Google is built to support a technocratic way of working. Its founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and most of its early employees are computer scientists by training. It has always been the sort of place where those devoted...
continue reading "Google and Aptocracy" »
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Washington Post: The world's largest Internet search company and the world's most powerful electronic surveillance organization are teaming up in the name of cybersecurity. Under an agreement that is still being finalized, the National Security Agency would help Google analyze...
continue reading "Google to enlist NSA to help it ward off cyberattacks - washingtonpost.com" »
The relationship between the two services is a subject of great interest to me. Any thoughts on the matter?...
continue reading "Michael Jackson Died in 2007 : According to Google & Wikipedia" »
Interesting interview about the role of human evaluators in revising search....
continue reading "The Human Element in Google Web Search" »
Kevin Kelly at TED: <object width="446" height="326"><param name="movie" value="http://video.ted.com/assets/player/swf/EmbedPlayer.swf"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true" /><param name="wmode" value="transparent"></param><param name="bgColor" value="#ffffff"></param> <param name="flashvars" value="vu=http://video.ted.com/talks/embed/KevinKelly_2007P-embed-PARTNER_high.flv&su=http://images.ted.com/images/ted/tedindex/embed-posters/KevinKelly-2007P.embed_thumbnail.jpg&vw=432&vh=240&ap=0&ti=319" /><embed src="http://video.ted.com/assets/player/swf/EmbedPlayer.swf" pluginspace="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" bgColor="#ffffff" width="446" height="326" allowFullScreen="true" flashvars="vu=http://video.ted.com/talks/embed/KevinKelly_2007P-embed-PARTNER_high.flv&su=http://images.ted.com/images/ted/tedindex/embed-posters/KevinKelly-2007P.embed_thumbnail.jpg&vw=432&vh=240&ap=0&ti=319"></embed></object>...
continue reading "Kevin Kelly on the next 5,000 days of the web" »
Can A New Search Engine Outdo Google? Talk of the Nation, May 15, 2009 · Is there anything Google can't do? The creators of Wolfram Alpha think so. The new search engine is slated for release this month. Danny Sullivan,...
continue reading "Can A New Search Engine Outdo Google? : NPR Science Friday" »
Schmidt on Universalism: "The most common question I get about Google is 'how is it different everywhere else?' and I am sorry to tell you that it's not. People still care about Britney Spears in these other countries. It's...
continue reading "Eric Schmidt on the Universalism of the Internet " »
Check out this paper: Alon Halevy, Google Peter Norvig, Google Fernando Pereira, Google Problems that involve interacting with humans, such as natural language understanding, have not proven to be solvable by concise, neat formulas like F = ma. Instead, the...
continue reading "Interesting paper by some Googlers: 'The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data'" »
A great course from UC Berkeley about search engines...
continue reading "Videos of UC Berkeley course on Search Engines" »
The Google Blog: Two new improvements to Google results pages 3/24/2009 07:18:00 AM Today we're rolling out two new improvements to Google search. The first offers an expanded list of useful related searches and the second is the addition of...
continue reading "A step toward semantic search" »
Stephen Wolfram is an eccentric inventor, mathematician, and business person. His latest venture is in search. Check out how he describes his service: Wolfram's blog: Wolfram|Alpha Is Coming! March 5, 2009 Stephen Wolfram Some might say that Mathematica and A...
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Bits Blog: Better Search Doesn't Mean Beating Google By Saul Hansell A headline that kicked around the blogosphere this weekend made no sense to me: "Wolfram Alpha is Coming -- and It Could be as Important as Google." The post...
continue reading "The difference between a technology and the company it keeps" »
Google raises our expectations about things both deep and shallow. Unhappiness and anxiety dwell in that space between reality and expectations. When our expectations about significant things - justice, peace, health, and knowledge - exceed reality by significant margins,...
continue reading "Comments, please: How Chapter 2.1 opens" »
Google Blogoscoped: Google is cancelling their Google Research Datasets aka Palimpsests program. Its aim was to provide large data sets for others to use. Wired in January this year wrote that Palimpsests' storage "will be free to scientists and access...
continue reading "Google Stops Research Datasets Program" »
GoogleBlogoscoped: When Google's "Did You Mean" Pushes Away Better Results Google's special "Did you mean" feature tends to get obtrusive at times. As you might have noticed, the general trend with Google over the years is that they get more...
