Hidden Distributed Search Function in Google Toolbar

Great scoop :) about the Google toolbar

[ROLAND_F]

Do you remember that I suggested Google to use the toolbar as a way to do Distributed computing so we could give back to google ???

They did it ! They are so smart they are really listening to us.

You know that the google toolbar is called the "NavClient".

Now, the Google toolbar look for a registry key called "DcClient".

I suspect that "DC" is for "Distributed Computing".

Have a look at the resouce in the Google Toolbar DLL
GoogleToolbar_en_1.1.53-deleon.dll you will find a "double helix" icon.

While searching for new button name I could add to my registry key buttonId I found this:

"DcTaskFoldingAtHome"
"DcTaskSimpleProtein"
"DcTaskPerfectNums"
"DcClientOnOrOff"
"DcClientMenu"

I think that I will not sleep tonight, I'm so excited :).

Added: [foldingathome.stanford.edu...]
[toolbar.google.com...]

Key:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Google\NavClient\1.1\Options\

Add Binary Value "EnableDC" value "1".

[jammy]

personally i've been using United Devices help find a cure for cancer with their distributed thingymajig. as long as the google DC was helping worthy causes i think it's a good thing to create more awareness at least (apologies to aliens; it make take a little more time to find you with less seti@home's running)

[ROLAND_F]

More and more nice things are discovered.

You have somebody at Google that worked for the NSA. You have an army of PhD that do research about voice recognition. And you have the most powerfull and scalable infrastructure for a search engine.

Voice & Data interception -> Voice to text -> text indexing.

Scary isn't it ?

[ROLAND_F]

According to an article "About 2.3 million people have already downloaded the Google Toolbar, which makes Google searching a standing feature on your browser (see below). "

Read more here:
[onmagazine.com...]

[Everyman]

Yep, you're getting the idea. The last people you should trust when it comes to your civil liberties are the data nerds in Silicon Valley.

Both Scott McNealy of Sun and Larry Ellison of Oracle have come out in favor of a national ID card. These cards would have some physical characteristics encoded in a chip (like a thumbprint) so that the card can only be used by the rightful owner. They also anticipate that there would be a tie-in to a national database when you swipe the card.

Larry Ellison has offered to provide to the government, free of charge, the database software required for such a national system. Oracle got its start when the CIA gave Ellison a contract in the 1970s.

Google, of course, will be first in line to bid on and/or index this sort of database. They already have reverse and forward white page lookups, 17 years of newsgroup archives, 2 billion web pages, they're expanding into PDF and DOC files, and they just keep sucking it all up. This short list doesn't even get into Google's 36-year cookies, because they have never told us why they need those things.

Imagine that ten years from now, Google (or Google's successor with access to its archives) decides that you are politically incorrect and gives your ID card the equivalent of a PR zero? (That's PersonRank, a refinement of PageRank; algorithms are still secret, naturally.)

What would your life be like if that happens?

[emmanuel555]

so scary!

ok lets relax and see Gattaca (movie from A. Niccol) with the new version of pagerank: the blood rank...

[Brett_Tabke]

I generally agree that most programs that do things on your computer and phone home to some mothership are bad as they come. I don't even like running programs that do so for legitimate reasons like registration validation.

On the flip side, I can see where it might be something very useful in the p2p search engine field as a toolbar. I've heard of several distributed search engines, and quite frankly, it's a fresh idea. If that is indeed what we are working with here, and not some program simply designed to crunch numbers from the toolbar.

Either way, I'd like to give the chance to present it and then decide. We've been wrong before. Take all the talk the last few months that stated emphatically that Google was going pure ppc. Turns out, they are just auctioning off ads in the same ad system that has been around more than a year.

[Sokeo]

I downloaded the Google Toolbar for IE 5.5 but I cannot seem to find the option to turn on Foldingathome in the Google toolbar options. Is the Google Compute feature in the basic toolbar or is it a add-on I am suppose to download?

In the FAQ I found:
Go to the Google Toolbar menu, which is found by clicking on the Google logo on the left hand side of the toolbar. Select "Toolbar Options..." Then click on the checkbox to disable "Google Computing". Please note that you can always enable Google Computing again, using the same checkbox on the options page.

I can not find this option.

Thanks for any help

[PsychoTekk]

Hi Sokea, add this key to your registry:
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Google\NavClient\1.1\Options]
"EnableDC"=hex:01
..should work now ;)

[Sokeo]

DOH, I knew it was gonna be a edit reg type of thing.

I got this far into the regedit,[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Google\NavClient\1.1\Options] now I am lost. When I open the options file what do I need to do - New Key, String Value,Binary Value, or DWord Value?
Also do I need to right click the option folder or open the option folder and add this stuff.

Sorry I never edited my reg file before :)
Thanks
Ed

[Sokeo]

I got it figured out, it is running.

