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 A US publishing
organisation has accused Google of breaching copyright
rules through a plan to put university libraries online.
The organisation, representing American publishers
of academic journals and scholarly books, claims the
project has financially troubling consequences.
It believes it could undermine sales of works
publishers own the rights to and it has written to
Google to say so.
More...
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The PageRank on Google
Toolbar is not working, again.
And in AdWords,
the traffic estimator is working less than half the
time.
There will be no official comment.
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For a few days all
sites had a grey bar. It is now working again. No
comment from Google (they never admit to mistakes -
ever).
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For G-Mail users -
don't use Bloglines to check your G-Mail RSS feeds -
once you add it to your list of feeds to check it
becomes checkable not only by you but potentially by
anyone. Once someone discovers your RSS feed on
Bloglines they have access to every email you get via
G-Mail (or at least the first line of it). This could be
VERY damaging to you - depending upon the type of email
that you get.
More...
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At Google it
says:
"Thank you for your interest in Google Web
Accelerator. We have currently reached our
maximum
capacity of users and are actively working to increase
the number of users we can support."
This could
be related to a newly discovered bug
where people could see web pages under other users'
logins.
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Google
Hacked?
Posted
by: NewsProwler on Sunday, May 08, 2005 - 11:23 PM
GST | |
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Google
Says:
The site was down from 3:45 to 4 p.m.
PST, Google spokesman David Krane told The Associated
Press.
"It was not a hacking or a security
issue," Krane. He said the problem was related to the
DNS (Domain Name System), which routes one's Internet
protocol address to the appropriate Web site that the
user wants to visit. If the DNS system goes down, Web
pages requested usually do not appear or take a long
time to load.
"Google's global properties were
unavailable for a short period of time," Krane said.
"We've remedied the problem and access to Google has
been restored worldwide."
Om Malik
Says:
Google was not hacked, but instead had
a DNS problem. For some readers the site was redirecting
to the SoGoSearch page. That continues to fox me, and I
plan to investigate further. All services have been
restored. I find it amazing: Google is now as integrated
in our lives as a phone company, or heaven forbid, TV
networks. Multiple experts say that the screen grab I
got was result of broswers not being able to resolve to
Google.com, and instead stumbled upon google.com.net
(com.net is the SoGoSearch website, and they have a
wildcard match). Once Google’s DNS was restored,
browsers stopped the appending, and started functioning
normally.
Screenshots here.
Rob
says:
SoGoSearch are very clever people if they
have worked out a way of getting bulk re-directs
whenever a DNS outage occurs.
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Here are some that SearchEngineWatch
have dug
up:
Google-Hates-Me.com
GoogleSucks.biz
Anti-Google.net
MyGoogleLawsuit
darth-google
F*Google
Googlebut.com
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There are a number of
sites out there that prey on those of us that sometimes
mistype Google's URL. For example if you enter
Googkle.com you might get some spyware installed, and if
you give Google some extra Os, Goooogle.com you will see
pop-up advertising for an online casino.
Google
has clamped down on hundreds of such sites, and let's
hope they keep up the good fight.
More...
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Yahoo!'s free email
subscribers will get a bigger inbox from late April with
storage limits increasing from 250MB to 1GB - the same
amount as Google's Gmail subscribers get. The move will
take about two weeks to roll out to all
users.
Guess who I predict will be the first to
offer 2GB?... Google!
Guess when I think they
will do it? Someone is waiting with their finger on the
PR button, and it will happen when Google wants to
dominate the news, to either drown out a competitor's
news, or to drown out a Google embarassment
More...
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We are quite aware of
how much Google loves tagging new services for Beta, and
leaving them that way, sometimes for years. But this
takes the cake:
Electronic Funds Transfer
(BETA)
https://www.google.com/support/adsense/bin/answer.py?answer=15918
Rather
than using a reliable third-party, it seems they prefer
to use a beta version of what I presume is in-house
software.
I wonder how many AdSense publishers
will choose to be guinea-pigs?