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NYTimes.com: February 1, 2009 Google Error Sends Warning Worldwide By LIZ ROBBINS Google's Internet search service malfunctioned for nearly 55 minutes Saturday morning, upending users around the world with search results that carried false safety warnings and Web links that...
continue reading "The Great Google Breakdown of 2009 (so far)" »
CNet: The search engine space is filled with a slew of companies that are vying to become the next Google. What is the "next Google"? It's a search engine that captures the majority of the search engine market--a feat that...
continue reading "What would it take to outsearch Google? " »
Rough Type: All hail the information triumvirate! January 22, 2009 I was reading an interview today with Jorge Cauz, the president of Encyclopedia Britannica, in which he describes some of the Web 2.0-y tools that the company is preparing to...
continue reading "Nicholas Carr on the Google-Wikipedia symbiosis" »
An interesting collection of reactions. Thanks, Geert!...
continue reading "Why Google Employees Quit" »
How will this level of customization affect how we learn things?Preferences: Preferred sites About preferred sites The preferred sites feature lets you set your Google Web Search preferences so that your search results match your unique tastes and needs. Fill...
continue reading "Preferred sites: Is this a good idea?" »
NYTimes.com: Google Trends Falls Victim to Disturbing Stunt By Miguel Helft Google Trends, a service that shows the relative popularity of search terms, fell victim to what appeared to be an ugly stunt on Tuesday: a sketch of an airplane...
continue reading "Google Trends fooled again" »
Chris Soghoian: December 17, 2008 6:00 AM PST Google censors political-donation transparency ads Posted by Chris Soghoian Should members of the public be able to pay for Web advertisements detailing which companies have donated to politicians? While this seems...
continue reading "Google censors political-donation transparency ads | Surveillance State - CNET News" »
Washington Post: You've Gotta Think Like Google By Douglas LaBier Special to The Washington Post Tuesday, November 11, 2008; HE01 What are the keys to success and well-being? Being able to manage the stresses of your work and personal life,...
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Washington Post: ... "The vast majority of information is still not searchable or findable either because it's not published or it's on Web sites which the government has put up which no one can index," Google chief executive Eric Schmidt...
continue reading "Firms Push for a More Searchable Federal Web" »
Larry Lessig's blog was infected by gambling spam (as are so many blogs). Google purged him from the index. He fixed it. But it's still not right....
continue reading "Lessig Blog Dropped from Google " »
From Google Blog: Search and find magazines on Google Book Search 12/09/2008 09:47:00 AM The word "magazine" is derived from the Arabic word "makhazin," meaning storehouse. Since Daniel Defoe published the world's first English magazine back in 1704, millions of...
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Search Engine Watch: December 2, 2008 Google Buys Digital Historical Newspaper Archives from PaperofRecord.com Google has completed the purchase of 20 million digitized historical newspaper pages from PaperofRecord.com. The two have had an agreement for two years and has now...
continue reading "Google Buys Digital Historical Newspaper Archives from PaperofRecord.com - Search Marketing News Blog - Search Engine Watch (SEW)" »
Science: Electronic Publication and the Narrowing of Science and Scholarship James A. Evans Online journals promise to serve more information to more dispersed audiences and are more efficiently searched and recalled. But because they are used differently than print--scientists and...
continue reading "Electronic Publication and the Narrowing of Science and Scholarship -- Evans 321 (5887): 395 -- Science" »
From Cathy Davidson: Google now offers the option of creating custom search engines, which are google searches of multiple sites which you specify. John Unsworth, Dean and Professor of the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University...