One question though, does the Folding program run all of the time (as long as the computer is on) or does IE have to be open?

[ROLAND_F]

It work all the time, you can have a look at the windows task manager, there is a process running taking all the remaining cpu power.

[PsychoTekk]

hey Sokeo, don't thank me thank Roland, he was the one who found out about this...
well, it doesn't really matter where you click on options, it is a binary value that has to be set
if it doesn't work anyways just download the regfile (i posted the url somewhere above), or you put the two lines into a regfile...
i hope i could help ya ;)

[Sokeo]

working with both of you posts helped me out. Thank you very much.

I have run the Folding client before with the client from the Standford site, and with that you can enter your user name so all the work you computers complete will be credited to your account. Does the Google version do that? Or, if I run the Google version on two or three computers do I get two or three different accounts on the Google stat page?

Sorry about all these questions guys :)

[ROLAND_F]

You will get a very impersonal id such as google17832863725.

Yes, you are a number ...

[Sokeo]

Well I really don't care about a number ID, most everyone uses an alias anyway.

But if I run the Folding Client using Google on 5 computers am I going to have 5 number ID's, and 5 places on the Google Stat page.

Has someone found out what file they hide those ID numbers in.

Never mind this post I found what I need...hope it works :)

[ahmad]

Folding@Home is cool, the idea is neat and lovely. The newborn sibling of SETI@Home [the world's largest (or one of the largest) distributed computing projects founded in UCBerkeley] is not robust and mature yet, they gotta work on their applications (Specially the UI which becomes kinda confusing sometimes) more now since they got this huge support by Google. As for the usernames and number, I simply went to [foldingathome.stanford.edu...] and downloaded the software, joing with my own username [e.g. Ahmad Anvari] and then joined team 446 which is Google. You're not a number anymore :-)

[EliteWeb]

Saw that, was a brief but entertaining article. (: Damn google doesnt need to advertise they just keep coming up with intuitive and positive ideas and recieve all the free press in the world.

[msgraph]

>>what we knew 4 weeks ago

Like usual with CNET.....

[ROLAND_F]

Why didn't they talked about this earlier ?

[ROLAND_F]

Now if you have one of the last installed version of the toolbar go there:

[toolbar.google.com...]

You will have the possibility to turn on (or off) the Google Compute feature of your toolbar more easily than with registry surgery.

[ROLAND_F]

Oh my god, I may be wrong but it seems that with a little bit of javascript or only with an IFRAME you can turn on Google Compute without the users knowledge. You only have to redirect them to an URL that is intercepted by the google toolbar and that enable the Google Compute system. Now redirect the user to that url in a 1 pixel wide IFRAME and I think it would be possible to turn it on without user knowledge.

Google Guy, I'm I right or do you have implemented a way to put the message in a new browser window or something like that ?

[ROLAND_F]

By doing a query about Google Toolbar Beta and clicking on different links I was able to install version 1.1.1-45, 1.1.1-51, I once had a version 1.1.1-53
and the last one is a 1.1.1-54 :)

[ROLAND_F]

I tried really hard to reproduce what I suggested in an earlier post in this thread but I was not successfull. It seems that the toolbar is protected against this kind of hack and/or that I'm not good at javascript.

I managed to turn on the Google Compute by cut/paste the good url into my msie5.5 browser but I was not successfull to do it using javascript or using an iframe :(. Unfortunately I'm not good at Javascript.

[ROLAND_F]

By visiting this URL [toolbar.google.com...]

[IanTurner]

Please explain in more detail what you mean by Turn on Google Compute

[lazerzubb]

There is an article about this too.
[zdnet.com.com...]

[Rugles]

Check out this article on the toolbar.

[news.com.com...]

[Macguru]

Hehe!

Some member here scooped them! Who was it? Where is this thread gone?

[cfel2000]

There was already a thread on this.

Brett, the thread in questions has gone missing.

I installed the function and it doesn't seem to have any impact on my machine so I'm keeping it.

[GoogleGuy]

Hey Roland, I don't think it's possible for a webmaster to enable a user's distributed computing feature. I'll double-check though, and make sure that this can't happen.

I think anyone who wants to participate in the distributed computing project is welcome to. Just get a fresh version of the toolbar and visit the page at
[toolbar.google.com...]
to turn it on. You'll feel good about it.
We started with a trial of 500 users, and we'll slowly offer it to more users.

This is an easy way to do a good deed--the last time I checked into protein folding algorithms, the running times were like O(n^5), so it helps to get a few thousand computers working on the problem. Um, what else? At some point in the future, we may use it to improve Google using some of that computation, but the main motivation is to give something back and help science. We like science. I've got mine running right now. :)

I don't feel like going back over the user privacy and disclaimer stuff right now. It's this just this little inert thing that uses your CPU when you don't care. It doesn't spy or store secret data or whatever. More info at
[toolbar.google.com...]