Gord Hotchkiss of Search Engine Land talked to Google"s Marissa Mayer about search results design issues. I didn"t really get this part: Gord: One of the members of our staff has a background in physics and design and he was the one that noticed that if you take the Golden Ratio it lined up very well with how the Google results page is designed. The proportions of the page lined up pretty closely with how that Ratio is proportioned. Marissa: I"m a huge fan of the Golden Ratio. We talk about it a lot in our design reviews, both implicitly and explicitly, even when it comes down to icons. We prefer that icons not be square, we prefer that they be more of th ...

This is neat: the book detail pages of Google Book search now integrate a Google Maps result, where applicable. For example, search Google Books for The Travels of Marco Polo and click the "About this book" link below the top result. Now on the book details page, scroll down to the heading "Places mentioned in this book" and you"ll see a map centered on Africa, Europe and Asia with markers stuck onto locations like Kiev or Venice. When you click on say "Venice", you"ll get a quote from the book mentioning Venice, and you can jump right to the book page(s) in question: [Hat tip to Prashanth,

Google says they"ve managed to neutralize the impact of a lot of Googlebombs. A Googlebomb is a when a group of people get together to link to a certain site with a certain set of keywords, in order to convince Google that it ought to display that site at the top of search results when queried for these keywords. (This often worked because Google does a lot of backlinks analysis when they determine their search rankings -- the words you search for need not be on the page itself which ranks well for it.) In the past, for example, people tried to connect George W. Bush"s official biography page with the word "failure"... and a counter-bomb tried to connect Mich ...

That"s cool -- Google Blogoscoped is now available in Chinese! I gave my blessings to the project, and know the person behind it (who wishes to remain unnamed), though I"m not officially connected to the site. [Hat tip to A. and Haochi!]

Google launched a Build your campus in 3D competition. The official Google blog explains: "This spring, you and your (presumably equally artistic) friends can honor your campus turf as you hone your 3D design skills just by modeling your school"s campus buildings in Google SketchUp, geo-reference them in Google Earth, and submit them through the competition website to earn lasting online glory. And the winners get a visit to Google, all expenses paid."

AdSense has a new feature that allows you to define ad placement channels for Google"s site targeting feature. Now when you create or maintain a channel in AdSense Setup -> Channels -> Edit settings, you can check a "targeting" box, and then provide some info about where exactly the ad will appear (e.g. top left on the homepage, or bottom center on sports articles), as well as an ad description. "When advertisers search for places to target their ads using site targeting, they"ll see your placement and description as an option on which they can place their ads," the Google help explains. [Via

CNN, citing the (subscription needed) Wall Street Journal last week reported that Google "is negotiating to buy Adscape, a closely held San Francisco firm whose technology allows for the placement of ads over the Web in video games." PS: Above screenshot is a mockup! [Thanks David Hetfield!]

Google personalized homepage modules now have a "Send to a friend" feature listed in the context menu drop down (the one containing the module settings, when available), as Corsin Camichel notes in the forum. Corsin says it didn"t work for him, but for me the email did arrive:

Google acquired YouTube last year, and now they"ve started to integrate YouTube results within Google Video. If you search Google Video for cars, for example, the first result will take you to YouTube, and the second will play a video from Google Video. This also means that YouTube is now quasi-integrated onto the Google homepage (because Google.com has a "Video" link since August 2006), which may give it another substantial boost. A YouTube press release however states that... [YouTube] will remain an independent subsidiary of Google, and will continue to operate separately. Google will support YouTube by providing access to search and monetization platforms and, where/when YouTube launches internationally, ...

Google started a new developer blog on code testing. Interestingly enough, each tip is provided as additional Creative Commons licensed PDF download for easy printing -- so that you can plaster your company"s toilet walls with it to help educate employees in all kinds of contexts. [Thanks Colin C.! Image by Google.] To keep up with all of Google"s blogs, you can always check by our Google"s Blogs n" more page. More on code testing.

If you enter African Ingenuity into Google, Google will ask you: "Did you mean: American Ingenuity". "Unfortunate," as Mark Frauenfelder comments on this automatic spelling suggestion. [Thanks Haochi!]

Allen created a mockup screen illustrating what Google search results would look like if Google added video ads (Google already has video ads for AdSense on other sites, but just not on their own search results). [Thanks Allen!]

Forbes reports on statements on Google China censorship given by the Google co-founders at Davos: Brin said he was instinctively opposed to the deal because he was born in the Soviet Union. "Having felt that kind of oppression, I would never have wanted to compromise in that direction." His opinion changed, he said, when he talked with Chinese people about it. "They"re really proud of what China has accomplished. They feel that as much information as can go into China, the better off it is." I have three comments on this, not to debunk, but to balance Sergey"s words: I talked to other Chinese people who di ...

This video looks like a well-done prank on an alleged "secret test invite" for an upcoming "Google TV" service. Join the ongoing forum comments. [Thanks Zach P. and Colin C.!]

Here"s a personal plea: I"m looking for more advertisers on Google Blogoscoped in 2007, to be put into rotation at the top right (non-animated only) graphic/ text. If you are interested*, or know anyone who might be interested**, please let me know at info@outer-court.com. *E.g. you are the boss of a tech company. **E.g. you are working your butt off for the boss of a tech company.

