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
Fact is, for many businesses, the Internet is all about local search.
That’s because for many small businesses, the majority of their revenue is generated from a local catchment area.
(Let’s face it, no-one is going to drive halfway across town to a supermarket, especially when there’s almost certainly one that’s closer to home.)
So if this applies to YOUR business, there is a post over at UndercoverStrategist that you really should know about.
It is called Small Business SEO and Local Search – and it shares a 10 step strategy for taking your local corner store from obscurity to the local limelight.
Of course, local search traffic doesn’t have the glamor of huge search numbers – so lots of businesses don’t bother with it.
They are like a wild animal, blinded by oncoming headlights at full beam, overwhelmed at the possibility of somehow getting those huge numbers of traffic coming to their website. Continue Reading
“When you are part of a company that is trying to digitize all the books in the world, the first question you often get is “Just how many books are out there?”” says Leonid Taycher, Google software engineer working on the Google Books project.
They counted 129,864,880 titles, or almost 130 million.
As you would expect, not everyone is buying Google’s count of all the world’s books, with Jon Stokes amongst others coming out with their own announcement, and that is the Google book count is bunkum.
So, a long time ago (at least it feels that way), having posted about Google’s desire to reproduce the world’s books, and the ensuing arguments that arose from it, I thought it was time to do an update on the books project to find out where were at and what had happened since we last discussed it.
So last time we talked about the Google books project, Amazon (who stood to have its book retailing market pulled from beneath it), Microsoft and various Governments (including the German and French) had weighed in on the opposing camp.
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.
