Tag Archives: Google

Days after Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp announced a partnership with Microsoft to block their news stories from search engines, Google has revealed that they have created a program to restrict readers from reading too many stories on news sites without paying. Newspaper publishers will now be able to set a limit on the number of free news articles people can …

Wired reports that News Corp is working with Microsoft on their project to prevent Google from indexing stories from the Wall Street Journal, NY Post, and other News Corp-owned publications. News Corp has rattled its saber in Google’s direction for months, as chairman Rupert Murdoch accused the company of “stealing stories” by posting links and short article excerpts on its …

Sen. Kay Hutchinson (R-TX) is running for Texas governor against incumbent Rick Perry and her campaign staff thought it was a good idea to embed thousands of invisible search term meta-tags on her campaign site, including “rick perry gay.” Oh, hilarious! The folks at Google and Yahoo didn’t like that so much and have given Hutchinson the “death penalty,” completely …

Last month Microsoft challenged Google with their own search engine, the (as of yet) little used Bing. Today Google fired back with the announcement of their own operating system. Saying current operating systems were designed for a time when there was no World Wide Web, Google Inc. said Wednesday it will develop a new one based on its Chrome browser. …

Google is using goats rather than lawnmowers to prune the grounds at their Mountain View, California headquarters and PETA wants these new employees to have perks. PETA has no problem with letting goats do what goats want to do (e.g., look cute and eat weeds), but we do have concerns about how the goats may be transported, whether they are …

Via Tech Crunch: Google is in late stage negotiations to acquire Twitter. We don’t know the price but can assume its well, well north of the $250 million valuation that they saw in their recent funding. Twitter turned down an offer to be bought by Facebook just a few months ago for half a billion dollars, although that was based …

UPDATE: The Bilerico Project is back up! One of the nation’s top LGBT activism sites, The Bilerico Project, is under a continuing “denial of service” hack attack and is currently offline. Site founder Bil Browning: I wanted to give folks a quick heads up on what’s happened to the Bilerico Project and our affiliated sites. All of our sites are …

YouTube users in the UK cannot see music videos at the moment, thanks to another breakdown between Google and the major music publishers. Google Inc. said Monday it will block U.K. users from watching music videos on its popular video-sharing site YouTube after negotiations with Britain’s music royalty-collecting body broke down. Google said it would begin blocking British users starting …

Lifehacker reports of a new service that uses Google Maps to plot the locations of available apartments on Craigslist. The two most important things to look for when shopping for a new apartment on Craigslist are price and location. PadMapper maps Craigslist’s apartment listings on a Google Map for an at-a-glance look at available offerings. Previously mentioned MapsKrieg covers the …

Remember how hilarious it was to Google-bomb Dubya so that searches for “miserable failure” brought up his name? Now those same searches are finding our new president. In 2003, haters of President George W. Bush with a mean streak and tech savvy managed to Google-bomb him as a “miserable failure” — meaning that a rash of users linked Bush’s name …

Coolness from Google Earth Blog: Google has updated the 3D buildings in Google Earth for New York City! This is a HUGE update with at least hundreds (if not thousands) of new 3D buildings with photo textures applied. Basically, Google has completed nearly every building in Manhattan Island for Google Earth. Just fly to “New York City” and turn on …

Last night I was Googling “how to get NYPD press credentials” to find a link for yesterday’s post, and these were the choices offered when I had gotten as far as typing “how to g”. Such a strange mix of suggestions. And where the hell are Dalaran and Northrend? I’m totally sure that I’ve never searched for anything on this …

More website owners are expressing anger at Google for publishing Yes On 8 banners on their sites. Google has become embroiled in a row about gay marriage, after opponents of same-sex unions in California used the search engine’s advertising network to post messages on popular websites against the owner’s wishes. A number of American websites, including the widely read TechCrunch …

Gizmodo has posted a detailed review of Google’s new Android phone. Summary: It’s not the iPhone. Which is a good thing and a bad thing. Reportedly, Google has already sold out of the 1.5 million units it stocked for advance orders. Another 2 million are set to ship to retailers this week.

If you’ve been guilty of drunk mailing – sending regrettable emails while under the influence (and we’ve ALL done it) – Google has launched Mail Goggles, a user enabled program that forces you to solve a few math problems before sending late night emails. From the Gmail blog: Sometimes I send messages I shouldn’t send. Like the time I told …

What’s less surprising than the Gayken coming out? The Christianist boycott of Google for opposing Prop 8. Randy Thomasson of the Campaign for Children and Families says young billionaires Sergey Brin and Larry Page (Google co-founder) have “replaced all notions of God’s truth by worshiping money as god. You might have noticed that their website actually avoids Thanksgiving, diminishes holidays …

From Google co-founder Sergey Brin: As an Internet company, Google is an active participant in policy debates surrounding information access, technology and energy. Because our company has a great diversity of people and opinions — Democrats and Republicans, conservatives and liberals, all religions and no religion, straight and gay — we do not generally take a position on issues outside …

The Google phone comes out Sept. 23rd. Putting it firmly in a price point to compete with the iPhone, the Android-running HTC Dream will cost $199, according to the Wall Street Journal. The smartphone will also get an “aggressively priced” data plan from T-Mobile and receive some heavy Google branding. Some of the readers at Gizmodo find the Android “fugly” …

Because I am a complete Google whore, I had to immediately download the test version of Chrome, the companay’s first-ever browser, when it came out yesterday. And…..wow. Super clean interface (as minimalistic as the Google.com page) and super, super fast. So far anyway. That sucker just drew the NY Times homepage in less a second. It’s more like Firefox than …

Yesterday the FCC approved Google’s application for their Dream phone, considered by some to be the first smartphone to seriously compete with the iPhone. Nobody seems to have seen an actual Dream yet, but the image shown here is thought to be close to what it will look like. A video of the prototype has been floating around YouTube since …