To celebrate their 10th birthday Google have brought back their oldest available index dating back to 2001.
posted on Sep 30, 2008 - View this thread

Things [blank] people like. New search engine RushmoreDrive is a first step into the waters of Identity Based searching. Specifically, it weighs your demographic heavily when ordering your search results.
posted on Aug 19, 2008 - View this thread

Google Search Engine Ranking Factors v2 "represents the collective wisdom of 37 leaders in the world of organic search engine optimization. Together, they have voted on the various factors that are estimated to comprise Google's ranking algorithm." The highest ranked factor is Keyword Use in Title Tag.
posted on Aug 18, 2008 - View this thread

Cuil is a new search engine developed by former Google employees, and claims to index 3x more pages than Google. CNN Money story has the basics. My attempts were met with timeouts.
posted on Jul 28, 2008 - View this thread

Future Reading. Anthony Grafton explores what we can learn about the future of the text from the history of libraries, publishers, and the sorting of books.
posted on Nov 1, 2007 - View this thread

If Google was designed for Google.
posted on Oct 16, 2007 - View this thread

Google launches a site dedicated to the upcoming Australian Federal Election with Youtube channels from each party, electoral boundaries integrated into Google Maps, a search engine to allow you to view what each candidate has said on a range of issues, from immigration to interest rates, news from your electorate, and graphs of media activity on candidates and issues. Australians have been lacking a comprehensive political resource like the UK's The Work For You, and Google has brought it one step closer. Unfortunately, many of the resources are in the form of gadgets you add to your iGoogle homepage, rather than standalone applications.
posted on Sep 16, 2007 - View this thread

Add keyboard shortcuts to Google results pages. One of several new experimental search styles provided by Google Labs.
posted on Jun 6, 2007 - View this thread

"Web History helps deliver more personalized search results based on what you've searched for on Google and which sites you've visited." Google unveils Web History, a new feature to help you "view and manage your web activity." You can also get an idea of what sites you visit frequently, broken down by time of day, and search across the full text of pages you've visited. "If you remember seeing something online, you'll be able to find it faster and from any computer with Web History. " What could possibly go wrong?
posted on Apr 25, 2007 - View this thread

Google Patent Search can be a gold mine for a historical trivia. See the design for bucket seats patented by Steve McQueen, the secret communication system co-created by Hedy Lamarr that paved the way for the frequency hopping used by modern cell phones, the disposable infant garment made by Jamie Lee Curtis, the interactive music generation system made by Thomas Dolby of "She Blinded Me With Science" fame, and other unusual celebrity patents made by inventors that range from Abraham Lincoln to Zeppo Marx.
posted on Apr 7, 2007 - View this thread

The Best Hiding Place is Right Out in the Open?
Yes, its a simple Google search. But it returns confidential pdf's and pages from all over the internet. Business plans, powerpoint presentations and other naughty bits exposed to, well, anyone who finds it.
Oops.
posted on Sep 6, 2006 - View this thread

A9 gets MS? Amazon's search tool / portal, formerly powered by Google, is now using Microsoft's Windows Live search service. I first noticed when my image results went missing (which sucks, but I still use it for the incentive program). Does this mean MS is shifting out of the half-assery phase of its search strategy? What happens when its adCenter keyword program opens up? [commentary]
posted on May 14, 2006 - View this thread

Google must know exactly what you're you're looking for, right? Unfortunately, they limit the results of your query to 1000. If you're doing research on crack whores, you'll get 2,800,000 results. If the page you want is at 14,673, you're out of luck. But there's still hope for finding what you need in this vast, uncharted web.
posted on Mar 24, 2006 - View this thread

Is Google the new Netscape? With GOOG having taken a tumble Wednesday and falling more than $12 so far today, it's not unreasonable to ask... also why is Gmail still in beta when I've been using it for over a year now?
posted on Feb 3, 2006 - View this thread

Google Zeitgeist 2005
World Affairs Nature Movies Celebrities Phenomena
posted on Dec 20, 2005 - View this thread

It's long been known that if you type "failure" into Google and hit "I'm feeling lucky", you get this page. Haha. Funny. The phenomenon is explained here. Now, Microsoft's live.com went public recently. Guess what page it returns as the number 1 result for "failure"?
posted on Nov 2, 2005 - View this thread

Even though I've been using Google as a start page for the past five years, this exhaustive list of Google search tips still had loads of stuff I didn't know about.
posted on Sep 29, 2005 - View this thread

Google Blog Search -- in beta, of course. Works by crawling blogs' RSS feeds. Should Technorati be nervous?
posted on Sep 14, 2005 - View this thread

Google Live Search
A Greasemonkey Script that enables you to watch your google results come in live, as you type the search terms. Mesmerizing, time-wasting, and possibly useful.
Greasemonkey and Firefox required.
posted on Aug 22, 2005 - View this thread

