Early Search Engines:
Archie, pre-Web search:
The honor of being the first Internet search engine goes to Archie, a pre-Web search application created in 1990 by a McGill University student named Alan Emtage. Archie sourced Internet-based archives ad built an index of each file it found. Based on the Internet's file transfer protocol standard, Archie's architecture was similar to most modern Web search engines-it crawled resources, built an index, and had a search interface. But the pre-Web era was not a very user-friendly time. Typical users would query the engine by connecting directly to an Archie server via a command-line interface. They would Archie via keywords though to be in a matching file's could be found. They then connected to that machine, and rummaged around till they found what they are looking for.
WWW Wanderer:
Belongs to a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Matthew Gray. He wrote the Wanderer to systematically traverse the Web and collect sites.
AltaVista.com:
Louis Monier, a researcher at DEC's Western Lab in Palo Alto, California, suggested building a search engine: it could load the entire Internet (the massive database) onto an Alpha computer, then build a program showcasing Alpha's speed. Presto-Alta Vista was born, a proof point to DEC's hardware dominance. Monier wanted to make sure AltaVista stayed pure - the best search on the Web. "A pencil," Monier called it - a tool that did one thing very, very well -- it's exactly the approach that catapulted Google to the top of the heap four years later. By 1997, AltaVista was truly king of Search. Serving more than 25 million queries a day and on track to make $50 million in sponsorship revenue, the company was in a three-way heat with Yahoo and AOL as most important destination on the Web.
Journey of AltaVista:
In January 1998, AltaVista moved in the hands of Compaq a Houston-based personal computer giant with absolutely no knowledge of the consumer Internet.
In less than two years Compaq sold Alta Vista to CMGI, a high-flying Internet holding company, for $2.3 billion in June 1999 then CMGI sold this to paid search innovator Overture Services, Inc, in 2003. Later Overture itself was later sold to Yahoo, which restored AltaVista to its original look: a search box, a blinking cursor, and scads of white space. But before that Monier, creator of the first Goolge, moved from the Alta Vista with 30 members of team and his experience, is now working at eBay, helping that commerce giant redesign.
Lycos.com
Lycos was created in May 1994 by CMU's Dr. Michael Mauldin, working under a grant from Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency(DARPA).
History behind the name "Lycos": It was derived from Lycosidae,the Latin word for the wolf spider family,whose members actively seek their prey rather than catching it in a web.
How it works:
Lycos deployed a spiderlike crawler to index the Web, but it used more sophisticated mathematical algorithms to determine the meaning of page and answer user queries. The crux of Lycos search technique was analysis of anchor text, or the description of outbound links on a Web page, to get a better idea of the meaning of the existing page. Lycos's introduced Webpage summaries in search results ,rather than a simple list of links.
For a short period in 1999,Lycos became the most popular online destination in the world. But in May 2000, Lycos was sold to Terra, a Spanish telecom giant. Four years later, Terra sold Lycos to a South Korean company.
Similarly like AltaVisa Lycos moved into couple of hands and today remains a top-twenty destination.
Excite:
Founded in 1994 by six Stanford University alumni. Excite began life under the name Architext. The company's original goal was to create search technology for large databases within corporations, but Vinod Khosla(person who funded Excite with $1.5 million ) encouraged the company to focus on the consumer Web.
Innovations from Excite:
Personalization - MyExcite was among the first services to allow users to create custom Web pages with news ,business information, and regional weather reports. In 1997, Excite became the first of the major portals to offer free e-mail.
Journey of Excite:
In 1998 every major search engine was in play ,and every one looking for merges and acquisitions. Excite had discussion with Yahoo, Google,AOL,Microsoft, and Lycos. According to both Khosla and Bullington, Excite was extremely close to closing the deal with Yahoo but another bidder came knocking on the Excite's door. When @Home, a broadband company owned by several major companies, made a richer offer to combine Excite with its @Home broadband Internet service. It's quite similar to Compaq was to Alta Vista and naturally Excite ended up in a very messy Chapter 11 proceeding.(bankruptcy)
Unbeknownst to them all, there was a giant vacuum left in search.
Yahoo Kick Off:(Yang and Filo)
Yahoo got its start when two bored Phd candidates at Stanford hacked together a system that helped them win a fantasy basketball league. In 1993, Mosaic, the first Web browser, launched and Yaung started obsessively surfing the web , noted all web lists which interested to him. Filo took note of Yang's passion and write some software which collects the list and puts in one web page.