Throughout January, I"ve taken snapshots of the page count different search engines show for the phrase search for "copyright 2007". The idea behind this, similar to last year"s experiment, is that a lot of pages replace "copyright 2006" with "copyright 2007" in their site footer after new years, so that creates a good setup for a page count experiment. There are some pretty big disclaimers for this. The page count may or may not represent the actual number of indexed pages -- these numbers often change with the datacenter you hit, and they"re always approximations, and often, they"re vastly off-target (and a search engine may also artificially inflate the number). Furthermore, a bigger index size does not indicate a "better" search engine; as a hypothetic ...

Mathias Schindler is a 25 year old university student in Frankfurt, Main, Germany. He was among the people who started the Wikimedia Germany association, where he"s currently board member. Wikipedia is often confronted with accusations of all kind -- activist Seth Finkelstein called it "a poorly-run bureaucracy where there"s not a lot of accountability" -- so I wanted to get an actual & factual inside view. What was your first encounter with Wikipedia, and how and why did you get involved more actively? A ...

Here"s an idea for a (Google?) patent for 2015: targeted advertisement for the public information bubble. The public information bubble, PIB, is defined as your openly emitted information in public spaces. As an example: you"re sitting in the train, wearing a shirt with a Nike logo, reading a book by Kerouac, and listening to your iPod loudly playing Christina Aguilera. A call comes in and you answer your cell phone, telling your friend you"ll meet up at Johnny"s Rock Cafe at midnight. Cameras are already installed in many public spaces, like trains, so I take for granted there won"t be a privacy issue by aggregating all this information. Now, with that in hand, similar to Amazon"s "customers who bought this item also bought...", the seat in front of you will now match your interes ...

Goo(g)d news. Soon you will start generating money on YouTube. How soon? We don"t know. But Chad Hurley announced at World Economic Forum, Davos on 27 Jan that they would reward users for self-generated content, saying "We are getting an audience large enough where we have an opportunity to support creativity, to foster creativity through sharing revenue with our users." The idea is great, and I think it is a strong response to video sharing site Metacafé"s challenge, where revenue sharing already started 3 months ago. Eyal Herzog, co-founder talked about it

The German television program magazine TV DIGITAL in cooperation with Audible.de offers a free audiobook. You can choose between "Wächter der Nacht 1", "Der Patient" and "Die Google-Story" translated into German. To get the code for a free download you have to buy the third issue of the magazine published on January 26th, 2007. Then look up the code on page 19, register at Audible.de and download the audiobook about Googles history. Have fun!

Google"s Niniane Wang is currently leading a team of Googlers to develop a new product in the social application space. Details are unknown to outsiders as this is a top secret project, but a colleague of Niniane believes it"s interesting enough to be considered the "best project in the world." Now Reto Meier weighs in, hypothesizing this might be a kind of Second Life social 3D world: Niniane"s background is in Windows programming, specifically real-world simulators. Her project has a c++ client and a Java server (like Google Earth). Before working at Google she was a team leade ...

The Google Maps onebox is a bit older by now, but I think this flavor the official Google Blog reports on is new -- a search for e.g. Mexican restaurants in Pasadena, CA results in a map next to different reviews with ratings: Clicking on the location"s name, like "El Portal Restaurant," takes you straight to the site (which is interesting, because this way, El Portal Restaurant kind of beat the top "organic" result for this ...

Google"s Kai-Fu Lee gave a talk at Google this month. I"m fast-forwarding to minute 35 where Mr. Lee describes how they had Google employees reenact some of the past things in China"s long and proud 5000-year history, a history which brings "interesting challenges and opportunities." Regarding above picture Mr. Lee says, "If people want to know how did the current government form its credibility, and how it disseminates information to the public, this shows basically a set of people in the propaganda group in the military, trying to disseminate key information." [Via Google"s blogs.]

Yvo Schaap today writes: The search engines have become the gatekeepers of the internet. As a webmaster -- if you don"t play along by their rules, you won"t be getting any high rankings: the so called holy grail for websites. Matt Cutts -- Google employee -- has made it very clear ... that buying and selling links is not corresponding with the webmaster guidelines and to be found a non-ethical practice because it"s not "natural". But who is Google to make the rules for webmaster on what they can sell and put on their sites and what not? Same goes for buying links. I don"t see the harm, except in the fact that Google -- if they don"t like selling links -- need to ...

Mathias Schindler reports from a talk given on Google Book Search in Mainz, Germany, today. [Thanks Mathias!]

Several people report that their Google contacts list used in Gmail and Google Talk has been wiped clean -- including the comments they added to contacts (signatures are gone for some, too, as Lukas points out). My contacts are still there this morning, how about everyone else? [Thanks Lukas!]

Java-developer and entrepeneur Paul Tyma applied for a job at Google, got through the Google interview process alive, and is back to tell us how he managed to do that. [Via Digg.] Also see Google employee Niniane Wang"s guide to preparing for a software interview. Also see this site"s Googlers who blog page ("cause not all who do get fired).

