google

New Google search features: real-time updates, cellphone photos as search query

Google introduced a number of new features today, most notably real-time updates and searching by an uploaded photo. Real-time updates means that Twitter and Facebook statuses will immediately feed to Google search.

Google Public DNS service

Please correct me if I am wrong, but I am starting to feel very concerned about Google's new Public DNS service. It seems that Google is trying to build its own Library of Babel collecting as much information as it can in order to improve its knowledge of web usage. I haven't read their privacy policy, but this opens new possibilities for targeted advertising.

Google Voice Speech to Text Transcription of Voicemail (with examples!)

As some of you are probably aware, the Google Voice service will automatically transcribe your voicemail using Google's speech recognition technology - it was mentioned in one of Emily's blog posts.

Through the Google goggles (reloaded)

Google realizes that its search algorithm is far from perfect. It seems that even the "politically incorrect" opinions could be able to show up in the first places out of Google control. If you search for words such as "jew" or "obama" you may find disturbing results and images.

Google gets a break with lucky.

I apparently got cookied for a Google experiment that removes the long-running "I'm feeling lucky" button. Interestingly, it also defaults to removing nearly all elements from the page - the only remaining items are the Google logo, a search box, and the words "Press Enter to Search." A mouse-over brings back some links, minus the "I'm feeling lucky" option. See the pictures for details.

Google "Wonder Wheel" Visualizes Search Results

Apparently this launched back in May, but I just noticed it when playing around with Google for this week's discussion.

The "wonder-wheel" takes the input query as the center of the wheel and produces a set of expansions and related terms as petals. Clicking on a related term moves out from the origin node and shows a new set of expansions - the original node shrinks in size and gets fainter. You can repeat this multiple times to branch out over a conceptual space. Search results show on the left (where the ads normally are). Here's a sample search for flower:

Google does not use the keywords meta tag in search rankings

It's now official, though many in the SEO industry have known for years -- Google's search algorithms don't take into account the meta tag in its web rankings. Google says that the main reason is because people were abusing the tag.  Not a big surprise for people in the SEO industry, but Google says that they they of couse *may* use them in years to come for something--though probably not.

Google Sidewiki: a step towards a semantic web?

I've just learned about Google's Sidewiki initiative. It's supossed to help people to add information next to any webpage and display other's entries.

Is Google making us stupid... or augmenting human intelligence?

In our first class, Professor Glushko mentioned Nick Carr's 2008 July/August article in The Atlantic, Is Google Making Us Stupid? For the sake of brevity, Carr's argument was that, thanks to nearly ubiquitous connectivity through WiFi, mobile networks, and our devices, we no longer have to retain and recall information, we can just tap our physical or on-screen keyboards and call up whatever we need to know.

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