New Google+ Study Reveals Minimal Social Activity, Weak User Engagement Fast Company summarizes a
new study from RJMetrics that looks at public posts, +1s, replies and reshares on Google+. It concludes "the average post on Google+ has less than one +1, less than one reply, and less than one re-share." Google replies that public posts are a poor metric of user activity; Fast Company replies that "Google has refused to provide clear figures and metrics for its social network's active user base" and links to Danny Sullivan's "brilliant rundown of Google's lack of transparency on the subject" -
If Google’s Really Proud Of Google+, It Should Share Some Real User Figures.
There was also Wil Wheaton's recent angry
"Oh, go fuck yourself, Google" rant in response to a recent experiment replacing YouTube's "like" button with a Google+ button for a small number of users, thus requiring them to sign up for Google+ before they can 'like' a YouTube video.
Is Google Forcing Google+ Down People’s Throats?
posted by mediareport
on May 21, 2012 -
200 comments
Top 100 search terms of the <18 crowd during summer. If you're Glenn Quagmire, don't read this. All others, continue!
An article with at least superficial credibility (they admit kids search for porn, etc.) about what kids, tweens and teens search for online. Randomness includes Megan Fox, Walmart, Youtube and Naked Girls. (And Craigslist. What the hell do kids need on Craigslist?)
posted by ShadePlant
on Aug 14, 2009 -
75 comments
Le réseau - Starting in the late 19th century, Belgian
Paul Otlet envisioned the basics of a human powered Wikipedia and Google. He created a 12 million item database on index cards and accepted queries via mail or telegraph. The article describes his work and the Mundaneum museum in his honor. Be sure to watch the video. There is a
full documentary on Otlet as well.
posted by Argyle
on Jun 17, 2008 -
8 comments
Internet blows CIA cover The identities of thousands of Central Intelligence Agency employees, many of them operating under cover, have been available to anyone looking for the right information in public records searches. Only problem: The CIA was kind of surprised to find this out.
(Site may require registration for some. Use BugMeNot.)
posted by emelenjr
on Mar 12, 2006 -
41 comments
Factbites is a new approach to web searching - the results make sense! Factbites offers users meaningful, relevant sentences from every site in the search results. For example,
durian.
posted by crunchland
on Nov 7, 2005 -
19 comments
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 by mediareport
on Aug 7, 2005 -
18 comments
Grokker. It's powered by Yahoo! search, but the results are presented in a very different way, a visual map [
example]. There's a few tools to refine the output. It's different, a bit slower than a "normal" search and requires a bit of patience. There's an affiliated weblog, with an entry explaining their philosophy, "
Moving Beyond the Algorithm."
posted by gsb
on May 19, 2005 -
31 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
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 by jayantk
on Jul 22, 2003 -
39 comments
"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 by Voyageman
on Nov 2, 2002 -
28 comments
Information gods amongst mortals is the first in a series of three blog entries (so far, anyway) by
Brad Wardell on the topic of the growing knowledge gap between the net-savvy and the non-wired.
I found the link in a newsletter from
WinCustomize today. They plugged all three:
- Information gods amongst mortals
- The
Information Gods respond
- Information
Gods Srike Back
He explores the theory that those who are net savvy are quickly leaping ahead of the non-wired among us: "You know the situation. Someone has told you something you want to know more about and within a few minutes you have gotten yourself up to speed on it. You did it through the use of the Internet. A combination of search engines and helpful websites have educated you on that topic."
posted by tbc
on Sep 27, 2002 -
12 comments
Domain Surfer is just plain cool. I mean... now I can see if a text string appears
anywhere in a domain, and the results are clickable (note to the folks who do those awful WHOIS searches: I don't care who registered it, I care whether it's up-and-running!). Anyway, the link is via
Rion.nu who, BTW, has some wonderful
photographs of the Tribute of Light.
And the link to the photographs came via David Gallagher... another fine photographer, not to be confused with that ijit from Oasis.
posted by silusGROK
on Mar 14, 2002 -
12 comments
anti-thesaurus unhappy with web users who are unnecessarily drawn to your site in the pursuit of non-existent content? does it bog down your bandwidth? solution? write a metadata tag that specifically excludes certain terms from search engine hits by the simply defining them as non-words.
posted by bwg
on Dec 2, 2001 -
10 comments
Interesting sellout.
About.com has changed the "o" in their name to a Life Saver throughout the site. That's some desperate advertising.
posted by endquote
on Aug 3, 2001 -
37 comments
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 by straight
on Sep 13, 2000 -
8 comments