Here"s what you need to do to make Google go crazy (this supposedly works for other websites too, though I only got it to work with Google): Go to Google.com Remove everything from the address bar, then copy & paste the following into it: javascript:R=0; x1=.1; y1=.05; x2=.25; y2=.24; x3=1.6; y3=.24; x4=300; y4=200; x5=300; y5=200; DI=document.images; DIL=DI.length; function A(){for(i=0; i-DIL; i++){DIS=DI[ i ].style; DIS.position="absolute"; DIS.left=Math.sin(R*x1+i*x2+x3)*x4+x5; DIS.top=Math.cos(R*y1+i*y2+y3)*y4+y5}R++}setInterval("A()",5); void(0); Hit enter. Enjoy. [Via Digg. Thanks Suresh S.!]

According to Google Trends, Google searches for global warming have overtaken searches for terrorism. (As the lower part of the illustration shows, news mentions of "terorrism" are still higher than news mentions of "global warming," though.)

Google lost another trademark battle against the German holder of the G-mail trademark, Daniel Giersch, The Register writes: The Office for Harmonisation in the Internal Market (OHIM), the body which is responsible for European community trademarks, rejected Google"s appeal after a stiff battle with German-born venture capitalist Daniel Giersch. Giersch, who has held his trademark for six years, has been fighting this battle since Google launched its email service in 2004. Google already renamed Gmail to Google Mail for German users, though those who registered a *@gmail.com address early on didn"t need to switch to *@googlemail.com.

Answers: Google Answers was a "human search engine" project that ran from 2002-2006. Around 500 researchers worldwide at a time, often experts in their fields, directly answered to paid questions at answers.google.com... anything from relationship tips to shampoo ingredients to "I can vaguely remember this movie scene but forgot the movie"s title." Beta: The Beta label is applied to new technology products when they enter the first public testing stadium (after the internal-only Alpha release). A ...

Blog search engine Technorati -- continuing the eternal search for their own site"s purpose -- added a new feature called WTF (short for "what the fuck," though Technorati claims it means "where"s the fire"). It works like this: Every registered Technorati-user can add an explanatory article on any subject (like a popular search query in the blogosphere). The article will be Creative Commons licensed (you can fully copy it in non-commercial environments, if you attribute the source). You can"t use HTML, but you can type URLs, which will then be auto-linked. Users can then vote for this "WTF", digg-style. The best WTF"s climb to the top spot of the overcrowde ...

Robert Cringely notes that Google controls more network fiber than anyone else, and is building a lot of data centers, and he argues they do so because in the coming years ... More and more of us will be downloading movies and television shows over the net and with that our usage patterns will change. Instead of using 1-3 gigabytes per month, as most broadband Internet users have in recent years, we"ll go to 1-3 gigabytes per DAY -- a 30X increase that will place a huge backbone burden on ISPs. Those ISPs will be faced with the option of increasing their backbone connections by 30X, which would kill all profits, OR they could accept a peering arrangement with the local Google data center. Seeing Google as their only alternative ...

Master Plan by Ozan Halici & Jürgen Mayer, from the University of Applied Sciences in Ulm, Germany, is a graphically impressive but otherwise somewhat shallow discourse on privacy in the age of Google. [Thanks Tadeusz!] Join the ongoing comments.

When it rains, it pours: Google News presents itself empty to me at the moment. Search works, but there"s just no news on the frontpage. Reto Meier in the forum says, "This has been happening on and off for about 24hrs. Very frustrating!" Someone, somewhere seems to be updating something at the moment (I wonder if it"s in any way connected to that "radically improved" prototype Google originally aimed to release by the end of 2006). [Thanks M. and Prashanth!]

Google"s Blogger is out of Beta, but the problems remain. Right now, many blogs deliver the following message: We"re sorry, but we were unable to complete your request. When reporting this error to Blogger Support or on the Blogger Help Group, please: * Describe what you were doing when you got this error. * Provide the following error code and additional information. bX-vjhbsj Glitches happen with every web application, though Ionut from Google Operating System concludes, "The jury has reached a verdict: people from Blogger are simply unable to build a reliable blog software." I reached my verdict ...

"You don"t need a satellite to see the cosmic microwave background radiation! Turn on your TV to a channel that"s not broadcasting: a few percent of the snow on your screen is the Universe talking to you -- or rather, whispering. What"s it saying? It"s saying, "Try to understand me."" -- Philip Nelson Right now, to answer your queries, Google quotes from the web, and orders the quotes in a list. In the future, Google may combine these quotes into a free-style text for a more direct answer. When the Google AI advances beyond that, it may analyze the texts available to it to come up with conclusions of its own. Let"s sketch this potential evolution using an everyday search query. Level 1

Several sources report that "sensitive" Indian locations, like government buildings or military sites, will now be blurred in Google Earth, on request of the Indian gov"t (I"m sure that goes for Google Maps too, though the reports don"t explicitly say so). Other country"s satellite censorship requests have been fulfilled too in the past. German Spiegel writes that this includes military camps in Kosovo, the king"s palace in the Dutch Utrecht, military sit ...