YAHOO -Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle ,came by reveres engineering by way of acronym. Yang and Filo adopted directory approach to navigation -sorting links into categories like Arts, Science, Business, and so on.
Tim Koogle, Yahoo's first CEO, knew he was onto something when he met Yang and Filo in 1995. I saw great guys who were clearly in need of adult supervision ,Koogle tells. Both Filo, and Yang readily admit their lack of business expertise at the time, and welcomed experience of Koogle, who was a former Motorola executive.
Google Is Born:
Page read a biography of Nikola Tesla, one of history's most prodigious inventors. Telsa discovered or developed the foundational technologies for an astonishing array of innovations,from wireless communication and X rays to solar cells and the modern power grid.But despite his extraordinary invention,Telsa remains a minor figure in particular when compared to Thomas Edison, a man who Telsa worked for. The twelve-year-old Page was stuck with this fact:regardless of how brilliant and world-changing Tesla's work had been, the inventor received little long-term fame. After reading Telsa biography Page tells, I realized I wanted to invent things, but I also wanted to change the world. I wanted to get them out there, get them into peoples hands so they can use them, because that's what really matters.
The two others working with Page and Brin were Scott Hassan and Alan Steremberg, graduate assistants who had been assigned to the project,Google. But Hassan and Steremberg ended up separating from the project before Google really took off. But even those missing Beatles started successful Internet companies. Hassan went on to found eGroups.com with Larryy's brohter,Carl Page, and later sold it to Yahoo for more than $500 million. Steremberg had already launched The Weather Under ground, a popular weather site, while an undergraduate at Michigan and still runs today.
The first version of Google released on the Stanford Web site in August 1996. Graduate students usually lack the money to buy new computers; Page and Brin were no exceptions. Instead they begged and borrowed - a hard drive from the network lab, an idle CPU from the CS loading docks. Using Page's dorm room as machine lab, they fashioned a computational Frankenstein from spare parts, then jacked the whole thing into Stanford's broadband campus network. After filling Page's room with equipment, the young students converted Brin's room into an office and programming center.
Initial Investment for Google Inc:
By late 1998, Google was serving more than ten thousand queries per a day, and it was clear to Page and Brin that the service would quickly outgrow their ability to beg resources to support it. David Cheriton (who heads Stanford's Distributed Systems Group) suggested Page and Brin meet with Andy Bectolsheim, a founder of Sun who was active in early-stage investments. Both of them met Andy and given demo, and Andy asked a lot of questions. Then he said: 'Well, I don't want to waste time. I'm sure it'll help you guys if I just write a check. Page and Brin weren't ready for such an offer, but when Bechtolsheim went out to his car to get his checkbook, they pondered how much to ask for and what valuation. But when Bechtolsheim returned, they told him their suggested valuation. Page picks up the story: "We told him our valuation, and he said 'Oh, I don't think that's enough, I think it should be twice that much." Brin and Page were stunned, but of course, they agreed, and Bechtolsheim asked who the check should be made out to. The founders hadn't settled on a name, so Bechtolsheim suggested Google Inc.,after the service's name. They agreed, and minutes later, Page and Brin had a check for $100,000.
The Early Years -Google first Office
Page kept the check in his dorm room desk for several weeks, as the founders went about forming the company and setting up back accounts. On September 7, 1998, Google Inc. was formally incorporated, with Page as CEO and Brin as president. When Brin and Page hired their first employee-fellow student Craig Silvestein- they realized they needed to find office space. They found a temporary answer in Susan Wojciki, a friend of Sergey's girlfriend.
Monday, June 28, 2010
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
The Search-Notes
What is Search?
Link by link ,click by click ,search is building possibly the most lasting, ponderous ,and significant cultural artifact in the history of humankind: the Data base of Intentions.
The Data base of Intentions is simply this: the aggregate results of every search ever entered ,every result list ever tendered , and every path taken as result. What we call simply as Search.
Who ,What ,Where ,Why, When, and How:
John Battelle words: As a cub reporter ,I was taught to answer five questions about any topic before writing about it: who ,what ,where ,why and when. If you crammed answers to all those questions into your lead paragraph ,then you'd essentially done your job. Author also said he quickly learned to add a sixth how?. I hope these words holds good for every one.
