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Posted on Wednesday, 2 December, 2009 By yours truly | TOOLS: Talk or Share
Dear Google,
Rupert Murdoch could block Google searches entirely. Great news! Good riddance to bad rubbish.
I would love a search result that by default didn’t include his propaganda empire of faux news. However, Google, since you seem to want to play ball and offer a first-view-free compromise of sorts, Try this out: Add a a couple of new tabs to your search browser, one that filters out subscription-only content and another one that just shows the subscribe stuff.
Because I get tired of sifting thorugh results that include pay-to-view content in the mix. It doesn’t say you have to pay before you click, so it’s kind of false advertising anyway. Add an option so I can just see the non-subscription content and filter out the rest. If I ever want to see what the pay-for stuff has to offer I could simply click over and check it out. That would let online publishers know what people are willing to click and what they aren’t, and also show them what search results look like that don’t include the subscriptions sites.
I have a hunch that the free tab will in fact offer richer, more interesting and unique content, because it will be taking out a number of media organisations throwing money at SEO geeks trying to game their crap content higher on the ranking ladder. Anyway, that would introduce some friendly competition to the mix. Rupert shouldn’t have a problem with that.
Posted on Monday, 12 January, 2009 By yours truly | TOOLS: Talk or Share
Well for crying out loud it’s about time and what an improvement! The design I made for ISM long ago when I was just learning how WordPress works has been changed by my cohort and it’s about time. hop on over to the International Solidarity Movement’s spiffy new site at palsolidarity.org.
When I worked on it a few years ago, it was a jam session to get the site back up after someone had gone in and maliciously erased it from the server. Thanks to different people keeping files on their own machine, and the magic of InterWeb archiving at the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, we were able to relaunch the site in a matter of days.
The former design was always meant to be temporary and had outlived its usefulness by years. I was glad to see it replaced with something else as my design and WordPress chops have grown since.
Like the last one, this launch also looks to come as another nasty bit of hackery is taking place against ISM, though. Someone or some people are successfully gaming search engine results against http://palsolidarity.org as a number of stale old articles slamming the organization and some fringe-rightwing low-traffic websites are suddenly getting higher placements. Dear google, please note: ou are being played. It seems that, almost overniight (as of this writing), a google search of “international solidarity movement” doesn’t actually bring up the organization’s official website. It used to come up first, now it’s not coming up at all.
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Posted on Tuesday, 2 December, 2008 By yours truly | TOOLS: Talk or Share
So today at work I was forwarded an email from our accounts office telling me that they received an urgent cancelation nitcie of our Google Adwords account. I checked out the email and clicked on the link to see how the page looked. online fraud people are getting better at forging official-like pages.
However, I doubt Google Adwords has been outsourced to http://www.orafaq.com/sites/adwords.google.com/select/Login.htm and is handled by a guy who’s address is OBSCURED EMAIL ADDRESS. The page as it turns out is hosted on a wiki, dedicated to all things Oracle.
It’s amazing that anyone actually can pirate google that long without Google knowing about it.
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Posted on Wednesday, 28 May, 2008 By yours truly | TOOLS: Talk or Share
Can you copyright search results if the entire content is coming from other websites?
I’d be more willing to stand behind Google’s aggresive appraoch to using content and challenging copyright if Google would remove the idiotic little © from its website.
Posted on Thursday, 30 March, 2006 By yours truly | TOOLS: Talk or Share
I show up in exactly two places on “Google Local.”
Posted on Tuesday, 21 March, 2006 By yours truly | TOOLS: Talk or Share
Rak Besmahot and David Nir write:
There’s a new wonderful service by Google: “Google-Earth.” Takes few minutes to load the free software. One can within several tens of seconds apply close-ups to view any point on the globe, even with 3 dimensional modeling, roads, restaurants, webcams for real time. Some places have resolution so articulate that individual persons can be seen. As an example one can see tennis players in action at the UC Berkeley sports center or view the nearby stadium full of spectators in the midst of a football game.
But wonder of wonders:
Unlike other zones on the globe, it seems that the ultra-right-wing AIPAC had the last word on what Google will let us see in Palestine and Israel.
While all the illegal settlements, even the tiniest ones’ are listed by their names, it seems that most of the Palestinian villages or towns had miracolously disappeared. Full size cities like Nablus are marked by tiny letters, while Elon More, according to the letter size, is probably a 10,000,000 size metropolis, thus Nablus may be suspected as a slum neighborhood at it’s outskirts.
Some examples:
- Nablus Yeshiva = Hawara
- Matkhan Tapuah = Tsomet Tapuach
- Rehelim = Sawieh
- nothing written = Akrabe
- Karmei Tsur with HUGE letters, Beit Ummar hardly noticeable.
Also the resolution quality at the Palestinian zones is extremely poor, compared to all other places on the globe. Undoubtly this is intentional. Therefore we are denied of the lovliest of sights such as the overcrowded checkpoint zones, the splendid appartheid wall (the 9th wonder), the demolished homes.
As a compensation we can see the tip of Eiffel tower and observe nearby strollers, or glide near the Everest’s crest.
Of course the press a mentioned week ago (“The Marker”?) that Google accepted to blur Israel’s sensitive security zones (such as military airfields or Beit Zacharia’s launch sites), but could it be that someone tricked Google to apply this magic also to “innocent” views whereby the Palestinian communities are represented as a blurry spot on the global scene, just as they are treated by the majority of the enlightened countries?
The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.
