The Life and Times of Google

If you depend on SEO or internet marketing for the success of your business (and there are all sorts of businesses, from eBay to Ricardo’s Hairdresser around the corner, that do), then you will also be very interested in what Google is doing. Every little movement has an immense impact on the search environment … at least, when you are as big and as fat as Google is! So today we turn all gossip rag-ish, and in a testament to the quality of publications like ‘New Idea’ and ‘Famous’, take an intimate look at Google’s life details over the past month or so

Google Buzz - Saving the World?

Google Buzz gets launched to mixed reception

Most gossip journalists concur that Google Buz has been getting buzz in the press for the wrong reasons … the main one being the default privacy settings. In some cases, people feel that their physical safety has been horribly compromised by Google’s Buzz introduction. However, there are some real advantages to Buzz, not the least of which is the opportunity to set up a Google profile and get followed links to websites from a PR10 site.

Electronic Privacy Info Centre complains to FTC

This US based group, concerned over the privacy breaches engendered by Google Buzz, wants the FTC to investigate and consider forcing Google to make Buzz an opt-in feature, rather than opt-out.

Google Books saga comes to an end

In 2005, Google was sued over copyright infringement by a group of authors and publishers, because of the preview feature on Google Books. It seems likely that the lawsuit will be settled in the next week or so, and if it is, Google will be able to create a subscription library for its collection of over 12 million books, sell books direct from its site (bye bye, Amazon!), and display portions of books for free.

Google works on creating real-life Babel fish

Before the Altavista Babelfish search engine (and its AMAZING accuracy … not), it seemed incredible simply that computers could translate between different languages. Now Google is working on creating a more realistic ‘Babel fish’, with Google Goggles. They would use OCR, Optical Character Recognition, to pick up what a text is saying, and then run it through Google Translate, and spit it out in comprehensible form.