Search for "Colbert Report" at Google-owned YouTube, and clicking on the individual videos results in a bold red message: "This video has been removed due to copyright infringement." That"s because, as San Francisco Chronicle writes: YouTube ... has begun removing more than 100,000 unauthorized clips belonging to Viacom -- everything from snippets of Jon Stewart"s "The Daily Show" to Nickelodeon"s "SpongeBob SquarePants." The purge comes after Viacom demanded that YouTube take down the material, accusing the site of violating its copyrights. Viacom s ...

Ionut Alex. Chitu reports that Google is working on a presentation application as part of their existing suites of document tools like Google Docs & Spreadsheets. While tinkering with the Google apps, Ionut found a couple of messages in this file (which doesn"t contain those messages anymore, at least not here) which show that the current name of this application is "Google Presently." Some of these messages read: "Convert document to presentation" "Once your document is converted to a presentation, you can insert slide breaks using Insert > Slide from the main menu."; "Convert presentation to document"

Wired recently ran a pretty interesting article on the machine translation efforts of Jaime Carbonell of Meaningful Machines. From what we know, Google"s translation efforts so far work on the idea of parallel text; when you have older texts human-translated into different languages, you can use statistical analysis to automatically figure out translations for other texts. These approaches may be best in town, but if Google"s Arabic machine translation is any indicator, they"re still not good enough to give meaning to every text you translate, let alone translate text into anything native-sounding. But quote Wired on Jaime"s approach: [T]he Meaningful Machines system uses a large collection of text in the target language (in the initial case it"s 150 Gby ...

Patrick Sexton"s FeedTheBot.com explains the Google webmaster guidelines in great detail. Not all guidelines are covered yet, though, e.g. "Don"t use cloaking or sneaky redirects." For example, Google does not believe that redirecting the user from "webmasterworld.com/forum44/1287.htm" to "webmasterworld.com/login.cgi? status=google.&url=http://www. webmasterworld.com/forum44/1287.htm" (which shows another content than the Google result snippet presented, that is, a registration screen instead of the text one searched for) is sneaky, even though some webmasters might have thought so after reading the guidelines. [Via

Mario Sixtus recently asked for some input for his interview with Google"s Marissa Mayer at the DLD conference (see previous post). The video is now live at the German Elektrischer Reporter, and Siggi Becker has a transcript. Questions Mario asked: Why did Google buy YouTube? Isn"t it risky to rely on ads only for revenues? Google releases a lot of products, what"s the general strategy here? When will Google OS arrive? (They were talking about a traditional OS, not a web OS.) Isn"t there a privacy problems when Google i ...

Search Engine Optimization consultant Joe Whyte published an in-depth list of Google filters -- like the Google sandbox, or Google"s duplicate content filter -- along with strategies on how to get around the filter. Granted, SEO will always be partly speculation... [Thanks Joe!]

Joe Critchley aka Mambo got his first computer when he was 8, and started making web pages when he was 11. He"s currently working as freelancer doing stuff like HTML, CSS, PHP and MySQL, as well as web design. Here are the changes, and the reasons behind them: Reorganised Google Account links, with centre alignment, to avoid too much white-space on large monitors, and merging the "My Account" link into the e-mail address, because it directly relates to that particular user only. When a user is about to s ...

Google adjusted the introductory paragraph of their webmaster guidelines today: Before After ... we strongly encourage you to pay very close attention to the "Quality Guidelines," which outline some of the illicit practices that may lead to a site being removed entirely from the Google index. Once a site has been removed, it will no longer show up in results on Google.com or on any of Google"s partner sites. ... we strongly encourage you to pay very close attention to the "Quality Guidelines," which outline some of the illicit practices that may lead to a site being removed entirely from the Google index or otherwise penalized. If a site has been penalized, it may no longer show u ...

The Ask blog posts on yet another Google product that had an outage recently: the Google Pen. Additionally, I have a video proof that the Google Maze is broken as well.

Siggi Becker points out a type of search query that seems to be becoming more and more popular for a variety of keywords, according to Google Trends: something wikipedia (e.g. life wikipedia, or rss wikipedia, or george bush wikipedia). I also often append "wikipedia" to a Google search query to go straight to Wikipedia"s entry on the subject...

This is really neat. You know how Google"s "link" operator to show backlinks to a site was broken, and didn"t always show the full amount of links? Well, it"s still broken, but now Google allows you to see a much larger spectrum of backlinks to your (verified) site when you use their Webmaster Tools. Just click on the new "Links" tab and you"ll see an overview of your pages from a specific domain. Click on the number of links show for every page, and you"ll see a list of URLs that contain backlinks -- it"s not a complete list, according to Google, but much larger than what their "links" operator allows you to see. You can even download this list as CSV ...

Billionaire entrepeneur Mark Cuban complains about the Google/ YouTube copyright stance -- like, "we can"t monitor everything, but do take down copyright-violating videos on requests" -- and asks: why are they able to filter porn then? As a proof of concept, he"s asking everyone to try upload adult videos to Google Video and YouTube and send him the links. (I dunno... while it takes a lawyer to determine if the copyright is cleared on something -- is it fair use quoting? is it copyrighted material? was permission granted? is the uploader the content owner? -- it only takes a mere human to monitor clips for nudity.) [Via Wirre ...

