Google Inc. announced on Monday its new Google Desktop 2 software, which provides users with a personalized stream of news headlines, weather reports, stock prices and other information based on their web-surfing habits.
Jun Yang, a Duke University professor of computer science, says Google's latest product combines three technologies -- web searching, Really Simple Syndication (RSS) and a continuously running desktop service - “ that take a step toward an "intelligent push" system for retrieving information from the web. With intelligent push technology, computer users automatically have the information they most want "pushed" to them from sources across the web, instead of actively checking those sources and "pulling" the information.
"RSS by itself provides a kind of 'poor man's push technology,'" said Yang, who was a graduate student in the computer science database group at Stanford University with one of the founders of Google and a number of the company's first employees. "When you combine it with Google's ability to aggregate RSS feeds from a huge number of sources, its support for customized information feeds based on user-defined searches and a continuously running desktop application, you have a platform capable of supporting some serious publish-subscribe functionalities.
"We could be moving to a model where relevant information is intelligently pushed to users in a timely fashion, not haphazardly pulled," he said. "Ranked, personalized, customized updates pushed out to users - “ that's where this technology is headed."