2 February 2006
[web] The Last Google Result — What is the last Google result for a search term? [via Gordon McLean]
17 January 2006
[net] Random Personal Picture Finder — find random pictures from Google based on filenames from various types of digital cameras.
12 January 2006
[google] The Prejudice Map … ‘According to Google, people in the world are known for…’
9 January 2006
[google] Can’t Find On Google — web site listing things people can’t find on Google … ‘Most of the time, you punch what you want to know into Google, and you instantly get what you’re looking for. But have you ever had that experience, where you try query after query and no matter how hard you try, you just can’t find what you’re looking for? That’s what this site is for — because the things Google can’t find is more interesting than the stuff Google can find.’
15 July 2005
[maps] Google spots Jesus in Peruvian Sand Dune … ‘A quick phone call to Erich von Däniken confirmed our initial suspicions that the image was hewn from the sand by an ancient civilisation using hot air balloons and alien laser technology borrowed from the scientists of Atlantis. Either that or someone is projecting a picture of Charles Manson onto the desert from a low Earth orbit…’
24 February 2005
[search] Keeper Finders — Paul Boutin compares five desktop search programs … ‘You probably won’t find all the Steely Dan songs in your iTunes library or every PDF with the phrase “owner’s manual” using the Windows search. If you use the right desktop search application, it’s a snap.’
3 January 2005
[google] Bypass Google’s Regional Pages — Google has been redirecting requests for google.com to google.co.uk. Very annoying but this page will fix that – just visit it.
14 December 2004
[microsoft] For Softies, Search Is the New Black — Steven Levy on Microsoft’s efforts to compete with Google … ‘Bill Gates has a Google thing. When I asked him about the search competition last summer, he turned on the sarcasm. “We’ll never be as cool as them. Every conference you go to, there they are dressed in black, and no one is cooler!” Clearly Gates’s dander was up, not only because the Google upstarts were eating his lunch, but they were press darlings as well. Behind the rant was a taunting subtext: watch me. Bill, you see, had been busy figuring how to get his lunch back.’
13 December 2004
[web] Suggested Google Alphabet … ‘A fully automated look at the most popular search keyword for each letter of the alphabet’ [via del.icio.us]
30 October 2004
[useful] Google Cheat Sheet — I learned a couple of new tricks from this … ‘~auto loan – loan info for both the word auto and its synonyms: truck, car, etc.’
14 October 2004
[search] Google Desktop Search — Google releases beta software which allows you to search your desktop as easily as the internet … ‘Search your own computer.’
8 June 2004
[fgi] Fucking Google It … ‘Google Is Your Friend. All Smart People Use Google. You Appear To Not Be One Of Them’
27 April 2004
[google] What can’t you find on Google? Vital statistics — John Naughton wonders why Google is so reticent to talk about the technology behind it’s website. ‘…what it all comes down to is this: Google has far more computing power at its disposal than it is letting on. In fact, there have been rumours in the business for months that the Google cluster actually has 100,000 servers – which if true means that the company’s technical competence beggars belief.’
9 March 2004
[google] Googlemaniacs — some great quotes about Google from notable users …
Garry Trudeau: ‘Google is my rapid-response research assistant. On the run-up to a deadline, I may use it to check the spelling of a foreign name, to acquire an image of a particular piece of military hardware, to find the exact quote of a public figure, check a stat, translate a phrase, or research the background of a particular corporation. It’s the Swiss Army knife of information retrieval.’
19 June 2003
[search] GoogleGuy Says — insider info from Google … ‘GoogleGuy is a Google employee who is very helpful in responding to questions and providing information to webmasters in the forums at WebmasterWorld.’