A Search engine Consists :A search engine consist of three major pieces
The Crawl
The Index
The run time system or query processor
The crawler is a specialized software program that hopes from link to link on the World Wide Web , scarfing up the pages it finds and sending them back to be indexed.
The more sites they crawl , and the more frequently they crawl them ,the more complete the index is. When the index is more complete ,the search results pages (SERPs) that are returned for particular query have a greater chance of being relevant. The process of grokking the index is referred to as analysis. Google's PageRank algorithm is an example of analysis: It looks the links on a page, the anchor text around those links , and the popularity of the pages that link to another page and factors them together to determine the ultimate relevance of a particular page to your query. Google in fact ,looks at more than one hundred factors to determine a sites relevance to your keywords.
The query processor which is the interface and related software that connects user's queries to the index.
Once the crawl data is analyzed ,indexed , and tagged ,it's dumped into what's called a runtime index - a data base ready to serve results to users. The runtime index form something of a bridge between the back end of an engine (the crawl and index) and the front end(it's query server and user interface).
Atomic phrases:Phrases that have their own sets of results at the smallest levels ,search engines are capable of tell the difference by parsing a list of atomic phrases.
As per John (2007) Google alone has more than 175,000 computers dedicated to the job.
The power of search lies :
We do ask lot of the same questions , but we ask far more that are unique , and therein lies the power of search.
Google Whacking:
In the early days of Google , a popular sport among the search watchers was to find a query that had exactly one result. This game even has a name - Google Whacking.
Where & Why -Search:
Navigational Query: The practice of typing in a word you know so as to yield a site you wish to visit called as navigational query.
Why Search: We are searching for more than one answers. Not only are we searching for that which we know. We increasingly searching to find that which we do not know.
Web blindness: A sense that was know there's stuff we might want to find, but have no idea how to find it.
Link by link ,click by click ,search is building possibly the most lasting, ponderous ,and significant cultural artifact in the history of humankind: the Data base of Intentions.
The Data base of Intentions is simply this: the aggregate results of every search ever entered ,every result list ever tendered , and every path taken as result. What we call simply as Search.
Who ,What ,Where ,Why, When, and How:
John Battelle words: As a cub reporter ,I was taught to answer five questions about any topic before writing about it: who ,what ,where ,why and when. If you crammed answers to all those questions into your lead paragraph ,then you'd essentially done your job. Author also said he quickly learned to add a sixth how?. I hope these words holds good for every one.
A Search engine Consists :A search engine consist of three major pieces
The Crawl
The Index
The run time system or query processor
The crawler is a specialized software program that hopes from link to link on the World Wide Web , scarfing up the pages it finds and sending them back to be indexed.
The more sites they crawl , and the more frequently they crawl them ,the more complete the index is. When the index is more complete ,the search results pages (SERPs) that are returned for particular query have a greater chance of being relevant. The process of grokking the index is referred to as analysis. Google's PageRank algorithm is an example of analysis: It looks the links on a page, the anchor text around those links , and the popularity of the pages that link to another page and factors them together to determine the ultimate relevance of a particular page to your query. Google in fact ,looks at more than one hundred factors to determine a sites relevance to your keywords.
The query processor which is the interface and related software that connects user's queries to the index.
Once the crawl data is analyzed ,indexed , and tagged ,it's dumped into what's called a runtime index - a data base ready to serve results to users. The runtime index form something of a bridge between the back end of an engine (the crawl and index) and the front end(it's query server and user interface).
Atomic phrases:Phrases that have their own sets of results at the smallest levels ,search engines are capable of tell the difference by parsing a list of atomic phrases.
As per John (2007) Google alone has more than 175,000 computers dedicated to the job.
The power of search lies :
We do ask lot of the same questions , but we ask far more that are unique , and therein lies the power of search.
Google Whacking:
In the early days of Google , a popular sport among the search watchers was to find a query that had exactly one result. This game even has a name - Google Whacking.
Where & Why -Search:
Navigational Query: The practice of typing in a word you know so as to yield a site you wish to visit called as navigational query.
Why Search: We are searching for more than one answers. Not only are we searching for that which we know. We increasingly searching to find that which we do not know.
Web blindness: A sense that was know there's stuff we might want to find, but have no idea how to find it.
