Google Blogoscoped
Sun Jan 24 11:40:41 EST 2010
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Google's A-Z of How-Tos - Jeff Anderson in the forum writes, "I just set up a computer for my 7-yr old daughter, installed parent monitor etc. On to google, safe search is on, I was on it doing a search for 'how to find' -- go try it now, just get as far as the 'f' in that phrase and see what it shows, and this is a 'safe search'!" For the partly NSFW list below, all containing the first top 3 results as shown on Google.com's auto-completion, I've signed out and then set SafeSearch to its strictest level: A how to ask a girl out how to apply eyeshadow how to add fractions B how to bake a potato how to bake pumpkin seeds how to brine a turkey C how to cook a turkey how to cite a website how to cook pumpkin seeds D how to download youtube video how to draw how to draw ...

Bruce Schneier: "It's bad civic hygiene to build technologies that could someday be used to facilitate a police state" - Bruce Schneier in an article at CNN writes: In order to comply with government search warrants on user data, Google created a backdoor access system into Gmail accounts. This feature is what the Chinese hackers exploited to gain access. (...) In the aftermath of Google's announcement, some members of Congress are reviving a bill banning U.S. tech companies from working with governments that digitally spy on their citizens. Presumably, those legislators don't understand that their own government is on the list. [Via Reddit.]

Gmail With Behavioral Targeting - Google is now doing some behavioral targeting in Gmail ads. "For example, let's say you're looking at a message from a friend wishing you a happy birthday. If there aren't any good ads for birthdays, you might see the Chicago flight ads related to your last email instead," Google writes at their blog. [Thanks Juha-Matti Laurio!]

Sergey Brin About His Travel to Haiti - Google co-founder Sergey Brin at his blog writes, "Several days ago I volunteered on a relief mission to Haiti that brought in nearly 20,000 lbs of supplies. While the trip was brief, I did travel into the city of Port-au-Prince to deliver medical supplies to a key hospital and witnessed the devastation first hand." Google's homepage still links to their Haiti support page, where you can donate. [Thanks Hebbet!]

Google Now Shows Synonyms Bold - Google has a detailed post up about how they treat synonyms and stemmed words in web search, and about the complications of having algorithms figure out just what is the right synonym in which context. They say one change to how results are displayed is that now, synonyms are bolded, too. For instance, in a search for pictures developed with coffee, Google considers the word "photos" to be synonymous to "pictures" and bolds it. You can also search for pictures developed with coffee -pictures to see just the "photos" results; also, you can use +pictures developed with coffee to turn off the synonyms for t ...

Queries With Removed/ Censored Results in Google - Here are some sample queries which contain removed or self-censored pages, according to Google's disclaimers (I'm including pages missing due to alleged copyright infringements, you can judge for yourself if you'd call this censorship): In Google France: aryan 88 The notice linked at the bottom of the results reads: "Google received complaints prior to March 2005 about URLs that are alleged to be illegal under U.S. or local law. In response to these complaints, one or more URLs that would have appeared for this search were not displayed." The site in question is likely aryan88.com, which is completely missing in Google France (in Google.com, the query site:aryan88.com returns 213 hits). In G ...

Google Agrees to Censor Encyclopedia Dramatica Entry in Australia - Google self-censors certain results in countries like France or Germany, and Australia as well. The Sydney Morning Herald writes: Google has agreed to take down links to a website that promotes racist views of indigenous Australians. Aboriginal man Steve Hodder-Watt recently discovered the US-based site by searching "Aboriginal and Encyclopedia" in the search engine. (...) Mr Hodder-Watt then undertook legal action, that resulted in Google acknowledging its legal responsibility to remove the offensive site. When searching Google Australia for [

Google's Eric Schmidt on Gaming - From H+ Magazine: Google CEO Eric Schmidt made news at the recent G-20 meeting in Pittsburgh, suggesting that multiplayer video games provide good career training -- particularly in technology -- where workplace collaboration stimulates innovation. "The game world is good training for a career in tech," he said. "It teaches players to build a network, to use interactive skills and thinking." "Everything in the future online is going to look like a multiplayer game," said Schmidt to this international audience. "If I were 15 years old, that’s what I would be doing right now." [Thanks Destinyland!]