Google blacklists CNET reporters? An article about privacy issues that highlighted the potential for abuse if logs of search terms linked with IP addresses are combined by search companies with address and phone data, angered Google CEO Eric Schmidt enough to blacklist CNET reporters for a year, at least according to the bottom of this CNET story. The article begins with information about Schmidt found via Google searches, and goes on to "question Google's ability to adequately balance the heavy burden of safeguarding consumer privacy rights with the pull toward intermingling and mining data for ever more lucrative targeted advertising."
posted on Aug 7, 2005 - View this thread

Google demos their SMS capability . Personally, I have used Google via Wap/GPRS on my mobile for years. Now, quick definitions, telephone numbers, and calculations are available via SMS, too. Great for geeks on the move - but will Joe Q Bloggs catch on?
posted on Jul 11, 2005 - View this thread

Yahoo gets social. Yahoo's new search is designed around your contact list. Save a few bookmarks with some notes and the next time anyone within two degrees of you searches on that topic, they'll see your bookmarks above random search results. Oh, and it's got tags too. Will this kill search engine gaming? What's Google going to do to compete, buy delicious and incorporate that?
posted on Jun 28, 2005 - View this thread

Google is watching you.... "My Search History lets you easily view and manage your search history from any computer." Given the continuing concerns about Google's respect for privacy, is this a good thing?
posted on Apr 21, 2005 - View this thread

So Google is now accepting video submissions to their Google Video search. But according to this blogger, Google's terms of service (which you have to create an account to view) are excessive. And I think he might be right.
posted on Apr 14, 2005 - View this thread

It's not Yahoo, it's not Google... it's Yagoohoogle! Quickly prove or disprove your favorite search engine conspiracy theories!
posted on Apr 6, 2005 - View this thread

Customized Google News , launched today, requires no registration, unlike Yahoo News or MSNBC News or even clean-format My Way News. A revolution in customization without commitment, based on Google's largely no-registration strategy. One giant leap in Google commoditization. I'd link you to the Google Blog entry, but although it reached my RSS reader it disappeared from the blog.
posted on Mar 10, 2005 - View this thread

Pupna is "the search engine puppy that retrieves EXACTLY what you are searching for (and absolutely nothing else!)" ;-)

This is a simple yet rather humorous search engine parody - are there any other good ones out there?
posted on Feb 28, 2005 - View this thread

whoa again. Amazon introduced "Search inside the book" a while ago, but now the searchmasters are doing it.
posted on Feb 14, 2005 - View this thread

Google video search. Search transcripts of recent television shows. Catch up on your Judge Judy.
posted on Jan 24, 2005 - View this thread

filetype:doc For those of you who don't know, Google allows you to limit your searches to files of a certain type. It reminds me of the world wide web of '93 in a lot of ways, before the web become so commercialized and vapid. Little bits of randomness.
posted on Jan 19, 2005 - View this thread

Find 753 unsecured webcams in 0.09 seconds. Forum posters use this Google search to find cameras, mostly security cams, unintentionally publically broadcasting. Hurry before the cam's as hard to control as "Just Letters."
posted on Jan 4, 2005 - View this thread

Google, Yahoo, Alta Vista, others under attack? Despite all the big IPO news about Google, the bigger news today is that it doesn't work. Slap on an age-discrimination suit while we're at it, and potential trouble for the IPO. Have Larry and Sergei finally pissed off the wrong people?
posted on Jul 26, 2004 - View this thread

Increase your Google-Fu. I've been a user of everyone's favorite search engine since it was in beta, but still failed on searches where others succeeded. It seems that the coolest search operators aren't documented on google.com at all. Now I can aspire to find scary and interesting stuff on the Web.
posted on Jul 4, 2004 - View this thread

Gmail is too Creepy "Dear Gmail user: Due to privacy considerations, we cannot respond unless you resend your email from a different account."
posted on Jun 10, 2004 - View this thread

Mining the Deep Web. Google indexes 4 billion pages, but there are hundreds of billions of documents out there in the Deep Web that are effectively unreachable by search engines because they are locked in databases or are unsearchable media. It looks like Yahoo is going to start giving us a peek by providing unified access to a wide variety of sites that are ordinarily only searchable by their own custom search engines.
posted on Mar 2, 2004 - View this thread

Googlearchy: How a few heavily-linked sites dominate politics on the Web. [pdf file] Political communities exhibit winner-take-all properties. Surprising?
posted on Jan 8, 2004 - View this thread

Spears Reigns Again on Internet . Lycos, America Online and Yahoo! all have their top ten of '03 lists out. Google Zeitgeist wasn't mentioned in the Hollywood Reporter Article, but it's always worth a look.
posted on Dec 21, 2003 - View this thread

