In-Q-Tel, the venture capital of the CIA, recently announced a planned sale of 5,636 shares of Google stock worth over $2.2 million. The stock was most likely a result of In-Q-Tel’s investment in Keyhole, a earth visualization software company acquired by Google in October 2004. In-Q-Tel is also invested in search companies Intelliseek and piXlogic, and Verity. Tags: inqtel…
Category Archives: Google
Google spam suite primer
Google provides a full suite of services for the entry-level blog spammer. There are plenty of legitimate uses for all of these Google services, but Google’s market-leading position in search creates a spam ecosystem that inflates corporate revenues, index size, and user data. Google’s blog hosting service, Blog*Spot, received a lot of attention this week as blogosphere neighbors threw up their arms in protest of the host, which is like the seedy motel at the edge of town that rents by the-hour. It’s cheap and inviting to those who know no better, but those in the know don’t want anything…
Google Reader
Google just released their web-based feed reader named Google Reader. Users can login using their Google account and track web feeds in a two-column layout with a default sort of “relevance.” Google is not currently pulling from its archive of past blog entries and only displays the items currently present in the feed. The first column displays a list of subscribed feeds and switches to a list of posts when you click an item. Posts are displayed in the sidebar drawer using title and publication date only. The complete entry display contains the entry title, author, publication date, link, and…
Visit to Google
Today I visited Google to talk about web spam. I had never been on the Google campus so although I was busy I did make a point to note many details. Just about every meeting room I saw was video enabled. The spam summit met in a medium-sized room with array microphones hanging from the ceiling tiles, three video cameras in the back of the room, and one video camera in the front of the room for crowd shots. Smaller meeting rooms had phones with eye-level cameras. Lunch was really good. I had a chicken breast pesto panini with roasted…
Google Blog Search infrastructure thoughts
I have been reading through some of the posts about Google Blog Search and have some new thoughts on possible infrastructure although nothing has been officially stated by Google. I’ve read about how fast Google’s results come back. I would hope so, their entire index covers only about 90 days. Powered by Google Fusion? We already know that Google Blog Search is indexing only feeds, and the index does appear to separate from the main Google index. We also know that Google’s feed search index only contains posts since June 2005. We also know that Google plans to add a…
Google Blog Search is live
Google Blog Search is now live. I spent some time clicking around and searching for terms and phrases where I expected a certain result. Some early thoughts: Query time is very fast, at around half a second for most queries. The database only goes back two months, so a quick response is to be expected. The related blogs search for “George Bush” suggests “George Bush doesn’t care about ugly hoes” which cracks me up. No advertisements. Is this another “mistake” like Google claimed for Google News? I don’t think so. Google exposes results as RSS and Atom feeds in…
Google launching feed search tonight
Google is launching a feed-specific search interface tonight for both all feed producers as well as a search interface specific to Blogger. It’s important to note that from what I have read on Search Engine Watch and others Google is specifically restricting its search to feeds, and not using the HTML of the blog. Why? Googlebot is designed to swallow a page whole and not break the page up into individual entries or items. Feeds come prepackaged as individual items or entries allowing for easy digestion by parsers and indexers. Google would need to overhaul its indexer or design a…
Vint Cerf joins Google
Vint Cerf will join Google starting October 3 as their Chief Internet Evangelist. Vint already posted to the Google blog to let us know he is “committed to the vision of Google’s criticality to the daily lives of hundreds of millions of people.” Vint Cerf is currently working on the Interplanetary Protocol and may be working with Google to create the first Earth node at the top of the often rumored Google space elevator. :) Tags: vintcerf…
The Onion on Google
The Onion posted an article on Wednesday about Google’s plans for world domination. In the Onion’s satirical account Google will index all of the world’s information by destroying anything it cannot index. The Onion also speculates about Google Sound, a global network of microphones to index the world’s emitted sounds, and Google’s vast army of laser-equipped robots that will scan the DNA of every living organism. (via Doc Searls) Tags: theonion…
Google Talk client now available
The Google Talk application is now available on Google for Windows 2000 and Windows XP. It features voice and text messaging and loads all of your contacts from Gmail. The application is only 900 KB in size. Google Talk supports voice codecs PCMA, PCMU, G.723, iLBC, ISAC, IPCMWB, EG711U, and EG711A. They are evaluating the Speex codec. They currently use XMPP-based signaling but plan to support SIP signaling in the near future. Google is currently working with EathLink’s Vling product as well as Sipphone’s Gizmo Project for integration with Google Talk. Google also has a page listing Jabber/XMPP clients…