HOME |
RSS | 
If you don’t toss your cookies on a regular basis, you leave a trail behind as you surf the web. But making any sense of that trail is a science that may be beyond the reach of automated analytics -at least for now.
Ars Technica’s Casey Johnston has started a fun new game: find out what Google guesses is your age and gender. These “inferred demographics” are based on the websites you visit and are tracked by a Google cookie; they are used for advertising purposes. Given Google’s controversial announcement Tuesday that users will not be able to opt out of new privacy changes, learning what the company thinks about you seems particularly useful, and informative.
The Google ad preference page shows my interests, which is actually evidence of my work plus the interests of the three teenage girls who also use my computer, often without changing to their own Google accounts. Then it guesses that I am male, age 24-34. Wrong on all counts. How is this useful to advertisers? These analytics are based on categorizing individuals based on the perceived behaviors of groups. In real life, we call that discrimination and try to teach our kids not to do it. Either way, there’s a lot of room for error. How wrong are they about you? Link -via Metafilter
When Larry Met Sergey is the highly condensed story of Larry Page and Sergey Brin and the company they named Google. Scroll down for each chapter (slowly, because the graphics are in layers) and watch the men’s hairstyles and clothing change over the years. Link -via the Presurfer
You know, when someone confides that they sometimes Google themselves, the classic answer is “You’ll go blind!” But this Twaggie, illustrated from a Tweet by @IamMsMoneypenny, strikes close to home for me today. You can see a new Twaggie every day at GoComics. Link
Google has installed another Easter egg, except this one’s more appropriate at Christmas than Easter. Go to Google search and type in Let It Snow, and watch your wish come true! I’ve even made a shortcut for you. Link -via mental_floss
Did you know you can make Google do a barrel roll or go askew? Even if you did, you probably didn’t know at least a few of these funny Google Easter Eggs.
Neatorama readers might have a bit of a leg up on today’s Lunchtime Quiz at mental_floss. In the wake of the “do a barrel roll” frenzy, they’ve looked up more neat tricks from Google and made some up from imagination as well. Your challenge is to determine which is which. I got 10 out of 12 correct, as I did NOT open a new tab to quick-check the answers. That would be too easy. Link
I learned this morning from reddit that the Google search page will do a barrel roll if you tell it to. That’s far from the only neat tricks Google has embedded in their sites for those who have the time to find them. For those who don’t, Buzzfeed has a list of ten you might have fun checking out. Link
Don’t think for a second that Google’s business is limited to internet services. Indeed, they have their hands in a variety of industries, most recently, they’ve been testing out the beer-making business. That’s right, Google has paired with Dogfish Head beer to make their own Belgian Dubbel beer called Urkontinent.
The final brew included some impressive ingredients sourced around the world: Wattleseed from Australia, toasted amaranth from South America, green rooibos from Africa, myrica gale from Europe, and Hive Plex Honey from Google’s own California beehives. Taken all together, the beer is described by Dogfish as being hearty, with notes of coffee and chocolate covered cherries. Also, it packs more than double the average alcohol content of average beer.
To be fair, Google’s not making any money from the venture, they just want to see how the process works and to use the beer’s creation as a marketing tool. If you saw some Google beer, would you try it?
Link Via Geekosystem
Google has a neat feature that I’d never heard of before today. You can draw a distribution curve and Google will find the search term frequency that most closely resembles it. Mine ended up being “2008 sports cars.”
Comments Off
You've probably heard about how Google is enforcing a "real name" only policy for Google+ social platform (dubbed "Nymwars" and ably covered by Boing Boing).
Here's what the excellent webcomic Joy of Tech think about the whole kerfuffle (Google vs the Man of Steel? Great Scott!): Link
Google is now offering its boyfriend feature to selected users. G-Male is the perfect boyfriend. He knows everything about you! Everything.
Don’t worry about the screenshot displayed. This video from Comediva is completely safe.
Link -via Joe Carter
Comments Off 
Oops! It’s a first -an accident caused by a Google driverless Prius. It apparently drove into another Prius near Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California. Updates say that the wreck involved three Priuses and two Honda Accords! The question is: who gets the ticket? Link -via The Daily What
I have spent hours just typing in a random location and using Google Maps to “visit” it with the street view application. If that wasn’t entertaining enough (don’t knock it till you’ve tried it) Rorschmap is a website created by James Bridle which takes Google Maps and creates Kaleidoscope like images out of them.
Comments Off
Aaron Wood created three propaganda posters featuring social media giants Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. Excuse me while I head on over to Facebook to help out my friends' farms (I hear that there's also a war against mafia brewing. My help is needed!): Link - via +PeteCashmore
Comments Off 
One of the nice features of Google+ is that you can sort relationships into different categories that you can name anything you want. Happy Place had some fun with this idea and offered suggestions about how you can categorize your contacts. Link -via Swiss Miss
The winners of the very first Google Science Fair were announced on Monday. Congratulations to the top winners in each age group!