continue reading "A cool use of Google's custom search engine feature" »
Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: The cost of First Click Free October 20, 2008 The web you see when you go through Google's search engine is no longer the web you see when you don't go through Google's search engine....
continue reading "Google changes the Web" »
Chronicle.com: AND GUESS WHAT COMES UP WHEN YOU TYPE 'WIKIPEDIA': Wikipedia is, like, really popular, according to an article in the spring issue of the quarterly journal Education Next. Michael J. Petrilli, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, selected...
continue reading "The unsurprising rise of Wikipedia in Google ranks" »
First Monday: Abstract Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia, has challenged the way that reference works are used and understood, and even the way that the collective enterprise of knowledge construction and circulation is itself conceptualized. The article presents an ethnographic...
continue reading "Wikiversity?" »
UCL press release: Pioneering research shows ‘Google Generation’ is a myth 16 January 2008 * All age groups revealed to share so-called ‘Google Generation' traits * New study argues that libraries will have to adapt to the digital mindset *...
continue reading "Right on!: University of London (the Fightin' Benthams) study shows "no such thing as a Google Generation"" »
From Kieran at Crooked Timber: Google 2001 by Kieran Healy on October 1, 2008 Though it may have seemed impossibly far off in our hazy youth, these days we fondly look back at the turn of the 21st century and...
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Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life : ... This boils down to the corporate ideology that "anything that is good for the Web is good for Google". This means Google is in favor of anything that increases the breadth of the Web...
continue reading "Why Chrome Matters" »
Amy Fry, a San Diego-based librarian, wrote this essay, Information is Power - Even When it’s Wrong for the ARC blog. ... This story contains a powerful lesson about information literacy. One: Proper metadata is important. Metadata experts have been...
continue reading "A great analysis of the Tribune-Google-United Airlines messup" »
Official Google Blog: Today, we're launching an initiative to make more old newspapers accessible and searchable online by partnering with newspaper publishers to digitize millions of pages of news archives. Let's say you want to learn more about the landing...
continue reading "Google's big newspaper project" »
Caleb Tucker-Raymond at ⌘f writes of various librarian reactions to Cuil: ... One theme is, “if you think Cuil is neat, you should try SearchMe”. SearchMe may fill some of the same discovery and serendipity niche that Cuil is vying...
continue reading "More on Cuil and how we might search differently" »
chrisbrogan.com: Nick Saber isn’t happy now. Monday afternoon, after lunch, Nick came back from lunch to find out that he couldn’t get into his Gmail account. Further, he couldn’t get into anything that Google made (beside search) where his account...
continue reading "When Google Owns You" »
WSJ.com: Google to Extend Reach With Venture-Capital Arm Ex-Entrepreneur Hired To Assist in Setup; Brand-Name Advantage By JESSICA E. VASCELLARO July 31, 2008; Page B8 Google Inc. is working on plans to start a venture-capital arm, according to several people...
continue reading "The Googlization of Venture Capital?" »
I spent most of yesterday playing around with Google's newest competitor, . I did a series of searches on Cuil and compared them with Google. The results, when I could get past the server crashes cause by the rush of...
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baltimoresun.com: baltimoresun.com When jurors Google Easy access to news, criminal records and legal jargon raises questions about courtroom integrity By Julie Bykowicz Sun reporter July 27, 2008 Some of the grand jurors investigating allegations of misconduct by Baltimore Mayor Sheila...
continue reading "Should jurors Google? TMI and the justice system" »
Techdirt: Is Google's Proprietary Tech Stack Destroying Its Acquisitions? from the not-invented-at-Google-syndrome dept While Google has bought plenty of small startups, almost none of those deals have amounted to very much. It almost seems like most of the startups disappear...