17 April 2003
[web] Inside the Soul of the Web — a Wired Reporter watches 24hrs of Google Searches …
‘Darkness crawls across the Atlantic and makes landfall in the Western Hemisphere. On the screen, the West Coast of the United States is ablaze with dots, while only insomniacs and night owls are still typing away in Europe. The noonday sun is now over Indonesia. This may be the strangest time of all. The predawn monsters of European imagination meet the late-night desires of North America – then all are nearly buried by a deluge of business questions, most in kanji, pouring out of Asia. Amid this flood there are also anxious queries, perhaps from emergency room doctors short of reference books and journals.’
18 March 2003
[google] How Google Grows…and Grows…and Grows — profile of Google. ‘…the difference between 0.3 seconds and 0.2 seconds is pretty profound. Most searches on Google actually take less than 0.2 seconds. That extra tenth of a second is all about the outliers: queries crammed with unrelated words or with words that are close in meaning. The outliers can take half a second to resolve — and Google believes that users’ productivity begins to wane after 0.2 seconds. So its engineers find ways to store ever-more-arcane Web-text snippets on its servers, saving the engine the time it takes to seek out phrases when a query is made. And it’s why, most of the time, the Google home page contains exactly 37 words. “We count bytes,” says Google Fellow Urs Holzle, who is on leave from the University of California at Santa Barbara. “We count them because our users have modems, so it costs them to download our pages.”‘
18 February 2003
[blogs] Fame or misfortune beckons for weblogs? — BBC News on Google and Blogger … Comment from Rebbecca Blood: ‘Google buying Blogger validates the importance of weblogs to the internet ecosystem. You can’t devalue people and the things they care about.’
17 February 2003
[blogs] More Google Buys Blogger Linkage:
- Ev: ‘Everyone got quiet for a second while they read “Google buys Pyra.” Doc said “holy shit.” It was the coolest culmination and synchronicity, wirelessness, and instantaneous publishing.’
- Live from the Blogosphere Transcript: ‘one more thing — Ev — evhead.com GOOGLE BUYS PYRA!!!! BLOGGING GOES BIGTIME HOLY SHIT!!!!’
- Kottke: ‘It reminds me of the Netscape IPO. At the time, Netscape had a ton of good will from its users: it was good, it was free, people loved using it because it gave them access a global network of people and information…’
- Mena Trott: ‘To truly integrate weblog metadata, Google needs to expand that content base. And in fact, Google’s acquisition of Deja, and subsequent creation of Google Groups, may provide a model for that: When Google acquired Deja, they only got access to about 6 years of Usenet history. But with the help of Usenet archivists they were able to piece together the entire history back to 1981.’
- Guardian — Google gets Blogger and better: ‘Google has bought Blogger. Forget those peace protests around the world on Saturday: there is nothing more interesting to the weblog community than the weblog community, and this was the news of the weekend.’
16 February 2003
[blogs] Google Buys Blogger — WTF?! ‘…now Google will surge to the forefront of what David Krane, the company’s director of corporate communications, called “a global self-publishing phenomenon that connects Internet users with dynamic, diverse points of view while also enabling comment and participation.” “We’re thrilled about the many synergies and future opportunities between our two companies,” he said in a statement on Saturday.’
- Evhead: ‘Holy Crap.’
- Shellen.com: ‘Well, looks like someone scooped us on our own story.’
- Boing Boing: ‘Right in the middle of the panel discussion [at Live at the Blogosphere], Ev gets a call on his cellphone and announces live for the first time in public — in person, and by way of his blog — that Google bought Blogger.’
- Metafilter: ‘There goes the neighborhood.’
- Slashdot: ‘Great :( So as if my searches weren’t already becoming diluted with Blog drivel they definitely will now!’
- Blogdex, Daypop and Google News Tracking.
- Oblomovka: ‘Winer’s going to go ballistic.’
- Nick Denton: ‘It’s huge news, both for weblog publishing, and search.’
- Anil Dash: ‘Now that the platform is moving to a presumably much more robust infrastructure, it’ll be interesting to see what effect that has on the services they offer in the future. My sense is that weblogs as a whole are more valuable than any one platform, tool, or community of weblogs.’
