Google Fusion Tables is going to change the way we all interact with data. The site allows people to upload their own data, such as stuff stuck in spreadsheets, and do more interesting stuff with it, such as visualize trends, collaborate, and other stuff that works best when working together. For example, someone could upload [...]
A Good Day for Google, originally uploaded by edkohler. Google hooked me up with some free WiFi at the Milwaukee airport and stopped censoring search results in China in reaction to some government shenanigans today. That sort of stuff makes my life a little bit better. This is on top of a conversation I had [...]
I had a little chat about my latest obsession, the Google PowerMeter service, on Quick On The UpTake with Mike McIntee this afternoon. Good times were had. The theme of the hour was energy conservation starting with my segment at 15 minutes into the segment embedded above (that a live studio shot of Mike doing [...]
Jamie Thingelstad raised what is likely a common privacy concern regarding Google’s PowerMeter service in the comments of my previous post: Knowing someone uses 2x the “neighborhood” average of electricity would be a great targeting opportunity. For whatever reason, I find that data crossing a boundary that makes me a little nervous. I don’t know [...]
Google is in the process of rolling out a new feature called “Preferred Sites” that lets web users customize their search results by proactively telling Google that they consider certain websites valuable. Assuming this takes off – or even if it’s a marginal success – it seems pretty clear that website owners will benefit from [...]
I like playing around with the stats of online ad programs to figure out how to maximize revenues. And why not? It’s a fun game with a financial reward. For example, here’s a look at the growth in month by month traffic on The Deets over the past year alongside the growth in relative revenue [...]
Google announced yesterday that that made a change to how long they’ll associate a search with an IP address in order to better protect user’s privacy: Another step to protect user privacy We’ll anonymize IP addresses on our server logs after 9 months. We’re significantly shortening our previous 18-month retention policy to address regulatory concerns [...]
What happens when someone searches for your name? Do they find you? Do they find other people by the same name? There are obvious benefits to showing up when someone searches for you. Especially if the results on the page have nice things to say about you. Here is a shot of the top-10 results [...]
Here are a few advanced searches that are incredibly valuable: 1. “quoting phrases” will search for the words within the quote in only that order. This is especially valuable when searching for people. 2. Searching within a site: site:technologyevangelist.com twitter brings back pages from this site that include the term “twitter” 3. -negatives Throw a [...]
Google came out with a post the other day clarifying different types of clicks they don’t charge advertisers for, when detected. They break down into two categories: fraudulent clicks and invalid ones. Frauduent clicks are generally defined as those there someone is motivated to click for financial gain while invalid ones are double clicks and [...]
