Good buying ?

Don't know why i've been blogging about Google too much lately, or why i am blogging at the middle of the day.

Anyways, Google has bought another company. This time, it is the security company GreenBorder. This is strange, as comparing to its previous buys, most of them are entertainment and advertising companies.

Does it realise some long-term security flaws in the systems needed to be repaired ? Firstly, let have a look at GreenBorder first. This California-based company is believed to help cooperate to create a sort of sandbox environement that detects and keeps all the malicious codes/software out. In principle, it works like a very big (operating system-wise) Java Virtual Machine used for Java applets. If i undrestand correctly, then it differs to the currently popular solutions of Virtualization (like Xen or VMWare). GreenBorder looks to provide security at the outter layer, and all the operating systems inside are independent. With virtualization software, it allows multiple copies of an operating systems working on the same set of hardware, and not interfereing with each other. Thus, it provides security at the inner layers, from inside out.

Not sure about how GreenBorder's detection of malicious codes work though. But it must be efficient and good enough to charge $100 per customer.

So how Google would benefit from GreenBorder's technology. Its spokeman said that it can be used in many services, but didn't reveal what and how. The first thing that came to my mind when reading this acquisition was that Google was going to use it for an overdue enhanced version of its search engine. Not long ago, an article in BBC mentioned the need of eliminating malicious websites (containing virus, worms) in search results. So for example, there are websites (adult content, ...) that when you click on it, strange things would happen to your PC. Annoyingly enough, you found most of those sites via Google search.

It's not really straightforward to incoporate the filtering mechanism to Google's search engine. Basically, Google downloaded (mostly) the entire websites in the Internet and ran a PageRank algorithm to rank the popularity of the page. The most popular sites would come up first in the search results. The information that determine the ranks are links from other sites, which look rather static to me. Scanning through the entire sites looking for malicious codes require much, much more work than simply looking for hyperlinks information. That may be where GreenBorder's technology comes to handy.

If Google can make its search engine to do that, well, we no longer need any sort of firewall or antivirus software installed in our machine. And those antivirus companies wouldn't like that a bit.