Tuesday, August 5, 2008

A Google.com Without Copyright Notice

When I visited the Google homepage some hours ago, there was no copyright notice at the bottom... and the privacy link was moved into the footer navigation bar. (The story goes that Google once added the copyright notice because people back in the portal-plagued 1990s otherwise didn't understand the page finished loading already.) I wasn't able to reproduce this on another computer so this might be a prototype experiment in which Google collects usage data. To join the experiment, you can copy the following bit into the address bar while you're at google.com, then hit return, and then load Google again (please do so at your own risk, I'm not sure which side-effects the experiment may have):

javascript:document.cookie="PREF=ID=f6e36171f77121a1:FF=4:TB=2:LD=en:NR=10:CR=2:TM=1216633048:LM=1217880029:FV=2:GM=1:S=JQGJ6TII4Y4UOZHu;path=/;domain=.google.com"

On that note, just recently Google added a privacy link to their homepage after a long time, putting it next to the copyright note, and removing the word "Google" there.

A Google.com Without Copy ... by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (10)

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