Free Republic

Today's news can prompt two very different views of Google, based on the announcement of its free Google Public DNS. In one view, Google is our best friend and a noble public servant. In the other, Google may be the darkest force on the Internet. Which is it? We all must decide. Here's the news: Today Google has begun offering an experimental, but stable, Public Domain Name Server (DNS), described in a Thursday post to Google's Official Blog. The goal is for the new DNS to increase browsing speed and improve Internet security. I have read the technical description and...

If you've used Google, you've probably noticed the "autosuggest" feature. Type a few letters, and a drop-down box appears of phrases which might complete your search term. For example, if you type "tekt" you'll get several suggestions, including "tektronix" and "tektronix oscilloscope." Now try typing "climategat" (without the final "e"). All you get is "climate guatemala" (4,180,000 results) and "climate guatemala city" (1,120,000 results), even though g-a-t doesn't spell "guatemala." And yet if you search for "climategate" in full, you'll see over 20 million results (as of this writing). I've found no subset of "climategate" which actually causes Google to...

YAHOO! and Microsoft have finalised the details of their planned internet search and advertising partnership. The companies hope to implement the deal next year with the approval of anti-trust regulators. "Yahoo! and Microsoft welcome the broad support the deal has received from key players in the advertising industry and remain hopeful that the closing of the transaction can occur in early 2010," the companies said in a joint statement. "Microsoft and Yahoo! believe that this deal will create a sustainable and more compelling alternative in search that can provide consumers, advertisers and publishers real choice, better value and more innovation."...

Google News is blocking all searches of "Climategate". Proof:site:news.google.com climategatesite:news.yahoo.com climategate (for comparison)site:news.aol.com climategate (for comparison) Click on any of the above links to run the search and see for yourself. However, if you search "climate change" on Google News, you will find plenty of hits:site:news.google.com climate change

The map, which demonstrates the devastating effects of global warming in just a century, shows how San Francisco Airport would be completely underwater if sea levels were to rise by ...60in. The coastline on the map was also coloured, highlighting how nearly half a million Californians are at risk from rising sea levels. The map, named CalAdapt, which was revealed at a press conference on Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay by Mr Schwarzenegger and Google CEO Eric Schmidt, was created as part of a plan for the state to adapt to global warming. 'Within a century, Treasure Island, this...

Android goes for iPhone weak spot: porn apps Bill Andad - Dec 3rd, 2009, 9:45 am Yes there are 100,000 or so apps for the iPhone, but thanks to Apple policy if it's porn you are after there's not an app for that. The construction of an Adult App Store for Android devices, however, could soon swing this particular market segment towards the iPhone competitor. The MiKandi App Store is strictly an adults only affair, and claims to be the world's first fully mobile adult app store. Although currently only available for Android users, the developers are already talking about...

Excerpts: "On a related note, Monckton also is accusing Google of playing dirty tricks with Internet searches. A popular Internet video featuring the noted climate skeptic was allegedly "buried" beneath junk searches on the popular Internet search engine Google." Monckton says Google knowingly hid the video that featured him discussing the dangers of signing a climate treaty in Copenhagen later this month. [...] He adds that Al Gore serves as an advisor on Google's board.

Oh this truly is sad. Image at link.

Mountain View, CA (AHN) - Google has unveiled a program that will allow news sites to limit the number of free clicks on news by online user per day to appease publishers complaining of Google News as profiting from their content. The First Click Free program launched Tuesday allows an individual only five free clicks on news sites per day. Readers who click more than the allowed number of times will be greeted by a pop-up inviting them to subscribe to the news site. The search engine giant is also applying to News Corp. another program that allows publishers to...

Is Google Ignoring ClimateGate? A study of contrasts. You be the judge

Google is closing in on a beta for the Mac version of its Chrome browser, according to a list of still-to-be-addressed issues. Just eight bugs are holding up the release of Chrome for the Mac, Google's bug tracking database showed Monday morning. Of the eight, only two are marked as Priority 1: Both involve crashes when the browser tries to render content for Adobe's Flash media format. Three weeks ago, a product manager on the Chrome team said that Google would deliver a beta for the Mac in early December.

