• Audience segmentation
• Unlimited reporting
• Integration with innumerable services

These features help you gain crystal clear insights into user behavior, which is a prime requisite for building scalable and interactive business apps.

2. High-quality app development

Firebase provides ample opportunities to create and develop high-quality applications. The internal features, operations, and functions make app development a unique affair. Here are some of the innovative features that make your job easier than ever!

• Authentication
• Remote configuring
• Crash reporting
• Storage
• Real-time database
• Cloud messaging
• Hosting solutions
• Test Lab

From file storage to syncing app data, these features help you perform quite a few essential steps. You can add and integrate crucial data in real-time which improves your app’s functionality to a great extent.

3. Invites

If you wish to motivate users and compel them to install your business app, word-of-mouth advertising will be of paramount significance. With the ‘invites’ feature, Google’s Firebase can make it happen. You can send personalized invitations, emails, and messages to potential clients.

4. User engagement at its best

There’s no denying the significance of user engagement in the app development process. You will surely want your application to grow and scale up with time. The built-in features of Firebase make it happen. Check them out if you wish to create scalable and unique apps:

• Dynamic Links
• App indexing
• Integrating Adwords
• Notifications

Final thoughts

With these incredible benefits, Google’s Firebase emerges as the best option for business app development. You will surely want your business to grow, which is the prime reason for leveraging this innovative framework.