Andreas Wacker

Nicolas Carr asks Is Google Making Us Stupid.

The question is provocative, the underlying mechanism interesting. His conclusions seem predictive and not very helpful I am afraid. Reading the title I hoped for the wrong article. One that would illuminate and much more interesting question: “How does google change the way we think”. It certainly does. I am amazed how quickly I find myself forgetting things. It was worrying at first. After all I make a living based on the application of knowledge. The foundation of knowledge was being able to remember things. I say was. And -actually- I think it is quiet ok.

The apparent loss of memory was frightening when I observed how I would google for things again and again. The nicest anecdote I mention frequently: Reading my own blog without noticing that I am fixing an issue following a recipe that I wrote myself.

Nowadays I think that my brain just realized that it is a waste of time to compete with the internet and google as it’s access if it comes to all those mundane details that make up my job. Once a decent phone book function comes along (be it as a book or function of the phones software) we quickly forget most numbers we used to be able to remember. Just how it goes.

Google mail seemed to have gotten a facelift a few weeks ago. But it also got more functionalities. Of the nice kind: I was working on an email exchange with a couple of people just now. While typing along there was all of a sudden a yellow message in the lower right corner. It informed me that somebody had added a message to the thread I was writing in. It’s this kind of helpful idea and feature that makes gmail the best mail app around these days. Very impressive.

Just got an email back that I had send. Or should we say that I supposedly sent. No, I have not switched to Windows and are victim of the usual malware. No I don’t think that just because somebody has put in my email address in the “From:” field that I have sent it. What just happened is much much scarier:

Only the tail of my email was what I sent. The start was spam. I send this email with gmail to somebody that uses SBC or pacbell and is pretty sure on a mac as well. If my email get mixed up with spam then they certainly have a hard time getting delivered.

Which is the scariest part of the whole story: I still assume that email works. I send something once, and if I don’t hear back then I do not bother people again. Which is a good way of communicating, as long god damn email works.

the slate sheds some interesting light on Copyright and why youTube might be in less trouble than everybody claimed.

the youTube founders came up with a ‘video’ for the occasion

“Two Kings came together” ?? wtf!

Honestly, I would rather not be in their shoes. Good for them that they cashed in like they did.
But not being a dork like they are: priceless.

It reminds of the “King of the World”.
Somehow the gluttening reference to royality is a sure way to make you disappear.

google buys youtube

Didn’t google try their own video thing? If you have it, then you can pay 1.6 billion for making your own solution worse than the one coming out of a garage somewhere. The only problem is, that once you start doing this you loose the edge. Gmail was the last thing that google did that really worked. Search is still of amazing quality for them. Maps is decent,
but video they screwed up, and now they pay the equivalent of the GDP of Mongolia for their mistake. OK almost, that one is 1885 Millions.

google did a quick little game to let you add tags to images.
It’s actually quiet nice, since it seems to have a couple of innovative ideas and it does even work.

http://www.google.com/ncr

is the URL you want to use in order to teach google NOT to show you the localized Version that they throw at you based on your IP. I had removed all my google cookies and was faced with the devastating fact that I rank at #15 or so for my own name on the german gogole version.

google checkout

If lots of merchands sign up then this will be a big deal.

why did google blog at 3:00 am about it?

It took me a while to be the ‘#1 result’ results when somebody enters my complete name in google. I look at the results page for this once in a while. Since I know the usual order of the pages by heart, it makes a great indicator if something changed at google. This morning I saw a pretty nasty bug:

As you can see my blog agregator BlogsNow contains the wrong “snippet”. It does not produce compelling effects. This snippet is actually one that comes from the result above it. In this case it’s not that tragic, since the result above is still related to me: It’s my former job. But the same might happen to two sites that have controversial views on a topic.

Things break. Google code is not immune to this. The bigger question is, if and when it gets fixed.

Looks like an interest article about Tron.
Just that I have no time to read it right now.

tron on youtube

tron on google video

I let you decide what is more relevant and more interesting.

As much as I like a free thing that works mostly. Today google over did it:

I understand their urge for more money ( they are only worth billions by now) so they like to peddle their “google talk service”. At first I was mildly shocked when I had to click through their “there is google talk” banner page in order to get to my emails. I thought that would be it and I had gmail for years, so once a year one screen to click away is ok.