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"Beginning Thursday,
February 3, 2005, apparently several keywords across
multiple search topics have been attacked. Such search
terms as “web hosting,” “irs,” “mortgage” and even
“ebay” have resulted in significantly fewer AdWords
contextual placements appearing in search
results.
ClickRisk, a click fraud consulting
service, issued a Google AdWords advisory on February
2nd that botnets are able to “shut down or seriously
impair a Google Adwords advertising campaign by
artificially inflating the number of times an ad is
displayed.” This in turn would cause AdWords to
automatically disable the targeted keywords essentially
shutting down the campaign for those words.
"
Basically, a piece of web software repeatedly
searches for a keyword, and AdWords will turn off ads
that are being displayed hundreds of times but are not
clicked on.
When all the rivals ads are disabled,
the fiends turn off the software and run their ad - they
get #1 position for 5 cents!
More...
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As reported at Google
Blogoscoped (via me):
Google’s Wildcard
operator (the Asterisk “*” character) is showing some
strange results as of lately. Before, when you would
enter e.g. “god * america”, the result snippets would
contain “god bless america” and similar in bold. Now,
the wildcard is simply ignored and you get results like
“God, America and classic cars” or “Bless God
America”.
However, the omission of the wildcard
doesn’t always happen. Try enter “we’re the * in
america” into Google.com, and the wildcard will be
replaced by a bold “kids”. To see the glitch again,
enter “we’re the * in *”, and the snippets will contain
“We’re the In group” and similar, ignoring your
wildcard.
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Earn
Rupees!
Posted
by: NewsProwler on Friday, March 04, 2005 - 09:23
PM GST | |
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Mid-last year Times of
India reported
that:
----
With her baby on her lap, Maya
Sharma (name changed) gets down to work every evening
from her eighth-floor flat at Vasant Vihar. Maya's job
is to click on online advertisements. She doesn't care
about the ads, but diligently keeps count — it's $0.18
to $0.25 per click.
A growing number of
housewives, college graduates, and even working
professionals across metropolitan cities are rushing to
click paid Internet ads to make $100 to $200 (up to Rs
9,000) per month.
Why, type in 'earn rupees
clicking ads' in Google — you get 25,000
results
-----
If you search for that today,
there are only 904 results, but the problem remains. If
you have a website that carries AdSense ads... and if
you earn some cents if someone clicks on those ads...
then if you can find someone to click on them very
cheaply (ie from India), then you can make an income at
the expense of AdWords advertisers.
More....
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An excellent look at
Google and their decision to include "AutoLink" in their
toolbar is at The
Register.
Snippet:
"Now, there are a
few things critics of AutoLink have ignored. For
instance, it's not enabled by default. A user has to
push the AutoLink button every single time they want to
enable its use on a page. Further, current links are not
overwritten; only unlinked text is affected. Even so,
I'm really torn about AutoLink."
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SearchEngineWatch
says:
Yesterday, I could go over to Barnes &
Noble, find a page with an ISBN number and use the
AutoLink tool in the Google Toolbar to turn the numbers
into links that lead to Amazon. Today, all those ISBN
numbers are already links.
What happened? My
guess is that Barnes & Noble got wise to the fact
that AutoLink won't impact any ISBN numbers that are
already links -- so they made every ISBN a link leading
back to within their own site.
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When Microsoft
indicated they wanted to do this, there was widespread
condemnation. Now Google are doing the same thing -
embedding links into web pages, links that the author of
the web page did not intend to be there...
The
creator of this feature (you'll need the latest Toolbar
version) is the same
guy behind Microsoft's SmartTags.
I think
Google should stick to indexing information, rather than
altering it.
More..
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Mark Jen was fired for
blogging, the ex-Googler confirmed in a Web posting on
Thursday.
He wrote:
on
january 28th, 2005, i was terminated from google. either
directly or indirectly, my blog was the reason. this
came as a great shock to me because two days ago we had
looked at my blog and removed all inappropriate content
- the comments on financial performance and future
products. for my next entries, i was very cognizant of
my blogging content, making sure to stay away from these
topics. i mean, as much as i like to be open and honest
about communicating to users and customers, i'm not
insubordinate. if i was told to shut down this blog, i
would have.
