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MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – April 17, 2008 - Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) today announced financial results for the quarter ended March 31, 2008.  “Our ongoing innovation in search, ads, and apps helped drive healthy growth globally across our product lines, yielding another strong quarter for Google,” said Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google.  “As we integrate DoubleClick into our advertising platform, we see exciting new ways to improve the user experience and increase value for our advertisers and partners.  Also, while exe

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The works of one of the most towering figures of modern science are now available to anyone on the Web.

The Darwin Online Project is releasing on Thursday more than 90,000 online pages of Charles Darwin’s photographs, sketches, and manuscripts, including the first draft of his theory of evolution.

Transcripts of many of the documents have been published in the past, but this is the first time that the original manuscripts have been made available to the general public–and seeing these works in Darwin’s original scrawl somehow adds to the weightiness of what you are reading.

“This release makes his private papers, mountains of notes, experiments, and research behind his world-changing publications available to the world for free,” John van Wyhe, director of the project, told Reuters. “His publications have always been available in the public sphere–but these papers have until now only been accessible to scholars.

Besides drafts of On the Origin of Species, the collection includes thousands of notes and other drafts of his writings, as well as notes from his voyage on the Beagle, where he began to establish his theories on evolution.

For a more personal glimpse into Darwin’s life, there are also some letters from his wife, Emma, on her concerns about his faith, as well as recipes from her cookbook.

Google is typically tight-lipped about it the inner workings of its search business, but there are a few nuggets worth looking at in a Popular Mechanics interview with Udi Manber, the Google vice president who oversees search quality. Among them: Google rejiggered its search algorithm 450 times last year.

The job of the algorithm is to best match Web pages with people’s search terms. One tweak the company tried last week was increasing the “diversity” of search results so the listed Web pages would cover a broader scope in an attempt to compensate for the ambiguities of search terms, he said.

And while some might see the industry of search engine optimization (SEO), which strives to get Web sites higher placement on search sites, as gaming the system, Manber said that at least a basic amount would make his life easier.

“I wish people would put more effort into thinking about how other people will find them and putting the right keywords onto their pages,” he said.

He also said Google doesn’t adjust search results by hand.

“If we find, for a particular query, that result No. 4 should be result No. 1, we do not have the capability to manually change it,” he said. “We have to find what weakness in the algorithm caused that result and find a general solution to that, evaluate whether a general solution really works and if it’s better, and then launch a general solution.”

For those interested in the subject, I also recommend the New York Times interview with Manber from last year and another from Eric Enge at SEO firm Stone Temple Consulting. (I can’t help but note that the latter piece shows up higher in Google search results.)