The man who created Windows

Contrary to popular belief, the omnipresent Windows operating system does not owe its existence to Bill Gates, Paul Allen or the development team at Microsoft. The man responsible for giving us Windows was actually a marketing expert called Rowland Hanson.

Work on the OS had started after Gates had seen a demo of Visi Corp's software called Vision, which featured a graphical user interface (GUI), at Comdex, in 1982, and had decided that Microsoft would also come out with a GUI based OS. Gates and the development team referred to it as 'Interface Manager' and the name struck, at least until Hanson was hired to develop a marketing campaign for the product. He was unimpressed by the rather geekish 'Interface Manager' and proposed that the product be named 'Windows', as the user saw a number of 'Windows' on the screen that contained the tools and files they needed to work with.

And the rest, as they love to say, is history. Had it not been for Hanson, 'IM' would have been an abbreviation for an operating system rather than for Instant messaging!

Google launches site search for businesses

The service lets businesses build customized search pages for their Web sites

Google Inc. today launched its Custom Search Business Edition, a fee-based service that lets businesses build search pages for their own Web sites.

The Custom Search Business Edition uses Google's free Custom Search Engine, which allows users to search within a specified group of Web sites.

The new service enables visitors to a company's Web site to search within that site on a customized search page, Google said. Businesses can customize the search page with their own logos and colors and can include Web sites and Web pages that are not contained on their sites. Google announced the service on its official Google blog.

"For a fee, the Business Edition enables customers to enjoy technical support (e-mail and/or phone), customization of search results using XML API, a tailored look and feel, optional Google branding -- and no ads next to the search results," Google said on its site.

For Web sites of up to 5,000 pages, the Custom Search Business Edition costs $100 per year. The fee for Web sites that have as many as 50,000 pages is $500 per year.

The service provides an option for businesses that want to bring Google's search technology into their organization without paying for more-expensive products. The company already sells the Google Search Appliance, starting at $30,000 for 500,000 documents, which indexes material in file servers, content management systems, databases and other sources. It also offers the Mini Search Appliance, starting at $1,995 for 50,000 documents.

Information from the IDG News Service and Computer world was included in this report.