The search engine Google.com was blocking the word "climategate" from its autosuggestion routines, and appears to be still doing so. Screenshots published by Ian Wishart of The Briefing Room, and Anthony Watts of WattsUpWithThat, show that when a user tries to spell out the word "climategate," even when he spells it out almost completely, the Google routine fails to suggest the word--unless that word is part of the user's prior search-engine history. Instead, the autosuggestion routine returns "Climate Guatemala" and "Climate Guatemala City."

Newspaper publishers will now be able to set a limit on the number of free news articles people can read through Google, the company has announced. The concession follows claims from some media companies that the search engine is profiting from online news pages. Publishers will join a First Click Free programme that will prevent web surfers from having unrestricted access. Users who click on more than five articles in a day may be routed to payment or registration pages.

Note: title suffix – “autosuggest still blocked” has been removed, see update2 at bottom of story. We’ve had the term “global warming” in the lexicon since well before the Internet became a household tool, certainly well before Google itself. So it is with amazement that I report the rise of a new term, “Climategate” in just a little over 1 week in the Google search engine.

November 30, 2009 SNIPPPET: "GIMF Stands for the Global Islamic Media Front. They are the primary media outlet for the al-Shabaab terrorist group in Solmalia." http://gimfmail.blogspot.com/

What is going on at Google? I only ask because last night when I typed “Global Warming” into Google News the top item was Christopher Booker’s superb analysis of the Climategate scandal. It’s still the most-read article of the Telegraph’s entire online operation – 430 comments and counting – yet mysteriously when you try the same search now it doesn’t even feature.

Water-on-moon discovery doesn't align with 'trends' Tuesday, November 24, 2009 3:18 AM By JOE BLUNDO A few days have passed since we learned that the moon has water, but I'm still not over it. Water on the moon! It's astounding, isn't it? At least a little? I checked Google Trends for Nov. 13, the day NASA made the announcement. "Water on the moon" finished 10th -- behind search terms such as "Tony Alamo," "Tia Mowery wedding pictures" and "Wal-Mart Black Friday." The next day, the topic didn't make the list. Granted, Google Trends -- a daily look at the most...

For most of the past week, when someone typed "Michelle Obama" in the popular search engine Google, one of the first images that came up was a picture of the American first lady altered to resemble a monkey. On Wednesday morning, the racially offensive image appeared to have been removed from any Google Image searches for "Michelle Obama." Google officials could not immediately be reached for comment. Google faced a firestorm of criticism over the episode. First, it banned the Web site that posted the photo, saying it could spread a malware virus. Then, when the image appeared on another...

BAGHDAD / Aswat al-Iraq: Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Rafie al-Issawi discussed with the chief of Google company on Sunday investment opportunities available in Iraq’s communications sector, according to a release by Issawi’s office. “Issawi and Eric Schmidt took up ways to launch investments in the communications field with the objective of providing better services for Iraqi citizens,” read the release as received by Aswat al-Iraq news agency. Eric Emerson Schmidt (born April 27, 1955) is an engineer, Chairman/CEO of Google Inc. and a former member of the Board of Directors of Apple Inc. He also sits on the board of...

Talk about your tangled webs!  When you start looking at the online terrorist community you can get lost in a never ending circle.  Here's the journey I took today - starting where else?  YouTube, the terrorists dream come true.  Let's take a trip, shall we? Isn't that sweet?  An old man strapped with a suicide belt.   This video is apparently so good it has 2 sequels:   In part 3 there we see the suicide terrorist waving goodbye from a car that's driving away, and then later in part 3 - BOOM!  He blows himself to hell. In case...

A searchable map detailing 40 years of Israeli archaeological work in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, developed for the USC Digital Library, has won the 2009 Open Archaeology Prize from the American Schools of Oriental Research.A nonprofit organization founded in 1900 and located at Boston University, the American Schools of Oriental Research support the study and public understanding of peoples and cultures of the Near East. The prize, to be presented today at a professional meeting in New Orleans, recognizes “the best open-access, open-licensed, digital contribution to Near Eastern archaeology by an ASOR member.” Project leaders Lynn Swartz Dodd...

