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Google Search Term Rollup

/ Shane / Leave a comment

“random things nobody would ever think of” – Good luck with that search.

“swashbuckling chicken” – I just…I…wow.

“so i stopped the apocalypse” – …and now I’m looking for something else to do.

“things that are going well in schools” – Aw, this made me so sad! I just imagine some depressed parent looking for just one example they could point to that something was going well in our schools these days…and only able to find my blog.

“rocket propelled banana” – Not sure what it has to do with me, but I’m in!

“advantage of pseudopods” – Plastic surgery has gotten so crazy these days. People are actually weighing the merits of attaching pseudopods?

“von trapp dog training” – So long, farewell, arf wienerdog, goodnight.

“just simple drawings of different types of puppets” – That’s all I’m looking for. Is that so much to ask, Internet?

“zombie narwhals” – This one captured my imagination. I googled it myself and found a surprising number of hits! There’s a wealth of information about this topic. I never knew narwhals were such staunch zombie fighters! And the possibility that all their zombie fighting might inevitably lead to a few zombie narwhals has come up a time or two before. Absolutely fascinating.

“zombies vs jedi” – I’m sorry, but this wouldn’t be much of a fight. I don’t know how I’ve never considered a lightsaber as a zombie fighting weapon before, but I’d be hard pressed to imagine anything better for slaying zombies!

“The first snowfall of the winter of a boys 18th year means he must take his first step towards manhood.” – This was actually a spam comment, but it is definitely the strangest one I have ever received!

My god…it’s brilliant…almost TOO brilliant

/ Shane / 2 Comments

You are probably aware of Google’s efforts to digitize as many books as possible, scanning (literally) tons of print books into their computers. Sometimes there are technical glitches or errors when scanning these books in: print may be smudged or damaged, especially if it is very old. So Google came up with a brilliant yet simple solution to this problem: get people to unwittingly do it for them, for free.

You see, even now, there are some things that are very easy for a person to do, but very difficult for a computer to do. Recognizing distorted text turns out to be one of these things. Google doesn’t want to pay an army of people to read through these books and transcribe them. That would take forever, to say nothing of the cost (although I’m pretty sure Google is more concerned with the time, than the cost). So how do you trick people into doing this for you?

reCaptcha.

You might not know the term, but a “captcha” is one of those things you have to fill out on the Internet to prove you’re not a spambot. You know, look at the image and write the text that you see, something like:

Well, if you’re using Google’s free reCaptcha product on your site (and who wouldn’t? If it’s good enough for Google, it’s good enough for me!), it not only verifies you’re not a robot, but also helps decode a particularly tricky word.

Take the example in the picture above. The first part (Years) decides if you’re a robot or not. The second part (maybe subioik?) is a picture of a word from a paper book which was scanned in, but not understood by the Google computers. If enough people answer the same thing on that captcha, the Google hive mind can assume that that image correctly maps to subioik.

In other words, it might take a computer a million years to run algorithms to figure that out, but Google could accomplish the same in about 30 seconds by harnessing millions of people trying to enter porn sites.

This is such a simple, obvious solution to the “smudged word” problem. It’s so smart it’s almost scary, like encountering an alien intelligence that is so far beyond my capacity. In fact, when I first heard about this, I dismissed it as some kind of crazy conspiracy theory. Not so. Information is available directly from Google.

I don’t see anything wrong with them doing this per say, but it still leaves a funny feeling in my stomach. I feel manipulated somehow. And anybody that ingenious is a little scary. So far they seem to be using their power for good, but what if that changed? I don’t know man…for some reason, this disturbs me greatly.

Link via Sylvain

Google+ Extensions

/ Shane / 1 Comment

Now that I’ve been using Google+ for a while, I’ve found the need for a few add-ins to make things work a little better. I should note that these are actually add-ins for Chrome, not directly for Google+, so they will only work for you if you use Chrome (and if you don’t, then I don’t have much sympathy for you anyway). I’ve been using these for a while now, and I will vouch for each of them.

Start G+ – This extension is essential! This one consolidates my Facebook and Twitter accounts with my G+ account. I can make a post in G+ and have it automatically go to Twitter and Facebook. I can see all three of my feeds in one stream. I don’t actually like having my Facebook stream combined with the other two, so I turned that option off. At this point it is still easier for me to view Facebook via Facebook, so that’s a personal choice for me. But I basically never used Twitter at all, and now I am, because it’s conveniently co-located with a service that I like. The downside is that people who follow me in more than one place have to deal with repeat messages, but I already had my blog going out to all of those places, so there was already a lot of overlap.

