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London Bloggers [Comic Blogs][Other Blogs] | 29 April 2024
[web] The creepy sound of online trackers … A powerful demonstration of how much we are tracked on the internet – listen in to online trackers sending information home. ‘Even though I personally am acutely aware that this tracking is happening on most sites we visit today, the video and its noise still make me shiver. In case you are hard of hearing, the noise in the second video is almost constant, ongoing even as Bert is just scrolling.’
12 September 2023
[google] The end of the Googleverse … A look at Google’s impact on the internet and some ideas on why it’s influence is waning. ‘Discoverability of the open web has suffered. Pinterest has been accused of eating Google Image Search results. And the recent protests over third-party API access at Reddit revealed how popular Google has become as a search engine not for Google’s results but for Reddit content. Google’s place in the hierarchy of Big Tech is slipping enough that some are even admitting that Apple Maps is worth giving another chance, something unthinkable even a few years ago.’
1 July 2022
[google] Is Google Dying? Or Did the Web Grow Up? … The Atlantic takes a look at where Google Search is at in 2022. ‘The AI attempts to understand not just what the searcher is typing, but what the searcher is trying to get at,” Haynes told me. “It’s trying to understand the content inside pages and inside queries, and that will change the type of result people get.” Google’s focus on searcher intent could mean that when people type in keywords, they’re not getting as many direct word matches. Instead, Google is trying to scan the query, make meaning from it, and surface pages that it thinks match that meaning. Despite being a bit sci-fi and creepy, the shift might feel like a loss of agency for searchers.’
25 March 2019
[web] Killed by Google – The Google Graveyard & Cemetery … A list of products shutdown by Google. ‘Google Reader – 2005 – 2013. Killed over 5 years ago, Google Reader was a RSS/Atom feed aggregator. It was over 7 years old.’
25 July 2018
[religion] Why Is Google Translate Spitting Out Sinister Religious Prophecies? … Is Google Translate’s AI a Prophet? ‘In Somali, for instance, strings of the word “ag” translate into missives about the “sons of Gershon,” the “name of the LORD,” and references to Biblical terminology like “cubits” and Deuteronomy.’ [via jwz]
30 November 2017
[maps] 12 Incredibly Useful Things You Didn’t Know Google Maps Could Do … including Time Travel! ‘Fire up the flux capacitor, Doc, ’cause we’re about to do some serious time traveling. Google Maps has a little-known feature that lets you look at the Street View for any area as it existed at various points in the past. This one only works from the desktop site, so open up Maps on your computer and pick a place. See that little yellow guy in the lower-right corner-known to his friends as Pegman? Drag him up with your mouse and drop him wherever you want to go. Then look for the clock icon in the gray box at the top-left of the screen. Tap that, and you’ll be able to drag a slider back through time to see 360-degree views from previous years.’
22 April 2015
[google] What does Google need on mobile? … a look at Google’s mobile strategy from Benedict Evans… ‘Google has gone from a world of almost perfect clarity – a text search box, a web-link index, a middle-class family’s home – to one of perfect complexity – every possible kind of user, device, access and data type. It’s gone from a firehose to a rain storm. But on the other hand, no-one knows water like Google. No-one else has the same lead in building understanding of how to deal with this. Hence, I think, one should think of every app, service, drive and platform from Google not so much as channels that might conflict but as varying end-points to a unified underlying strategy, which one might characterize as ‘know a lot about how to know a lot’.’
4 September 2014
[loremipsum] Lorem Ipsum: Of Good & Evil, Google & China … the strange story of finding hidden messages in Google Translate with Lorem Ipsum filler text as input … ‘It all started a few months back when I received a note from Lance James, head of cyber intelligence at Deloitte. James pinged me to share something discovered by FireEye researcher Michael Shoukry and another researcher who wished to be identified only as “Kraeh3n.” They noticed a bizarre pattern in Google Translate: When one typed “lorem ipsum” into Google Translate, the default results (with the system auto-detecting Latin as the language) returned a single word: “China.” Capitalizing the first letter of each word changed the output to “NATO”…’
13 November 2013
[retro-computing] Google BBS Terminal … How Google search would behave if it had been created in the 1980’s.
1 July 2013
[web] Google Reader Closedown: Find LinkMachineGo’s RSS Feed Here Or Follow LMG On Twitter.
[web] Google Translates Lorem Ipsum … ‘We will be sure to post a comment. Add tomato sauce, no tank or a traditional or online. Until outdoor environment, and not just any competition, reduce overall pain. Cisco Security, they set up in the throat develop the market beds of Cura; Employment silently churn-class by our union, very beginner himenaeos. Monday gate information. How long before any meaningful development. Until mandatory functional requirements to developers. But across the country in the spotlight in the notebook. The show was shot. Funny lion always feasible, innovative policies hatred assured. Information that is no corporate Japan’
20 June 2013
[tech] Internet Anonymity Is The Height Of Chic … A look at the plausibility of remaining anonymous from Google and the Internet … ‘In the 1930s, HG Wells wrote of a “world brain” through which “the whole human memory can be … made accessible to every individual”. Today, perhaps we have that world brain, and it is called Google. Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, professor of internet governance and regulation at the University of Oxford’s Internet Institute, sounds an Orwellian note about this: “Quite literally, Google knows more about us than we can remember ourselves.” No wonder some dream of slipping under Google’s radar.’
