A Japanese woman has got her knickers in a knot over Google Street View.
She is suing Google over claims the search giant displayed images of underwear hanging on her washing line on its Street View mapping service.
The unnamed woman is seeking damages of 600,000 Yen, claiming that the images had caused her psychological distress, resulting in losing her job and the changing of her residence.
Japan’s Mainichi newspaper reported news of the suit, highlighting that the lady first saw the photo on Google’s Street View service in Spring when she performed a search on her own house.
It is claimed that upon discovering the pictures of underwear on her washing line, the woman’s existing obsessive compulsive disorder worsened as a result of increased anxiety, leading her to feel as if her life was being secretly recorded.
In their earnings call last week, Google announced a record 2010 third-quarter revenue of $USD7.29 billion (up 23% from last year).
The market rejoiced and Google shares shot past $USD615 giving the company a market cap of more than $USD195 billion.
This month, Google broke an equally impressive Internet traffic record — gaining more than 1% of all Internet traffic share since January, according to research by Arbor Networks.
If Google were an ISP, as of this month it would rank as the second largest carrier on the planet.
Google now represents an average 6.4% of all Internet traffic around the world. This number grows even larger (to as much as 8-12%) if estimates of traffic offloaded by the increasingly common Google Global Cache (GGC) deployments are included and error in Arbor’s data due to the extremely high degree of Google edge peering with consumer networks.
These numbers represent increased market share — Google is growing considerably faster than overall Internet volumes which are already increasing 40-45% each year.
Happy Birthday Google, which turns 12 years old on 27 September 2010. The California-based company was first incorporated as a privately held corporation on 27 September 1998.
To mark the occasion, users of Google’s home search page are met with a Wayne Thiebaud cake, reproduced by permission of VAGA, Visual Artists and Galleries Association. Most of Thiebaud’s cakes were painted in the 1950s and 1960s.
Although Thiebaud is associated with the Pop art movement due to his interest in objects of mass culture, his work is earlier than Andy Warhol.
Eight-year veteran David Ku, senior vice president of advertising products, and a key player in its search marketing platform, is the latest in a string of execs to leave the global giant as it attempts to reinvent itself under Chief Executive Carol Bartz.
Amongst other execs calling it quits have been Chief Technology Officer Ari Balogh (April 2010), advertising sales boss Joanne Bradford (March 2010) and Chief Financial Officer Blake Jorgensen in 2009.
In other news, Yahoo! will revamp its search pages to include more visual content, a move the company hopes will engage more of its users.
The move encompasses improvements to search, mail and advertising, as market share continues to fall, with Bing recently overtaking Yahoo! in search, meaning the laggard fell to third place.
The Internet giant will also integrate news, as well as search and conversational trends, moves that could be directed at blunting the impact of popular sites like Twitter Inc.
We entrust Google with our most private communications because we assume the company takes every precaution to safeguard our data. It doesn’t. A Google engineer spied on four underage teens for months before the company was notified of the abuses.
David Barksdale, a 27-year-old former Google engineer, repeatedly took advantage of his position as a member of an elite technical group at the company to access users’ accounts, violating the privacy of at least four minors during his employment. Barksdale met the kids through a technology group in the Seattle area while working as a Site Reliability Engineer at Google’s Kirkland, Wash. office.
He was fired in July 2010 after his actions were reported to the company by parents. Continue Reading
Google has rekindle its love for speedy Web searches with Google Instant, a new version of the search engine that displays results as you type.
When typing a search query with Google Instant, results appear after the first letter is entered, and they update as the user types. Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice president of search and user experience, said results are actually delivered “before you type,” because Google Instant predicts and automatically completes search terms.
According to Google, a typical searcher spends nine seconds entering a query, and 15 seconds searching for answers. Google hopes to shave two to five seconds per search using Google Instant as each keystroke triggers a predictive search which eventually will display the target of your ferreting. Watch this video to learn the basics.
Okay, the latest news is that GOOGLE has bought social games start-up SocialDeck, the latest in a series of acquisitions that it is currently collecting so that it can compete against Facebook.
It’s on a not-so-secret mission to build an enormous social networking service.
Sorry to rain on the parade, fellas, but yer going to fail.
That’s right folks, you heard it here first, the Google entry into the social media world will be the latest addition to the growing list of Google flops and failures.
As much as I love Google (and truly I do), time and time again, Google falls into the trap of trying to be all things to all man – which is why it fails.
It’s getting to the point where Google simply cannot abide someone else having a decent brand profile on the Internet. Think I’m kidding? Here is some proof. Continue Reading
