Your Facebook Comments, Coming Soon to a Google Search Near You Mind what you say in Facebook comments, Google will soon be indexing them and serving them up as part of the company’s standard search results. Google’s all-seeing search robots still can’t find comments on private pages within Facebook, but now any time you use a Facebook comment form on a other sites, or a public page within Facebook, those comments will be indexed by Google. The new indexing plan isn’t just about Facebook comments, but applies to nearly any content that’s previously been accessible only through an HTTP POST request. Google’s goal is to include anything “hiding” behind a form — comment systems like Disqus or Facebook and other JavaScript-based sites and forms. Typically when Google announces it’s going to expand its search index in some way everyone is happy — sites get more searchable content into Google and users can find more of what they’re looking for — but that’s not the case with the latest changes to Google’s indexing policy. [Photo by Glen Scott/Flickr/CC]
A note to Google recruiters (and on Google hiring practices) Writing this in part to let off steam, and in part so I can point the next recruiter at it. Time from my leaving Google til getting the first unrelated contact from a Google recruiter: 6 days. Interest I have in going through Google’s hiring process again: zero. When Metaweb/Freebase was acquired by Google last year, we came in as part of the Search team. I’m going to handwave a bit, but in short, we shuffled things around so that I could continue doing my job by moving to a more appropriate part of the organisation. Now, I’m 100% confident that Google wouldn’t have hired me straight off the street. You see, I don’t have a computer science degree from an elite university, or indeed any degree at all. I guess that’s why when I interviewed for my transfer, I was told I was “not technical enough” to do the job I’d been doing for 3 years already, supporting the Freebase community. (True story: in my interview I was asked how I would extract entities from an HTML page.
Google Plus Deleting Accounts En Masse: No Clear Answers A striking number of Google+ accounts have been deleted in the last 24 hours as the new social network struggles with its community standards policy around real names - alienating and frightening the people it aims to serve. Removed but restored through influence is Limor Fried - AKA Lady Ada / Adafruit Industries: She was recently featured on the cover of WIRED Magazine. Google suspended Limor Fried “Ladyada” Google+ profile, no show-and-tell tonight… Her account has just now been mysteriously restored, though only after a groundswell of complaints. Many have now been purged and not restored. The message I received this morning from the source in my previous Google+ article summarized it, Google+ suspended my acct "After reviewing your profile, we determined the name you provided violates our Community Standards." After the next few messages repeating the same thing, it was clear that the dam had burst and Google+ is on an account suspension rampage. A.V.
Publications by Googlers Google publishes hundreds of research papers each year. Publishing is important to us; it enables us to collaborate and share ideas with, as well as learn from, the broader scientific community. Submissions are often made stronger by the fact that ideas have been tested through real product implementation by the time of publication. We believe the formal structures of publishing today are changing - in computer science especially, there are multiple ways of disseminating information. We encourage publication both in conventional scientific venues, and through other venues such as industry forums, standards bodies, and open source software and product feature releases. Open Source We understand the value of a collaborative ecosystem and love open-source software. Product and Feature Launches With every launch, we're publishing progress and pushing functionality. Industry Standards Our researchers are often helping to define not just today's products but also tomorrow's. Resources Impact
Why I Hate Android Why do I hate Android? It’s definitely one of the questions I get asked most often these days. And most of those that don’t ask probably assume it’s because I’m an iPhone guy. I should probably explain. Believe it or not, I actually don’t hate Android. Let’s turn back the clock. Then on January 9, 2007 — exactly 5 years ago today — Steve Jobs took the stage at Macworld to unveil the iPhone. Apple and Google were great allies at the time. A few months later, on November 5, 2007, Google teamed up with many of the big players in the mobile/telecom space to announce the Open Handset Alliance. In hindsight, Steve Jobs was clearly not happy about this and the subsequent iPhone-ification of Android. Jobs probably didn’t say much at the time because he didn’t have to. Time went on and it was pretty clear that despite the major players involved in the OHA, Android wasn’t getting a lot of traction. Let’s back up for a second. In the pre-iPhone world this may have sounded like crazy-talk. It.