But now they draw a little overlay over every email address that the mouse is hovering over. How annoying is that!
If they don’t shut that of soon ( I looked in the preferences and it seemed there was no way to do that ) then I will get my imap install going on andreaswacker.com. Or maybe google does not like to store 1038 MB worth of email for me anymore and they like to annoy me so that I go away? Either way, if this nonsense does not stop soon then I will migrate my mail over to my server again. That will be an interesting ‘pop3′ session: 1GB of email …

update 2/17/06: google stoppped displaying those pesky overlays. Glad about that.
Don’t really have the time right now to get imap going on my own domain.

In December 2005 Google handled an average of 924 searches a second. It was 528/sec a year before. Every search is done against the content of some eight billion documents or so. I think that is rather impressive. All done on Linux machines.

In December ‘04 Google did three times more searches than MSN, a year later that ratio had changed to 4.4 times.
Summer 2004 Steve Ballmer had said:

“We don’t want to be a fast follower. If we’re not first, we’ll be a fast follower, but we really want to be first.”

Mick Jagger is know to have said: “You can’t always get what you want”

Numbers from Nielsen

When I was digging for those Ballmer quotes I read a couple of articles about Microsoft and search. They had the tone as if Microsoft and the world was taken by surprise by the success of search. It sometimes sounds as if search came out of nowhere. I think Microsoft decided consiously not to pay attention to search around 2000 when it should have. They probably underestimated the value that is out there on the internet in this uncontrollable heap of information and tools. Microsoft owns the PC operating system and office software market. They simply assumed that all the valuable content would be created within their domain. Therefor they would just need to go along, release a nice pace of updates for Office, Entourage and Windows and that would be that. The internet, so they thought, is something you browse for entertainment with IE in the lunch break. They won the browser war, so what could happen to them?

As confident as the Armada did they sail into this century. And they are sinking as fast as those spanish ships did 418 years ago. Their stock price is flat. They share with Sony the grief about not being part of the booming mp3 business. Longhorn is called Vista now. It’s ok, but the excitement is largely missing. Google just started the next phase of competition by replacing the functionality of Exchange with a free service of theirs. As a little side node here: Web pundits had speculated in vivid colors how there would be a web based word or excel product to challenge the dominating products made in Seattle. Of course it makes so much more sense to start with Microsoft Exchange. Email is, after all, already a network based system. So much for the collective wisdom of crowds.

Microsoft never anticipated that there could be a whole new use of computers that would have nothing to do with writing texts or doing spreadsheats. Microsoft got their lucky break from the lack of imagination and enthousiasm at IBM when it created the personal computer. Only few years of big blue being asleep at the steering wheel, gave Bill and his people enough time to become leader in this emerging field. And they made all the right moves to stay ahead of the game since then. The PC OS market has been domimated by Microsoft very much like IBM had been sucessfully leading the computation field before. IBM could not imagine that the PC that they started would change everything. Nor could Microsoft imagine that the internet would do it all over again.

Imagination is not very tangible. It’s lack however can cost you billions. And somehow it always does.

I don’t get it they must be too smart for me. I can not see how this would be anything that google would be doing and why this makes any sense.

—

On the other hand this makes allot of sense
Imagine you are a small company: You pay some MS Exchange Expert and Microsoft quiet some money just to have email. Most features you would want you might get for free via “caribou”. Or for very little money.

I think it would make sense if the service is free. Eyeballs pay for it. Support could cost money. Putting ads in
outgoing email would be a big ‘nono’. Being a small company you don’t want to expose that you use a cheap/free service for email.

had not seen ‘chat in gmail’ yet

Looks like most of blogger is offline from here and from where BlogsNow looks.
So I told the bot to stop trying.

I just hope that gmail is been maintained better than blogspot.
Then on the other hand: After installig a postfix server recently I might be tempted to
keep gmail only as a backup.

I followed the whole google china thing and was not upset that much. I did expect google to behave like this.
But a press release like this in a blog is just too much. That’s calling everybody to drink the cool-aid. Some people will do.
I will not. Google is a big and greedy corporation. They make billions right now. They could have afforded the high route, and they choose deliberate not too. Instead they come up with a phony press release. All those smart people they hired in the last years will not leave. Their stock options will keep them. But this marks the time when google stopped being cool. I think that google is evil.

Google censors it’s results in China. Lately I have been googling allot for a current project. Installing things on linux machines means that you have to have access to all those how-to’s boards forums. Allot of linux technology exists in China and everywhere in the third world. How about calling the next redhat release not ‘tettnang’ but rather ‘democracy’. Or sprinkle those ‘bad words’ in your source code. Everybody who will filter would cut himself of a significant amount of information. The chinese boom is fueled by technological information available so freely. By merging ‘bad terms’ into the things they need to read you essentially break filtering. No matter how eagerly google will comply: Either you censor and loose lots of information for your business or you give up on the censor stuff and deal with the realities of history. Their choice really.

