Thursday, November 23, 2006
Kid’s Drawings (Video)
Google Wired - Tired - Expired
[Thanks Haochi! Image by Wired.]
Google’s Kirkland Office (Video)
Robert Scoble visited Google’s Seattle Engineering Office [MOV]. “We’re small teams, the company is run by engineers,” ex-Microsoft employee Peter Wilson (pictured) says. “We do a lot of stuff to enable small teams of engineers to launch software very, very quickly.” Google’s Steve Yegge later adds, “Google tries to be a company where you can kind of do a startup inside the company, with a similar sort of risk/ reward trade-off.”
[Thanks Pd! Video from the ScobleShow.]
Google Betas Gallery
The “Museum of Modern Betas” also features Google – in fact, Google recently cracked their 100 sites barrier. Their page was removed due to bandwidth problems, I’ll see what I can do.
Ignored Accessibility Problem?
Jakob Nielsen writes, “Lower literacy is the Web’s biggest accessibility problem, but nobody cares about this massive user group.”
Did Google Increase Anti-Porn Algos?
Did Google increase its anti-porn measurements in search results? SEO Black Hat – strong language ahead – indicates that a recent Google algorithm change now almost strictly brings up non-adult sites on potentially adult, single-word search queries (even when SafeSearch is turned off, that is). For instance, searching for “porn” on non-SafeSearch Google returns funny videos about internet porn usage, articles from Washington Post and VeganPorn.com (“not an actual porn site”, as the snippet disclaims), and only about a single porn, ClipHunter.com.
Google for a long time favored non-porn sites even for potentially adult terms*, so I’m not sure there indeed was a huge shakeup lately. Does anyone know more?
*I suppose tackling the “short tail” of ambiguous terms like “cock” manages to get rid of a lot of scary mainstream coverage in the style of “my daughter was searching for images of an animal for her homework and got shocking nudity instead”... in other words, a family-friendly Google is wise to only return actual porn when they can be rather sure porn was what people were after. Certainly, in reverse, a porn hunter won’t be shocked to find harmless imagery, though I bet even Google makes very sure to never turn into constant disappointment to their porn-searching clientele either, afraid they might flee to less “safe” grounds.
Eric Schmidt on Economist Podcast
The Economist interviewed Google CEO Eric Schmidt [MP3] on the world in 2007. From the interview:
Q: When most people hear the word “internet”, the first thing that pops into their head is “bubble.” But you’re saying that we’re now entering a new era – what sort of era?
A: Well, you know, the bubble – which everybody sort of enjoyed, except for the bust – is really going to end up being just a side-show in the history of the internet. The internet is a phenomenon that is as big as the development of the modern transportation system, as big as the creation of radio and television, newspapers etc. ... maybe all combined.
The important thing about the internet is that it goes fundamentally at the things people care most about, which is communication. And it’s clear, over the next few years, that people will have access to far more information then they can ever handle. And that is a good thing: that more information crowds out bad ideas, bad information, bad governments, bad behavior. And knowing what people are doing produces a better, more profitable, faster growing, and I think safer world.
(More information produces all that? Or the right kind of information?)
[Thanks Jairson Vitorino!]
Search Engine Thanksgiving Logos 2006
Google, Yahoo and Ask are showing off special Thanksgiving Day logos in the US today; Thanksgiving is celebrated on the 4th Thursday in November, often with an accompanying Thanksgiving feast with a turkey. In this year and past years, Google always shows the turkey being served the food, not being the food itself.
[Thanks Brinke and others!]
Get Fuzzy (Google Cartoon)
Today, the Get Fuzzy cartoon features Google.
[Thanks Norm & Debra Copeland and Peter Krismer!]
Several Indented Result Snippets
Bug or feature? Searching for get fuzzy, Google was just showing me 3 indented result snippets in a row, one from comics.com and two from news.yahoo.com. Usually, Google will only indent a snippet if it belongs to the domain one snippet above (e.g. the second comics.com result, and the second yahoo.com result, but not the first yahoo.com result). I guess it’s just a harmless bug, though it’s quite rare to see bugs in Google.com SERPs, like the extra-large snippets spotted a while ago.
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