Matt McAlister writes a wonderful (and only partially tongue-in-cheek) post on how Google has morphed from a search company into an advertising company, and eventually into "a fast-growing capitalistic enterprise competing for world domination." Some excerpts:The AutoLink debate seems more…
Category: Search Engines
Personalized search: who owns the information?
In an interesting post forecasting the rise of personalized searching, Greg Yardley raises an important concern about who actually "owns" the personal information/history upon which search companies will base "personalization." Pretend it’s December, 2007. You’ve been using Google (or Yahoo,…
Yahoo to preserve e-mail of Marine killed in Iraq
One example of the type of ethical issues that cross Srinija Srinivasan's desk at Yahoo! is whether family members should have access to the e-mail of a deceased relative. From Yahoo's perspective, to release messages from a deceased user's e-mail…
Srinija Srinivasan: Perception and Policy at Yahoo!
Srinija Srinivasan, Yahoo's editor-in-chief, presented at the latest Colloquium on Information Technology & Society hosted by the Information Law Institute at the New York University School of Law. Her talk was "Perception and Policy at Yahoo!" and discussed her role…
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Google Auto-Link Function Raises Copyright/Trademark Discussion
[source: The Trademark Blog]The new Google toolbar adds links to content through a function named Auto-Link. For example, it is my understanding that if an address appears on a webpage, a program in Google's toolbar can create a link from…
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Google Calendar Next?
Search Engine News reports speculation that Google might soon launch its own Calendar tool. If true, I'm sure it'll be a useful and attractive tool, likely based on Apple's iCal calendar program. What this also means, however, is that Google…
France’s Top Librarian Attacks Google Online Library
TechNewsWorld reports that The National Library of France is not happy with Google's effort to scan and integrate millions of books into its Web search. Jean-Noel Jeanneney, President of the library, wrote in an editorial that he is concerned Google's…
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Amazon Personal Search History
Slashdot reports on the recently disclosed patent application by Amazon.com for "Persistently storing and serving event data," which describes a9.com's personal search history feature. Admittedly, I need to spend more time studying the privacy implications of "personalized searching" - the…
Google and Wikipedia
There's been a lot of talk lately about Google's offer to donate bandwidth and servers to Wikipedia. John Dvorak at PC Magazine provides helpful commentary, warning that the "nice guy" attitude of Google might not last forever:...let's say that Google…
Google and the Mission to Map Meaning and Make Money
(via Google Blogoscoped)Google and the Mission to Map Meaning and Make Money is the title of a new book on Google by Bart Milner. This book is a brief history of Cyberspace and Google's fundamental contribution - a new search…
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