continue reading "When Google tech is a hinderance" »
Official Google Blog: Knol is open to everyone 7/23/2008 10:31:00 AM A few months ago we announced that we were testing a new product called Knol. Knols are authoritative articles about specific topics, written by people who know about those...
continue reading "Knol is open for business: Worst product name ever?" »
Slashdot | Google Open Sources Its Data Interchange Format: A number of readers have noted Google's open sourcing of their internal data interchange format, called Protocol Buffers (here's the code and the doc). Google elevator statement for Protocol Buffers is...
continue reading "Google's Data Interchange format better than XML?" »
Official Google Blog: Introduction to Google Search Quality 5/20/2008 06:20:00 PM Posted by Udi Manber, VP Engineering, Search Quality Search Quality is the name of the team responsible for the ranking of Google search results. Our job is clear: A...
continue reading "Introduction to Google "search quality"" »
Developer Sergey Solyanik writing at his blog, 1-800-MAGIC: Back to Microsoft Last week I left Google to go back to Microsoft, where I started this Monday (and so not surprisingly, I was too busy to blog about it). I think...
continue reading "Why would anyone quit Google?" »
Check out Microsoft Searches For Meaning In Powerset. I am not so sure this is the answer. Any thoughts?...
continue reading "Can MS capitalize on semantic search?" »
Sebastian Mary is saving me a lot of work here....
continue reading "Another great If:Book summary: Privacy and Net Neutrality" »
WWW 2008: Refereed Papers: Paper Title: PageRank for Product Image Search Authors: * Yushi Jing(Georgia Institute of Technology and Google, Inc.) * Shumeet Baluja(Google Inc.) Abstract: In this paper, we cast the image-ranking problem into the task of identifying "authority"...
continue reading "Better image searches ahead?" »
NEJM: Tectonic Shifts in the Health Information Economy Kenneth D. Mandl, M.D., M.P.H., and Isaac S. Kohane, M.D., Ph.D. In a recent shift in the health information landscape, large corporations are seeking an integral and transformative role in the management...
continue reading "How should we regulate privately held health records?" »
This week I am in the Bay Area. I gave a talk at UC Davis yesterday and will be visiting some interesting people in Silicon Valley the rest of the week. While driving on I-80 and approaching Berkeley, I turned...
continue reading "Interesting interview with Marissa Mayer" »
Leslie Johnston at Digital Eccentric has a couple of helpful links that tell the story....
continue reading "What's happening with the Semantic Web?" »
The March 2008 issue of First Monday (volume 13, number 3) is now available at http://journals.uic.edu/fm/ ------- Table of Contents Volume 13, Number 3 - 3 March 2008 Special issue: Critical Perspectives on Web 2.0 edited by Michael Zimmer Preface:...
continue reading "Essential issue of First Monday now available" »
The Common Datatrust Foundation is an interesting new project devoted to the following: Raise awareness of the privacy challenges we face today. Broker the exchange of data between individuals, institutions, businesses, and government. Advance new solutions for securely storing and...
continue reading "What's Google's REAL mission statement?" »
Hal Varian Answers Your Questions - Freakonomics - Opinion - New York Times Blog: ... Last week, we solicited your questions for Google chief economist Hal Varian. Here are his answers. Thanks to Hal for his generosity and to all...
continue reading "Google's chief economist, Hal Varian, answers questions" »
I have been talking to a few people in the academy how and why they use Google Scholar. Anybody unaffiliated with academia have experience with the service? Does it serve you well? Have you found anything useful? How often to...
continue reading "Question about Google Scholar" »
Google, search, and the economic imperative of comprehensiveness: The topic this week was whether the classic concerns about media concentration around broadcasting and publishing, i.e. the worry that more and more media outlets are owned by fewer and fewer companies,...
continue reading "Tarleton Gillespie on "The economic imperative of comprehensiveness"" »
From GoogleBlogoscoped: Marissa Mayer of Google says: Social search happens every day. When you ask a friend “what movies are good to go see?” or “where should we go to dinner?”, you are doing a verbal social search. You’re trying...