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Now that he has
installed Google AdSense ads, all the curious traffic he
is receiving at his blog, (subtitled
Life at Google from The Inside!) will help Mark Jen
receive a psuedo-dismissal-compensation...
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You might have too
read through his candid blog (that
includes details of his work) to see what he said that
upset Google, but Google employee Mark Jen appears to
have been fired.
I know from my own experience
that Google do not give employees a second chance. If
they believe you have done something to disrespect
Google, or harm its image, in even the most trivial way
that perhaps the public never noticed... you are
out.
More at Slashdot
and MarketWatch
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Orkut communities have
been created around a shared interest in photography,
Miles Davis's music and travel to offbeat places. A
small minority, however, advance a hatred for Jews,
blacks or gays, including a "Death to the Jews" site and
a site called "Death to Blacks."
The
hatemongering is rapidly becoming an embarrassment for
Google, the world's most popular search engine,
particularly because the company has adopted "don't be
evil" as its motto.
For Google, the trouble on
Orkut - which is still in beta - could easily escalate.
A prosecutor in Brazil, where the service is especially
popular, has already initiated an investigation into
some of the more virulent Orkut sites.
For the
moment, Google is not saying much about the
issue.
More...
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Apple Computer, riding
renewed name recognition from its iPod music player, has
moved into first place in a poll of branding
professionals.
1. Apple
2. Google
3.
Ikea
4. Starbucks
5. Al Jazerra.
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Following on from last
month's security worries over Google Desktop Search,
this week sees a curious flaw surface in Gmail, Google's
must-have email system. Why worry? It's not a big
problem: small amounts of other people's email surfaces
at random if you type just the wrong thing. It's fixed
now. And anyway, both products are in beta. You knew the
risks when you signed up.
Google is taking the
art of the public beta to new levels. Its popular Google
News service was launched in beta form over two years
ago: it's still there. Even Microsoft at its most
paranoid has never left a release candidate of a product
out in limbo for that long -- perhaps the Googleplex
could do with some dull old project managers to leaven
the visionaries.
More...
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By embedding
JavaScript in a URL pointing to Froogle, a hacker can
gain access to the user’s Gmail account. The JavaScript
redirects the browser to a malicious web site, where the
hacker can read the user’s cookie, which contains
personal information, such as purchase history, user
name and password for Google services.
More...
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"an improperly
formatted address allowed Gmail users to retrieve the
message body of the last HTML-formatted email processed
by the server"
Google acknowledged the problem on
Wednesday and said it had been fixed. It is unclear how
long the glitch lasted.
More...
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Internet searches that
wrongly implied that Kraft Foods Inc. was a sponsor of a
white supremacist Web site raised alarms recently about
the potential perils of a popular form of online
advertising.
The operators of whiterevolution.com
included a free search-engine feature from Google Inc.
on their Web site that late last year generated results
making it appear Kraft was an advertising
sponsor.
Kraft executives were alarmed when they
were alerted last month by a Connecticut newspaper
reporter who had discovered the problem. The Northfield,
Ill., food giant wants to be known for peddling its
cookies and macaroni and cheese, not
hate.
Technicians for Google, the California
Internet search engine and advertising company, quickly
disabled the use of their technology on the
whiterevolution.com site after Kraft raised objections,
said Donna Sitkiewicz, a spokeswoman in Kraft’s Illinois
headquarters.
Full
Story
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"Google now faces
choices as fundamental as those Netscape faced in 1995.
Google... needn’t perish as Netscape did, but it could.
Despite everything Google has—the swelling revenues, the
cash from its initial public offering, the 300 million
users, the brand recognition, the superbly elegant
engineering—its position is in fact quite fragile.
Google’s site is still the best Web search service...
yet, nothing prevents the world from switching
(painlessly, instantly) to Microsoft search services and
software, particularly if they are integrated with the
Microsoft products that people already use.