Google as voyeur Interesting use of Google technology. Anyone find anything really interesting? Pretty addictive... [via MilkAndCookies]
posted on Aug 6, 2003 - View this thread

Google: the God that failed? is the title of the article on MSN Slate. All of us know Microsoft is working on a new search engine technology. Till date everyone considers Google to be the Guru. MS obviously doesn't like that, so what it is doing? Well, the same thing it always does - to survive competition, eliminate it. The reasons being given by the article are pretty silly and more aimed at 'faming down' Google.
posted on Jul 22, 2003 - View this thread

Bananaslug is a serendipitous search engine. It uses the google API to mix your search term with a random seed and returns results that are probably orthogonal to what you were looking for. Minutes of fun.
posted on Jul 14, 2003 - View this thread

Is Google God? "While you were sleeping after 9/11, not only has the process of technological integration continued, it has actually intensified — and this will have profound implications." "...Google, combined with Wi-Fi, is a little bit like God. God is wireless, God is everywhere and God sees and knows everything. Throughout history, people connected to God without wires. Now, for many questions in the world, you ask Google, and increasingly, you can do it without wires, too." [NYTimes]
posted on Jun 30, 2003 - View this thread

The Turbo10.com search engine beta is back online. Here's why it will make Google its bitch.
posted on Jun 6, 2003 - View this thread

Google, everyone's favourite search-engine, is planning a seperate category for Blogs, to help searchers "filter out blog noise," from primary search results.
posted on May 9, 2003 - View this thread

Grub: The seti@home of search engines?
According to the New Scientist: "A distributed computing project called Grub, which harnesses individual users' spare computing power and internet bandwidth, began cataloguing millions of web pages this week."
Grub has thus launched before HyperBee, a similar distributed search project.
This link was previously posted on MeFi when it was still in the conceptual stage.
The project is being run by LookSmart (along with its own open directory project called zeal) but as the New Scientist article notes: "Website information collected by Grub is already being fed into one of LookSmart's search services, called WiseNut. But the collected data are also freely accessible to the public, so they can be incorporated into any web site or desktop application."
Possible Google competition or doomed from the start?
posted on Apr 21, 2003 - View this thread

Nationalise Google? "Perhaps the time has come to recognise this dominant search engine for what it is - a public utility that must be regulated in the public interest." Bill Thompson from the BBC tells me that Google puts a cookie on my computer that can't be deleted till 2038: "This means that Google builds up a detailed profile of your search terms over many years. Google probably knew when you last thought you were pregnant, what diseases your children have had, and who your divorce lawyer is. It refuses to say why it wants this information or to admit whether it makes it available to the US Government for tracking purposes." Are they "a secretive, hyper-competitive company with no respect for the personal privacy of its users"? Are other search engines better behaved? And is this the beginning of search ethics?
posted on Apr 14, 2003 - View this thread

Google.ac is some kind of fake Google site that seems to return nothing but sponsored results. Is it supposed to fool somebody?
posted on Mar 28, 2003 - View this thread

This just in! Search Engines help find people, too! Reuters has apparently just figured out that you can google up old acquaintances. As for myself, I find that google has become less useful than these guys for people-searches. So, what is the most obscure thing/person you have searched for, and how did you find it?
posted on Mar 13, 2003 - View this thread

A Google boondoggle? Does Google deserve your nomination for Big Brother of the Year? Nine points from the previously mentioned folks at Google Watch. (via the Disinformation Newsletter)
posted on Feb 18, 2003 - View this thread

A warning shot in the dark: For connoisseurs of clever turns of phrase: The phrase "a warning shot in the dark" popped out at me from a Google News preview panel as being a mixed metaphor. Indeed, a Google search reveals that the phrase has never before been used on the entire Web, which is rather amazing. Delving into the story, it appears by paragraph three that the mixed metaphors are appropriate, in this case.
posted on Nov 27, 2002 - View this thread

"Our goal is to become bigger than Yahoo" "...We don't serve banners or pop-ups...We will not rent, sell or trade your personal information... Out of the gate, we make money through Google's advertisements - Google sells the ads, Dell pays Google and Google pays us....Does it work? Yes. In fact, we will be profitable in our first month of operation." Could this be a Google back-door attempt to begin to move into Yahoo territory, or are they just starry-eyed dreamers? Their mission, and some answers from the founder, apparently the same people behind iWon.com. PS Site really does look like a Yahoo carbon copy. There must be some copyright issues.
posted on Nov 2, 2002 - View this thread

Google censors search results "Google, the world's most popular search engine, has quietly deleted more than 100 controversial sites from some search result listings. "
posted on Oct 24, 2002 - View this thread

