The Blog of Record

Compare this:

and this:

Well, Google’s motto is “Don’t be evil”, not “Don’t be a coward”.

(From here and here.)

A long article about the new twist the Internet brings into the old question of whether schoolchildren will be better off learning some general facts about history, geography, etc., or just how to use the means of finding out information when they need it.

A former winner of the BBC quiz show “Mastermind” recently took part in a pub quiz which came down to a tiebreaker between his team and a group of young people who were relying on BlackBerrys. Anyone familiar with quizzes these days knows that this can happen, whether it is under the table or outside in the smokers’ zone; the combination of wireless internet access and Google searching is simply too powerful for some to resist and for others to prevent. In this case, happily, virtue triumphed and the team led by the Mastermind champion won. Then afterwards a young woman from the losing side came over and asked in baffled tones: “How did you get that?” So attuned was she to the idea that answering quiz questions was a task to be outsourced to the internet that she seemed not to understand the idea of general knowledge that was kept in the head.

Is this where we are heading? A Google search, once you have keyed the words in, takes a broadband user less than a second, and the process will only get quicker. As for those laborious keystrokes, voice-recognition technology will enable us to bypass them. And soon pretty well everybody, from schoolchildren to drinkers in pubs, will be online pretty well all of the time. In that context, perhaps there is no longer any point in keeping facts in our heads. If you want to know who wrote “Skellig”, or whether Norway is a member of the European Union, or what Cary Grant’s real name was, you ask your laptop or your phone.

I teach undergraduates, and I am prepared to bet that many other teachers have found themselves wondering whether they are seeing this force at work.

When you know how to use Google, you know everything. Right?

When Microsoft was founded, its mindset was “Don’t be evil like IBM”. Google’s well-known motto is “Don’t be evil [like Microsoft]“. The way things are going, one day we’ll see an agile, hip startup whose founding mindset will be “Don’t be evil like Google”.

(Illustration by Federico Fieni.)

Update: Google has noticed Anil Dash’s article and seems to be taking the criticism well.

Might come in handy if you use Google’s various services – or even just the search.

Even if not, Google is definitely planning to become the place where everyone will go to do anything and everything that can possibly be done online. Plus, I learned a new word: usership.

More from the same blog: A world without Google (part two here). Not a pretty picture.

Good luck, guys:

[British government] officials will train pro-West Islamic groups to manipulate their Google search ranking in an attempt to drown out extremist voices online, The Register has learned.

Google would probably be more likely to let it slide if anti-West groups were trying to game it.

That is, of course, if what they are planning to do is, indeed, gaming – but this would require the UK Home Office’s Office for Security and Counter-Terrorism to be complete fools, which is unlikely.

Rupert Murdoch says they are.

While the Internet is not the only reason why the news industry is dying, Murdoch still has a point: the search-engine news aggregators do profit from other people’s work without paying them a penny. They do send traffic their way, though.

Update-1: Is everything Google’s fault now?

Update-2: The Associated Press wants news aggregators to pay up, or it sues. If you see the name AP in a news article, you can be sure the words “legal action” are somewhere in the same sentence.

And switched it on.

They were so excited about it that they couldn’t wait one extra second, it seems.

If you use Google’s Gmail email service, you can now enable an option that lets you undo sending a message within five seconds of hitting the Send button if you suddenly realize you sent it to the wrong address, etc. You can then fix the mistake and send the message.

So that terrorists can’t use it to plan their attacks.

Because what else can this be on the ocean floor?

Here is the Google Maps link.

The upgraded Google Earth software adds features to explore ocean floor, see historical images of an area, or even visit Mars. The video below is Google’s official demo, and here is a review from Ars Technica.

“Do no evil, but if you must do evil, then have the “delete evil” button close to hand.”

It’s real.

It took four years for Google to address the “miserable failure” Bush Google bomb, but only a few days to defuse a similar attack on President Obama.

Drops to fourth place. That’s what happens when you cancel your annual ski outing. NetApp’s employees do enjoy some nice perks, though:

Worker benefits reportedly include paid days for volunteer work, cash to supplement adopting children and medical coverage for family members with autism.

Is Wikipedia’s remarkable success in Google search rankings evidence of a fundamental failure of the Web as an information-delivery service?

Three things have happened, in a blink of history’s eye: (1) a single medium, the Web, has come to dominate the storage and supply of information, (2) a single search engine, Google, has come to dominate the navigation of that medium, and (3) a single information source, Wikipedia, has come to dominate the results served up by that search engine. Even if you adore the Web, Google, and Wikipedia – and I admit there’s much to adore – you have to wonder if the transformation of the Net from a radically heterogeneous information source to a radically homogeneous one is a good thing. Is culture best served by an information triumvirate?

But of course Encyclopedia Britannica would say that, right?

The 68-page brief supports the cases currently challenging Proposition 8 in the California Supreme Court.

I take it to mean that Google is OK with gay activists using Google Maps to intimidate their (and Google’s) political opponents.

Interesting how Google’s general counsel’s post presents it as something they are doing solely to defend basic and fundamental rights of their employees. I don’t remember Google mention anything about any rights when it happily obliged to censor China’s Internet at Beijing’s first request. I wonder if things like business and profits didn’t have something to do with it.

More here and here.

Eugene Volokh found an interesting website:

 Proposition 8 Donor Maps, for San Francisco, Salt Lake City, and Orange County, are now posted at EightMaps.com. Proposition 8, of course, was the proposition that amended the California Constitution to bar legal recognition of same-sex marriage. The map is built — presumably automatically — from the data reported by the California Secretary of State’s office. (The site I linked to contains the committee id’s, but if you click on the committee name, you’ll see the individual contributors.) Many of the listed contributions are $50 or below. I suspect this sort of technology may well make people much more reluctant to donate money to (or against) controversial propositions — and may lead people to rethink whether the government should indeed mandate disclosure of such contributions, especially small contributions.