Much
more
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At least one online
commentator believes that the Google Library isn't all
it's cracked up to be:
Just imagine that book
digitized and available for Googling. Google isn't
saying exactly how such a search would work. But, if
it's anything like the current system, you might enter,
say, "Nantes+prisons" and get back hundreds of thousands
of "hits." Somewhere in those hundreds of thousands
would be a reference to a paragraph or more in our book.
If you found it, what would you do with it? Suppose it
says "... there were few murderers in the prisons of
Nantes in 1874 ... " and gives you the source of the
paragraph. That is all but useless. Absent a lot more
searching, you have no idea whether there are other
references to the subject in the book, and the
"information" you have found is almost meaningless out
of context.
More...
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The problem resides in
the way that Google Desktop intercepts outgoing network
connections from the user's computer. When Google
Desktop registers that a search has been carried out on
Google's internet engine, it inserts relevant results
for a PC search in with website listings - although no
information about the contents of the PC hard drive
search is carried over the web. However, the researchers
say it is possible to trick the Google desktop search
program into inserting those results into other web
pages where an attacker could read them.
To carry
out such an attack, a user would first need to visit a
website crafted by an attacker, where malicious code
could be upload to allow for the attack to take
place.
Google has corrected the problem in the
current version of the software, which is available for
free over the web and will update itself automatically
in PCs where it has already been installed. Google also
claims that there have been no reported exploits of the
flaw.
More...
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It's not as if Google
are communists during the cold war! It appears that they
simply tried to keep a data center secret for very
obvious security reasons... and that location has been
revealed in the media:
"Almost without notice,
the Internet search company has tiptoed about 100
employees and a significant investment into a windowless
building in a Douglas County industrial park near Six
Flags Over Georgia.
There's no sign on the
building, no logo on the locked glass door, nothing to
indicate that an Internet icon has come to town.
A note taped to the door points visitors to a
buzzer, which prompts a polite, but firm, female voice
to shoo you away. The voice can't --- or won't ---
confirm you've found Google, or even if you're in the
right place.
It's all very mysterious.
"
Full
Story
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The story
reads:
Canadian authorities have arrested US
President and charged him with offences under Canada's
War Crimes Act...
A photo of it on Google News is
here
More
here
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The beta version of
MSN's search tool has sparked controversy less than a
week after its launch when sharp-eyed users noticed that
a search for 'more evil than Satan' brings back Google's
homepage as the top match.
More...
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State-sponsored
internet providers in China routinely block access to
internet sites deemed inappropriate by the government.
These include both Chinese and foreign news sites
carrying reports that criticise the Chinese
government.
Researchers at Dynamic Internet
Technology (DIT), a US company that provides technology
for circumventing internet restrictions in China, have
discovered that the recently-launched Chinese version of
Google News omits blocked news sources from its results.
Some users recently reported that Google's
Chinese news search returned different results depending
when they searched using a computer based outside of
China. The claims were substantiated by researchers who
connected to computers inside the country.
More...
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"Last year Google
started the "Google Azerbaijan Project", Google was
translated into Azerbaijani and www.google.az was used
for all local Azerbaijani users.
Starting this
morning, google.az does not respond. A query of
WhoIs.net shows that the domain doesn't exist.
"
More...
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GMail
privacy
Posted
by: NewsProwler on Sunday, April 04, 2004 - 05:40
PM GST | |
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Lots of privacy
advocates are complaining that Google software will look
at the content of emails, so as to deliver relevant text
ads.
Well, if you don't like that idea, don't use
the service. It's that simple.
The Guradian has a
good
summary of the situation
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The main reason that
Google will continue to flourish and improve is that
little text ads that they sell. No ads, no more
Google.
Unfortunately a company has designed a
toolbar that will block automated sponsored advertising
on sites and search results.
550 Access
Toolbar 3.0
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It's not hard to slip
one in - usually Google takes longer than a day to
review any new AdWords ads.