+PhotoZoom – When you hover over an image, it pops up full size. I thought this one sounded stupid, but everyone kept recommending it, so I tried it. It’s amazing! I’m so used to it now that I try doing it in Facebook all the time. Some examples of when I use it are: when I get a notification that someone changed their profile picture, the thumbnail is so tiny you usually can’t figure out what it is a picture of, but it’s not necessarily worth clicking on the image to see it bigger. By the same token, when someone puts up pictures, sometimes the thumbnails are good enough for most of the pictures, but you want to see one a little closer. So you can just mouse over it, and you don’t have to be taken out of the whole flow of your stream to see it.

Useability Boost for Google Plus – This is a really minor one, but it just tweaks the CSS a little bit of the G+ page. The main thing it does is change the background from white to gray, and add a little space in between posts. This might not sound like much, but it makes it so much easier to read. I tried turning it back off once, and I had to put it right back on.

+Comment – This was a way to collapse comments. When I went to get a link to where to download it, it seemed to be gone from the app store. Upton further review, it seems that it was not needed anymore, because Google+ folded that functionality into the base program. So, good on you Google. Looks like I can uninstall this one.

The one thing I’m really missing is something to automatically push my blog posts out to Google+. Right now it automatically goes to Twitter via WordPress and Facebook via Networked Blogs. But there doesn’t seem to be any equivalent yet to push things out to G+. So I am manually pasting the link in every day, which is kind of tedious.

Anybody know of anything to do this? Any other extensions you like?

Google+

/ Shane / 8 Comments

I finally had some time to play around with Google+, the new social network from Google.

I was inclined to dislike Google+. Google got me twice recently with their over-hype of Google Wave and Google Buzz, both of which were awful. After those two debacles, I believe I was on record saying, “That’s two strikes Google!” Well, Google will be happy to know that they’re back in my good graces with this one.

Google+ is very, very similar to my preferred social network, Facebook, but it is, in fact, better. Although I am a Twitter user, I do not like their interface. I know there are plenty of twitter fans out there, but I’m not one of them. So Google+ has them beat by a mile in my book.

Basically, Google learned the lessons of those that have come before. Sleek, clean interface (sorry MySpace), and more-tightly integrated security over who can see what (sorry Facebook), while keeping all the good features, such as image tagging and “liking” a post (or +1 in Google+ lingo). And the best part so far? No annoying game messages! (sorry Farmville) We’ll see if that changes in the future. I have a bad feeling there’s no way to stop it.

The best part about Google+ in my opinion is the integrated concept of “circles”.

Basically, all of your friends are categorized into one or more circles, such as “friends”, “family”, “acquaintances”, or anything else your heart desires, such as “college friends” or “red-headed step-children”. Then, whenever you do anything on Google+, you decide which circles you’d like to do it in. For example, are you telling the entire world what you had for breakfast, or just your family? Are you sharing that picture with your co-workers, or just your close friends? Do you want to see the whole stream/newsfeed, or do you want to skip the updates of mere acquaintances?

I have been using the lists feature on Facebook for quite some time in this manner, and I love it, but it always sort of feels like a late-game add on. It is a bit more difficult to use and manage, not nearly so tightly integrated. Whenever I tell someone about it, they’re always surprised to hear it exists. And really, I think it more closely represents the way we *want* to use a social network. There are some things we want to share with some people, and not others. We need the ability to sort through the overwhelming amount of information and read the updates we care about.

So, +1 to you Google+!

The problem, however, is that the thing that makes social networks social is, well, people to socialize with. Since most of the people I interact with are on Facebook, then I have to be on Facebook too. I can’t just up and switch over because I feel like it, abandoning my entire existing social network. And, although Google+ is better than Facebook, it is not *enough* better, that everybody is going to up and move. So, for the time being, I guess I’m stuck with two websites to check.

So, if you’re on Google+, you can find me here. And if you’re not, drop me a comment, and I’ll send you an invite.

Google Street View

/ Shane / 2 Comments

At this point, everybody knows there is weird stuff to find in Google street view. Statistically speaking, if you photograph enough of the world, you’re going to see some interesting things. I’ve even blogged about it before. However, seeing the weird and interesting things that the Google camera captured doesn’t seem to get old. So here’s a nice gallery of some of the interesting things found. It’s called 9 eyes in reference to the disco-globe camera that Google uses to take the pictures. (Note, the pictures are from tumblr, so the links will expire. Enjoy them while you can! Otherwise you can just go directly to 9 eyes and scroll down.)

Pictures of wildlife, prostitutes, and people with guns are always popular. There are also some nice ones of an abandoned baby, an active house fire (notice the neighbors just running outside), the aftermath of an accident (is that a body on the ground?), and a car fire. I love how the Google van just keeps going when he sees some of this stuff. He’s like, “Hey, not my job!” The Google camera van operator must have a story or two to tell. I wonder sometimes if the Google van itself actually caused any accidents? As a side note, some of these are obviously fakes. There is no road through the middle of the viewing tank at Sea World. So if some of them are fakes, can we believe any of them?