Ervin Peretz, a 37 year old Google developer and sparetime pokerbot creator, along with Susan Allsup opened a special kind of cafe in Kirkland. According to a Seattle Times report, when you"re at the "Terra Bite Lounge," you pay whatever you feel like: from nothing at all to 40 bucks or whatever else you want to put into the metal lock box. Amy Roe explains: The idea emerged during a booze-fueled debate in a Saigon bar, where Peretz and a colleague had traveled to blow off steam after a period of long hours at work. Peretz argued that people are essentially good, but can be influenced by their environment. If people se ...

Peter Forret writes: I created an overview of Google domains in Europe, with the Pagerank and # Technorati references. It"s funny to see how google.de has almost double the backlinks of google.fr, but only has a PR8. It"s just a showcase for a new tool (nothing revolutionary) I"ve created. [Thanks Peter!]

The new backlinks checker of the Google Webmaster Tools has a bug that lets you see all the backlinks of unverified sites, too. This allowed me to check all backlinks for Google.com, for example, and download the links table as CSV file. Even though I don"t see a security issue with this (the links are public to begin with), and even though the details of this bug have been posted on other sites, I"ll omit the specifics for now and rather alerted Google so they can fix this. But here are a couple of backlink counts I retrieved: Google.com: 1,432,908 backlinks (in comparison, the "link:" operator shows a backlink count of 1,750,000) Yahoo.com: 1,431,186 backlinks

Reto Meier, originally from Perth in Australia, currently works as software developer in London. Yesterday Google Maps Australia went fully functional with driving directions and local business listings. The local business listings are being provided by Truelocal, an Australian business listings provider owned by News Corp. The Australia (A News Corp newspaper) reports that this is part of the Google / News Corp deal from last year which saw Google Ads displayed in MySpace. Google has been s ...

Look, a smoke signal message on Google Maps! You can create your own, too. [Via Digg.]

Google CEO and Machiavelli-fan Eric Schmidt did some evangelizing before a tough Washington, DC, crowd, speaking on the issues of internet freedom, and privacy in the age of long-lived digital storage. Computerworld reports: Schmidt acknowledged that a completely free flow of information over the internet can be messy, but an unfettered internet gives people the best information, he said. "The internet has empowered people in a way we"ve never seen before," Schmidt said. "What we say at Google is, "don"t bet agai ...

Why do these few pages contain the words "Confidential: For Customer Use Only" in the footer? They"re public, and even publicly indexed by Google. The documents describe an SAML (Security Assertion Markup Language) based SSO (Single Sign-On) for GAFYD (Google Apps for Your Domain)*, and if that"s a lil" too much gibberish, there"s also a

There was some buzz recently in the French blogosphere: personalized homepage service Netvibes exposed a vulnerability that allowed one module developer to gain some access to Google accounts (through the carelessness of some Google users, if I understand it right) as well as private Netvibes developer information. "[T]his vulnerability is now fixed," the official Netvibes blog announced this week, adding that "the module developer unethically exposed the vulnerability on his blog before contacting us." TomHTML of French Google blog Zorgloob wraps up what happened. So, the French guy said he ...

Google released a book bar as part of their AJAX Search API. You can configure the bar with a comma-separated list of keywords. I used the word "google" for the result below:* Loading...

An air cannon challenge, with the Google Maps product manager waltzing through the picture. The Googleplex volleyball court with professional actors genuine Google employees enjoying themselves. The Google Culinary Team sure takes their job serious. A SpaceshipOne replicate.

People are doing some pretty neat sci-fi stuff with SketchUp at the Google 3D Warehouse. SketchUp was originally intended as design sketch tool for architects, but these structures expand on that (note that some of these may be imports from other 3D tools... also, some of these will stall SketchUp for some seconds). M62F by Elvis747 Custom Gundam by Illsteir

Google developer Kevin Fox released a new site that presents news in haiku form -- daily. Here"s the one from yesterday: astronaut killer? envy drives attack on peer Houston has problem (An idea for a different challenge: present daily news in bar joke format.) [Thanks Kevin!]

I"m currently counting 8 advertisements for the query anna nicole smith on Google"s US search results. Every one of these advertisers is investing some money to get your attention. Some of these campaigns were created in a hurry -- the NYT spells itself "The New York Tmes" --, others are trying to use the occasion to make you download toolbars. Anna Nicole Smith Find Out About Her Sudden Death at TMZ TMZ.com Anna Nicole Smith Read Bios, See Photos, Browse Movie

YouTube will adopt inline ads for all content, followed by "pay to play" for large advertisers including promotion and ultimately; a paid "premium" service to opt out of all the advertising. Google will start selling "Google Checkout" (They"ll change the name to GCash first, though) cards in denominations $5, $10, $25, $50 and $rechargeable (Available at actual offline merchants) and then start establishing a micropayments system for services (Sub-cent transactions). These cards will be accepted at Google sites and at content vendors (First one up; The New York Times -- they"ve had a hard-on for paid content since the day nytimes.com launched). This will be the next adwords, and they"ll be making a billion in revenue off of it in the first 12 months (everyone will simply have to try it at least once, you know, because ...