- Interconnected — Google is building the Memex: ‘They’ve got one-to-one connections. Links. Now they’ve realised – like Ted Nelson – that the fundamental unit of the web isn’t the link, but the trail. And the only place that’s online is… weblogs.’
- Cory Doctorow: ‘Blogger’s been treading water. It has a million blogs tied around its ankle, users who require constant care and feeding (I’m one of them!), who occupy a large fraction of its cycles. New users flow in every day, and the competition is sniffing around its heels, adding features (better RSS, trackback, more flexible APIs, RSS aggregation) that often require less scalability than they would in Blogger’s context…’
13 December 2002
5 September 2002
[web] Engine Trouble — profile of Google covering the block by China … ‘Google knows things. Not only does it index more of the web than any of its competitors, offering makeshift translations of pages between languages – it remembers, too. The company archives millions of web pages on its own computers, giving them a life beyond their creators, which provides another potential motive for the Chinese block: even if the computer hosting a Falun Gong website is seized and destroyed, the page persists in Google’s collective memory. In 2001, Google bought the rights to thousands of old postings on the Usenet system on online message boards. They are now catalogued on its database, and your past obsessions with Dungeons and Dragons or ornithology cannot be erased’
30 August 2002
[web] Meet Mr. Anti-Google — interview with a guy who believes that Google’s PageRank algorithm is evil and wrong. ‘…Google does seem all-powerful. It’s been four years since the search engine came online, and in those years, while the whole industry has crumbled around it, Google, somehow, has only became bigger, better and more popular. To someone like Brandt, someone not unfriendly to conspiracy theories and wary of the “power structure,” the Web according to Google must be a hard thing to bear. And bizarre as it may seem to go after a service as loved as Google is, on evidence as thin as Brandt offers, isn’t it more surprising that it’s taken this long for someone to snap up the google-watch.org domain name? Google seems indomitable, and Brandt’s fight is, certainly, doomed from the start. But perhaps it’s time someone took on Google — even if just for the fun of it.’ [Related: Google-Watch, Metafilter Thread, via Beesley]
21 August 2002
[web] PageRank: Google’s Original Sin — interesting view of what’s wrong with Google. ‘… PageRank drives Google’s monthly crawl, such that sites with higher PageRank get crawled earlier, faster, and deeper than sites with low PageRank. For a large site with an average-to-low PageRank, this is a major obstacle. If your pages don’t get crawled, they won’t get indexed. If they don’t get indexed in Google, people won’t know about them. If people don’t know about them, then there’s no point in maintaining a website. Google starts over again on every site for every 28-day cycle, so the missing pages stand an excellent chance of getting missed on the next cycle also. In short, PageRank is the soul and essence of Google, on both the all-important crawl and the all-important rankings.’ [Kinda Related: Googlegate]
9 January 2002
12 August 2001
[web] Something I’ve just noticed — Google’s cache is really up to date at the moment … LMG, or if you prefer … Haddock or NotsoSoft or Plasticbag.
2 January 2001
[weblogs] Interconnected has some interesting thoughts on Google and weblogs: ‘This explains why weblogs rank so high in Google. The integrity of PageRank relies on the fact that you only own your own page, so you can’t force much linking to your ‘site to up your rank. The weblog community has several features that break this model: The tendency for links lists to be on every weblog page (and there are often many pages of archives too), and the large amount of reciprocal linking. The community appears as a very highly connected network, and this effect is magnified because of the large amount of the links on weblog pages compared to other ‘sites on the web.’
30 July 2000
[tech] Danny O’Brien profiles Google — possibly the best web search engine around at the moment. “Google’s secret is in being a plain, almost arid-looking search engine driven by a set of abstruse mathematical principles. Its extra selling point is that it actually works. Indeed, its many fans insist that a Google search is better targeted than any other, its unique text-matching technologies yielding a more selective and relevant set of results than the overwhelming deluge many rivals dump on you. And all in two seconds maximum.”