Google Age

Life in the Google age

2007-07-06T08:42:00.000-07:00

Search and ye shall receive

BY DAVID VALDES GREENWOOD

Several years ago, a right-wing fundamentalist magazine published (and truncated) a Phoenix article of my mine, without my knowledge. A reader enamored of the piece (which had been twisted into a form Jesse Helms could love) searched the Web and eventually snagged my e-mail address. With a few clicks, a complete stranger halfway across the country found me. I’d been Googled.

The latest Webster’s may not list Googling as a verb, but lexicographers are going to have to face it: Americans Google, more than they admit publicly, and they enjoy it very much. Simply type the name of someone you know into the massive search engine that is Google.com, and the virtual machine — part ferret, part private eye — zips into action, digging up eclectica: random photos, forgotten high-school projects, and so on into cyber-infinity. You Google to fill in the blanks about your sweetie, or to learn what a childhood pal is doing now, or perhaps for a window into the soul of the hottie in the next cubicle.

After my right-wing fan found me, the first person I Googled wasn’t a stranger, it was myself — and it brought up links seemingly to every article I’d ever written, interspersed with notices of old play performances, even papers students had written for my courses. But I already knew this stuff. So it wasn’t long before I was plugging in friends’ names to see what the Web knew that I didn’t.

I found that my friend Tim had created a study of home pages as a grad student. His characteristic ironic amusement pervades the study’s Web site, with its André the Giant graffiti, links to humor sites, and paranoid conspiracy theories. Five years later, the results of this student survey are all over the Web, but with his chuckling sensibility supplanted by the gravitas of accepted wisdom. Stuffy doctoral dissertations and college communications courses refer to the "careful" and "thorough" work of "researcher" Tim.

In Tim’s case, the Google yield — a combination of intelligence and humor deployed like a stealth bomb — matched his personality. But sometimes, the results suggest a kind of double life. My friend Tanya — she who wears elaborate hand-stitched costumes as a belly dancer, and no stitches at all as a Burning Man reveler — shows up as a Bible-story illustrator. Nicole — whose high-powered adventures took her to Hong Kong, Oslo, Ivory Coast, and Equatorial Guinea before she became vice-president of a UK company — surfaced as the author of a homey article about baby car seats for Southern moms.

The Web seemed a bottomless well of colorful tidbits about my friends: Samantha agitating at Harvard, Jeff sniffing that a popular clam shack was tourist-quality, and Carly — once an oversleeping, ever-procrastinating English major — now not only a morning anchor for a CBS affiliate, but a "hot news babe," according to one fan. It was mindlessly addictive fun, as rewarding as a treasure hunt.

That remained true until I Googled a friend’s new boyfriend. A strong woman and talented stage actress, Amy is one of my favorite people, but she lives in another city, so I hadn’t yet met her TV-actor beau. No need to wait for an introduction — I typed in his name and was instantly rewarded with a photo. Unfortunately, it was a recent photo of the guy and his wife, looking happy as clams at a celebrity event. It was unsettling that this should be my first image of him. Pictures can lie, of course, but two things seemed clear: his wife didn’t know, and my smarter-than-that friend was the Other Woman. I’d bitten off more than I’d Googled for.

Suddenly, Googling seemed less like catching up with friends than snooping on them. It had never occurred to me that, while fun, this practice might also be a bit invasive. Because the Web is an open book, the information is fair game. But what if I’d tried to "search" friends through a pre-Web method: going to the library to track someone through newspaper articles, public records, and so on? Imagine saying to someone, "I read the funniest thing about you while looking for your name in old-newspaper microfiche files at the library!" Creepy, right?

What’s the difference? In a word: effort. It would hint at obsession to invest the time and work required for an old-fashioned search for someone who isn’t, say, a fugitive or your long-lost child. Comparatively, Googling requires almost no effort at all — and less time, which somehow takes the edge off. But even so, the adulterous-boyfriend incident made me feel a little like Big Brother, enough to keep me from mentioning my Google penchant to friends.

No one else ever mentioned it either, until a dinner party last fall, when someone offhandedly referred to something they’d read on the Web about someone else. The floodgates opened: almost everyone at the table had Googled one — or two, or five — of the others. My husband, who Googles vicariously through me, was floored to realize that it was all the rage. For him, the lone Google virgin, it was like learning about a really excellent rave the morning after.

