Google

tags: Onion News Network, ONN, privacy, humor, funny, satire, fucking hilarious, streaming video This streaming news report reveals that web users who wish to completely protect their privacy can choose to move to a desolate mountain village started by Google. While living there, they are guaranteed an environment free from Google products and natural light from the sun [2:18]

A quick follow up to the post below, I was curious as to the increased profile of Google in The New York Times (Google trends doesn't seem to be available to the public before 2004) around the turn of the century. In particular, I curious as to Google's prominence in the "Technology" section of the paper. So I looked it up. There were 78 mentions between July 1999 and December 2001. Mentions of Google increase at a rapid clip throughout this whole period. Below is a histogram of this period, illustrating the consistent rise in frequency of mention. A dotchart view (x-axis = time along a…

The collaboration between Yahoo! and Microsoft is spawning a lot of articles about the coming duopoly in search (since the Yahoo! Microsoft deal is for 10 years, we're talking 10 year horizon times). But this got me to thinking: when did people realize Google was something big? I realized Google was something big (for me personally since I'm a data junkie) after being pointed to it from this article in Salon in December of 1998. I became a Google evangelist. Initially most people thought my enthusiasm was a bit strange, at that point there were a dozen search engines, and all of them were…

For Mozilla and Google, Group Hugs Get Tricky. To some extent it seems that the story is going to be relevant in a few years when Chrome will presumably be more of a full-featured browser. Right now it seems a non-issue since Chrome's penetration is rather low. But this part was pretty weird: "Mozilla performed a really good service, but you have to wonder what their relevance is going to be going forward," says Matt Rosoff, an analyst at Directions on Microsoft, an independent firm that tracks the company. "They keep Microsoft honest. But if Google is pushing innovation in its own browser,…

Wired had a long piece on Facebook's attempt to challenge Google. The gist seems to be that just as Google revolutionized the way search was done via PageRank, so Facebook will revolutionize search though results generated via one's personal "Social Graph." I'm generally skeptical of this idea in relation to Facebook, though my skepticism has more to do with the assumption that the value of a social network declines as it becomes less exclusive. In the Wired piece the author suggests that Facebook has reached the penetration at which positive feeback loops begin to occur. Perhaps. But it…

Anil Dash has an essay up, Google's Microsoft Moment, (H/T, Charles Iliya Krempeaux) which will be roughly correct at some point in the future if not now. Organizations go through changes in a predictable manner, and Google is unlikely to defy the inevitable laws of corporate evolution. On a related note, Bing Delivers Credibility to Microsoft. Bing is OK, but I wonder how much of the relative openness to it is conditional upon the reality that Microsoft's star is in relative decline in the firmament of technology companies, and so there isn't a reflexive hostility engendered by genuine fear…

Two positive assessments of Bing. Google is my main search engine, but I use Bing's image search preferentially now since the UI seems less kludgey.

Gmail and a raft of other apps were finally thrown out of beta recently. The assumed reason is that Google is trying to horn in on the enormous business market for applications, and people can get fired for greenlighting betas which break. But if you miss that not-ready-for-primetime new app feel, go "Back to Beta".

Mark Gimein defends Google Books over at The Big Money. New technology can be misused, but in general I tend to agree with Gimein. Along with Amazon's Search Inside feature Google Books is an excellent resource to look up and cross-reference obscure facts and data. With the utilization of Google Translate you can even get a good sense of some books in languages you don't know (I generally use this to make sure I understand the legend for a table or figure).

And if so, will it make us even stupider? Only one more week until we find out! This could be the datahead's ideal engine: It'll tell you the family, genus, species, and caloric value of an apple, and it'll forecast Apple's stock price, but it won't give you apple pie recipes. It'll tell you the box office take of the first "Star Trek" movie, but it won't tell you the theater where you can see the newest "Star Trek" movie.But a technical audience is still big. This could unlock a lot of data that students, research assistants, lawyers, marketing managers, financial analysts, and scientists…

I promised you some updates on the Google Books Settlement, so here you go. Things are definitely getting interesting. First, I mentioned earlier that I was going to attend a panel on the Google Book Search Settlement here in DC, featuring representatives of Google, the publishers, and the Internet Archive. ITIF, which organized the panel, has made the entire thing available online; I've linked to it at the bottom of the post, because it's over an hour long. Anyway, it was interesting to hear the (very civil) differences of opinion between Dan Clancy, the Engineering Director for Google Book…

I've been on this domain for over 3 years. So I have a fair amount of google analytics data. Care to guess which the top 10 sources are for readers to this weblog in terms of nationality? Answer below the fold.

It's just not Google's week. A mob of angry villagers north of London formed human chains and chased off the Google Maps car (no word whether they had torches). Microsoft is all up in Google's business (to be precise, they're funding a team at New York Law School's Institute for Information Law and Policy, led by a former Microsoft programmer, which is weighing in on the pending settlement of Google's book-scanning lawsuit). And it's not just Microsoft that's taking aim at Google: the NYT has an overview of the many parties, from librarians to law professors, who have serious doubts about…

I overheard this high school student complaining about a teacher. Here is essentially what she said (about a class her friend is in): "This teacher is crazy. He said we have a test the next day and he gave them a study guide. But he didn't give the answers to the study guide. My friend and her mom stayed up till midnight looking up the answers on google." I am pretty sure this was regarding a math class. So, what is the problem? I think there are a couple, but it mainly has to do with the nature of assessment. What is the point of assessing if students know (memorize temporarily) stuff…

If you're wondering why I've been posting more than usual the last couple days, it's because I'm home with the flu.  When wrapped in blankets and doped up on Sudafed it's a lot easier to futz around on the internet than attempt any actual work. It turns out that flu levels are at their highest point for the season.  I know this through Google's Flu Trends, one of the company's cleverest applications.  It seems someone noticed that activity levels of certain search terms correlate tightly with CDC's official flu statistics, but lead CDC's estimates by two weeks.  Amazing.

Even Google does Darwin Day.

It's time to take a deep look at the world's oceans, from Straightgoods: Google is adding the world's oceans to its extensive Earth mapping. In a phone conversation with David Suzuki Foundation staff, John Hanke, director of Google Earth and Maps, admitted, "We had really overlooked two thirds of the planet." Partly because of prodding from oceanographer Sylvia Earle, the company has embarked on a massive project as part of Google Earth 5.0 to map the oceans using sonar imaging, high-resolution and 3-D photography, video and a variety of other techniques and content. As some of you might have…

via Google Trends. Blue is ants, red is beetles: Ants win, even in the face of the beetles' 20-fold species advantage. That seasonal pattern is striking, no?

As demonstrating and rioting against the heavy-handed Chinese occupation of Tibet increased in intensity this weekend, it's not surprising that China cracked down using one of its favorite tools: internet censorship. As of sometime Saturday, the Chinese government had already blocked YouTube in response to protest/riot footage on the site, and recent reports indicate that Google News has also been blocked. The government's crackdown has already caused the loss of about 80 lives, and it's doing its best to prevent footage of the crisis from reaching the rest of China (through internet…

So you like insects, but can't be bothered to get up from your computer to go look for some? Google earth to the rescue! South of Tucson, Arizona (31°38.097'N 111°03.797'W) I found this lovely aerial image. Visualized from an elevation of about a kilometer and a half, it shows a hill just west of I-19 covered in freshly-sprouted grass. Except, there's this strange pattern of evenly-spaced polka-dots: What could account for the speckles? Alien crop-circles? Bizarre gardening accidents? Why no, those are the nest discs of one of our most conspicuous insects in the Sonoran desert, the red…