Slashdot Mirror

Wow Yahoo, if you merge with AOL after throwing Microsoft's bid back in their face a couple years ago, there will be some serious questions of why you declined such an eligible suitor in favor of a bum. Have you lost all your self esteem? Or are you one of those hopeless cases in love with the idea of changing and redeeming your partner? That never works!

Using Google Translate to read about a Google Maps fuckup. Irony ensues.

What's worse, they destroyed forest in a protected area and dumped the waste in to the river. How stupid and destructive can these guys be?

http://searchengineland.com/nicaragua-raids-costa-rica-blames-google-maps-54885

The troops are accused of setting up camp there, taking down a Costa Rican flag and raising the Nicaraguan flag, doing work to clean up a nearby river, and dumping the sediment in Costa Rican territory.

This is the privacy policy I see for Google.

http://www.google.ca/intl/en/privacypolicy.html

The quotes you provided are NOT in it. And it says things that weasel around those quotes if you ask me. Please clarify.

My concern is one day they may start linking my Google accounts to my searches such as my iGoogle account.

Its called "Personalized Search" or "Web History" its been around for years. Not too long ago they expanded it to make it an opt-out service, instead of opt-in... you probably already 'use it'. Ooops.

http://searchengineland.com/google-now-personalizes-everyones-search-results-31195

Enjoy.

As originally posted on Search Engine Land, These allegations are merely exploratory and it is difficult to determine exactly where the GA's office is headed in this investigation, or how Texas could claim jurisdiction. All the lawsuits in question are being raised by non-Texas corporations and against a California-based company.

Yesterday, Google responded to the investigation, which has not been made public yet by the General Attorney's office. In it's response, Google states that they "listen carefully to people's concerns" and " we strongly believe our business practices reflect our commitment to build great products for the benefit of users everywhere". To some extent this sounds like the usual play from Google, invoking it's "do no evil" mantra.

Does Google manipulate results to thwart competitors and advance its own businesses? Some competitors to Google are concerned that the company lowers search results listings for certain firms and/or charging higher fees ads they place vs those of Google's partners.

Google has never revealed its search or ranking methodology for sites in detail, though it has published some papers on optimization and best practices.

Google's reply on a Friday night after business hours on the biggest 3-day summer weekend of the year is sure to draw little attention.

and Google will have no part in it at all, surely... Esp. after they put money in Recorded Future together with the CIA.

Ever since they switched to Teleatlas, it was a step backwards.

Google no longer uses Teleatlas in the U.S. They now create their own mapping data generated from StreetView information. A search for "google teleatlas" will give you lots of articles discussing this recent (~ 1 year) change.

I RTFA, there is an anchor that points to the images. The Plaintiff clearly avoided the pathway. I can't help but wonder what the Plaintiff's attorney fees are, but I wager Google's will be not free, as in Bloom Box Powered Search Engines.

I'd vote for stupid. Sure, it looks dangerous, but there's a clear foot path on the other side of the road!.

I'd vote for stupid. Sure, it looks dangerous, but there's a clear foot path on the other side of the road!.

The link with the StreetView images make the situation all the more plain: she's an idiot. For A) deciding to walk along a busy highway that in satellite images and StreetView clearly did not have sidewalks, which would have been obvious on the ground too, B) apparently being too clueless to stay on what narrow, non-sidewalk area did exist adjacent to the asphalt -- it looks wide enough to me that if you valued your life there would be room to stay off the road, and C) apparently too clueless to realize that there is indeed a walking/biking trail running parallel along Deer Valley Drive that she walked right past along her route (the entrance at the corner of Iron Horse Drive and Bonanza Drive). note the cyclist. The path was a few steps off the road, and it even has a tunnel under the highway to avoid crossing at the busy intersection. The trail is used frequently enough that you can clearly see people walking/riding all along it in the satellite images.

Google handled approx 88 billion searches in Dec-2009. (88b/31)*2=5.67billion searches in two days. If (conservativly) one tenth of those are work related, that's 567m. If one in ten work related users plays this once for 60 seconds, that's 3.4 billion seconds. 3.4 billion seconds is approximatly 108 person-years worth of productivity. (Which at US federal minimum wage is about 1.6 million dollars). That's a low figure as those who need google to work probably don't earn minimum wage. Now that's power! I personally played for more than 60s....