After that, Googling seemed okay again. I may be Big Brother, but I’ve got millions of siblings, and the family is growing. Whenever I feel a guilty twinge — should I really be looking up an old boyfriend to see if his secret gay life is ruining his political career yet? — I remind myself of the golden rule of the Internet age: Google unto others as you know they will Google unto you.

David Valdes Greenwood can be reached at

valdesgreenwood@worldnet.att.net

Google Offers SMBs a Ride in Its Mini

2007-07-02T16:15:00.000-07:00

By Lauren Simonds April 6, 2005

Does it ever seem like it's easier to search the Internet to compare the migratory patterns of the African and European sparrow than it is to find last month's sales projections on your company's network? If you're searching the Internet with Google, you're probably right. But what if you could harness Google's search technology for your business?
That's the idea behind the Google Mini — a hardware and software appliance designed to let SMBs add Google search to their company networks and Web sites.
The Google Mini reflects the company's mission statement — organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful — on a somewhat smaller scale.
According to Matt Glotzbach, a Google product manager, the amount of data that companies accumulate is astounding. "We want to help companies make their information accessible. Right now, employees spend too much time looking for — and not finding — the right data. And all too often, they end up making bad, or poorly informed, decisions."
The Google Mini, which launched in January, indexes and searches up to 50,000 documents and sells for $4,995. Today however, in a surprising and welcomed move, the company announced that it's doubling the Mini's index and document capability to 100,000 documents and cutting the price to $2,995.
Make It Search Like GoogleThe Mini, a 1U rack-mountable box, plugs into a standard power outlet and into a network Ethernet port. Then, it's a matter of configuring the device — directing it to the company intranet or Web site you want to index.
Once it's up and running, you'll be able to search across all of your company's documents and Web sites in a way that's familiar to anyone who's ever used Google — the interface and functionality are the same.
The Mini can index over 220 file formats including HTML, PDF and Microsoft Office. There are, of course, limits to the document size, but they're generous: the Mini indexes the first 2.5MB of any HTML document and the first 30MB of binary files, such as Word or PDF.
If you want to see how it all works, you can learn more with book . Google Mini

Google Web Search Features

2007-06-29T06:30:00.000-07:00

In addition to providing easy access to billions of web pages, Google has many special features to help you to find exactly what you're looking for. Click the title of a specific feature to learn more about it.

• Book Search
Use Google to search the full text of books.
• Cached Links
View a snapshot of each page as it looked when we indexed it.
• Calculator
Use Google to evaluate mathematical expressions.
• Currency Conversion
Easily perform any currency conversion.
• Definitions
Use Google to get glossary definitions gathered from various online sources.
• File Types
Search for non-HTML file formats including PDF documents and others.
• Groups
See relevant postings from Google Groups in your regular web search results.
• I'm Feeling Lucky
Bypass our results and go to the first web page returned for your query.
• Images
See relevant images in your regular web search results.
• Local Search
Search for local businesses and services in the U.S., the U.K., and Canada.
• Movies
Use Google to find reviews and showtimes for movies playing near you.
• Music Search
Use Google to get quick access to a wide range of music information.
• News Headlines
Enhances your search results with the latest related news stories.
• PhoneBook
Look up U.S. street address and phone number information.
• Product Search
To find a product for sale online, use Google Product Search.
• Q&A
Use Google to get quick answers to straightforward questions.
• Refine Your Search - New!
Add instant info and topic-specific links to your search in order to focus and improve your results.
• Results Prefetching
Makes searching in Firefox faster.
• Search By Number
Use Google to access package tracking information, US patents, and a variety of online databases.
• Similar Pages
Display pages that are related to a particular result.
• Site Search
Restrict your search to a specific site.
• Spell Checker
Offers alternative spelling for queries.
• Stock and Fund Quotes
Use Google to get up-to-date stock and mutual fund quotes and information.
• Street Maps
Use Google to find U.S. street maps.
• Travel Information
Check the status of an airline flight in the U.S. or view airport delays and weather conditions.
• Weather
Check the current weather conditions and forecast for any location in the U.S.
• Web Page Translation
Provides you access to web pages in other languages.
• Who Links To You?
Find pages that point to a specific URL.