... your doctor tells you that according to Google, you should be alright. ... the horror flick displays life insurance advertisements whenever the slasher shows up. ... you"re being dumped because of something you said in your blog 8 years ago. ... your colleague asks why they"re not invited to the barbecue he"s seeing on your garden"s real time satellite imagery. ... the Google news are so fully personalized, you"re always making the frontpage. ... you"re searching for yourself to discover new stuff. ... the Googlebot starts emailing you spelling corrections for your website. ... Google"s book search scanned your diary. ... Google"s personalized homepage puts up a special logo for your ...

Technophilia and technophobia are the two extremes of the relationship between technology and society. The latter regards technology as destructive because it leads to a process of dehumanization and believes social reliance on technology is harmful. The former is a positive relationship, adopting technology enthusiastically, seeing it as a means to improve personal life and combat social problems. -- Wikipedia Here"s a rough idea. Right now, every country"s government needs to manually suggest a list of places that need to be photoshopped for Google Maps, URLs of news sources that need to be removed from Google News, websites that need to be banned in web search results and so on. Even for those countries that do have automated ways t ...

This page claims to be a copy of what Google looked like in 1997. Can anyone confirm this? [Thanks Timo Heuer!]

Online Media Daily notes: Chad and Ryan Steelberg, the founders of an automated radio ad placement company purchased by Google in January 2006, have left the company. The brothers resigned amid reports of growing tension between dMarc, the company they founded, and Google over differing approaches to radio ad sales. There was also said to be tension over the limited remuneration dMarc could expect under the performance-based terms of its original deal with Google. [Thanks TomHTML.]

Does anyone know what this gray shape is doing on Google Maps (it"s at Monzelfeld near Bernkastel-Kues, in Germany)? While it may look like censorship at first, it might also be just missing data, or be due to something entirely different. Because my father, who found this, asked my grandpa, who lives near-by the location, what"s in that area, and the answer is: nothing. At least nothing suspicious -- there"s just a road there dubbed Kaffeestrasse (coffee street). My grandpa added that he also saw this issue being pointed out in a reader mail to a local newspaper. Apparently, the gray blob has locals scrat ...

Google is getting more aggressive about their badware warnings. Previously, they only warned when you clicked on a page from the results (if the site in question was determined to contain spyware or similar stuff). Now, they also include a link right below the result page"s title, reading "This site may harm your computer." You can check this for yourself by searching for e.g. crack spider. This change has been rolled out for other languages too. It"s interesting to note that Google, who already knows a site contains badware when they displa ...

When Google announced its "Google Print" project (now known as "Google Book Search"), it caused quite a stir within the traditional publishing industry and among physical book stores. Some of the reasons to worry were based on rumors and Google"s decision to have two single projects, the Library Project and the Publisher Partnership Program under one brand. Even if some of the publishers participated in the Publisher Program, they tried to stop Google from indexing books from libraries and to make them searchable. In Summer of 2005, the "

Google expert Reto Meier on his blog continues to publish a detailed series of tutorials on how to get work done with the "Google Office"... from word processing, to calendars, to spreadsheets and email. His posts so far: Google Office - an introduction Google Office Part 1: Business Gmail Google Office Part 2: Client Interaction with a Powered Support and News Site Book Release ...

Tech Recipe suggests the following Google searches to find 3GP files for viewing on some cell phones: -inurl:htm -inurl:html -inurl:asp intitle:"index of" 3gp filetype:3gp inurl:3gp filetype:3gp inurl:3gp yourkeyword (On my phone I can view WMV, though I didn"t find any good site with small, downloadable and fun videos. Replacing "3gp" with "wmv" above technically works, but most of the ...

I just had a chance to try out the website friend and co-editor Tony Ruscoe works for. It"s called Click2Translate and it worked like it should, and it worked nicely. I wanted to translate Sketch Swap into Japanese*, so I uploaded a Word document containing all needed texts at their site. To make best use of the $65 price tag, I submitted almost, but not more than, 295 words (a minimum for small projects, and Sketch Swap contains only very little text). A couple of days later, just now, an email reached me, and I was able to login to their site and download the Japanese Word document**, which I can now implement at Sketch Swap (they even threw in some free translations, but I think that was ...

Read Write Web reports: Robert O"Callahan from Mozilla, who is based in NZ but drives the rendering engine of Mozilla/FireFox, spoke about how Firefox 3 will deliver support for offline applications. This is significant because you"ll be able to use your web apps -- like Gmail, Google Docs & Spreadsheets, Google Calendar, etc -- in the browser even when offline. I deliberately mentioned all Google web apps there, because of course this plays right into Google"s hands. Although Mozilla is an open source organization, some of its top workers are employed by Google. So it"s a very cozy relationship. Join the ongoing comments ...

Douglas McIntyre writes about the stock market and tech companies, sharing analysis for investors. More market coverage can be found at 247WallSt.com. It appears that Google"s purchase of YouTube gets more complicated by the minute. Two websites with pirated content claim that Google offered them advertising keywords (registration required) including "bootleg movie download" to help them market their services. The problem crops up at the same time that Google is trying to convince major media companies that it can police its huge video site, YouTube, to screen out unauthorized feature content. Google is trying to form partnerships with companies ...