Google doesn't own the map data, they just license it.

You sure about that? Check the copyright message at the bottom of this map, for example. They've been building up their own map database, probably as a side effect of all those Street View vehicles running around. More info here.

First Era: Human-Powered Search (1997-2002)

"Search isn't some relatively new effort that dates back to 2003 at Microsoft. Search, especially web search, is something the company has seriously pursued since 1997. In its first era, Microsoft started out with a crawler-based search engine, one that creates listings by using automation to harvest material from across the web. It then migrated to building a very good service that relied primarily on human power, human beings to either catalog the web or customize top search results with hand-picked answers. Bill Bliss was the person in charge during most of this period. Here's how it unfolded, over the years"

"I was always told "Search is not core to our business, Google is not a competitor, Yahoo is not the competition, AOL is the competitor to beat, subscription services is how we're going to win.", Bill Bliss, Former Microsoft Search Chief

First Era: Human-Powered Search (1997-2002)

"Search isn't some relatively new effort that dates back to 2003 at Microsoft. Search, especially web search, is something the company has seriously pursued since 1997. In its first era, Microsoft started out with a crawler-based search engine, one that creates listings by using automation to harvest material from across the web. It then migrated to building a very good service that relied primarily on human power, human beings to either catalog the web or customize top search results with hand-picked answers. Bill Bliss was the person in charge during most of this period. Here's how it unfolded, over the years"

"I was always told "Search is not core to our business, Google is not a competitor, Yahoo is not the competition, AOL is the competitor to beat, subscription services is how we're going to win.", Bill Bliss, Former Microsoft Search Chief

Better search results and a better privacy policy made me switch from Google to Bing. I do not have anything to hide but I prefer to use tools and services that value my privacy as much as I do. For example, Bing will remove the entire IP associated with the log after 18 months:

Further, we have built-in technological and procedural safeguards designed to prevent the unauthorized correlation of this data. We take additional steps to protect the privacy of stored search information by removing the entirety of the IP address, cookies and other cross session identifiers, after 18 months(more info here).

On the other hand Google will remove at most last octet from the IP address from thisarticle:

We are removing the last octet of the IP address. In other words, we put zeros into the last eight bits of a 32-bit IP address. Technically speaking, there can be one to three digits in the last octet, when it is written in decimal notation.

This completely contradicts two other reports from the last few days, which has Bing losing market share in December.

http://searchengineland.com/nielsen-yahoo-bing-down-google-up-in-december-33464

http://www.hitwise.com/us/press-center/press-releases/search-enginedec2009/

If you look at it with fresh eyes, the original three had a weaker plot line, worse acting, worse special effects, and significantly worse choreography.

Let me refute each of these points.

Weaker plot? What was the plot of Episode 1? Seriously. I can't figure it out. It's just a bunch of stuff. No one is motivated to do anything. So the whole thing is just to make Palpatine chancelor? Wouldn't it be simpler to just to have Palpatine already a corrupt chancelor? What was Episode 2 about? I honestly don't know. It didn't even have a big six movie plot point. It's just stuff blowing up for two hours. Episode 3 just built up to an overly long sword fight, that honestly got boring, and an annoyingly huge inconsistency with Padame dying in childbirth of a broken heart (I'm sorry, she died because "she lost the will to live." As Stewie said in Family Guy parody, "Oh come on!") even though Leia is supposed to know her as a child.

