Link Banana

Farhed Manjoo accurately captures the latest “Google killer”:

As it kept coming up empty, Wolfram Alpha came to seem less like HAL 9000 and more like a chatbot. It’s been trained to respond to some kinds of queries, but any variations leave it stammering. It’s a savant, smart about a few things but profoundly ignorant about large swaths of human knowledge.

If you manage to input a query that’s it’s well-suited to answer, the results can be deeply interesting — a seach for “weather” and my zip code gave data I’d never seen anywhere — but it’s a very limited tool.

That seems a little surprising. How many searches do I get if I add loading the first result? It seems likely that there’s more green information in a newspaper, but only if you’re interested in all they’re delivering to you. Which I guess in the primary argument for the web in the first place.

(via G’modo)

I’ve noticed that Google now adds to the search results of some searches a timeline of when that term is mentioned in sources — apparently a combination of newspapers, books, and websites. A few observations made using the tool:

• Many events have peaks in ten-year anniversaries of their first happening. See for example: Hiroshima, Apollo 11.
• Recession seems reasonably well correlated with market feelings.
• The historical usage of some terms in interesting. Try for example, piracy and Black Friday.
• “Apollo 13” got a definite boost when the movie came out.
• Some terms show the tool still has bugs. Mesozoic for example. (The peak at 2000BC, for example appears to be caused by a misinterpretation of a citation.)

Obviously the validity of all of these observations is limited by my limited understanding of how the thing works and its bugs.

Want to send visitors straight to the incessant song in Charlie the Unicorn 2? Now you can:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFCSXr6qnv4#t=3m33s

(via BF)

Robin Sloan pens an interesting “think piece” about  how Google may actually be changing our way of processing information. And no, it’s not a “technology will make us stupid” thing.

Also note the very good and thoughtful responses.

UPDATE (1/14/09): Robin clarifies.

Google disputes the rather dubious claim that each Google query causes 7 grams of CO2 to be released into the atmosphere.

You’ve probably seen this by now, but if you haven’t, now you have.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about this little project — taking pictures of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. in different cities across the United States — is that not two years ago someone would have had to visit all of these places to be able to compile it.

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.