11 April 2013
[web] Plan Your Digital Afterlife With Inactive Account Manager … A dead man’s switch for Google accounts.
3 April 2013
[london] An Autocomplete Guide To London … Londonist examines what Google searchers think about various London boroughs … ‘Romford is the cruelest of cities.’
10 January 2013
[google] The many different things the world wants to know how to do … as reported in the 2012 Google Zeitgeist … ‘Japan: how to save [battery] power. Kenya: how to abort. Mexico: how to vote. Netherlands: how to survive. New Zealand: how to screenshot.’
11 December 2012
[google] The best way to use Gmail and Google Calendar on your iPhone … useful guide to using Google services with the iPad and iPhone … ‘The trick here is combining the Gmail app with two syncing protocols called CardDAV and CalDAV (don’t worry, you’ll never actually need to know what these are to get them to work). You’ll need an iOS device running version 5.0 or above to take advantage of these, but each offers better and more powerful integration with Google’s services than just tapping “Gmail” when you first set up your email accounts on your phone. Much like the momentary pain of digging into your Facebook privacy settings, the five or ten minutes spent setting up this system will save you email stress for months to come.’
22 May 2012
[gmail] Gmvault … great little cross-platform backup solution for Gmail which dumps your email in flat files to a local disk.
15 March 2012
[stuff] Some links I’ve had in my “ToBlog” list for far too long…
9 September 2011
[google] How Google Dominates Us … a profile of Google from James Gleick… ‘…your search history reveals plenty-as Levy says, “your health problems, your commercial interests, your hobbies, and your dreams.” Your response to advertising reveals even more, and with its advertising programs Google began tracking the behavior of individual users from one Internet site to the next. They observe our every click (where they can) and they measure in milliseconds how long it takes us to decide. If they didn’t, their results wouldn’t be so uncannily effective. They have no rival in the depth and breadth of their data mining. They make statistical models for everything they know, connecting the small scales with the large, from queries and clicks to trends in fashion and season, climate and disease. It’s for your own good-that is Google’s cherished belief.’
19 August 2011
[web] Google’s Official List of Bad Words … ‘boob, boobs, booobs, boooobs, booooobs, booooooobs, breasts’
27 May 2011
[life] 9-eyes … A collection of captured moments from Google Streetview.
23 February 2011
[internet] 7 Chrome Annoyances and How to Fix Them … some useful tips for Google Chrome.
12 September 2010
[google] Matt Cutts On Google Instant … ‘If everyone uses Google Instant globally, we estimate this will save more than 3.5 billion seconds a day. That’s 11 hours saved every second.” With over a billion searches a day and over a billion users searching each week, that adds up to 350 million hours of user time saved a year. That’s 500+ human lifespans saved a year by this feature if everyone used it.’
5 March 2010
[google] How Google’s Algorithm Rules the Web … Steven Levy is given an interesting look behind the scenes into Google’s search engine …
Indeed, [Microsoft] the company that won last decade’s browser war has a best-served-cold approach to search, an eerie certainty that at some point, people are going to want more than what Google’s algorithm can provide. “If we don’t have a paradigm shift, it’s going to be very, very difficult to compete with the current winners,” says Harry Shum, Microsoft’s head of core search development. “But our view is that there will be a paradigm shift.” 1 March 2010
[religion] God Watches You Google … a religious blog poses the question of how we should feel about the morality (or lack of) displayed in our search requests …
This woman goes from searching about pregnancy, to realizing that the father does not want to keep the baby, to researching abortion clinics, to researching whether she can, according to her faith, choose abortion, to dealing with a miscarriage. And at the end of it all, life goes on and she seems ready to be married. 4 February 2010
[google] Have you checked out Google’s view of your social circle on the internet? … a long list of links to your friends and acquaintances pulled in automatically from a number of sources (useful for the internet stalker in all of us.)
25 January 2010
[useful] Add a “Gmail This” Bookmarklet to Your Browser … if you use Gmail you probably want to use this bookmarklet to quickly send links via email. I use it everyday – it’s a great timesaver.
12 January 2010
[life] What boyfriends and girlfriends search for on Google … ‘how can I get my girlfriend / boyfriend to trust me?’
2 December 2009
[google] Autocomplete Me … a blog revealing oddball search requests via Google’s autocomplete feature … ‘monsters are… real and ghosts are real too. they live inside us and sometimes they win.’