Lauren Hodge in the 13-14 age group. Lauren studied the effect of different marinades on the level of potentially harmful carcinogens in grilled chicken.
Naomi Shah in the 15-16 age group. Naomi endeavored to prove that making changes to indoor environments that improve indoor air quality can reduce people’s reliance on asthma medications.
Shree Bose in the 17-18 age group. Shree discovered a way to improve ovarian cancer treatment for patients when they have built up a resistance to certain chemotherapy drugs.
Shree Bose (center of picture) also won the overall Grand Prize, which comes with a $50,000 scholarship, a trip to the Galapagos Islands, and an internship at CERN. Shah and Hodge also won scholarships and internships at Google and LEGO. Link -via Geeks Are Sexy
“Computer, search for recipes on great barbecue ideas for the Fourth of July.” This may be how you search items on the web from now on with the launch of Google Voice Search. The new application will now be available for desktop computers.
The first of the features will enable users to search the web simply by speaking their requests. Called Voice Search, the speech-to-text application will be activated by clicking on a microphone icon located next to Google’s query box. Voice Search has already gone mobile as an App for Android phones, but Google wants to enable its users to search via speech recognition on their laptops and desktops as well. In addition to the convenience of not having to type, Voice Search will be a helping hand in those hard-to-spell searches. It’ll also be easier to, as Google puts it, enter “long queries, even really, really long queries, just by talking.” Initially, Voice Search will only be available on Chrome browsers, but they plan to make it compatible with other browsers in the future.
While there’s nothing wrong with giving your gal a glass of champagne before getting down on one knee to propose, some people prefer to go a less traditional and more personalized route. Of course, if the potential bride and groom both happen to be a bit geeky, then it follows that a customized wedding proposal might just have a bit of a nerd-twist to it as well. Here is a small sampling of some of the geekiest wedding proposals ever.
Be warned, if you tend to cry after watching emotionally-charged moments, this article (particularly the videos) might have you spraying your computer with tears. I know I was misty-eyed while writing it.
I have to admit, this just might be my favorite wedding proposal ever. Ben and his girlfriend, Tora, were both seriously addicted to the popular Gearbox RPG shooter Borderlands. That’s why when Ben decided to ask Tora to marry him, he decided to ask Gearbox for help popping the question. The company’s response was more positive than Ben ever could have hoped for, as they spent a week working on a special Borderlands-themed wedding proposal video for the couple. It even featured a few hilarious quips from the robot character, Claptrap.
Ben got all of Tora’s friends and family members together under the guise of throwing her a birthday party and unveiled the video by saying he got a hold of a new Borderlands trailer. Needless to say, after watching the video, Tora’s response was a big fat “yes,” although she did later admitted that she was a little upset that Ben got to go to the Gearbox studio without her.
This guy and his girlfriend both seriously love Mario (if you couldn’t tell already by looking at the room) so in order to ask his girlfriend to marry him, he set up a functional Mario question mark box that would drop the ring when she hit it with her head. While the set up is exactly as geeky as you might expect, it’s surprisingly emotionally touching when she tries to hold back her tears as she jumps to hit the box.
Video link
If your girlfriend loves the game Bejeweled and you happen to be a software programmer, you can do something above and beyond if you’re so inclined. Or at least, that’s what Bernie Peng did when he decided to propose, using his programming skills to create a custom Bejeweled game. Once the score got high enough, the regular screen would clear out and a ring would appear on the DS screen. Bernie then dropped to one knee and presented her with a pink ring that looked like it belonged in the game.
As if the story weren’t great enough on its own, the company that makes Bejeweled was so impressed by Bernie’s proposal that they offered to pay for the couple’s honeymoon and they volunteered to supply all of the wedding guests with a free version of Bejeweled. Now that’s a great way to capitalize on the publicity of the wedding proposal!
more …
Joshua J. Romero discovered that much of his daily life was dominated by Google. He used its myriad services for so many tasks, and worried that it gave Google too much ability to control him. So as an experiment, he decided to completely disconnect from the company:
In general, quitting Google was easier than I thought. One of the biggest lessons for me was that Google’s not the best at everything. I’m thrilled to be rid of Google Tasks. I realize now that I was always dealing with its deficiencies; it’s not even supported on Android, and it had a tendency to undo my recent changes. I now use a site called Todoist, which I find vastly superior. I had never bothered to research alternatives before, and I ended up falling for the inferior product out of what I thought was convenience.
It’s easy to get seduced by the lure of a single sign-on. But managing multiple user accounts actually isn’t as much of an annoyance as we think it is. For me, it quickly became clear that my single Google account had mixed and muddled my personal and professional services and data. There are many online services that make sense to link together—but there are plenty of others that don’t. Calendar and e-mail might be a good fit, but do you need to use the same company to manage your social contacts, RSS feeds, and to-do lists? What about your phone and computer operating system? Even in the midst of the experiment, it was hard to remember to sign-out of the Google account; I was signed in by default, just as I’m also often signed in to Twitter and Facebook without realizing it.