Saturday, July 11, 2009
Microsoft Office OneNote
Usually while logging bugs or uploading test results most of us follow
· Attaching the screen shot
· Attaching the log file (if possible)
· Attaching the error message (text displayed in the page)
We might of facing some problem with providing the complete text of error message , because few application's will not provide any option to copy the error text to clip board. If error message contains one or two lines we can read and write the exact message in bug description. It would be very difficult to write the error message if it contains more than 5 or 10 lines.
Microsoft Office OneNote is providing a cool feature 'Copy Text from Picture’, which allow us to copy the entire text
How to Do this:
Copy & Paste the image into OneNote.
Right click on the image and click on 'Copy Text from Picture'
Paste in OneNote.
You have the entire error message ready which eases developer work also.
Limitations:
Currently it supporting to copy the English text only.
If you are not using ‘Microsoft Office OneNote' not a problem, Google or Bing for 'optical character reader open source tools'.
Happy Testing.
· Attaching the screen shot
· Attaching the log file (if possible)
· Attaching the error message (text displayed in the page)
We might of facing some problem with providing the complete text of error message , because few application's will not provide any option to copy the error text to clip board. If error message contains one or two lines we can read and write the exact message in bug description. It would be very difficult to write the error message if it contains more than 5 or 10 lines.
Microsoft Office OneNote is providing a cool feature 'Copy Text from Picture’, which allow us to copy the entire text
How to Do this:
Copy & Paste the image into OneNote.
Right click on the image and click on 'Copy Text from Picture'
Paste in OneNote.
You have the entire error message ready which eases developer work also.
Limitations:
Currently it supporting to copy the English text only.
If you are not using ‘Microsoft Office OneNote' not a problem, Google or Bing for 'optical character reader open source tools'.
Happy Testing.
Never get influenced by…XYZ
Most of us might of experienced this type of situation like…missing very simple scenario during testing. Recently I had experienced this type of situation.
Expectations set to Test team for that particular drop is look for
-> No Application crashes.
-> Performance should be improved when comparing to the previous drop.
We tried all possible scenarios including positive and negative also .We found couple of observations, as most of them were classified as least preferred scenarios, those issues were deferred to next release and that particular drop was released to Production. We thought all the basic functionality would work as there is no specific code change but in production it happened in other way, the basic scenario was failed. When that issue reported to me I really did not believe myself how I missed out this...but fact was I missed it. Hope you all can guess the rest of the story L.
Lesions Learnt:
Never ever do sign off on the build without executing below mentioned test cases, especially when the drop is scheduled to deploy into Production.
-> Priority 0 Test Cases.
-> Frequently used scenarios.
-> Critical Scenarios.
Above test case results may give some sort of assurance that the particular drop is decent enough to deploy into production.
Any inputs???
Expectations set to Test team for that particular drop is look for
-> No Application crashes.
-> Performance should be improved when comparing to the previous drop.
We tried all possible scenarios including positive and negative also .We found couple of observations, as most of them were classified as least preferred scenarios, those issues were deferred to next release and that particular drop was released to Production. We thought all the basic functionality would work as there is no specific code change but in production it happened in other way, the basic scenario was failed. When that issue reported to me I really did not believe myself how I missed out this...but fact was I missed it. Hope you all can guess the rest of the story L.
Lesions Learnt:
Never ever do sign off on the build without executing below mentioned test cases, especially when the drop is scheduled to deploy into Production.
-> Priority 0 Test Cases.
-> Frequently used scenarios.
-> Critical Scenarios.
Above test case results may give some sort of assurance that the particular drop is decent enough to deploy into production.
Any inputs???
Sunday, June 21, 2009
Question the Implementation
Environment:
Application: Windows application
Operating System: Windows Vista
Requirement:
Whenever Agent hits Button (say Close Call) ,the application should close the session and the same time it should generate an XML should store in a table.
Implementation: Whenever Agent hits the button instead of directly storing into data base application temporarily stores in local machine and then stores into the data base. Once application stores the XML in the data base application will delete the temporary file.
Repro Steps:
1.Launch the application.
2.Do some operations in the application.
3.Click on Button.(Close Call)
Actual Result:
Application crashes.
