Link Banana

For a limited time only, you can Google like it’s January 2001. Andy Baio points to a few drastically different searches:

9/11, YouTube, Sarah Palin, or this [his] blog

Perhaps topping Firefox 3’s about:robots easter egg is Google Chrome’s about:internets, which unveils the 3D Pipes Window screensaver (you know the one) and the invocation: “Don’t Clog the Tubes!”

Steven Levitt points to a rather absurd study: scientists used Google Earth to determine that cattle — and other large herbiovores — are more likely to graze while standing in a north-south direction. They think it has something to do with magnetic fields.

Google Blogscoped shares (of all things) a comic book explaining Google new browser initiative. I wasn’t expecting much from the book, but it’s really quite good. It offers plain-spoken explications of all that they’ve tried to do with browser. Now I just want to try it out.

UPDATE (9/2/08): It’s now available for Windows XP and Vista. I’m using it to write this update and have to say that it’s pretty smooth. It seems faster than Firefox 3, but then it’s also not been running with 20 tabs open for three days. Oh, and there is, as promised, (at least) one system-visable process running for every open tab.

Two potential replacements for myself:

• The New York Times’s Week In Review team now has a rather excellent linkblog. (via Snarkmarket)
• Google’s Hot Trends show what America really cares about. This instant, it’s Ted Kennedy. (via Fimoculous)

Andrew Chen used Google Insights to put together a pretty interesting comparison of what (web 2.0-y) internet sites are most popular in which US states.

(via Waxy)

Though I don’t know how much I’ll use it, I think it’s cool that Google Maps now offers walking (and public transportation — when did that happen?) directions.

(via Gizmodo)

The consistently interesting William Saletan points to — and considers — an innovative argument about sexual propriety:

The defendant is accused of purveying obscene material from a Florida Web site. To be judged obscene, the material has to be found patently offensive or prurient by “contemporary community standards.” According to Matt Richtel of the New York Times, the defense attorney in the case, Lawrence Walters, will use Google Trends to argue that the community’s standards are lower than advertised. Walters “plans to show that residents of Pensacola are more likely to use Google to search for terms like ‘orgy’ than for ‘apple pie’ or ‘watermelon,’” Richtel reports. (Evidence here.) The point is “to demonstrate that interest in the sexual subjects exceeds that of more mainstream topics—and that by extension, the sexual material distributed by his client is not outside the norm.”

…[Th]is case is more than a titillating gimmick. It’s an early attempt to think through human duality in the age of the Internet. In the old days, there was a private you that lived in your head, a semi-private you that lived in your house, and a public you that lived in your community. You could commit adultery in your fantasies, try bondage with your spouse in the bedroom, and sing about purity in church. The Internet has confused these distinctions. Now the private you can sneak around the semi-private you and become semi-public. (I doubt those folks in Pensacola have talked to their spouses about orgies.) Your fantasies are no longer confined to your head. They’re visible, in the aggregate, on Google Trends.

…And don’t judge a porn site operator by the open-air standards of his geographic community. That’s not where he peddles his smut. He peddles it online, where the standards, as we now know from Google, are different.

I noticed two interesting things on Google today, so I thought I’d share.

• Google has a new favicon. They’ve switched from the big G to the little one. I like it. (via DF)
• Maps on searches for country names and cities. Now when I want to know where Zambia is, I no longer have click through to Wikipedia to know.

Thanks to Mr. Zawodny, this has sucked an hour out of my morning. Interesting stuff.

The surest sign that Facebook is “the next Google”?

But by all measures gastronomic, Google was still the dominant firm—until now. One of Google’s current chefs is Josef Desimone, who is admired chiefly for the kombucha tea that he ferments from scratch and that gets the employees’ creative juices flowing. Now however, Mr Desimone is smelling the coffee. He has given notice to Google, and will soon start work at Facebook. On Wall Street, no doubt, the short sellers have taken note.

Also, technically kombucha isn’t even a mushroom. But “a symbiosis of bacteria and yeast” was too long for the title.

That’s what the folks over at Dolores Labs found. Obviously this is contrary to conventional wisdom, but it seems reasonable enough to me.

