Tag Archives: Google

The SOPA Debate and How It’s Affected by Congress’s Understanding of Child Porn

January 11, 2012

Update (1/22/2012): SOPA was indefinitely postponed by Rep. Lamar Smith on Friday (PIPA is likewise stalled). Rep. Smith also has another Internet rights bill on deck though: the The Protecting Children from Internet Pornographers Act of 2011, which mandates that… Continue reading →

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Google Refine, a.k.a. Gridworks 2.0 released; ProPublica’s “Dollars for Docs” featured.

November 10, 2010

Good news for data-nerds everywhere. The 2.0 version of Google’s fantastic data-cleaning tool, Google Refine (formerly Gridworks), has been released. And they were nice enough to feature ProPublica’s Dollars for Docs as an example of a use-case. I talked briefly… Continue reading →

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Gawker Reports on Ex-Google Engineer Reportedly Showing his Unfettered Power to Teens

September 14, 2010

I hope most people are vaguely aware that the Google’s great utility and ubiquity also pretty much means it knows everything about you. If not, this Gawker/Valleywag story by Adrian Chen should be a primer. It’s the first detailed alleged… Continue reading →

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Mike Siwek, Lawyer from Michigan, shows how Google dominates

February 23, 2010

…Slight edit: To see Mike Siwek’s actually listing, try this directory for Mike Siwek, lawyer from Michigan. This blog post has become my most visited in the past few days, because apparently leading this post title (and thus the page’s… Continue reading →

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Google PageRank and SEO: Sacbee.com vs. KCRA.com on “Sacramento” and “California” news

January 23, 2010

When I was a reporter at the Sacramento Bee, I always wondered why the Sacramento Bee, the region’s only major newspaper, was always ranked lower on a Google search for “sacramento news” than KCRA, the area’s leading TV site: I… Continue reading →

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Google publicly calls out China over hacking of human rights advocates’ accounts

January 12, 2010

On the Google Blog, Google’s chief legal counsel David Drummond reveals that a “highly sophisticated and targeted” attack on its corporate infrastructure was traced back to China. The objective, Google believes, was to compromise the GMail accounts of Chinese human-rights… Continue reading →

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Is Google censoring auto-complete searches for Islam? “Islam is…”?

January 5, 2010

Google’s autocomplete function has suggested common searches for all of the major (and some less popular) religions. Except for Islam. This has been discussed in this Reddit thread, by Godless Blogger, and Google discussion group. At about midnight on Jan.… Continue reading →

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