Right now the chinese have the cake (free information on technology) and eat it too (cencorship)

… that we have learned that whale vomit is valueable, yahoo gives up on competing with gooogle and what George Lucas sold for 10 Million to finance a divorce is now worth seven Billion dollars.

So, yes, this is a strange day.

The BBC has an widely discussed article about google out. It does not contain any real news, and it’s tone is missing the point.
But they write that Google’s ad revenue was one point five billion US$ in the quarter ending in September. According to Wikipedia has 5,000 employees. Let’s stick with that number here even though they might have hired a couple hundred more people in the meantime. Probably smart ones.
Those numbers come down to the simple fact that google makes 100,000 US$ in earnings per month and employee. That feels profitable to me.

No wonder the telcos become greedy.

Their cause is lost though.
The internet is not an aqueduct.
It’s the content that matters.
TCP/IP is so commodizied that it will always be cheap.
Worst case somebody comes up with a hack to mesh wifis together. [kidding]

You an apply the Broken Windows Theory at spam blogs as well. There was always ample opportunity for spammers in blogs. Now they are in, and they make revenue. So they enhance their spam blogs to stay in the game. Here two splogs out of a current campaign:

exhibit A
exhibit B

They certainly get better.

looking down

For a new feature to be used. Recently google allowed
the placement on websites of their content.

somebodies most liked list

there will be more, of course.

http://thisasseenontvpetsteps.blogspot.com/
or
http://thisdoggieramp.blogspot.com/

not your usual link collection.

ok, provokative title. Let’s rephrase: google tolerates spam.

Blogger is owned by google. It runs the biggest blog service on it’s blogspot domain.

It appears to be very simple to create hundrets of thousands of ‘weblogs’ like this:

http://p85.blogspot.com/

Created solely for spam purposes. So called ’splogs’. You set up a robot and there is nothing in the blogger software that stops you from adding all the blogs you like.

This is not new. Google / Blogger / Blogspot knows about it. They did nothing against it in the last years.

It should be relatively easy to make sure that there is a human in front of the computer if a new weblog is created at blogspot.com. Simplecaptchas are very common today.

There are two possible explainations why this did not happen yet:

- blogspot engineering is amazing incapable

or

- there is no real rush to get rid of splogs on googles side.

It might make sense:
You have to forget the “don’t be evil” and “organize the worlds information and make it easily accessible” google dogma’s for a second though. Google knows one thing very very well: how to run a scalable service. They have the lowest cost per stored bit due to their own file system technology. It uses commodity hardware and adds failover management brilliantly. It does cost google not much to host millions of splogs.

But wouldn’t million of false blogs pose a danger to the result-quality of a search engine?

Exactly.

Google knows from which ip address a blog get’s maintained. Nobody else does. They have the actual blog data readily available for further parsing. I doubt that the googlebot comes through the front door to blogspot. The bandwidth alone that you could be saved by crawling blogsport internally should make up for the ‘exception’ that this would mean to the googlebot operations. I don’t know these things. It’s a guess.

Every search engine has to have spam combat tools these days. Google is one of the most useful search engines and in the US they have an ok handle on search engine spam. Isn’t it funny that they don’t use their insider knowledge and acess together with their anti-spam tools to simple turn off splogs on blogspot?

Last October there was somebody that scraped famous blogers sites and reposted that content splogs. That got some attention, and stopped. But splogs did not.

Blogspot hosts lots of splogs. But also lots of legit and very powerful weblogs. Nobody can really afford to ignore the biggest weblog service. Yahoo, Msn and even my little BlogsNow have to crawl blogspot in order to find out what is going on. Google can skip the skip, all others have to deal with it.

There is also a third theory that is the most plausible:

splogs don’t matter to search engines. They have to crawl billions of pages anyway. Who cares about a couple of million spam blogs here and there. That’s probably what it is: The aircraft carrier keeps on going regardless if there are 50% more roaches in the kitchen or not.

Tomorrow we will drive 40 miles to the next city to do some offline shopping. Who cares? I know, nobody. But these little chores give you an interesting glimpse on the state of things. In Germany shops can’t just be open when they like to be. As crazy as it sounds there is a Ladenschlusszeiten gesetz where more than 3000 words define when stores can be open or closed in Germany. It used to be simple that stores would close at 6:30 pm. Which was real helpful when I was young: It got me out of bed to return some empty beer bottles and get new ones. Sometimes I missed it. That was a long time ago, and there was a revision of the law. Of course it is still regulated, but not really simple when stores are open and when they are not. After all this is Germany: if you want to consume then you have to obey some rules. There need to be rules. Germans love their rules.
Back to the shopping trip: The biggest department store in Germany is called Karstadt. Think Sears blended with Macy’s. They usually occupy a big chunk of the inner city. My wife googles

karstadt bremen oeffnungszeiten

Which should do the trick: karstadt is a very very rare name, only being used for the store. Bremen happens to be the city that the store is in. And oeffnungszeiten is german for “shop hours”. The results are complete spam. 100%.
Not one page in the right direction.