I thought Joel Stein had mastered the George Clooney profile a few weeks ago. A.J. Jacobs may have just topped him.

You may Google yourself from time to time, but George Clooney doesn’t. How could he? It’s different for him. It’s overwhelming. Its infinite madness could disintegrate a man’s personality. “George Clooney” pops up on nearly 11 million sites on the Internet. Spend a day browsing these sites and you will find unfathomable rage and baffling adoration. You will find America with all its insane colors refracted through the prism of George Clooney.

But George Clooney is also a brave man, and today he has agreed to spend a couple of hours exploring what the Internet has to say about George Clooney. A sort of This Is Your Virtual Life. Today he will see things that shock him, scare him, and make him shake with laughter. He will see things so disturbing that he will walk out of the room horrified. Also, he will see his own nipples.

(via brijit)

I’ve never been much of an astronomy buff, and I can assure you that much of what Google Sky can do flows straight over my head. It sure is pretty though.

(via waxy)

Google’s satellite picture of Broomfield, New Jersey (near Newark) was clearly taken at three different times of year. One bit’s a lush green, another’s a solid white, and the last bit is distinctly brown. Isn’t technology grand?

(via BBGadgets)

I love this kind of thing. Neatorama has put together logos from throughout the histories of firms like Google, Adobe, IBM, LG, and Canon. The original IBM and Canon logos are really interesting.

This story was all over the blogs when I logged on this morning, but usually with knee-jerk reactions. As usual The Economist is more considered and more comprehensive.

Microsoft is desperate to grab a bigger share of the online-advertising market because many of its software products are being challenged by free, advertising-supported services offered by Google. The company is also worried that Google’s dominance in search and advertising allows it to dictate terms to advertisers, and gives it an unfair advantage over its smaller rivals. This is a bit rich coming from Microsoft, a convicted monopolist in operating-system software, which has also been known to squeeze out smaller competitors, but its anger that it has had to endure years of scrutiny by regulators, while Google has been left alone, is genuine.

Mr. Cringely, PBS’s usually-interesting and often-prescient technology columnist, addresses it as if it’s almost a done deal.

What I DO see happening is Apple buying Adobe, which would give it effective dominance of digital content creation and distribution on a global scale. Bruce Chizen suddenly stepped down as Adobe’s CEO without warning: why? A caretaker CEO (my characterization — no slight intended) is in place. Steve has always viewed Adobe co-founder and co-chair John Warnock like a father. Warnock and co-chair Chuck Geschke are losing interest in Adobe day-to-day as they move on with their lives. Acquiring Adobe would make Apple much more of a cross-platform company. The combined professional applications could be placed in the Adobe division of Apple where they could go up in price for some markets, becoming VASTLY more profitable. But most important — keeping in mind the whole purpose here is driving content distribution — merging Flash and QuickTime would make any other video standards (like Windows Media) simply immaterial.

PBS’s technology columnist, Robert Cringley, has unveiled his predictions for 2008. The most interesting:

5) Here’s a risky one. Google will bid billions and win the upcoming 700-MHz wireless spectrum auction, which is an auction for frequencies that are actually much more useful for a voice network than for a data network. Then Google will impose its open access rules on the frequencies before either TRADING them to Sprint or simply ACQUIRING Sprint to get that company’s WiMax licenses, which are what Google really wanted all along.

9) As part of its transition from a PC company to a consumer electronics and content company, Apple will introduce — and trumpet in a huge media show — its replacement for the mouse. Really.

Lifehacker’s made yet another post about Google hacks. Most are rather old (currency conversion, time zones) some are outright silly (#2 is Image Search? Really?). But I like this one a lot:

Simply search for, in quotes: “better than _keyword_” […]

The results will almost always lead you to discovering alternatives to whatever it is you’re searching for. Using the same concept, you can use this trick to discover new music or movies. For example, ” reminds me of _someband_” or “sounds like _someband_” will pull up artists people have thought sounded similar to the one you typed in. This is also a great way to find good, no-name musicians you’d probably never know of otherwise.

Tips 4 and 5 are cool too. And though I have no use for #1, it’s cool to know that Google can do it.