Outspoken atheist Nick Gisburne claims that the staff of Google-owned YouTube deleted his account simply because he posted a selection of Quran quotations, among other religious criticism. In a video he released on February 8th, he states: Today, in fact just a couple of hours ago, YouTube deleted my account -- in fact all of my accounts. They deleted the NickGisburne account, they deleted the Gisburne2000 account. And this is the reason that they gave me: "After being flagged by members of the YouTube community, and reviewed by YouTube staff, the video below has been removed due to its inappropriate nature: ... Islamic Teachings - Cruelty From the Quran Due to you ...

ArteLight.de is a German online shop for lamps. At the moment, their PageRank 6 homepage is ranking #1 in Google.de for both "Lampen" and "Leuchten", the German words for "lamps." Did ArteLight achieve this Google position through great products alone? It doesn"t look like it. Not only are they available as "partner links" or "link tips" on otherwise unrelated sites like BusinessMagazin.info, Coding-Net.de or Bildmitteilung.info (this looks like a large text link ads campaign). The owner of ArteLight, Marcin Nolte, has another site of his -- the free LogStats.de -- which provides a site counter service. Now take a look at the counter code and check if you notice anything unusual (user ID removed, colorized):

Recently released Yahoo Pipes was down for a while, but I now had the chance to play around with it a bit. Basically, it"s a graphical editor to create feed mashups. So you can connect a variety of RSS sources and then remix them for a new output, which you can then also subsribe to with an RSS reader. I was disappointed that this only seems to take feeds as source... the first thing I tried was to output a Google web search result as RSS pipe, but I didn"t find any obvious way to do it. Maybe this is due to data provider usage restrictions, but this also renders the service useless for many purposes. Or can anyone tell how to do this (without accessing existing RSS converters, that is)?

Google makes a couple of Valentine"s gifts, including a chocolate logo, opening up Gmail registrations for practically everyone*, and allowing all of us to comment at their official webmaster blog. Google even gives a gift to themselves by increasing the catchiness of their Checkout badges attached to ads; the advantage of supporting Checkout when advertising with Google AdWords becomes apparent in a US search for e.g. buy:

Yesterday, Google"s Valentine"s logo confused some people. This mail reached me today, I"m forwarding: Dear Person[or Persons] Responsible for Creating Festive Google Logos for Holidays and/or Special Occasions, I noticed that your logo is incorrect and it has been causing me discomfort all day. Please explain to me if I am wrong. I cannot function properly knowing that there is no L visible. Someone tried to calm me down by explaining that the stem of the strawberry could represent the L, but I strongly disagree. That stem is just a part of the letter G. Please send me and my four roommates free Google t-shirts[3 siz ...

Note sure if this documentary in the making is for real, but it does look like it: Jim Killeen says he set out to find other people sharing his name... with the use of Google. Jim says he wants to explore "the connection between a person"s name, their identity, and the underlying human condition that unites us all." This reminds me of Dave Gorman"s "Are You Dave Gorman?" (and incidentally, Dave is also the comedian behind the brilliantly funny Googlewhack Adventure stage show). [Thanks Or!]

Aaron Stanton wanted to get a meeting with Google to present his idea to them. Only problem? He didn"t have an appointment. So beginning of this month, according to his video blog at CanGoogleHearMe.com, he hopped on a plane to California, arguing that if Google doesn"t give him a meeting, he"ll just be "going to sit in their lobby like a spoiled child in hopes that they"ll change their mind." Aaron adds that "Every once in a while you have to give an idea a shot, or you spend your entire life passing up ideas that seem just beyond your reach." Well, turns out Aaron"s campaign was a success, and Google did hear him out -- yesterday, he did get the meeting, and was able to ...

On Tuesday, Mathias Schindler reported how easy it was to access the site of German Google Book Search competitor in progress, VTO (full text search online). A PowerPoint presentation linked from the VTO"s homepage contained the password to the Beta site, and the site itself only protected its book pages with some JavaScript that disables the right mouse button (a non-protection, actually, which the browser allows to circumvent through a variety of simple means). Mathias was able to download a complete copy of a current German bestselling book, which was quite delicate considering the company behind VTO supported a lawsuit against Google Book Search because Google allegedly didn"t protect ...

LinksViewer.com visualizes networks of Silicon Valley groups or people, like their investment relationships (based on the data available at LinkSV.com). A sample map shows the relations of Google employees to outside companies, e.g. Eric Schmidt is connected to both Google and Apple. [Thanks Brad!]

Today is Fat Thursday (Tłusty czwartek) in Poland, and Google.pl honors this with a special celebration logo showing baked goods instead of the Google o"s. Skuzik, who sent in the tip, claims this is the first special Google logo for Poland (can anyone confirm this?). Actually my home town also celebrates Fat Thursday (Fettdonnerstag) today as part of the "costumed, drunk & proud of it" carnival crazyness in some parts of Germany. PS: Tomorrow is Holiday Inflation Awareness Day.

This is ironic -- Pamela Fox of the Google Maps API blog posts a sample mashup using the geocoder feature, and inadvertently points out its limitation: there is a daily limit of 50,000 geocode requests, and the mashup currently displays nothing but the warning that "The bandwidth limit for this site has been exceeded." (It"s rare that official company blog posts are balanced enough to point out both pros and cons of a product!) [Thanks Googlaxy!] Correction: It was not the geocoder limit that was reached, ...