Karstadt has a website. But they seem to prefer to pay google money to be listed in the search results. Not a single result is from their own site.

The only question that remaings: Who is more broken, ‘google.de’ or ‘Karstadt’ .
Probably both.

google.de is as messed up as Apple Germany. They always have been a total pain to deal with.
I think they manage to tell their US motherships that it’s Germany’s fault that they have no success. Easier than actually getting something done here.

What might be the next google at the ‘big daddy data center’ does show the same amount of spam and junk.
Different junk, but the actual website of Germany’s biggest department store is equally missing.

or maybe I am one.
Last November Robert X Cringley writes about a google project.
He claims that Google is planning to put 5,000 opteron CPUs and 2.5 Petabytes in a 20 or 40 foot container.

Back in November the story got attention, and now it bubbles back up again in the context of the “Google PC Walmart CES” buzzword cluster.

I wondered if the “Cringleytainer” would actually be feasible:

Those pieces would barely fit in a 40 foot container. Forget about air flowing around. Maybe it’s all water cooled?

Which leads to the ultimate flaw in Cringley’s concept:
5,000 CPUs @ 90 W and 30,000 disks @ 15 W would use 0.9 Megawatt. Let’s add 0.1 Megawatts for boards and powers supplies. Of course this would assume a couple of technology breakthroughs.
Ignoring the laws of thermo dynamics we have to add the same power to cool the thing: 2 Megawatts.

Googling around I found this power source for the Cringleytainer. Guestimating optistically again it would use a gallon of diesel every minute.

Of course Mr Cringley is not an idiot. Not more or less than anybody else. I am only certain that I am one,
since I had to spend so much time with me.

What strikes me is that such a story can float around without anybody doing the basic math. Or maybe people did and got ignored. It’s much more ‘news worthy’ to toss around crazy ideas involving google.

If I should be bored in mid March then I will try to inject the urban myth of a planned Apple Google merger into the world.

gmail starts to put custom feed items on top of my email box.
Nice and not nice. The 5 different ones that I saw fly by
were tailored pretty close to what I care about. Of course:
gmail knows about me. I prefer not to realize that. And
I would like to do things at my pace, pick up information
instead of having it pushed my way.

good thing you can turn those things off …

update 12/9:
“Note: Clips of your favorite RSS and Atom feeds are displayed randomly, and aren’t targeted to the contents of your mail.”

so it say in the Webclips answer part of google.

Blogdex is still down. So I thought I might run some google adwords pointing people to BlogsNow.
Turned out somebody was faster: Right now I see an add for blogturbo dot com. Interesting what google advertises for:
It costs only 149 US$ and you can generate thousands of weblogs pointing to your site. This looks like a keyword spam tool to me.
Interesting that google runs ads for it.

Then I wonderred what is going on at daypop.com
Turns out they are down as well …

update November 1st
Blogdex: “up” again, yet results are old/pointless right now.
Daypop: back up again, results make sense. the usual 24 hour delay
blogturbo: still showing ads on google adwords for blogdex.

Blogdex did inspire me to write BlogsNow. Blogdex was great. Just a bit to slow, and took just a couple of thousand Weblogs into account. And it was not first aggregator like this either. Just the first one that got wide spread attention.

Now it’s broken. Today is Friday and it says:


Blogdex was improperly shutdown over the weekend, and should be up and running soon.


This might be related that it’s creator is no longer at MIT but took a job at Yahoo.

Blogdex Alex Rank is still very high. Interstingly the development on Blogdex stopped over a year ago. And most visitors it gained AFTER that.

I thought I do the people looking for Blogdex a favor and point them to BlogsNow.

Technorati and Icerocket both showed a couple of pages
where people noticed that blogdex is down.

Google however shows this:

a huge splog fest

Makes google blog search useless. I thought that Google would know what is spam on their own Blogger service and what is not.

Apparently not.

gmail has troubles sending mail

Right now it looks as if emails to specific recipients did not go through. They are in my sent box. But the people never received them.

Not that nice.

Not sure how far back it goes.