Episodes 4-6 are a traditional story. ANH is a complete story. It has a start, a middle and end. ESB and ROTJ on contrast are the middle and third acts of the 3 act story. ROTJ is just a a big battle (which probably makes it your favorite), but ESB is about losing. It's all about failure. The good guys lose. As the review linked above asks, "Who is the main character of the Phantom Menace?" It's not Anakin. He's not seen until 40 minutes into the film. It's not Obi-Wan. He's a sidekick. How about the New Trilogy? Anakin? Why do we care about him? The Original Trilogy? Luke. It's all about Luke. He's a nobody we identify with, rises to the occasion in ANH, gets kicked down in ESB, and overcomes and ultimately defeats the bad guys in ROTJ. Where's the plot arc? It's all so rushed. Anakin turns evil because he thinks Padame is going to die, but doesn't make sense. He kills Sand People in E2, but it's just a snap. He's whiney in E3 for some reason. There's no character growth. There's nothing.

Worse acting? Hayden Christensen is bad. He's just very very bad. There's a reason why he doesn't really work, even though Natalie Portman and Ewan McGreggor have since E1-3. It's not all their fault. There's only so much you can do with the script you're given. The writing is just very bad. Not only are there glaring plot holes, but the dialog is atrocious. The reason why the dialog is better in the original trilogy is simple. Lucas didn't write nor direct them. He only wrote and directed ANH, the one with the weakest dialog and weakest direction.

Worse Special Effects? Yes. Let's compare movies on special effects that are 28 years apart. Let me repeat that. TWENTY EIGHT YEARS. My god, if the effects weren't better, then there'd be something wrong. It's not how the effects are executed. It's about how they're used. There's just too much shit going on in the new trilogy. It's distracting. Even Lucas himself said during the production of the ESB back in 1980 that special effects that don't serve the story are pointless, but now we get stuff crammed into every frame. It's like watching one of the damn "punch the monkey for a free iPod" ads, or a chinese website. ("Renao" or "hot and noisy" is the Chinese term for that design. And yes, they consider crowded flashing colors a feature.) Just because you can make a dinosaur walk in front of the camera, or have a construction robot punch a tiny robot, doesn't mean you should.

Worse choreography? I assume you're talking about the lightsaber battles. Let's examine those. There are three in the original triliogy, and all three are better. Why? They mean something. Especially Luke vs Vader 1. Vader vs Kenobi is about letting go. It's the rematch of the old teacher and fallen student. It's the old teacher giving one last instruction to both his old student and his new one. It's about sacrifice. It's about saying that you w

Actually, when Yahoo was handing over blogger data to China, Google said they would change their policies and start anonymizing user data even sooner than they already were.

http://searchengineland.com/google-anonymizing-search-records-to-protect-privacy-10736

you've never heard of IE changing default search to bing? http://searchengineland.com/internet-explorer-6-forces-bing-as-default-search-provider-20398

Huh, you got me there.

I can dig deeper, but that is by far not the only isolated incident.

The article you just linked said it was. The issue doesn't apply to any other version of IE. (That is, versions of IE used by sane people.)

The issue here about the previous search results (prior comment) is that they are showing other OS's first, and MS is nowhere to be found.

That's not evidence of rigged results.

I wasn't even specifying an OS, so why or how would it magically put in linux and mac as insecure

What makes you think it "magically put in linux and mac as insecure" (whatever that means?) You've demonstrated absolutely nothing here.

You could be noticing a pattern, for example: articles about Windows don't include the term "OS" as often as articles about Linux and Macintosh. That might be a reasonable conclusion to draw, and has nothing to do with some paranoid conspiracy theory you've brewed up.

The only thing you've concretely shown is that Google and Bing don't have identical search results. Whoop-de-shit.

(re: your reply to me)The other issue here is, when I'm looking for something I don't need bing to tell me what I want to find, that by searching google I don't need it to automatically assume I don't know how to type google.com., which is what it's essentially defaulting.

That's because millions and millions of users do, in fact, type "google.com" into a search box to get to Google. This just proves you're completely out-of-touch with the search industry, and know nothing about the average user.

Likewise with Microsoft. I don't want "all about Microsoft from Microsoft's webpage", because a company's own view will always be skewed. I want "all about Microsoft from everyone else in the world other than Microsoft". This is a failure of the search engine for me.

Then hit "more results," the link's right there.

you've never heard of IE changing default search to bing? http://searchengineland.com/internet-explorer-6-forces-bing-as-default-search-provider-20398
There you go. I can dig deeper, but that is by far not the only isolated incident.

