Looking at the rest of the top search results for Christmas is like getting into a time machine that takes you back to a bizarro 2001 in which every single web surfer is a sucker. There are "Hot Links!" and "Fun Things to Do." What we see is the ad hoc, de facto social network formed by people who type Christmas into a search engine. And man, that network is like MySpace for your great aunt who has too many cats. [more inside]
posted by Horace Rumpole
on Dec 20, 2011 -
16 comments
We expect even more rapid innovation in the web media platform in the coming year and are focusing our investments in those technologies that are developed and licensed based on open web principles. To that end, we are changing Chrome’s HTML5 <video> support to make it consistent with the codecs already supported by the open Chromium project. Specifically, we are supporting the WebM (VP8) and Theora video codecs, and will consider adding support for other high-quality open codecs in the future. Though H.264 plays an important role in video, as our goal is to enable open innovation, support for the codec will be removed and our resources directed towards completely open codec technologies. - Google's Chrome is will be joining Firefox in
no longer licensing the MPEG-LA H.264 video codec favoured by Apple and Microsoft for use in the HTML5 <video> tag (
previously).
Not everyone is seeing this as a good thing.
posted by Artw
on Jan 13, 2011 -
145 comments
In 2006 some Italian teenagers filmed themselves assaulting a youth with Down Syndrome and uploaded the video to Google Video Italia. It was pulled from the site within hours, but that did not satisfy the Italian Down Syndrome support group named
Vivi Down, who filed a complaint that resulted in a two-year investigation. That lead to charges and indictment of four Google executives, who were never aware of the video until after it had been removed, for violating Italy’s privacy code.
Today the Italian court ruled that three of the four - chief legal officer David Drummond, global privacy counsel Peter Fleischer and former CFO George Reyes - are guilty, and sentenced them to 6 months to a year of jail-time. The fourth, Arvind Desikan, former head of Google Video in London, was acquitted.
[more inside]
posted by BeerFilter
on Feb 24, 2010 -
78 comments
Love
Helvetica and modernist typographic design? Seen the
film? Now, with the power of browser userscripts, you can have the 20th-century high-modernist experience in your favourite web applications. Scripts exist to Helveticise
Gmail,
Twitter and
Google Reader, and work with a variety of modern browsers.
[more inside]
posted by acb
on Sep 15, 2009 -
69 comments
Web Authoring Statistics from Google.
An analysis of a sample of slightly over a billion documents, extracting information about popular class names, elements, attributes, and related metadata.
posted by signal
on Jan 26, 2006 -
29 comments
Slow Mosaic is a mosaic generator powered by the Web. Feed it a word and watch it create related mosaics in front of your very eyes. Requires Flash. [MI]
posted by sjvilla79
on Nov 29, 2005 -
20 comments
Can't Find On Google . Com While many people seem to think that Google can find anything (and knows everything), experienced web surfers know the results are often a bit lacking. So this site allows you to post what you are really looking for and what you punched in to the "Big G" to try to find it. The owner claims to know someone who works at Google that is "always interested in what people can't find on Google" - doubtful IMHO if they will really change anything based on this site. But semi-interesting stuff that highlights the inadaquacy of search engine technology.
posted by RonZ
on Jul 10, 2005 -
36 comments
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 by Metauser
on Feb 28, 2005 -
20 comments
Dave Winer slams the new Google Toolbar Autolink feature as "poorly thought out" adware that unilaterally raises "serious integrity issues" for the Web.
Southern Rants adds this pointed critique: "The most important point Winer makes is that it's not about technology. It's about making a HUGE change on the Web, our new social nexus, without discussion. See, he and I are old enough to remember when no one would do such a thing without taking it to ISOC or some such org. It needs discussion. It needs consideration. That's what Google doesn't understand."
[via Ed Cone]
posted by mediareport
on Feb 24, 2005 -
96 comments
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 by badstone
on Mar 2, 2004 -
12 comments
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 by walrus
on Jul 14, 2003 -
5 comments
