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

This is weird but fun: you draw a figure, and then the Flash site will make your figure dance. [Thanks JennyPenny!]

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:

So you figured out your business plan (make cash), and you figured out the details (make cash online), but your business still misses a catchy name? Look no further than the Web 2.0 Name Generator. (It got me "Bubblepoint", which is nice, but Bubblepoint.com is unfortunately taken already by some German laundry cleaning chain.) [Thanks Luca and Mrrix32 in the forum!] And if you"re looking for a random website idea...

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 ...

Oh wow, this is fun: you sing or hum a part of a song, and music search engine Midomi finds the title and artist for you! I tried Yesterday, I Just Called To Say I Love You, and a couple of other popular songs and they were all found (some more exotic songs didn"t yield any hits; luckily for Midomi, I bet most searchers will blame their own singing talents instead of the search engine"s algorithms). When you get a result, you can then play the original artist"s recording, or play a user"s rendition, or add the song to the shopping cart for $0.99. I suppose this engine does some pattern matching, but the devil is in the details, and they got the details right (with room for improvement when it comes to the size of their music ...

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 ...

Yahoo now offers you to create a badge showing the backlinks your site gets: But what"s the point, really? Everyone can create a dynamic site using htaccess & a simple PHP script that will create 500,000 new nonsense content pages with links to whichever location you want (it may be less trivial to get Yahoo to index all those pages in order for them to show up as backlinks, but still). [Via Search Engine Land.] Edit: I replaced the dynamic code with a static image as there was a noticeable lag.

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

Don Park came up with the neat idea of Identicons, little automated graphics representing a user"s IP address (e.g. to display something unique & identifying next to a blog comment). If only all IP addresses were stable... [Via Information Aesthetics. Image by Don Park.]

What do these six phrases have in common? "Flo returns in Diner Dash 3" "Hair Infusion" "Paris Hilton" "How do you start knitting?" "Everything from tax help to 401(k) tips" "GEICO car insurance"

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.!]

Oh, I love subtle interface idiocy -- this one is from an online Turkish translator (they adapted this from a multi-language dialog, where the approach makes sense): English Turkish to Turkish English

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!]

Jeesh. Windows Vista can be exploited by playing sound files -- which basically every web page can do -- that tell the system to delete files utilizing Vista"s speech recognition feature (provided you have speakers + microphone + an enabled voice recognition). If you ever hear your computer talking to itself, be afraid... be very afraid... [Thanks JustinF!] Join the ongoing comments.

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 ...

After testing the idea of Brand Universe since last October, Yahoo! recently anounced that they will launch six other similar websites. At the end of the year, there should be about 100. The idea of Brand Universe is quite simple. Yahoo! offers a lot of different services, where users can publish content. The most famous one is Flickr, where millions of pictures are hosted. Now Yahoo! buys the rights of a brand like "Harry Potter" or "Wii" and launches a new website with special content to the topic. The content, which is published there, comes from the different services offered by Yahoo!. "You can"t buy your way onto our list. We"re doing what makes sense for the users," Ya ...

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

An ambigram is a word drawn in such a way that you can read it upside down too. But have you seen a 3d ambigram like above? [Image released into the public domain by a Wikipedia author.]

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...

Timo Heuer from Germany is 15 years old and writes as freelance journalist for publications like Netzeitung or Readers-Edition.de. YouTube, world"s first place for searching videos, is full of videos denying the Holocaust. One of these videos shows under the headline "Housewitz - Tanzen macht frei" ("Housewitz - Dancing relieves"; Housewitz the style of Auschwitz) one of the frightfulliest concentration camps ever. It goes on with some slogans such as "7,000,000 party people", "3 Days of non-stopping partying" and "Hot showers (free)". But there are also some anti-Semitism videos which want to show us the "reality" of a Jew ...

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.

Rand Fishkin of Search Engine Optimization company & blog SEOMoz proposed to his girlfriend on TV. Nathan Weinberg has the details and comments, "What an amazing, genuine reaction. I’ll be watching that a few hundred times." Congrats!

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

To enjoy some expert arcade playing, you can search YouTube for [computer system speed run]. For example, searching for amiga speed run (or speedrun/ fast run) retrieves videos from Marble Madness, Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizard, Zak McKracken, or Great Gianna Sisters. Even if you played these games before you might discover new levels... Also see the "best of Amiga" videos part I [WMV] and part II [WMV].

Feel free to create tougher puzzles than I did above! [Thanks Pokemo in the forum!]

News of Future.com presents fictional news reports from the decades ahead. You"ll see headlines like "Millionth Gay Marriage in the US" (January 24, 2025) or "Antarctic Ozone Layer Soon to be Restored" (January 31, 2050). There"s also a piece on TalkTalk, a search engine of the future. [Thanks Pontus!]

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.]

The Canadian Captain Copyright initiative has been canceled. The site provided teaching material for classes, but had a very unbalanced view on copyright -- missing out on giving equal focus on what you can share or remix (Creative Commons, public domain, fair use) vs what you are not supposed to freely share (copyrighted software, etc.). The situation was especially ironic because Captain Copyright was a complete rip-off of every existing superhero clichee on the planet, yet the Captain was supposedly fighting against remixing other people"s ideas. The site now proclaims: In August 2006, we took the Captain Copyright website offline so that we could revise its content in response to the c ...

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 ...

Wikipedia writes: Singles Awareness Day (SAD) is a humorous holiday celebrated on February 14 (although some prefer the 13th or the 15th to get away from the commercialism associated with the 14th). It serves as an alternative to Valentine"s Day for people who are single; that is, who are not involved in a romantic relationship and can therefore not participate in Valentine"s Day traditions. Some observers of SAD do so out of spite for Valentine"s Day, as a Hallmark holiday, or for other reasons. On Singles Awareness Day single people gather to celebrate or to commiserate in their single status. Some want to remind romantic coupl ...

Pipe 25 digg-style-chosen RSS feeds into a single new feed, and add a social bookmarking service on top to find additional feeds. Convert the feeds to a podcast through a text-to-speech engine. Channel the podcast into audio-based social networks which have a subscriber/ payment/ commission model. Expose the output via a customized, invite-only meta search engine accompanied by a link building campaign. After a year, from the resulting $40 in revenues, take a day off from the blogosphere, grab some food, walk up a lonely hill, and think about the world -- hopefully you"ll come up with the idea for your web 3.0 site.

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):

Life 07 is no game like any other, and you"ll notice pretty quickly after opening the box: in big bold letters, you"re warned that when you die in the game, you will not be able to play again. The game makers made this possible by tapping a video console memory capacity that was unused before, according to information from video console spokespersons. "It"s true that ... there is no way to erase from memory what happens in Life 07," one source commented. Great visuals and sound effects The game continues to be quite an atypical experience from the moment you insert it in your console, and make yourself comfortable sitting down with your controller, your friends, and a couple of drinks (get ready for a long play). First of all, this is strictly single-player mode, so your friends will need to eith ...

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 ...