The issue here about the previous search results (prior comment) is that they are showing other OS's first, and MS is nowhere to be found. This results in being both a: impartial and b: inaccurate. I wasn't even specifying an OS, so why or how would it magically put in linux and mac as insecure when common pageranking would not simply put MS's "why is MS so secure" right after "why is linux/apple so insecure?". It means the answers are intellectually dishonest. If I wanted answers tailored to someone else's purpose I wouldn't be looking for things that are unbiased, as is my requirement.

(re: your reply to me)The other issue here is, when I'm looking for something I don't need bing to tell me what I want to find, that by searching google I don't need it to automatically assume I don't know how to type google.com., which is what it's essentially defaulting. I want to be able to look for news on google, or other actual things of information. Likewise with Microsoft. I don't want "all about Microsoft from Microsoft's webpage", because a company's own view will always be skewed. I want "all about Microsoft from everyone else in the world other than Microsoft". This is a failure of the search engine for me.

I think your misunderstanding their product, web surfers are googles product, they provide surfers to retailers, etc for money. Those who pay google (most websites) are googles customers. Those who are paid by google, are googles suppliers (sites hosting advertisements.) The people who use googles (mostly free) applications/web search/google app, etc we are the product. So while Google doesn't have Monopoly control over us, their product, they do currently have monopoly type control over their suppliers, and customers.
Unless you are saying their are web retailers, that wouldn't be concerned with reaching Google's 71% control of their potential market? Google accounted for more than 71% of US searches in September
If any major web retailers was shunned by google, and thus denied access to 71% of the marketplace, they would be done, or severely handicapped in the market. That's my definition of a monopoly anyway when all other competitors combined would limit potential customers to 1/3 of the market.

Not even close.

You are naive if you think Google is pure like the driven snow. I'm no lover of Microsoft, but I'm no lover of any large corporation. Google's not better than their competitors - they just haven't been big long enough to have done as much bad stuff.

What about patent trolling,

Overall, they're pretty good about this one, but remember - Google's a relatively young company. Their cry for patent reform is in their own interest, since they're much more likely to defend patent suits than prosecute them. They certainly aren't afraid to go after folks they feel have violated their patents. This air duct patent doesn't bode well.

bogus lawsuits,

How about suing Grupa Mlodych Artystow i Literatow for using gmail.pl? Or suing GMail, a pre-existing physical mail service in Europe? Then there's Android Data Services.

astroturfing using the names of dead people,

Oh yes they do. Google hired the very same company that sent letters from dead people.

bogus TCO studies,

They aren't afraid of misleading TCO studies, by counting unpatched, pirated IIS servers as affecting the TCO of Windows Server.

bogus benchmark studies,

They do that, too.

bribing public officials,

There've been allegations of this in China and of media bribery in the US. They're one of the top DNC contributors, as well, which in my view boils down to bribery.

outright lying to the US-DoJ,

Of course they do that.

and so much more.

Sharing board members with nominal competitors, swiping copyrighted work, the whole AdWord thing going on, and so much more.

Yeah.

Indeed, in fact this happened in Belgium with them collectively asking for US$77M.

Eventually the two reached a settlement whereby G didn't show their cached results

a history of the case

I work for the news wire AFP, and we have an agreement with Google to use our news.. and they DO pay us... http://searchengineland.com/afp-google-settle-over-google-news-copyright-case-10926

Your page was from 2007 (and highly suspicious anyway). Let's try a 2008 page and a couple of 2009 sites.

Maybe Google listening to the Obama campaign and marking Conservative blogs as "spam" has caught up to them.

"Do no evil" my ass.

It's true that this could backfire, but it could also cause a massive arms race. If politics weren't messy and dirty enough already, imagine if both campaigns were spending massive amounts of time and energy to control the other side's Google results. McCain supporters would link to dirty articles about Obama, Obama supporters would link to dirty articles about McCain, and the whole Internet would be filled with even more political links than it already is.

Heck, a really smart campaigner would just outsource the whole thing to India and have thousands of staffers constantly building links to positive and negative results.

