Tag: google
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GoogleNet flickers into life
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Andrew Orlowski
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Five months after announcing its first Google-branded hot spots, covering San Francisco’s Union Square and main public library, Google is enhancing the service. The ad giant briefly made a beta of a proxy server, Google Secure Access, available for limited download today before withdrawing the link.
The proxy is intended to protect 802.11 wireless users at Google hot spots from casual packet sniffing. But it also gives the ad broker the advantage of knowing what you’re looking at, and exactly … Read More
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A Million Nation States of One fears Google Balkanization
by
Andrew Orlowski
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Some stories just take forever to come true. 30 months ago, we revealed Google was going to introduce a weblog search engine – and this week, it finally did. The story, so obvious in retrospect, barely merits the term ‘scoop’. But now, as then, it has been eclipsed by a raging debate about the implications for bloggers and for the web in general.
A great many people see this as the perfect opportunity to improve Google search – and … Read More
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Google hires ‘Astro’ Cerf
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Andrew Orlowski
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Vint Cerf, co-author of the TCP/IP protocol, has become Google’s latest trophy hire. The ad broker must be hoping that Cerf, hired for the PR position of “chief evangelist”, can add some gravitas to the operation after weeks of bad publicity. A poorly judged flounce saw Google vow to shun CNet’s reporters for a year, and the move snowballed into a series of articles unfavorably comparing Google to Microsoft. Silly they may be, but last week Google even found … Read More
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Pimplier Batgirls and Sawdusty Barmen
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Andrew Orlowski
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Whacking Google’s wordlist woes
Earlier this week the NCSA released a study that attempted to compare the respective merits of Google and Yahoo!’s search engines. (See My spam-filled search index is bigger than yours!). Unfortunately, the only thing it proved was which search engine was publishing the most gibberish it had collected – a fact apparently lost on the researchers. The three academics insisted that because Google was returning more gibberish, it must be doing a better job.
Doh!… Read More
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My spam-filled search index is bigger than yours!
by
Andrew Orlowski
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Last week Yahoo! claimed it had sailed past Google by indexing 20 billion web pages.
Because as much as a third of the wild wild web consists of artificially-generated pages of spam designed to promote commercial web sites, this isn’t much to boast about. Many of the fake pages are ‘splogs’, or spam blogs, or phoney catalogs, or simply pages of dictionary words. You can meet one of the perps here, in our story Interview with a link spammer.… Read More
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Google snubs press in privacy fury
by
Andrew Orlowski
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Google has thrown a hissy fit and blacklisted tech news site CNET’s News.com – vowing not to provide quotes or statements to the site for a year.
“Google representatives have instituted a policy of not talking with CNET News.com reporters until July 2006 in response to privacy issues raised by a previous story,” noted reporter Elinor Mills here.
The previous story, by the same reporter and published on July 14, drew on information largely gleaned from Google itself … Read More