A radical new day has dawned for the operating system. Today Google finally aired its long awaited Chrome Operating System. The operating system was detailed at a press conference starting at 1 p.m. EST, and the open source code was posted online just before the start of the presentation. The new operating system brings a dramatically different look and perspective to the market and just may give Microsoft and OS X some tough competition by reinventing a tired old wheel -- the operating system -- offering the first laptop/desktop OS built around the browser and web applications. A Google engineer...

An update on a story we ran two days ago. Here's the background: I've been watching this for a couple of days. Finally decided to blog about it. I think this except sums up the liberal outrage and Google's response. From Michelle Obama Watch: It has been 2 days since I began my countdown to how long it would take Google to FIX their image search result for Michelle Obama. Just in case you’ve never done a search I’ll save you the time. This is what you will find… Well...Google caved. Here was Google's response to the fringe blogger:...

Sometimes Big Brother needs help. I've been watching this for a couple of days. Finally decided to blog about it. I think this except sums up the liberal outrage and Google's response. From Michelle Obama Watch: "It has been 2 days since I began my countdown to how long it would take Google to FIX their image search result for Michelle Obama. Just in case you’ve never done a search I’ll save you the time. This is what you will find…" Offensive? Or just plain funny? You can decide that. By the way, I don't seem to recall any outrage...

I discovered something quite interesting just now. The domain name "ImpeachObama.com" was registered on 15 Jul 2004 07:10:37, just over one week after Obama was CHOSEN to give the keynote speech to the Democratic National Convention in Boston, which he delivered on July 27, 2004, nearly two weeks AFTER the domain was registered. Any browse to that address results in bringing up a Google search on the word "Obama," where, naturally, the first result is Obama's "Organizing for America" organization at BarackObama.com. When it comes to scheming, those Democrats sure don't mess around, do they?

Switzerland's data protection commissioner on Friday announced that he was taking Google to court in a dispute over privacy concerns on the US Internet giant's "Street View" facility. Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner, Hanspeter Thuer, said in a statement that he was taking the case to the Federal Administrative Tribunal after Google had refused to apply the majority of measures he had recommended. The Street View facility allows users to take a ground level panoramic view of some locations on Google Maps, based on still photographs taken by specially-equipped vehicles. The Swiss data protection commissioner had repeatedly complained since...

Who is failure? If you trust Google's top search result to point you to the right answer, it's President Obama. The culprit is not a politically charged search engine but rather a Google Bomb. Such tricks have plagued the White House for some time. Nefarious bloggers exploit the way Google's algorithm surfaces relevant information by linking a word or group of words -- in this case, "who is failure" -- to a central Web page -- Barack Obama's White House profile page. During President Bush's term, George W. Bush's profile frequently showed up on searches including "failure," "miserable failure" and...

I’d thought the googlebombs relating to “miserable failure” and “failure” had finally been defused earlier this year. Guess not. Ranking tops in Google right now, the official White House page for US President Barack Obama: I’ve not heard of any active campaign to linkbomb Obama to the top for these words, so I’m guessing this is fallout from the long-standing “miserable failure” googlebomb that was impacting his predecessor, President George W. Bush. Below, some key background from our archives: Google Kills Bush’s Miserable Failure Search & Other Google Bombs from January 2007 provides detailed background on what googlebombing or linkbombing...

Now appearing on Google: The story of my life. And yours. Not everyone can read it, but the engineers and advertising specialists at Google can. And now users can get a peek, thanks to Google Dashboard, a new service developed at the search giant’s outpost in Zurich. Dashboard lets registered Google users see what the company knows about them. If you’ve got a Google account, just punch up www.google.com/dashboard, and get ready to feel your skin crawl. Google knows just about everything about me. No deep, dark secrets; just thousands of tiny data points which, when put together, could provide...

A Democratic Party-sponsored "national innovation conference" to examine key policy and technology issues at Google's headquarters beginning today has critics charging that the $5,000-and-up ticket prices limit access to the event to Silicon Valley high rollers and raise the specter of "pay to play" politics. Consumer Watchdog in Santa Monica likened the event to Republicans holding an energy conference at an oil company headquarters. The consumer rights group urged California Sens. Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein and four other senators to boycott the fundraiser sponsored by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. Eric Schultz, communications director for the campaign committee, defended...