Authors@Google is a series of talks by authors available on Google Video. You can find all of them by searching for [type:google "authors@google"]. Currently available talks include authors such as: Steve Wozniak

Mark Malseed, co-author of The Google Story, takes an in-depth look at Google co-founder Sergey Brin and his family, mother Eugenia (NASA research scientist), father Michael (mathematics professor), and brother Sam. Here"s what Mark saw when he entered Sergey"s spacious Googleplex office 211, shared with Larry Page: Stepping through the sliding glass door into their office is like walking into a playroom for tech-savvy adults. A row of sleek flat-screen monitors lining one wall displays critical information: email, calendars, documents and, naturally, the Google search engine. Assorted green plants and an air purifier keep the oxygen flowing, while medicine balls provide appropriatel ...

Garett Rogers points out a couple of new Google domains, like: Google-Express.com Get-Me-On-Google.com GetUsOnGoogle.net YouOnGoogle.com Sometimes, Google arguably just grabs unrelated domains so others can"t use/ abuse them (like GoogleSucks.com). Not sure if this is the case with Google Express. But the scope of variants of the "You On Google" name seems to be too broad for that, so there"s probably a new Google product or service lurking around the corner. What could it be?

Red Herring and ZDnet report that Google has bought in-game advertiser AdScape Media for $23 million, citing a source close to the deal who remains anonymous. True or not? Google tells me they "don"t comment on rumor or speculation," as usual. Here"s what AdScape does, in their own words: Adscape Media is the in-game advertising company, and the developer of the world’s first dynamic in-game advertising technology. Adscape Media"s patented technology, AdverPlay™, allows advertisers and publishers, measurable in-game advertising opportunities.

Google now shows you the number of Google Reader subscribers to your RSS feed. They do so by adding a value to the HTTP user agent field when fetching your feed. In your raw logs, this may look like the following: User-Agent: Feedfetcher-Google; (+http://www.google.com/feedfetcher.html; 4 subscribers; feed-id=1794595805790851116) Join the ongoing comments. [Thanks Tony!]

This looks like a new search results prototype Google is playing around with (like some of you, I can"t see it): Jacobsd in the forum shows off a "plus box" showing on a search for Google. The top result google.com contains a "+" icon along with a link reading "Stock quote for GOOG". Clicking the link expands Google Finance-style stock information (similar to what you get when you search for goog). By now, there are a variety of "special" results above, within and below Google search results. Join the ongoing comments. [Thanks Jacobsd!]

I"ve asked Google if it"s a "sneaky redirect" per their webmaster guidelines to send some users to a registration page that does not contain the words available in the search results page snippet (the words you searched for). Google, usually more outspoken, refused to comment to my questions on this issue since several months, but now Google"s Vanessa Fox answered "we want the page that the searcher clicks on in the search results to be the same as what"s represented in the snippet." And yet, Google allows sites like WebmasterWorld (which we know members of the Google web spam team

PacificDave says he lost track of how many times Scott Adams referenced Google, and points to another mention. From the cartoon: "The new company health plan is Google"... Join the ongoing comments. [Thanks PacificDave!]

When you use Google to translate a website into any of the Beta translations Google provides (Chinese, Russian, Japanese and more) and you then hover over any of the translated sentences, you can find a link reading "Suggest a better translation."* Clicking it slides open a suggestion box where you can enter your own translation. (Send it, and Google echoes a simple "Thank you for contributing your translation suggestion to Google Translate.") My guess is that Google uses these submissions to either automatically implement some "wisdom of crowds" into their machine translation efforts, or more likely, that they"ll treat this as a kind of bug report with which they can better judge their translation e ...

Yahoo"s co-founder Jerry Yang will donate $75 million to Stanford University, the AP reports. Stanford is not only the place where Google was born, but also where Jerry and David Filo began the Yahoo web links directory in 1994. (Aww, 1994... don"t you want to go back to that year with your current knowledge to buy a couple of domains and try out a couple of website ideas? Then again, you"ll probably wish to go back to 2007 in a couple of years with the knowledge you have by then...) [Thanks Brinke in the forum! Photo courtesy of Yahoo.]

I suppose this site"s action may pop up on Google Maps" satellite images in a couple of years: Tree-Nation will plant 8 million trees in Africa in the shape of a huge heart to fight Climate Change and Poverty. (...) Inspired by Google maps we built our own special version to be able to plant 8 million trees, all with blogs and profiles. [Thanks Andy!]

Information Week has a couple of photographs of Google"s New York office. The obligatory Google whiteboard snapshot shows a portrait of the "Google Engineer of the Future." [Thanks Brinke and Search-Engines-Web!]

Larry Page talked about artificial intelligence [Video] at the annual conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (keep in mind that Google wants to build the world"s top AI lab, according to their internal goals): My prediction is that when AI happens, it"s going to be a lot of computation, and not so much clever blackboard/ whiteboard kind of stuff, clever algorithms. But just a lot of computation. My theory is that, if you look in your own programming, your DNA, it"s about 600 Megabytes compressed... so it"s smaller than any modern operating system. Smaller than Linux, or Windows, or anything like th ...