google

Why Google puts privacy second

European regulators sent shock-waves through the search engine industry earlier this week, when they proposed significantly tighter rules for logging data. If the EU adopts the proposed rules, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft will have to significantly reduce the amount of time they keep identifying search logs, and will have to start treating IP addresses as personally identifiable data -- something that Google has been particularly vocal against.

Google has recently engaged in a major public relations effort to try and make a credible argument for keeping log data. The company has trotted out respected employee researchers to try and make … Read more

Real estate site offers Google Street View

Trulia, a residential real estate search engine, has incorporated Google Maps Street View into its Web pages, the company said Wednesday.

The combination presents Google's view of a particular property from the road and lets users virtually pivot around to see the surrounding area. It works in the 40 cities where Google has supplied imagery for its Street View service.

It's nothing that couldn't have been done manually before by typing an address into a separate window with the Google view, or likely even with an on-page mashup, but having the curbside vantage readily available is certainly … Read more

Google App Engine: Cashing in on the user data

Google's announcement of its App Engine has naturally generated a lot of buzz, as well as some fear, uncertainty, and doubt. There is the concern that Google will corral even more user data via its App Engine, becoming a kind of 21st century data and advertising baron, as Microsoft has been the operating system and productivity software baron in the last three decades.

If you extrapolate from Google's growing share of search and advertising, and include a growing share of Web applications through its APIs and the fledgling App Engine, you could imagine a Google that becomes the … Read more

What's a better investment: Computers, chips, or coffee?

Sometimes I'm so uninspired I can't come up with a decent blog post to save my life. When that happens, I turn to what comforts me: numbers. Yes, I know how weird that sounds. What can I say, I'm a geek.

Anyway, I just got to wondering how investors in various technology companies fared over the long haul. I was just as interested in how technology companies performed versus companies with a more traditional business model.… Read more

Dave Winer looks into Google's App Engine and sees the future

Software pioneer Dave Winer knows about disruptive technology. He was instrumental in formulating RSS, XML-RPC, OPML, outliners, and podcasting.

Here's part of what Dave had to say about Google's App Engine, a foray into making its infrastructure available to developers.

Now, what Google announced is really exciting! I'm not kidding. It's even better than I hoped. Yes, it's only Python, but IBM's PC-DOS was only BASIC and Pascal when it first came out, and it didn't matter. Yeah, I preferred C, but I coded in Pascal because that's what you had to … Read more

Yahoo extends Flickr with video

In a bid to broaden Flickr if not actually crush YouTube, Yahoo is adding videos to what has just been a photo-sharing site.

The change, which the company plans to launch publicly later Tuesday, is a modest but significant extension of Flickr's features. The videos, limited to 90 seconds and 150MB, will be shown as thumbnails alongside users' photos, and will inherit all the features of photos stored on the site: users can add comments, captions, comments, geotags, and privacy restrictions so only friends or family may view the videos, the company said.

The company sees the videos in … Read more

Speed up Gmail searches the old-fashioned way

Gmail is great for many reasons, but one of them is the built-in power search tool. It's constantly indexing your e-mails to makes them easy to parse through on a later date.

My colleague and how-to guru, Dennis O'Reilly, of CNET's Worker's Edge has a few tips for people who want to speed up the way they search for old e-mails as their in-boxes continue to grow and fill up with messages. His tips involve using good old-fashioned operators, the little shortcuts you can put in front of a query to flavor your results.

You can … Read more

Buzz Out Loud 698: Beacon will kill you

Today, Buzz is on your side, with such gems of wisdom as "don't shop at Staples," "bacon will kill you," and "how to opt out of Beacon." I guess that last one is pretty helpful. In other news of the day, we refuse to talk about the Google App thing, unless you can prove to us why we should. Thanks in advance. Listen now: Download today's podcast EPISODE 698

Google App Engine Blog: Introducing Google App Engine + our new blog http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2008/04/ introducing-google-app-engine-our-new.html

California Lawmaker Proposes Music … Read more

Google to get Morgan Stanley veteran as CIO?

A week ago Google lost its CIO, Doug Merrill, to EMI. Word on the street is that Google has already found a replacement, and it's Ben Fried, divisional CIO at Morgan Stanley.

How relevant is Mr. Fried's experience to Google? Consider his role:

A Managing Director in Morgan Stanley's Information Technology department, Ben Fried manages teams in New York, London, Tokyo and Hong Kong and is responsible for Morgan Stanley's Institutional Securities Web infrastructure and client connectivity. His purview includes numerous Internet sites and a global, multi-platform application-hosting environment running over 1,000 applications, services and … Read more