34 posts tagged “google”

Now that Vox has fixed whatever bug it has and I can write again, I can tell you about the following find on Google, which Janette mentioned on her blog.
   On the one hand, I am glad Google has been transparent about this and told us that it has noted down our advertising preferences. There are countless other companies that track us through their cookies and have not been honest enough to tell us about them.
   On the other hand, it is disturbing what is being tracked about us online by Google and other companies.
   Mine are not accurate. You would expect that my interest in cars would be noted, but no. Here are the categories Google has associated with me, which are so off you wonder just how bad its technology is:

Arts & Humanities
Computers & Electronics - Programming
Computers & Electronics - Software
Computers & Electronics - Software - Audio & Multimedia
Computers & Electronics - Software - ... - Internet Clients & Browsers
Entertainment - Celebrities
Entertainment - Multimedia Content - Flash Content
Entertainment - Multimedia Content - Video Clips & Movie Downloads
Internet - Online Goodies - MySpace Codes & Graphics
Photo & Video - Photo & Video Sharing
Social Networks & Online Communities - Blogging Resources & Services

I admit I have checked for some celebrity news. One in eleven strikes me as an extremely poor understanding of my preferences. I am not a programmer, have little interest in software, certainly do not want multimedia content about entertainment, use MySpace four times a year, and only share my videos and photos with you here on Vox (though I do look at the Lucire videos from time to time). While I blog, I doubt I need to be advertised to since I am already set in my ways; and I do not recall seeing any ad for blogging resources lately.
   When I started removing the above, Google added some extra categories, including something to do with punk music and another to do with news from Korea! Very lame.
   I already think Google’s Adsense programme to be one of the worst I have ever encountered in what is a very mature industry in the US. I have no idea why it is so well regarded or why people speak so highly of it; it is the antithesis of Amazon.com, for instance, which has become a bit of standard when it comes to online shopping.
   I imagine Google Adsense is the online advertising equivalent of Microsoft Word: no one knows any better, so they assume that things are not that bad.
   I have since opted out of these Google cookies, as it seems Google will not serve relevant advertising in any case.

This was very subtle:

I thought it was a typo when I originally saw it (the proofreader’s instinct again), before it clicked: it’s Google’s 11th birthday. As parodies go, this one is clever—and few people can go around wrecking the Google logo in parody form, since the company regularly does it by itself.

In case my Firefox 3.5.3 woes were due to Google Toolbar not being up to date, I installed a new one. Bad mistake.
   The new one is difficult to edit in 3.5.3, and each update took 20 to 60 seconds for the menu bar to stop being greyed out. During this editing process—and, in fact, through no intervention of my own—the Google Toolbar spanner icon disappeared.
   So how does one get it back? Ask Google?

You guessed it: in order to get back a missing icon, you need to click the spanner icon. Which is a problem when the spanner icon is missing.

I am now remembering why the last time I used Google Earth, it was 2005. It’s very hard to use.
   Say you want directions between two very common locations. I chose Buckingham Palace and Victoria Station. I fed them in.

   You click next on the search button, I presume, which is marked by the magnifying glass. I think I am right. I only started designing websites in 1993. Google doesn’t like that:    It doesn’t know which Victoria Station I meant. The logical thing is to select the first one, correct? That would signify to Google that I meant Victoria Station, London SW1V, United Kingdom.
   All it does is open yet another set of ‘Did you mean’ options: And ad infinitum.
   I have typed in, manually, Google’s version of the address into the ‘To’ box, but it still produces a ‘Did you mean’. Yes, Google, I did mean. Now, work already!
   As I have said numerous times, I wish these programs were made for the common man and not someone with a master’s or Ph.D. in computer science.

I have never been to the capital of the United States before, but I was playing on Google Earth for the first time in about three years tonight, looking for the White House. Unless all my schooling was wrong, and I consider myself reasonably well educated, I was under the impression this is at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, DC. Here’s what Google Earth returned:

Nothing around here even looks like the White House. Can any American readers please explain what I am doing wrong, or is this another one of those computer glitches that only happens to me?
   If I have done nothing wrong, then here are some possibilities of what has happened:

• the White House doesn’t exist and never did. I only dreamed that it did;
• the White House only exists in fiction, like Ernie Wise’s wig;
• the boss of Google voted Republican;
  
• the White House has been moved to another location, like they did with the Museum Hotel;
• the White House has been blocked from Google Earth for a 9-11-related reason;
• UFOs have beamed up the entire White House;
• the Manhattan Project has beamed up the entire White House.
  

Some more oddities I have found on the web today, both relating to Google.
   Ever hear of people wanting you to give 110 per cent? Google’s Blogger service sure tries hard:

In a republish yesterday, Blogger reported that it was giving 103 per cent.
   Here’s one from just a few moments ago. Selling Cialis? Google News now picks that up: See the second and fourth entries. I found a third one there as well.
   And remember the PHP error I noted at the end of June? It turns out I am not alone with Firefox refusing to open a page and prompting me to save it instead, as I finally found this complaint today. However, unlike the complainant I was unable to solve it and the error is not on the servers I visited. As he was using Ubuntu, and I am using Windows, we can probably conclude that the error is Firefox’s alone, and sporadic as well.

Does anyone know if Google Video is dead? I can get to the other Google sites, and I know Google announced it would kill uploads to its video service. All I did was click the ‘Video’ link at the top of my search results’ page.

Google has some weird off-days. When typing the last blog entry, I went to hunt for the Dick Smith Electronics website in New Zealand. It wasn’t there, with the query Dick Smith Electronics site:nz:

The Australian one could not be found without the site:nz qualifier. Weird.

I don’t know if folks knew this, but Google supposedly was meant to make life easier with maths, so you could feed in arithmetic into the search box and it would work it out.
   Um, not really. Trying to convert temperatures just now was not easy. I have to type things in full: e.g. -6 degrees Celsius in Fahrenheit and not –6°C in °F (it didn’t like that) or –6°C in Fahrenheit. It is quicker reaching for a conversion calculator, or, if you remember the formula in your head, to do it that way.
   I am not even that sure if people can spell Celsius and Fahrenheit.
   I read on another Vox blog that it feels like –30°F in Chicago today, with the wind chill presumably. That’s –34°C in new money. It is a temperature that I find unfathomable as it never gets that cold here unless you head down to Antarctica.

I know a few of you in the northern hemisphere, where it is winter, are not happy with your stormy weather. But spare a thought for those of us who are meant to have summer right now. Summer, it seems, is off, and midsummer tomorrow is forecast to be lousy. The climate is wetter than a Rod Blagojevich excuse. And 10°C on Monday is plain chilly.