Google Blogoscoped

Tuesday, July 4, 2006

Independence Day Logos

The US search engines are all dressing up today to celebrate July 4th. Ask goes crazy with a fireworks wallpaper (-1 points style, +2 points braveness), Google shows two dancing... uhm... animals, and Yahoo uses elements from Lady Liberty in their logo. MSN seems to be missing out... [Thanks Brinke, David and Ionut.]

Concrete Footballs

According to German Spiegel, some pranksters are putting 10 kilo heavy concrete footballs all around Berlin, like near football festivities. Next to the so far 8 footballs, which are all chained to lamp posts and such, pink graffiti reads: “Can u kick it?” Two male twenty-somethings so far couldn’t resist and tried to kick the ball... and went straight to hospital. The police are investigating.

Google Co-Founders Interviewed in 2001 (Video)

Starting at minute 37 in this Charlie Rose interview on Google Video, Larry Page and Sergey Brin speak out on their relatively young company (Sergey: “Larry’s kind of obnoxious ... We’re both actually kind of obnoxious.”). We’ve come a long way... [Thanks Oreo in the forum.]

If Google Didn’t Exist...

... then we’d have a tiny email storage which we’d search by hand, we’d be paying for Sketchup, our homepage would be a portal, and more.

Google’s Problems (In Their Words)

A ZDNet post highlights a list of potential problems Google says may affect their success (this is from a Google statement to investors for the first quarter 2006). In a nutshell:

  1. Google may have scaling problems with increased traffic.
  2. Google relies on bandwidth providers, so they’re vulnerable to their actions in that way.
  3. Ad blockers could block Google AdSense/ AdWords.
  4. Google might have problems searching proprietary document formats on the web, e.g. if Microsoft adds indexing “protection” mechanisms to Word files.
  5. Search engine spam harms the results relevancy of Google
  6. Google could face more privacy concerns, and a damaged reputation coming out of that.
  7. Google isn’t fully prepared if the mobile web takes off, as their apps don’t work across all mobile browsers.
  8. Google faces click fraud.

[Via Tadeusz, who saw it on Digg.]

Google and Opera Support

Carlos Duarte sent along some screenshots and writes:

We all suspect that someday Firefox will be officially a Google Product. ... However, Opera users don’t have an easy life if they want to use some Google products. They don’t support some of the most popular applications like Google Notebook, Calendar, Writely, Spreadsheets or Page Creator. However, AdSense and AdWords are Opera friendly – [it’s] easy to know why.

Live PageRank Checker

The Live PageRank tool shows a site’s PR across different Google data centers. [Thanks Markus and Ionut.]

Advertisement

 
Blog  |  Forum     more >> Archive | Feed | Google's blogs | About
Advertisement

 

This site unofficially covers Google™ and more with some rights reserved. Join our forum!