http://www.google.com/ncr
is the URL you want to use in order to teach google NOT to show you the localized Version that they throw at you based on your IP. I had removed all my google cookies and was faced with the devastating fact that I rank at #15 or so for my own name on the german gogole version.
If lots of merchands sign up then this will be a big deal.
why did google blog at 3:00 am about it?
It took me a while to be the ‘#1 result’ results when somebody enters my complete name in google. I look at the results page for this once in a while. Since I know the usual order of the pages by heart, it makes a great indicator if something changed at google. This morning I saw a pretty nasty bug:
As you can see my blog agregator BlogsNow contains the wrong “snippet”. It does not produce compelling effects. This snippet is actually one that comes from the result above it. In this case it’s not that tragic, since the result above is still related to me: It’s my former job. But the same might happen to two sites that have controversial views on a topic.
Things break. Google code is not immune to this. The bigger question is, if and when it gets fixed.
Looks like an interest article about Tron.
Just that I have no time to read it right now.
I let you decide what is more relevant and more interesting.
As much as I like a free thing that works mostly. Today google over did it:
I understand their urge for more money ( they are only worth billions by now) so they like to peddle their “google talk service”. At first I was mildly shocked when I had to click through their “there is google talk” banner page in order to get to my emails. I thought that would be it and I had gmail for years, so once a year one screen to click away is ok.
But now they draw a little overlay over every email address that the mouse is hovering over. How annoying is that!
If they don’t shut that of soon ( I looked in the preferences and it seemed there was no way to do that ) then I will get my imap install going on andreaswacker.com. Or maybe google does not like to store 1038 MB worth of email for me anymore and they like to annoy me so that I go away? Either way, if this nonsense does not stop soon then I will migrate my mail over to my server again. That will be an interesting ‘pop3’ session: 1GB of email …
update 2/17/06: google stoppped displaying those pesky overlays. Glad about that.
Don’t really have the time right now to get imap going on my own domain.
In December 2005 Google handled an average of 924 searches a second. It was 528/sec a year before. Every search is done against the content of some eight billion documents or so. I think that is rather impressive. All done on Linux machines.
In December ’04 Google did three times more searches than MSN, a year later that ratio had changed to 4.4 times.
Summer 2004 Steve Ballmer had said:
“We don’t want to be a fast follower. If we’re not first, we’ll be a fast follower, but we really want to be first.”
Mick Jagger is know to have said: “You can’t always get what you want”
When I was digging for those Ballmer quotes I read a couple of articles about Microsoft and search. They had the tone as if Microsoft and the world was taken by surprise by the success of search. It sometimes sounds as if search came out of nowhere. I think Microsoft decided consiously not to pay attention to search around 2000 when it should have. They probably underestimated the value that is out there on the internet in this uncontrollable heap of information and tools. Microsoft owns the PC operating system and office software market. They simply assumed that all the valuable content would be created within their domain. Therefor they would just need to go along, release a nice pace of updates for Office, Entourage and Windows and that would be that. The internet, so they thought, is something you browse for entertainment with IE in the lunch break. They won the browser war, so what could happen to them?
As confident as the Armada did they sail into this century. And they are sinking as fast as those spanish ships did 418 years ago. Their stock price is flat. They share with Sony the grief about not being part of the booming mp3 business. Longhorn is called Vista now. It’s ok, but the excitement is largely missing. Google just started the next phase of competition by replacing the functionality of Exchange with a free service of theirs. As a little side node here: Web pundits had speculated in vivid colors how there would be a web based word or excel product to challenge the dominating products made in Seattle. Of course it makes so much more sense to start with Microsoft Exchange. Email is, after all, already a network based system. So much for the collective wisdom of crowds.
Microsoft never anticipated that there could be a whole new use of computers that would have nothing to do with writing texts or doing spreadsheats. Microsoft got their lucky break from the lack of imagination and enthousiasm at IBM when it created the personal computer. Only few years of big blue being asleep at the steering wheel, gave Bill and his people enough time to become leader in this emerging field. And they made all the right moves to stay ahead of the game since then. The PC OS market has been domimated by Microsoft very much like IBM had been sucessfully leading the computation field before. IBM could not imagine that the PC that they started would change everything. Nor could Microsoft imagine that the internet would do it all over again.
Imagination is not very tangible. It’s lack however can cost you billions. And somehow it always does.
I don’t get it they must be too smart for me. I can not see how this would be anything that google would be doing and why this makes any sense.
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On the other hand this makes allot of sense
Imagine you are a small company: You pay some MS Exchange Expert and Microsoft quiet some money just to have email. Most features you would want you might get for free via “caribou”. Or for very little money.
I think it would make sense if the service is free. Eyeballs pay for it. Support could cost money. Putting ads in
outgoing email would be a big ‘nono’. Being a small company you don’t want to expose that you use a cheap/free service for email.
Looks like most of blogger is offline from here and from where BlogsNow looks.
So I told the bot to stop trying.
I just hope that gmail is been maintained better than blogspot.
Then on the other hand: After installig a postfix server recently I might be tempted to
keep gmail only as a backup.
I followed the whole google china thing and was not upset that much. I did expect google to behave like this.
But a press release like this in a blog is just too much. That’s calling everybody to drink the cool-aid. Some people will do.
I will not. Google is a big and greedy corporation. They make billions right now. They could have afforded the high route, and they choose deliberate not too. Instead they come up with a phony press release. All those smart people they hired in the last years will not leave. Their stock options will keep them. But this marks the time when google stopped being cool. I think that google is evil.