Politics might be the one thing strong enough to overcome all of Google's attempts to stop Googlebombs.

It's not really Google's doing - just people exploiting the page rank algorithm by getting a lot of people to link to the site using particular terms. Normally this is a good input to an algorithm, but it means it's easy to get a particular site to the top for a particular phrase, so long as that phrase isn't commonly used to link to sites.

"Miserable failure" used to be a good one on Google, and this article gives a good overview of the phenomenon, which Google have implemented some measures to prevent.

It also mentions that the Yahoo! and MSN/Live search still returned the targeted page, but only Yahoo! seems to still be returning the the Whitehouse site as its top result now.

Surely you jest.

This page lists some dated stats which may or may not have changed significantly in the last ten months. Google had 54%, Yahoo had 22.9%, MSN/Live had 8.8% and Ask.com had 3.6%. That would effectively make two companies the ones serving up 85.7% of search results. Note that there's a reason Excite and Altavista are ignored.. they suck. I just ran a search on Excite for the term 'arduino' and every other link was a sponsored link. 39 results total including sponsored links. None of the good pages I found through google are listed with the exception of adafruit. Altavista did better, though I'm unsure how the addition of whipped cheese spread can help my little PCB with LEDs.

It would effectively be a duopoly between Google and MS, possibly turning into a monopoly if MS bombed back to their mighty 8% afterwards and gave up the ghost finally. I highly doubt those users will flock to engines left over from the 90s.

Prominent search expert Danny Sullivan outlined the reasons Google should divest Performics in a post last month at Search Engine Land. He also notes that Microsoft has a similar conflict since it owns Aquantive, whose Avenue A/Razorfish unit offers search engine optimization.

Danny Sullivan has apparently been contacted by Google, Inc. According to Mr. Sullivan, Google has stated that domain name tasting is OK. Here's the quote: "Domain kiting is when someone registers a domain but never pays for it, then keeps registering it. Google said the policy will only apply to kiting. Those doing domain tasting -- registering a site, trying it out with ads and then actually paying for it -- will not be impacted." see http://searchengineland.com/080125-081815.php

It's a form of Black Hat search engine optimization, in which you destroy a competitor's website. The way it's done is to set up a link farm of your own, but with every page pointing at your competitor's site. Eventually Google and the other search engine operators discover the link farm, but assume that your competitor put it there, and remove it from the index.

Thus they tell me at webmasterworld.

Wales was quoted recently complaining about Google's results for "Tampa hotels", and talking about how Wikia was going to be better. So I searched Wikia for "Tampa hotels".

The first three results from Wikia search are all from the domain "visit-tampa-bay.com". That's one of those bottom-feeder ad link sites. The site is supposed to redirect traffic to Orbitz, but doesn't even do that right. Very disappointing result. Could they have been spammed already?

Trying "Tampa hotels" in Google gets us "travel.yahoo.com" for the top two results, which indicates that Google isn't biasing their search against their biggest competitor. Next is "traveladvisor.com". Those are OK results; you'd be able to get a hotel room that way.

Trying "Tampa hotels" in Yahoo search gets us a page from one of Yahoo's special cases. Yahoo knows about "hotels", so we get a list of hotels and prices from Yahoo, and three sponsored results. The top organic result is "tripadvisor.com", which is at least a big-name travel site, followed by "visittampabay.com" (not to be confused with "visit-tampa-bay.com"), the site for the local Convention and Visitor's Bureau. Yahoo certainly tries hard for hotel searches, and seems to be doing OK.

Trying "Tampa hotels" in MSN search gets results that look much like Yahoo's, but with lower result quality. MSN understands hotels as a special case. There are three sponsored results, and addresses and phone numbers for three real hotels. The first three organic search results are Yahoo Travel, "tampa-hotels.net" (an ad-laden landing page), and "tampa-hotels-discounts.net" (a bottom-feeder generic landing page that isn't even on topic.) Poor results.

Trying our own SiteTruth the top result is "all-hotels.com", which has a list of hotels with pictures and a reservation interface. The second result is Yahoo Travel, and the third is Expedia. We're sorting Yahoo results on business legitimacy, so that's not surprising. OK here.

