Small bits

A Washington Post article about Google hiring and culture. One nitpick: the article states “Every bathroom stall on the company campus holds a Japanese high-tech commode with a heated seat.” That’s not quite right. Usually each bathroom will have one such toilet, but not every single stall has them.

Then Battelle ponders a Washington Post article on click fraud.

Looks like Ze Frank was offering sponsors “duckies” with cute mouse-over messages and Google Checkout said they couldn’t support that. The Checkout folks apparently studied the details further and decided to allow it. Earth sandwiches for everyone.

Speaking of Earth, Google Earth offers a United States election guide. It looks like this:

Google Earth District

That’s the 14th district. If you click on it, you see the Representatives and Senators from that district. From there, you can click into places like Open Secrets to see what political action committees (PACs) are giving money to a candidate. For example, you can see who is giving money to Anna Eshoo (my representative) on this page. Pretty neat, and clicking around on Open Secrets is addictive.

By the way, it’s really cool that searching in Google News can take you to blog results now. I did the search [google earth election] and got some news results. But at the bottom of the page, you also see the option to run the search on Google Blog search:

Blog search in news

Steve Rubel noticed another blog search link on Google News too. Cool. It’s been a couple months since Yahoo dropped their blog search via News. I wonder if there’s any new news about that?

11 Responses to Small bits (Leave a comment)

  1. “… Usually each bathroom will have one such toilet, but not every single stall has them.”

    How can you live under those conditions? Where I work, the seat is only heated after someones been on it a few minutes. If it’s heated before you get there, you just turn around and walk out…

  2. Google may be skilled at catching * certain* types of click fraud – but it is a given that in SOME industries – advertisers and their staff may maliciously click on a competitor’s highly bidded ad out of evil!

    Also if those engaging in Click Fraud are using dial up – or a dynamic IP add,ress and deleting Cookies – are they REALLY easy to catch??

    Some foreign firms are even outsourced to – for engagements in Ad Clicking – they may be not just focussed on Adsense – BUT – many also add Adwords and Overture to their list of SERVICES PROVIDED

    An experiment was done with a Listing that was at number ONE on Google for a moderately competative keyword – and a TOP sponsor link was purchased for same word on Google

    The differences in hit results were too dramatic to be accounted for by any other likelihood except click fraud – also, the Stats / Trackers used showed an large overall percentage of the visits from the sponsor links staying on the visited page for an extremely shorter period of time ๐Ÿ™

  3. at the bottom of the page, you also see the option to run the search on Google Blog search…

    It would be very useful to have the same type of link on the bottom of the news results to the Google News Archive search, no?

  4. Google earth is very cool!
    I like that very much.

  5. I am not sure that a heated toilet is something that I would consider a good thing, at first! Normally a heated seat means it was recently used…that would take some getting used to.

    Thanks,
    Seth

  6. I saw zefranks video after the checkout ban. His reaction had me rolling.

    The future of politics will never be the same once the masses catch onto using the web to find out what their politicians are really up to.

  7. I just don’t understand why when we search something that has no results in the Google News we have to click the blogsearch and search again. The blogsearch link should redirect us to the results page for the same query. don’t you think?

  8. Google News does include many blogs in Google News… and on the other hand, they also kicked a couple of blogs out of Google News this year. Here’s a list from earlier this year:
    http://blog.outer-court.com/googlenews/?q=blog

    Google when kicking a blog says e.g. “We don’t include sites that are written and maintained by individuals. We also don’t include sites which don’t have an editorial review policy” … though somehow they’re missing that news blogs often consist of a main author and a community, both fact-checking each other’s input, acting as quasi-editors.

  9. Re Poltics there was an article in the Guardian (Mancester Guardian) about Google PAC. And a bit about the Uk/EU stuff.

    http://business.guardian.co.uk/story/0,,1929781,00.html

    Hmm recruiting an ex full timer from Amicius – I think you could have done better ๐Ÿ™‚ not exactly representing many geeks are they.

  10. Is the heated one labelled or do you have to search for it ๐Ÿ˜‰

    Hmm, I wonder if bacteria live longer on heated seats?

  11. Matt,

    What do you think of certain bloggers trying to Google Bomb as many candidates as possible before the 2006 mid-term election? Isn’t it about time Google did something to protect the brand and the results?

    http://pardonmyfrench.typepad.com/pardonmyfrench/2006/10/bombing_more_th_1.html

    Eric

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