23 November 2009
[goog] Mystery Google … the results are what the person before you searched for. I got MLIA.
2 September 2009
[gmail] Send mail from another address without “on behalf of” …. useful tip for Gmail users to send e-mail from another SMTP server with a custom e-mail address.
10 October 2008
[gmail] How to Embed Images into a Gmail … useful tip and I always forget how to do it! … ‘Drag your mouse across the image so the whole image gets selected or highlighted (it would turn dark to indicate that it is successfully highlighted/selected). don’t miss that part. then while it is selected/highlighted, right-click your mouse over it, then from the menu which appears, choose COPY. (It works in Firefox too. You just have to make sure you “COPY” NOT “COPY IMAGE”.)’
10 September 2008
[google] Useful Lifehack: Use Multiple Google Accounts Simultaneously in Google Chrome … This tip is also useful if you have multiple accounts on other services such as Delicious or eBay… ‘When you open a window in incognito mode (Ctrl+Shift+N), your cookies from the standard session are no longer available and you can easily log in to a new Google account.’
4 June 2008
[google] Simply Google: ‘…is a roundup of every Google search and service out there on one convenient page.’ [via Grayblog]
25 February 2008
[google] Google circa 1960 … ‘Mail to: Google Search Request. […] Please allow four to six weeks for results.’
27 July 2007
[web] Blackle — try some energy saving Google searches … ‘In January 2007 a blog post titled Black Google Would Save 750 Megawatt-hours a Year proposed the theory that a black version of the Google search engine would save a fair bit of energy due to the popularity of the search engine.’ [via Blackbeltjones]
12 July 2007
[funny] A Google Map Plotting the many Gaffes of Prince Phillip … ‘You are a woman, aren’t you? – The Prince seeks clarification from a Kenyan lady in tribal dress back in 1984.’
5 June 2007
[comics] Ask Cerebra – The Comics Blog Search Engine — useful Customized Search Engine from Beaucoupkevin.‘…it’s even easier to find out exactly what the zeitgeist is when it comes to such important topics as that Heroes for Hire Hentai-A-Go-Go Special cover and whether or not Jimmy Olsen is the devil.’
11 February 2007
[nude] Top 10 Naked People on Google Earth … ‘This person thinks they have privacy on this rooftop (haven’t they seen Enemy of the State?), and they’re definitely topless! (Sex unknown of course, but topless nevertheless.)’ [via linkbunnies.org]
8 December 2006
[politics] Dick Cheney’s Google Searches: ‘birdshot pellet removal, quail hunting “involuntary manslaughter”, katherine harris naked, iraq exit strategy, mullah omar MySpace’
4 December 2006
[google] How Google handles hacked sites — interesting post from the head of anti-webspam at Google on why a website got de-listed from their index and how Google deals with the problem … ‘So talkorigins.org has these porn words and spammy links, and it’s all hidden via sneaky JavaScript. We have pretty good reason to believe that this site was hacked, but it’s still causing problems for regular users, so Google has to take action…’ [via Scobleizer]
7 November 2006
[google] Searchmash — Google 2.0 or Google’s Playground… You Decide. [via Google Operating System]
24 October 2006
[ukblogs] UK Blogs Search Engine — a Google Custom Search Engine which searches a list of 600 regularly updated British blogs.
2 October 2006
[google] Eric Schmidt to address Tory conference — the Chairman and CEO of Google is speaking at the Conservative Party Annual Conference tomorrow … ‘Googling for policies?’
17 July 2006
[google] Resource-Intensive Google Queries — Google OS Blog wonders if you can find search queries that slow Google down… ‘In 1999, the average search took approximately 3 seconds. Now most of the searches take less than 0.4 seconds.’
15 July 2006
[blogs] Why doesn’t Google invest anything in Blogger? — interesting post on Google’s lack of interest in updating Blogger … ‘Have they essentially decided to allow Blogger to atrophy and die? Are there no, actual, people at Google who really get (or have ideas for) blogging?’
23 June 2006
[google] The Devil’s Guide to Google — a dummies guide to fucking with Google … ‘Buy 2 million cheap domains, heavily interlink them, and wait until they go up in Google’s ranking. Start using them to sell Viagra.’
15 March 2006
[web] Google in 20 Years Time … ‘On top of the fridge, right where you left them…’ [via Sore Eyes]
13 March 2006
[blogs] 18 Ways for Blogger to Beef Up … ‘The dearth of tagging and categories has become to Google’s Blogger what the lack of commenting was to Pyra’s Blogger — a monument to antiquity!’ [via Robot Wisdom]
1 March 2006
[web] Google Users: I Can Quit Anytime — could you go cold turkey on Google? … ‘Six days a week, Shari Thurow spends copious amounts of time conducting searches on Google. But each Saturday, she makes a point of observing a “Google-free day.” The rules are simple: Use any search engine except for Google. In practice, however, the policy is surprisingly difficult to implement…’
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