So there's where Wikia is today, on their recommended demo search.

The U.S. government's idea that it can get any information from any U.S. company at any time by threatening to put the executives of the company in jail, and can keep that secret, means that, using Google's information, your entire history online can be tracked by the U.S. government.

However when the US federal government went on a fishing expedition to see what people searched for Google refused. "Bush Administration Demands Search Data; Google Says No; AOL, MSN & Yahoo Said Yes". As for privacy: Google Anonymizing Search Records To Protect Privacy.

your entire history online can be tracked by the U.S. government.

Only Firefox with NoScript can prevent this. Since Google has been paying $50,000,000 each year to the Mozilla Foundation, the developers of Firefox, and since Google makes money through advertising, it seems likely that Firefox will eventually not allow add-ons like NoScript and Ad-Block.

WRONG! Big tyme. If I want to block Google Analytics, or whatever, all I have to do is to add the address I want to block to my Hosts File. Hosts files work with Linux, OS X, and Windows. I know, I've used one on all of these. And I don't see most ads.

NoScript makes your browsing much more secure, in addition to giving you the option to stop spying. It's amazing how many web sites run Javascript scripts linking the web sites we visit to other servers at other companies.

Thanks for the NoScript addon. I like being able to block scripts from some websites while allowing other websites to use them. On my Windows PC I had a firewall that allowed me to do this, but I know of no firewalls for Linux or Macs that does the same.

I stand corrected. I had spoken with Ask.com representatives, but obviously they were just trying to generate some additional revenue and I failed to do any additional research (doh!). Here's the scoop and some analysis.

No, next up is a homegrown search engine called Groognik, which uses the proprietary PutinRank(tm) to score pages for their positive content. Next they will take a page from the Chinese and redirect search traffic to Groognik.

A good point by point refutation of this (not by Google), courtesy of Search Engine Land, an industry blog about search engine:

http://searchengineland.com/070610-100246.php

Danny Sullivan has an interesting blog post on this issue: http://searchengineland.com/070330-100220.php He cites the response from a Director at Google saying that it indeed was a technical issue: the desire to show higher resolution imagery.

NineNine - You are giving way too much importance to the amateur vs professional debate and thinking about bloggers in terms of education level and ability to find "real" news. I could go off in a very long article about the power and profit a successful blog can bring the owner and the influence it can wield, but an example would be better. Take a look at TechCrunch sometime http://www.techcrunch.com/about-techcrunch/, although I'm sure you already know about it. It's were the MSM (Main Stream Media) takes a lot of their tech tips from and it's been featured in everything from CBS News to Business Week. It's just a blog run by a very successful business man. Another example see http://searchengineland.com/ It's another blog by Danny Sullevan. It was launched in December and ALREADY it's posts show up on google news. So when you search GOOGLE news his posts show up ABOVE THE MSM as news items. Talk about power. Yes anyone can have a blog, but not everyone can write well enough or wants to devote enough time / energy to attract a following. Blogs in many ways enable the possibility of writers to earn more and reach a wider audience. New publishing and add technology (google adsense, adbright, text link sales) enable writers to directly profit off their readers via targeted advertising without the need to be censored and influenced by middle man organizations that syndicate other people's writing. There will always be a place for some of the MSM, but many of the news papers, televisions news shows are now outdated and with the advance of new technology they're publishing business models will cease to exist. There is increased competition, but with the cost for distribution and exposure skyrocketing downward if people like what you can find an audience six figure salaries funded by advertising dollars are in ready supply. You just have to find an audience and that's the hard part. To relate this to a personal story - I launched a new blog last month. I'm not making any major money off it, but I was already approached for syndication by WebProNews in less then a month after launch. The articles they syndicate show up in Google and Yahoo news. Blogs are here to stay and people are listening, if you like it or not. If you're a write new distribution channels and new technologies are opening more doors then they are closing! Keep writing! That's my take anyways. I'm new to Slashdot (I use other social media and publishing sites). I hope my contributions here are welcomed here.