China Blocks Google » In the highest praise yet for Google, China (as in "great firewall of China") blocks Google. Dissident search engines. It must be the future.
posted on Sep 3, 2002 - View this thread

Kartoo, a New Search Engine. Do check out Kartoo. It basically creates a map linking sites related to a search. Interesting graphics, too. It seems like this would serve a different purpose than Google.
posted on May 22, 2002 - View this thread

Google continues march towards world domination with Google News. "Google's News Search (BETA) service presents information culled from many of the world's news sources collected over the previous week. With continuous updates throughout the day, you'll keep up to date with what's happening now and learn about the stories that led to the most recent developments." Now there's no excuse for posting a CNN link.
posted on Mar 15, 2002 - View this thread

Googlewhacking. A procrastination aid like no other. Find The One -- and score it. I'm getting a little verklempt. Talk amongst yourselves.
posted on Jan 24, 2002 - View this thread

"Google effect" reduces need for many domains. Dan Gillmor says effective search engines can and should stop people from freaking out that "Wah! All the good .com names are taken" and compulsively registering all the .biz, .info, .tv, .to, and other .crap domains which the registrars would like us to believe are vital. Bob Frankston agrees, [link via Ev] adding that reducing our dependence on semantic (i.e. keywordy) web addresses will improve the stability and usefulness of the web. (I agree too!)
posted on Jan 14, 2002 - View this thread

Google Catalog Search uses Google technology to search thousands of scanned mail-order catalogs, from industrial adhesives to designer clothing and gourmet food.
posted on Dec 14, 2001 - View this thread

OS Google searches are pretty helpful when you're looking for Mac or Linux-specific info, and they each come with their own Google logo.
posted on Nov 7, 2001 - View this thread

Google Current Events: Always the innovator, Google's brains make it easier to find news (and archives of news) about all of today's events.
posted on Sep 11, 2001 - View this thread

More google ???: phone/address listings (with a map right to your house!), and (useless) news headlines which contain search terms (some screenshots in case they are just testing).
posted on Aug 23, 2001 - View this thread

For Sale. Pre-owned Search Engine $250,000,000 o.n.o

Google is hinting at an end of year IPO for a measley $250 million. Is this the beginning of the end of the dot-com crash?. Via The Register.
posted on Jun 25, 2001 - View this thread

From the googlebot FAQ: "For most sites, Googlebot should not access your site more than once every few seconds on average"

I thought it was a mistake at first, but they go on to say that you should contact them if "we are placing too high a load on your site" Do they really hit some sites that hard? If so, is it really necessary?
posted on Jun 5, 2001 - View this thread

It's become second nature for many of us to head straight to Google when trying to find something, and more people seem to be discovering the site all the time. These days, savvy New Yorkers are Googling for love.
posted on Feb 9, 2001 - View this thread

"Search. It's all we do. Test our results." So, is that braggadocio... or insecurity? Given the spate of "how [they] scammed Google" pieces lately, I find the newest addition to their home page... interesting.
posted on Nov 3, 2000 - View this thread

Somebody found my blog while searching for a 'doctor's surgery webpage'. AltaVista, Yahoo, Lycos -- has anyone ever found anything useful from any search engine ever? Really? I don't believe you. Never ever has any search engine -- not even lovely, nifty little Google -- given me what I want in any useful way whatsoever. You would not believe how long it took me to find a sodding picture of Steve McQueen smoking the other day. And for God's sake don't get me onto the utterly pointless localised versions or the abyssmal AltaVista picture search.
posted on Oct 16, 2000 - View this thread

Has Google finally sold out? You may have already seen this via Robot Wisdom - evidence that Google has monkeyed with their search engine to give preference to partner Yahoo!'s pages. I guess it had to happen sooner or later, but I'm sad. Anyone know of a better search engine on the horizon that still has integrity?
posted on Sep 13, 2000 - View this thread

Google: advanced search — this is new, no?
posted on Aug 9, 2000 - View this thread

Holy Mother of Google!
posted on May 12, 2000 - View this thread

Google appears to be telling a story with their logo. Is this a fun and creative way to "extend their brand" (as the marcom kids like to say) or do they need to stop letting their engineers handle their logo design?
posted on May 2, 2000 - View this thread

Everyone's favorite search engine Google has opened their GoogleStore. They've got shirts, mugs, and bags, some with the "I'm feeling lucky" slogan, but the strangest thing for sale? That'd have to be the Exercise Ball, which I suspect secretly carries Happy Fun Ball-style disclaimers. When not in use, Google Exercise Ball should be returned to its special container and kept under refrigeration. Do not taunt Google Exercise Ball. [thanks RasterWeb]
posted on Mar 18, 2000 - View this thread

Um, does anyone want to venture a guess as to why google's logo is surrounded by threes?
posted on Dec 29, 1999 - View this thread