"a user of the
Manxnet forum told other members she'd used popular
search engine Google to search for children's stories
and the site turned up a sponsored link to a site
dedicated to violent incest.
The user e-mailed a
complaint to Google and the link was removed."
More...
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The
Register is saying:
"Can you trust Google's
Friendster clone Orkut? The search engine behemoth
certainly has ambitious plans for your innocent musings.
And be careful about any business ideas you express
there.
The privacy policy, which fades
beautifully into view, looks innocent enough. But
Orkut's terms of service harbor a nasty
payload"
Well, I don't care about the legalese
any website uses, all I care about is whether I trust
them or not. Microsoft no, Google yes.
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Google has an office
in Dublin, and now they are charging UK AdWords
customers from there instead of the USA. Which means
that UK customers must now pay 19% VAT (value-added tax)
on top of their usual charges.
Hopefully Google
will be cool and also send AdSense payments to UK
webmasters in pounds, to save them paying high bank fees
to deposit the current checks that arrive in American
dollars.
More...
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I read an article at
The Enquirer, and it is bizzarely true...
A
search for the two words Linux Windows at Google gets
15.7 million results - even as a phrase it gets
950,000...
A MSN search for the same two words
gets just 18.
What the?
There is no way that this is a random
glitch! Try it at Hotbot and each engine returns
millions of results! Microsoft are tinkering with
results, and this is clearly unethical and indicative of
crook future.
Boycott any attempt by Microsoft to
enter the search engine game. More at The
Enquirer
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Someone is complaining
that:
"The Desert Light Journal been refused
listing at Google News due to the nature of my content
delivery system. This is totally wrong -- many other
news outlets use blogs to deliver content, and this
should not be a consideration when deciding the viablity
of a publication."
More at Always
On
I agree with Google on this one. News
sites don't link to news, they are the news. The
complainants site is here
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Googleholes
Posted by: Anonymous on Wednesday,
July 16, 2003 - 07:48 PM
GST | |
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Of course Google's not
perfect - the day computers achieve perfection is the
day James Cameron's Terminator dreams become
real.
Specific problems
outlined at Slate:
1. Shops dominate results
when you search for a product. If we want to get a cheap
price, we can use Froogle or DealTime. What we want to
read is reviews, and they get buried in the
results.
2. Skewed Synonyms. They mention that a
search for "apple" turns up a lot about computers and
little about the fruit. This highlights two features
that are strangely missing from Google, that their
rivals have... The ability to specify capitalization,
and the results broken down into suggested categories or
themes.
3. PDF files containing scholarly
research appearing in the results. Not a problem for me
:)
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Wonderful! Amazing!
Extraordinary! But not 100% perfect, because the Google
search engine has some inconsistencies:
"Since at
least May 27, 2003, certain field searches on Google
have stopped working. The inurl: and intitle: field
searches are not working properly, even though the
allinurl: and allintitle: do work. "
Greg Notess
lists
the others, but they're not too bad, really.
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"Britain's biggest ISP
Freeserve is to drop using Google as its search
provider. Instead it is to announce a deal with Overture
to use the listings from FAST - the search engine
Overture bought for $70 million back in
February."
More
at PC Pro
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Someone more attentive
than me points out in this Traffick
article that the Yahoo figures (which pipped Google
for US only searchers) included visitors using Yahoo
Finance and Yahoo Yellow Pages, whch aren't really
search engines.
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We all know that
Google doesn't have a single unethical bone in its body,
but people out in cyberspace love to challenge Google.
The un-named writer asks 10 questions like this
one:
3) How much are news sources from non
Western countries covered?
More at Robin
good
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A Chinese group is
trying to out-Google Google before Google launches a
site there.
"China Search Alliance, a combination
of more than 200 Internet portals, accelerated its
expansion to meet the upcoming challenge from the global
search giant Google.com, which is expected to officially
launch its service in China this year. The Alliance will
sign a strategic partnership agreement with
NASDAQ-listed SINA, the most popular Internet portal in
China, on search collaboration, while talks with another
leading domestic portal is also on-going..."
More
at Interfax
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