Link via Glenn Reynolds | Photo by Flickr user orangeacid used under Creative Commons license
For those of you that treat your smart phone and tablet like it’s your best friend, you may now be able to get one step closer to having an actual companion. Google and the company iRobot have teamed up to create the AVA robot which rolls on wheels and uses a tablet computer as its “head.”
AVA is a pedestal shaped bot on wheels which can autonomously navigate itself through a crowd without breaking anyone’s ankles. While containing a great deal of its own functionality, AVA’s head is a tablet computer. Any tablet computer. iPad2, Galaxy, you name it – iRobot claims they want AVA to be “head agnostic”.
How well do you remember -or decipher- the alterations that Google makes to their logo for special occasions? Test your knowledge with the Google Doodle quiz, from our own social networking expert David Israel. Hey, I scored 58% just by guessing. You will probably do much better! Link
Comments Off 
Since humans were able to conceive of the concept of time they have wanted to know the future. And with the advent of Google we have come even more expectant of having any and all information at our fingertips. Have you ever found yourself wanting to Google something that doesn’t exist yet? Sports scores to a game that hasn’t been played? Find results for the 2012 presidential election? Well now someone has cataloged future events for each year as determined by the first page of Google search results. What comes up is an interesting list of visions of what’s to come. Only a small portion of the time line is shown here. Link
Bruno Miguel snapped this photograph of Yoda, just moments before he became a Jedi Master. Now you know where he got his infinite wisdom. The best part is that the Yoda in the picture came from the NeatoShop! Link -Thanks, Bruno!
Comments Off 
Can you algorithmically optimize a company’s management team? Well, after building the web’s most dominant search engine and self-driving car, Google’s gonna try to tackle the next frontier: they’re going to build better bosses.
IN early 2009, statisticians inside the Googleplex here embarked
on a plan code-named Project Oxygen.Their mission was to devise something far more important to the future of Google Inc. than its next search algorithm or app.
They wanted to build better bosses.
So, as only a data-mining giant like Google can do, it began analyzing performance reviews, feedback surveys and nominations for top-manager awards. They correlated phrases, words, praise and complaints.
Later that year, the “people analytics” teams at the company produced what might be called the Eight Habits of Highly Effective Google Managers.
Adam Bryant of The New York Times has the full story: Link (Photo: Peter DaSilva/The New York Times)
Students between the ages of 13 and 18 are invited to take part in a global online science fair, sponsored by Google, CERN, The LEGO Group, National Geographic, and Scientific American.
You may have participated in local or regional science fairs where you had to be in the same physical space to compete with kids in your area. Now any student with an idea can participate from anywhere, and share their idea with the world. You build and submit your project—either by yourself or in a team of up to three—entirely online. Students in India (or Israel or Ireland) will be able to compete with students in Canada (or Cambodia or Costa Rica) for prizes including once-in-a-lifetime experiences (like a trip to the Galapagos Islands with a National Geographic Explorer), scholarships and real-life work opportunities (like a five-day trip to CERN in Switzerland). And if you’re entering a science fair locally, please feel free to post that project online with Google Science Fair, too!
You can enter up until April 4th. Find links to the rules, prizes, and particulars at the Official Google Blog. Link -via Discoblog
Google has a new tool in which you can search the books that Google has digitized for a keyword and get statistics from as far back as the 16th century. The Google Book Ngram Viewer gives you data you can use to track the popularity of …just about anything. For example, Geeks Are Sexy looked as terms like “geek”, “computer geek”, and “computer hacker” to ascertain that geeks are indeed, gaining in popularity. Link
This promotional video for Google Docs shows how the utility’s presentation options can be used to create a fairly sophisticated animated short. It took 3 animators 3 days to complete the 413 slides. You can view the file at the link.
Comments Off 
Google has now released the Zeitgeist, a report on search patterns and trends, for 2010. New for this year is that they have added interactive HTML5 data visualizations for the top queries and events from around the world.
Link – via Official Google Blog
Comments Off 
What a neat idea! Type the name of each state in the US into the Google search field one at a time, and see what autocomplete suggestions come up. Then make a map of them. That’s what happened at Very Small Array, which resulted in this. I would have guessed Kentucky easily. See a larger version of this map at the site. Link -via The Daily What
One enterprising redditor named harrichr found that it is possible to make Google Translate’s audio function generate a beatbox sound. Here’s the process.
1) Go to Google Translate
2) Set the translator to translate German to German
3) Copy + paste the following into the translate box: pv zk pv pv zk pv zk kz zk pv pv pv zk pv zk zk pzk pzk pvzkpkzvpvzk kkkkkk bsch
4) Click “listen”
5) Be amazed
You can try it out yourself at the Google Translate link below.
Google Translate Link and reddit Link via Geekosystem
