With Caffeine, Google moved its back-end indexing system away from MapReduce and onto BigTable, the company's distributed database platform. Caffeine is also based on Colossus, or GFS2, an overhaul of the GFS distributed file system.
In May 2010 Google rolled out SSL-encrypted web search. The encrypted search can be accessed at: https://encrypted.google.com
Google Instant, an enhancement that displays suggested results while the user types, was introduced in the United States starting on September 8, 2010. One concern is that people might select one of the suggested results instead of finishing their request, and that such a practice could cause bias toward familiar businesses or other search terms. Pornographic or otherwise offensive search terms are excluded from the suggested results. The instant feature appears only on the basic Google site and not specialized iGoogle pages. Google expects Google Instant to save users 2 to 5 seconds in every search, which they say will be collectively 11 million seconds per hour. Search engine marketing pundits speculated that Google Instant would have a great impact on local and paid search.
In concert with the Google Instant launch, Google disabled the ability of users to choose to see more than 10 search results per page. Instant Search can be disabled via Google's "preferences" menu, but autocomplete-style search suggestions now cannot be disabled. A Google representative stated, "It's in keeping with our vision of a unified Google search experience to make popular, useful features part of the default experience, rather than maintain different versions of Google. As Autocomplete quality has improved, we felt it was appropriate to have it always on for all of our users."
Google is available in many languages and has been localized for many countries.
The interface has also been made available in some languages for humorous purpose:
In addition to the main URL Google.com, Google Inc. owns 160 domain names for each of the countries/regions in which it has been localized. As Google is an American company, the main domain name can be considered as the U.S. one.
Some domain names unregistered by Google are currently squatted, such as "Google.ua" (for Ukraine, where the correct URL is "google.com.ua").
In addition to its tool for searching webpages, Google also provides services for searching images, Usenet newsgroups, news websites, videos, searching by locality, maps, and items for sale online. In 2006, Google has indexed over 25 billion web pages, 400 million queries per day, 1.3 billion images, and over one billion Usenet messages. It also caches much of the content that it indexes. Google operates other tools and services including Google News, Google Suggest, Google Product Search, Google Maps, Google Co-op, Google Earth, Google Docs, Picasa, Panoramio, YouTube, Google Translate, Google Blog Search and Google Desktop Search.
There are also products available from Google that are not directly search-related. Gmail, for example, is a webmail application, but still includes search features; Google Browser Sync does not offer any search facilities, although it aims to organize your browsing time.
Also Google starts many new beta products, like Google Social Search or Google Image Swirl.
In 2017 the USPTO issued Microsoft a patent describing a methodology that could serve as an alternative to Google's Instant Search.
Google claims that a search query requires altogether about 1 kJ or 0.0003 kW·h.
Fade (audio engineering)
In audio engineering, a fade is a gradual increase (fade-in) or decrease (fade-out) in the level of an audio signal. The term can also be used for film cinematography or theatre lighting, in much the same way (see: fade (filmmaking)).
A recorded song may be gradually reduced to silence at its end ("fade-out"), or may gradually increase from silence at the beginning ("fade-in"). For example, the songs "Bitter Sweet Symphony" by The Verve and "Turn to Stone" by Electric Light Orchestra fade in from the beginning, while the songs "Born to Be Wild" by Steppenwolf, "Boogie Oogie Oogie" by A Taste of Honey, and "Hey Jude" by The Beatles fade out. However, "Born to be Wild" and "Boogie Oogie Oogie" fade out in a matter of seconds, whereas "Hey Jude" takes over 2 minutes to completely fade out. "Goodbye Stranger" by Supertramp takes about a minute to fade out. Fading-out can serve as a recording solution for pieces of music that contain no obvious ending.
Though relatively rare, songs can fade out, then fade back in. Some examples of this are "Helter Skelter" by The Beatles, "Suspicious Minds" by Elvis Presley, "Thank You" by Led Zeppelin or "Undercover of the Night" by The Rolling Stones.
The term "fade" is also used in multi-speaker audio systems to describe the balancing of power between front and rear channels.
"Neptune", part of the orchestral suite, "The Planets", by Gustav Holst, was an early piece of music to have a fade-out ending. Holst stipulates that the women's choruses are "to be placed in an adjoining room, the door of which is to be left open until the last bar of the piece, when it is to be slowly and silently closed", and that the final bar (scored for choruses alone) is "to be repeated until the sound is lost in the distance". Although commonplace today, the effect bewitched audiences in the era before widespread recorded sound—after the initial 1918 run-through, Holst's daughter, Imogen (in addition to watching the charwomen dancing in the aisles during "Jupiter") remarked that the ending was "unforgettable, with its hidden chorus of women's voices growing fainter and fainter... until the imagination knew no difference between sound and silence".
The technique of ending a spoken or musical recording by fading out the sound goes back to the earliest days of recording. In the era of mechanical (pre-electrical) recording, this could only be achieved by either moving the sound source away from the recording horn, or by gradually reducing the volume at which the performers were singing, playing or speaking. With the advent of electrical recording, smooth and controllable fadeout effects could be easily achieved by simply reducing the input volume from the microphones using the fader on the mixing desk.
No single recording can be reliably identified as "the first" to use the technique. In 2003, on the (now-defunct) website "Stupid Question" , John Ruch listed the following recordings as possible contenders:
A fader is any device used for fading, especially when it is a knob or button that "slides" along a track or slot. A knob which "rotates" is usually not considered a fader, although it is electrically and functionally equivalent. A fader can be either analogue, directly controlling the resistance or impedance to the source (e.g. a Potentiometer); or digital, numerically controlling a digital signal processor (DSP). Digital faders are also referred to as "virtual" faders, since they can be viewed on the screen of a digital audio workstation. Modern high-end digital mixers often have piezo-electric actuators attached to the faders such that they can be multi-use and will jump to the correct position for the selected function and/or saved setting.
A crossfader on a dj mixer essentially functions like two faders connected side-by-side, but in opposite directions. It allows a DJ to fade one source out while fading another source in at the same time. This is extremely useful when beatmatching two phonograph records or compact discs.
The technique of crossfading is also used in audio engineering as a mixing technique, particularly with instrumental solos. A mix engineer will often record two or more takes of a vocal or instrumental part and create a final version which is a composite of the best passages of these takes by crossfading between each track.