On Rumors of China Attacks Targeting a Google Search Warrant Compliance System (and About Google Allegedly Already Lifting Censorship) - There were some rumors out there that the recent hack into the Google system originating from China actually attacked a program established by Google to comply with law enforcement requests. Not knowing whether any of this is true, I asked Google: "MacWorld writes that you apparently have a system in place 'used to help Google comply with search warrants by providing data on Google users'. Is this true?" A Google representative answers: "I haven't read the article you quote, but that line on its own looks accurate to me. As a matter of company policy, we don't comment on the specific structure or specific inquiries. What I can say is that we do have a team in place to help us comply with the law, much like any other company. When ...

Upload Any File to Google Docs: A Kind of Google Drive? - Google announced that they plan to add the capability of uploading any file to Google Docs storage. This is supposed to be rolled out over the next week, and you get 1 GB for free (more if you pay), with a single file being limited to 250 MB. Google says "This makes it easy to backup more of your key files online, from large graphics and raw photos to unedited home videos taken on your smartphone." Searching across upload documents should be possible as well, according to the post. If you do have an Upload button in your Docs start page, that still doesn't mean you can upload any files, like ZIPs -- Google says you should look out for a "bubble notification" when signing in to know whether or not you got the feature. Signi ...

Google, Under Cyber Attack From China, Aims to Stop Censoring Its Results in the Country - Google in a blog post has stated that they have been part of a cyber attack: In mid-December, we detected a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google. However, it soon became clear that what at first appeared to be solely a security incident -- albeit a significant one -- was something quite different. First, this attack was not just on Google. As part of our investigation we have discovered that at least twenty other large companies from a wide range of businesses -- including the Internet, finance, technology, media and chemical sectors -- have been similarly targeted. We are currently in the process of noti ...

Google Chrome Ad Philosophy Clash - David Lock sent this in via email: I saw these two adverts side by side on the London Underground today: a new Google Chrome advert, which (among other things) praises it as a speedy new browser, made for everyone. The next advert along is of [Gandhi's] wise old words: 'There is more to life than increasing its speed'. Clearly Google Chrome wasn't made for the likes of [Gandhi]. [Thanks Dave!]

Built By Google - Pete logs onto his desktop computer. It's a "dumb" netbook built by Google and called Google Chrome Superbook 5, with a fast startup time of 0.3 seconds, the point at which the Google engineers figured further optimizations were not useful, in terms of limitations of human perception. The mouse next to the computer is also made by Google. It includes some technical wizardry that Pete was happy to wait for when he ordered it online in the Google web store: the mouse automatically logs him into his Google account based on his fingerprint, skin color and more, falling back to a password prompt if anything's off. The netbook doesn't contain a browser, at least, that's not how people talk about it -- the netbook is the browser, and every computer is a netbook, so people just call that thing they surf with "the computer" or "Google ...

German Spiegel on Google Goggles' Face Recognition and More - German Spiegel ("mirror") has a relatively good cover story about Google out for tomorrow's issue, perhaps more balanced than some of the magazine's online articles. There's a broad overview of Google's recent and older products and what privacy issues they imply; the title suggests that Google now knows more about you than you do yourself... you are now on a computer chip. Google's Philipp Schindler in an interview on the other hand tells Spiegel (my translation): We don't spy, nor do we sell data to third parties. We are not interested in you as a person. We know neither your name nor your personal data, nor your bank account. You can register as "Donald Duck" and use all personalize ...

Image Promo on Google's Homepage - Google's currently promoting their Nexus One on the frontpage, at least in the US. I'm still only seeing this after the fade-in, but when it does appear, it shows a graphical illustration, a rare sight (is it a first for a promo?) on Google's homepage. Mbegin in the forum also reported he saw a Nexus ad before the fade-in earlier on (now, it shows afterwards for him too). Still some way to go until they're at the clutter level of this mock-up. Google's homepage is not the only place where the Google phone is advertised. DPic in the forum writes, "I have never seen the internet covered with so much of the same advertisement. Holy shit they mea ...