It happened only in UAT environment in all the machines and Testing environment it never happened. After UAT people reporting the bug ,we tried but could not repro it. After going through the log file we came to know that application is crashing while writing the data into temp file ,meaning application unable to append the data to the existing tem file because of some corruption and then it crashes. Then the implementation has been changed to like this
whenever agent hits the button ,before writing into temp files application deletes the old file and creates new temp file.
Finally ,what I would like to Conway is as a tester it's not enough to cross check the functionality with respect to document we also need to check (if possible test )how the functionality is being implemented.
Application: Windows application
Operating System: Windows Vista
Requirement:
Whenever Agent hits Button (say Close Call) ,the application should close the session and the same time it should generate an XML should store in a table.
Implementation: Whenever Agent hits the button instead of directly storing into data base application temporarily stores in local machine and then stores into the data base. Once application stores the XML in the data base application will delete the temporary file.
Repro Steps:
1.Launch the application.
2.Do some operations in the application.
3.Click on Button.(Close Call)
Actual Result:
Application crashes.
It happened only in UAT environment in all the machines and Testing environment it never happened. After UAT people reporting the bug ,we tried but could not repro it. After going through the log file we came to know that application is crashing while writing the data into temp file ,meaning application unable to append the data to the existing tem file because of some corruption and then it crashes. Then the implementation has been changed to like this
whenever agent hits the button ,before writing into temp files application deletes the old file and creates new temp file.
Finally ,what I would like to Conway is as a tester it's not enough to cross check the functionality with respect to document we also need to check (if possible test )how the functionality is being implemented.
CAP's Lock
Environment:
Application: Windows application
Operating System: Windows Vista
Requirement:
If agent selects the option save the user name /password ,from next login onwards application should not ask username/password.
1 .Launch the application
2. Save the option user name/password once you logged in with
3.Close the application and launch it again by clicking the short cut .
Actual Result:
Some times application is not doing automation.
As testing team haven't provided exact repro steps and moreover it happened in my machine only ,dev team set the priority as low.
I defiantly know ,there is some issue but I could not figure it out for long time why it's happening some times that to in my machine. That time I had changed my password as per the password policy ,mostly I will keep at least two letters in CAPs. Whenever I am entering my password I will on the CAP's lock, after login I will off the CAP's lock. That time I got the exact repro steps why this issue happening some times
Here are the repro steps
1 .Launch the application
2. Save the option user name/password once you logged in with
3.On the CAP's lock.
4.Close the application and launch it again by clicking the short cut .
Actual Result:
Application is not doing automation.
Reason: When ever we switch on the CAP's lock Operating system will display a message 'CAP's lock is on..' because of this the focus is not moving to the password field.
Application: Windows application
Operating System: Windows Vista
Requirement:
If agent selects the option save the user name /password ,from next login onwards application should not ask username/password.
1 .Launch the application
2. Save the option user name/password once you logged in with
3.Close the application and launch it again by clicking the short cut .
Actual Result:
Some times application is not doing automation.
As testing team haven't provided exact repro steps and moreover it happened in my machine only ,dev team set the priority as low.
I defiantly know ,there is some issue but I could not figure it out for long time why it's happening some times that to in my machine. That time I had changed my password as per the password policy ,mostly I will keep at least two letters in CAPs. Whenever I am entering my password I will on the CAP's lock, after login I will off the CAP's lock. That time I got the exact repro steps why this issue happening some times
Here are the repro steps
1 .Launch the application
2. Save the option user name/password once you logged in with
3.On the CAP's lock.
4.Close the application and launch it again by clicking the short cut .
Actual Result:
Application is not doing automation.
Reason: When ever we switch on the CAP's lock Operating system will display a message 'CAP's lock is on..' because of this the focus is not moving to the password field.
Monday, June 18, 2007
Now it’s time for US to know where we are standing in TESTING / SQA.
We started our career in testing... either by choice or by virtue. Now it’s time for US to know where we are standing in TESTING / SQA.
- Testing process
- Testing Techniques
- Web application testing
- Client Server testing.
- Automation testing
- Domain knowledge
These are all jargon's... in software testing industry....Having 3 years of experience in SQA I am 100% sure that we are aware of those listed topics (Please include if you have any)....but we need to know how proficient we are in the above skills. How can we know this? This is where we need to start...and we have to know where we stand, which helps either in improving our skills or to intensify the profile. I would request you all to share your views or ideas on this to make ourselves as an Expert-Tester....
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