Google Rumored Preparing $10/Month Chrome OS Laptop Rentals Google Doing Some Profile Unification Leading Up To… Well, Something. Google is still hard at work on their social strategy. You know it, I know it, we all know it. What it will actually be, remains to be seen. But there are clues related to it that have started to appear. The first was the redesign of the toolbar. As The Next Web spotted a couple weeks ago, Google quietly announced that it would be deleting Google Profiles that weren’t public starting in July. The purpose of Google Profiles is to enable you to manage your online identity. And that’s important because other Google properties are also being woven into these profiles. Google Groups-specific profiles will no longer be supported. This type of unification will also take place across other Google properties as well, we hear. But as we laid out a couple weeks ago, don’t look for a massive launch of something being billed as a “Facebook-killer” (not that anyone besides the press would label it as such anyway).
Google Chrome OS: unlike Android, it's open source Unlike Android, Google Chrome OS is open source. Whereas Android is coded behind closed doors — one big-name developer says it's no more open than Apple's iOS — Google's imminent browser-based operating system is built — in large part — where everyone can see it. A portion of the project remains closed — Google's boot-time-boosting firmware work — but like the browser it's based on, Chrome OS is a platform that can serve Google's ad-centric purposes even if its code is set completely free. According to the man who's closer to the project than anyone outside of Google and its various hardware partners, Chrome OS will offer few surprises when it is officially released, likely before the end of the month. When we spoke to Liam McLoughlin this summer, he assumed the company was crafting certain tools outside the public Chromium OS code tree — Android-style — but in recent weeks, the man known as "Hexxeh" has come to see things a bit differently. Chrome OS (click to enlarge)
Opinion: Google Android is only 'open' if you're the phone company Google distributes Android's source code under something called the Apache License and is free for anyone to use. Apache License lets anyone use the code in question as part of proprietary software Google doesn't try to prevent you from downloading apps of which it doesn't approve "It shouldn't give away the "Android" brand to any company that cripples the product," says Saint Business Insider is contributing a series of columns to CNN.com that challenge commonly held beliefs about the tech world. (Business Insider) -- Google loves to talk about how "open" Android, its operating system for mobile devices, is. But what, exactly, does it even mean that Android is "open?" Google would point to a number of broadly related facts about the OS, but here's the essential point: Android is "open" in that Google distributes its source code under something called the Apache License. Code distributed under an Apache License is free for anyone to use as they wish. They buy phones.
Google Web Accelerator: Hey, not so fast - an alert for web app designers Google’s web accelerator seems like a good thing for the public web, but it can wreak havok on web-apps and other things with admin-links built into the UI. How’s that? The accelerator scours a page and prefetches the content behind each link. This gives the illusion of pages loading faster (since they’ve already been pre-loaded behind the scenes). Here’s the problem: Google is essentially clicking every link on the page — including links like “delete this” or “cancel that.” We discovered this yesterday when a few people were reporting that their Backpack pages were “disappearing.” This wouldn’t be much of a problem on the public web since it’s pretty tough to be destructive on public web pages, but web apps, with their admin links here and there, can be considerably damaged. Update: If you use Ruby on Rails for your web-apps, here’s some code to just say no to Google Accelerator.
wave-protocol - Project Hosting on Google Code This project is currently in the process of moving to the Apache Foundation, as an Incubator project. We are moving the issue tracker this coming week followed shortly by the code base. All activity will soon move to the new project found here: This project contains a Java implementation of the Google Wave Federation Protocol and a prototype server, web, and console clients. We're currently working to round out the prototypes for the Wave in a Box effort. Code The libraries repository contains the wave model, including the wave operations, operational transform (OT) code, and federation protocol. The default repository contains the protoype server and clients. There's an alternative, lightweight Wave client, called Splash, which is built on the Wave Data APIs: Starting points Get Involved If you'd like to get involved with the Wave protocol please take the time learn more at