Facebook continually pesters me to entrer the "city" where I live, but rejects Kempt Head, Ross Ferry, Boularderie, and Cape Breton all of which are more-or-less accurate. It will allow me to enter Halifax, Sydney, or Baddeck, none of which is accurate. Contrast this with Google, which embraces locations with admirable granularity. Google effortlessly adopts islands, villages, hamlets—even micro-locations like Frankie's Pond and Parker's Beach—as long as it sees real people using them. This may seem a small thing, but it strikes me as a profound difference in the cultures of the two organizations. One constantly cajoles you into ill-fitting pigeonholes. The...

08 July, 2013

Many of you receive daily updates from Contrarian by email. These are sent out shortly after 3 am every day from Google's Feedburner service (to those who subscribed via the "once a day by email" link at right). This morning, for some reason, Feedburner sent out a trio of week-old posts for the second time. It's not clear why, but I wanted those who received it to know it was an error, not a deliberate reposting of these items. We are trying to sort out what happened, and why, if only to prevent it from happening again. Meanwhile, our apologies for adding to...

21 April, 2013

Last Friday, in one of its periodic displays of  nerdy humor, Google displaced its usual search page logo with an animated gif celebrating Earth's non-collision with Asteroid 2012 DA14, a 50-meter-wide rock that passed within 28,000 meters of our planet—closer than a geostationary communications satellite. Trouble is, another, much smaller meteor chose the same day to collide with Earth, exploding over the Siberian town of Chelyabinsk Oblast with the force of a half megaton nuclear weapon, and injuring 1,500 people below, mostly from flying glass. Google quickly yanked the animation. "Out of respect for those injured in the extraordinary meteor shower in...

18 February, 2013

Engineers from Google, Twitter, and SayNow, a voice messaging startup Google bought last week, put their technical chops to work over the weekend devising a way around the Egyptian government's Internet shutdown. From Google's Official Blog: Like many people, we’ve been glued to the news unfolding in Egypt, and thinking of what we could do to help people on the ground. Over the weekend we came up with the idea of a speak-to-tweet service—the ability for anyone to tweet using just a voice connection...

01 February, 2011

That's what Atlantic tech blogger Alexis Madrigal calls Google's Books Ngram Viewer. Google has scanned about 10 percent of all the books ever published. Enter any word or phrase into the search box, and the viewer returns a graph of its frequency of appearance in books published over the last two centuries. Note that the searches are case sensitive, and you can compare the relative frequencies of up to four five different words or phrases, separating them by commas in the search box. Say, "Nova Scotia" and "Ontario," for example: Try it yourself, and please send me any interesting pairings you come up with. Madrigal's...

16 December, 2010

Until its cave-in to Verizon last month, Google was the most prominent corporate advocate of net neutrality—but only for others, not for itself. Recently, Google has applied self-serving filters to its search results in a manner reminiscent of, say, China. Late in July, Google searches began filtering out any results for the website bestofyoutube.com, an aggregator of videos from the Google-owned video site. I can understand why Google might have a problem with bestofyoutube, which, it could be argued, infringes Google's intellectual property by poaching YouTube content. Mind you, it would be a brazen case for Google to make, given that YouTube itself...

08 September, 2010

Google wasn't always a carrier-humping, net-neutrality, surrender money, and TechCrunch has video to prove it: For those who don't follow tech news, Google pulled a stunning about-face on net-neutrality this week, teaming up with Verizon, the very company it pilloried on the issue, in an agreement to abandon the concept of neutrality for fast-growing wireless portions of the Internet, and for whatever new transmission technologies happen along in future. The do-no-evil company's reversal stunned the tech world. Unabashed Google admirer Jeff Jarvis, author of What Would Google Do, called it a Munich Agreement, a description Josh Marshall of TPM Media said was "a...

15 August, 2010

We've read a lot lately about the value of swift, full, and forthright apologies when public figures screw up. What about companies that screw up? Blippy is a website that lets users trade updates about their consumer purchases. Recently, an obscure programming error, compounded by mistakes at Google and one small midwestern bank, allowed Google to index the credit card numbers of four or five Blippy customers, potentially exposing these numbers to people browsing the web. Co-founder & CEO Ashvin Kumar's apology to users could serve as a model for companies that find themselves in a similar pickle. Moneyquote: It has been...

11 May, 2010

"If you have something that you don't want anyone to know," said Google CEO Eric Smith, "maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." Smith's cavalier assessment of browser privacy issues in an MSNBC interview so incensed the main developer of the Mozilla Firefox browser that he urged Firefox users to abandon Google for a search engine with a better privacy policy, namely Bing, by Google arch-rival Microsoft: Asa Dotzler's outburst raised eyebrows on the net, because the non-profit Mozilla Foundation, maker of Firefox and the Thunderbird email program, depends on Google for about 97 percent of its revenue. Various bloggers...

16 December, 2009