Big news for developers out there: Google has just announced the release of a new, open sourced programming language called Go. The company says that Go is experimental, and that it combines the performance and security benefits associated with using a compiled language like C++ with the speed of a dynamic language like Python. GoÂ’s official mascot is Gordon the gopher, seen here. HereÂ’s how Google describes Go in its blog post: Go attempts to combine the development speed of working in a dynamic language like Python with the performance and safety of a compiled language like C or C++....

While many of the search giant’s temporary logos - such as the recent series marking the 40th anniversary of Sesame Street - appear to surfers in many countries, some are specific to particular nations. We have trawled through all the archived doodles for the past two years to select 10 that Anglo-Saxon web users may struggle to decipher. Can you identify the celebrations and anniversaries to which they pertain, and to which nation’s Google visitors they were visible? Click at the link at the bottom of the story to reveal the full list of answers.

Wow. Somebody contact Google and applaud them for customizing their logo to honor veterans, and this after celebrating Sesame Street for the past week.  They dropped their usual PC party, for at least one day, to actually pay tribute to America's veterans with a touching logo involving a faceless veteran with a child at his feet, looking up, and saluting.Back on Lincoln's birthday, last year, they had to celebrate Darwin's birthday instead.  I was speechless until more inappropriate language came to mind.  And with subsequent custom logos that alert surfers to a special day, their left-leaning web artwork has advertised their values as...

Media experts will join bishops from across Europe to tell them how best to communicate the Catholic Church's message in the 21st century.Steeped in history, the Church often struggles to explain its outlook and Pope Benedict XVI has in recent months been mired in controversy over remarks about the role condoms can play in halting the spread of Aids and his decision to rehabilitate a Holocaust-denying British bishop.During a four-day conference which starts on Thursday, representatives from the social network Facebook, the search engine Google, the YouTube video sharing website and the online encyclopedia Wikipedia will explain the importance of...

If the iPhone didn't finish off Windows Mobile in the smartphone market, the Motorola Droid may. Windows Mobile is losing the last vestiges of its mojo--if it really had any to begin with--as the Droid and other phones based on the Android 2.0 operating system push the buzz meter needle into the red zone. Many in the media--which can play a big role in steering users to one technology platform or another--sense that Windows Mobile has now been relegated resolutely to has-been status. The Motorola Droid's high-resolution screen.(Credit: Verizon) Let's do a quick canvas of what some in the press...

Last month Skype was in talks to acquire VoIP startup Gizmo5. It was a perfect backup plan in case all that IP litigation didn't work out. Gizmo5's SIP infrastructure could theoretically replace Skype's proprietary P2P back end. After the Skype settlement, though, Gizmo5's strategic value to Skype sort of plummeted. In the meantime, Google bought them, say multiple sources with knowledge of the deal, for around $30 million in cash. The deal is done, say our sources, and will be announced shortly. Gizmo5 is a good fit with a number of Google products. Google Talk allows voice calls between users...

Google has always been surprisingly random in the historical events it chooses to highlight by changing the logo on the front page. All last week they chose to highlight Sesame Street by promoting different characters from the show to celebrate the T.V. show's 40th Anniversary. If you follow these things, you'll know that Google celebrated the birthday of H.G. Wells, the USB code, Comic Con, and crop circles in the same way. On today's anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, however, Americans get another Sesame Street theme featuring the "Count."

Google Dashboard is unveiled revealing just how much information the internet giant stores about its users. Benjamin Cohen asks whether it raises privacy concerns. Google has this morning unveiled the Google Dashboard, a simple way of immediately seeing all of the data the internet giant holds on you and allowing you to delete, if you wish. For years, Google has been under pressure from privacy campaigners due to the huge amount of data the company has stored for many years about nearly every internet user in the world.

Want more evidence print media is giving way to digital formats? According to CNBC "Squawk on the Street" Nov. 3, Internet behemoth Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) could have its sights set on The New York Times (NYSE:NYT). Brian Shactman, a general assignment reporter for CNBC noted an article in the Nov. 2 Wall Street Journal that indicated a lot of big companies are hoarding cash and short term investments and it pointed out the information technology sector had nearly $280 billion to invest. ...more (w/video)...