continue reading "What would "social search" look like?" »
I Want Media: David Eun: Google Won't Become a Media Company The head of Google's content partnerships insists that the Internet behemoth won't be a competitor to traditional media. Producing content is "not our business," he says. "Journalists, news bureaus...
continue reading ""That's not what we do."" »
RealClearMarkets: Might Google Buy the New York Times? By John Ellis In the last five years, the New York Times has declined in value by an astonishing 70 percent. There is no indication that things will get better any time...
continue reading "This makes no sense" »
Julia of The Folks' Web writes this smart and helpful response to this blog: ... Vaidhyanathan seems to think that it would have been better if the government would have set up something like this as a public service, rather...
continue reading ""Why I Trust Google"" »
Wired Science from Wired.com: Google to Host Terabytes of Open-Source Science Data By Alexis Madrigal EmailJanuary 18, 2008 | 2:23:21 PMCategories: Dataset, Research Einsteingoogle Sources at Google have disclosed that the humble domain, http://research.google.com, will soon provide a home for...
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From the Times of London: From The Times January 14, 2008 White bread for young minds, says university professor Alexandra Frean, Education Editor Google is “white bread for the mind”, and the internet is producing a generation of students who...
continue reading "UK Professor bans Google from her classes" »
From Digging Digitally: At the last ASOR (American Schools of Oriental Research), Gary L. Christopherson (University of Arizona) gave an interesting talk called "'Google' Archaeology: data and applications for everybody." The talk discussed the huge and under-recognized impact Google is...
continue reading "How is Google affecting scholarship?" »
TechCrunch reports that Wikia Search Is A Complete Letdown. Many of us have waited a year as the Jimmy Wales hype machine promised a human powered search engine that could take on Google. Tonight that search engine launched at alpha.search.wikia.com,...
continue reading "Jimbo Wales' new search service -- Wikia -- debuts today" »
Rich Skrenta, co-founder of news site Topix and the Open Directory Project, writes that PageRank wrecked the web. I am not sure I follow his argument. But it's interesting. Over at Smartmobs, Marius Chitosca writes about Skrenta's new project: a...
continue reading "How bad is Page Rank? Can someone compete with Google on Web Search?" »
if:book: a few rough notes on knols: ... Google's new encyclopedia will go head to head with Wikipedia in the search rankings, though in format it more resembles other ad-supported, single-author info sources like the About.com or Squidoo. The knol-verse...
continue reading "Ben Vershbow of IfBook outlines Knol" »
Michael Madison writes: I’ll go out and a limb and say that as Research Dean at Pitt, I think that Paul Caron’s “Google Rank” list of U.S. law schools is more than a curiosity. Is it too much of a...
continue reading "What do Google ranks tell us about law schools?" »
Google: As Open As It Wants To Be (IE, When It's Convenient): In two weeks, we've had two "open" initiatives from Google: OpenSocial, to free social networking data from behind the Facebook walled garden and the Open Handset Alliance, to...
continue reading "Great analysis of the relative "openness" of Google by Danny Sullivan" »
Teaching Geology, Google-Style - Chronicle.com: Teaching Geology, Google Style Rocks, contrary to popular belief, do move. They just do it slowly, over the course of hundreds of thousands of years. The pace doesn't make for scintillating geology lectures or textbooks....
continue reading "Using Google Earth to teach Geology" »
How Google Works by David Carr is a great nuts-and-bolts guide to how Google was built and how it operates such a stunning amount of data capacity. Check out the section on the file system. Amazing. And this section, about...
continue reading "'How Google Works:" One of the best Google articles I have encountered" »
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All the World's Information
From Harnessing Web 1.0 to Generating Web 3.0
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Like the Mind of God (57 posts)
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A Public Utility? (37 posts)
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