Sunday, February 23, 2003

BBC NEWS | Technology | Is Google too powerful? BBC NEWS | Technology | Is Google too powerful? [Daypop Top 40] Tracking users Google is a privately-owned US company that has a policy of collecting as much information as possible about everyone who uses its search tool. It will store your computer's IP address, the time/date, your browser details and the item you search for. It sets a tracking cookie on your computer that does not expire until 2038. This means that Google builds up a detailed profile of your search terms over many years. Google probably knew when you last thought you were pregnant, what diseases your children have had, and who your divorce lawyer is. It refuses to say why it wants this information or to admit whether it makes it available to the US Government for tracking purposes. And the much-loved Google toolbar tells Google about every web page you look at. Yet it so dominates the search engine market that no website can afford to ignore it, and it indexes so much of the web that few users think of using another. The way it ranks pages is a commercial secret, outside any external supervision or control. If Google decides it does not like you then you can be dropped from the index. 2:12:05 AM    Comment [] Brits to roll up their pants legs At least somebody is looking at what is happening to the world. Flowers blooming in Alaska, indeed! Golfing in Anchorage in February?! But no, Bushie says we must go to war to get more oil. Must not be hot and tempestuous enough for the mofo. Miasma Farewell Cool Britannia. Floods, tornadoes - and bags of sun. Blair to warn of drastic changes to our climate. [Guardian Unlimited] London will be like Naples. Mediterranean temperatures will be the norm from Brighton to Bristol. Freak weather events will dominate the news as tornadoes and hurricanes crash across the country. Winter - what's left of it - will be no more than a few days in the middle of January. Snow will be rare, even in the mountains of Scotland. Thousands of square miles of Britain will be at threat from disappearing into the sea as floods wreak havoc. Tomorrow the Government will release its bleakest assessment yet of the state of the world's environment. In the first review of Britain's seemingly insatiable desire to consume more and more energy, an official report by the Department of Trade and Industry will say that the Earth's temperature will rise by up to 6 C by the end of the century. Compared to a rise of just 0.6 C during the whole of the twentieth century, it would be the most rapid rise in the Earth's temperature for 10,000 years. The blame will be put squarely on the rise in polluting carbon dioxide emissions, a direct effect of ever-increasing demand for fossil-fuel based energy. 1:10:13 AM    Comment [] Wired: Why Did Google Want Blogger? Why Did Google Want Blogger?. Google's recent purchase of Pyra Labs, maker of a weblogging tool called Blogger, has generated much speculation about why the popular search engine did the deal. One man who worked closely with Pyra thinks he knows the answer. By Leander Kahney. [Wired News] [...] Meanwhile, thousands of weblogs and weblog indexes like Daypop and Blogdex have been loaded with debate about what the deal meant for the Web, for searching and for blogging. The acquisition has puzzled some onlookers: what would a search company want with a tool for making weblogs? [...] Cleveland said Google's acquisition of Pyra would, quite simply, help Google create a more accurate search engine by adding rich new sources of data gleaned from weblogs. The secret, Cleveland said, is in the scores of links webloggers create every day to content on the Web. Google became the preeminent search engine by exploiting the structure of hyperlinks that make up the Web. Instead of using a simple keyword search, which is how most early search engines found their results, the company developed a proprietary system, called PageRank, which looks at hyperlinks as well as keywords to determine which pages are most popular on the Web. [...] Cleveland said Google will likely use Blogger to develop sophisticated searches that utilize the rich metadata inherent in the RSS feeds from weblogs: who wrote what and when, what it linked to, what linked to it and its level of popularity with Web surfers. [...] "By doing this we were taking a couple of baby steps down the road of what some have called the semantic Web -- a Web ... where computers can understand, at some level, the meaning and context of a Web page or blog post," he explained in an e-mail. Cleveland said in addition to using RSS metadata, the company planned to add ways to factor in Web traffic statistics. "We would look not only at what was written, but what was viewed and how people got there," he said. Cleveland said the technology could allow Web surfers to find not just breaking news stories, but those highly ranked by the weblogging community. In addition, those stories could be accompanied by the best comments made by popular webloggers, or those writing in a certain language or from a particular country. "You could search for 'U.S. invades Iraq' and get instant worldwide reaction," Cleveland said. "And then you could search, sort, filter or group (those posts) using metadata. Here's what people in France are saying." 12:50:34 AM    Comment []

© Copyright 2003 Miasma. Last update: 25/3/03; 11:32:59 PM. This theme is based on the SoundWaves (blue) Manila theme.