Mountain View wants your exabyte Google’s massively global infrastructure now employs a proprietary system that automatically moves and replicates loads between its mega data centers when traffic and hardware issues arise. The distributed technology was first hinted at — in classically coy Google fashion — during a conference this summer, and Google fellow Jeff Dean has now confirmed its existence in a presentation (PDF) delivered at a symposium earlier this month. The platform is known as Spanner. Dean’s presentation calls it a “storage and computation system that spans all our data centers [and that] automatically moves and adds replicas of...

ON THE INTERNET - Quote: 30 October 2009 SERGEI BRIN MAKES JIHADI SH*TLIST Mazel Tov! Posted on 30 October 2009 @ 23:42

Verizon Wireless opened up to us. Verizon Communications Inc. and Motorola Inc. proudly and excitedly showed off their new Droid smart phone in a meeting Wednesday afternoon.First impression: The device is fast, powerful, fully featured and well-designed -- a combination of adjectives we've never used for a Verizon cellphone.When was the last time a Verizon phone got this much hype? The BlackBerry Storm? Ouch.Yet, one is coming on Nov. 6, and it has a good chance of living up to the hype. A phone with Google's fast-improving Android operating system, a 5-megapixel camera with a flash and digital zoom, a...

Conservative columnist and radio host Andrea Shea King had her Radio Patriot site at Google's Blogspot taken offline last night by Google.King had maintained the Radio Patriot at Blogspot for over three years. The site was taken down without warning and without explanation. King's efforts to contact Google have been for nought so far. Attempts to bring up the site get this message:Blog has been removed Sorry, the blog at radiopatriot.blogspot.com has been removed. This address is not available for new blogs.King is a vocal opponent of Barack Obama. She has posted many entries criticizing his presidency and reporting on...

Just how far is the Obama administration willing to go to reward big donors? In the wake of yesterday’s explosive report regarding “scores of top Democratic donors” being rewarded with “VIP access to the White House, private briefings with administration advisers and invitations to important speeches and town-hall meetings,” it’s a question that’s on the minds of many politically-engaged Americans, and one likely to grab yet more attention, thanks to this article in today’s USA Today. It notes that: “More than 40% of President Obama’s top-level fundraisers have secured posts in his administration, from key executive branch jobs to diplomatic...

SNIPPET - quote: Doing a Google search today for "al Qaeda", I accidentally hit "map" instead of "news". And you know what? Al Qaeda is on the map.

Energy Secretary Steven Chu announced this morning at Google's Mountain View campus the first round of federal grants on high-risk but potentially high-reward ventures, such as converting bacteria into gasoline, to counter global warming. Chu chose Google's college-campus-like headquarters to fulfill a pledge by the Obama administration to back the kind of convention-breaking technology Silicon Valley — and the innovative search engine company — is known for. "We are trying to hit home runs, not base hits," Chu said. "These are out-of-the-box approaches." The grants are being directed through the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, or Arpa-e, a relatively new organization...

Leading Indian politicians have condemned Google, the internet search engine, for publishing a map which cedes parts of the country's Himalayan states to China. Google's satellite map of the border area between India and China show several Indian towns in Arunachal Pradesh listed under their Chinese names as part of the People's Republic of China. Itanagar, the capital of Arunachal Pradesh, is shown on Google Maps as north of a dotted line marking the border between India and China, ie in disputed territory The maps also show the state's southern border with Assam and its northern boundary with China as...

Think that everything you get with a Google search is the real deal? Not when you search for "Ruth Bader Ginsburg"! And this is one search you might regret making! NOTE: The author of this comic requests that you visit his web site and please refrain from copying the cartoon within this thread. Thanks much peeps!

Ever get the idea that what you were searching for on Google aint quite what you got back in the results? We know how you feel in today's "Geeks On Caffeine"! NOTE: The author of this comic requests that you visit his web site and please refrain from copying then cartoon within this thread. Thanks a bunch y'all!