Rants Tagged with “Google”
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I usually am not one of those tinfoil hat guys, but the Google Chrome Privacy Policy says that anything I do with the browser is sent to Google with a browser unique id attached to it. From their privacy policy (emphasis added by me):
When you type URLs or queries in the address bar, the letters you type are sent to Google so the Suggest feature can automatically recommend terms or URLs you may be looking for. If you choose to share usage statistics with Google and you accept a suggested query or URL, Google Chrome will send that information to Google as well. You can disable this feature as explained here.
If you navigate to a URL that does not exist, Google Chrome may send the URL to Google so we can help you find the URL you were looking for. You can disable this feature as explained here.
Google Chrome's SafeBrowsing feature periodically contacts Google's servers to download the most recent list of known phishing and malware sites. In addition, when you visit a site that we think could be a phishing or malware site, your browser will send Google a hashed, partial copy of the site's URL so that we can send more information about the risky URL. Google cannot determine the real URL you are visiting from this information. More information about how this works is here.
Your copy of Google Chrome includes one or more unique application numbers. These numbers and information about your installation of the browser (e.g., version number, language) will be sent to Google when you first install and use it and when Google Chrome automatically checks for updates. If you choose to send usage statistics and crash reports to Google, the browser will send us this information along with a unique application number as well. Crash reports can contain information from files, applications and services that were running at the time of a malfunction. We use crash reports to diagnose and try to fix any problems with the browser.
You supposed to be able to disable it, but this is where you can disable the address bar suggestion on my machine:
Can be disabled for me. Hopefully its a bug. Even if you can disable it all, but its not obvious to me in the browser how to do it, only by reading the privacy policy. Back to IE for me.
LOTS OF UPDATES: Read down to see more info.
I just installed the Google Chrome browser and to no one's surprise, it doesn't support Silverlight 2. Not sure why it doesn't work since it supports WebKit. What I find most interesting is that it thinks its rendering it. It may be Google's Plug-in/Process model that is breaking it.
To see what I mean, visit my http://www.silverlight-tour.com site. On that site, I test to see if the plugin can load and show a non-Silverlight version of the map when Silverlight isn't supported. When it is supported, I show the Silverlight app. When you follow the link you'll see that the Silverlight 2 app is taking space, just not loading. So the Silverlight.js script thinks its supported and tries to load it. Hopefully we'll hear more about this soon. Keep tuned and i'll let you know what I find out.
UPDATE: Google's Task Manager definitely shows that Silverlight 2 is loaded in a separate process, but interestingly the page with Silverlight is getting odd info in the Task Manager (e.g. no memory):
Another UPDATE:
Flash doesn't seem to work either:
After re-running the Flash installer it now works. Must have had a heads up to a fix that was required.
UPDATE: Instead of not working, Silverlight 2 its just sorta working. Sometimes yes, sometimes no.
In this TechCrunch article, they report that Adobe has released a stripped down version of the engine that can parse the swf files and give back info that is useful for the indexing engines. Its unknown whether Google or Yahoo (the report doesn't mention Live.com as one of the search engines it gave the technology to) will use it, but I expect they will.
So the question comes up, what about Silverlight apps? Will SEO for Silverlight become a big bargaining chip? I hope Microsoft responds though with the .xap and XAML files, Silverlight is already pretty easy to consume. My one request would be that Silverlight 2 stop embedding the .xaml into the assemblies so that the search engines don't have to double dig to get to the XAML.
I have been complaining and discussion image spam (spam e-mail where most of the body is an ad for a stock, medication or other ridiculous product) on some of my favorite mailing lists. In the past few months it has gotten really bad. I've used SpamBayes to rid myself of spam the last few years and it works great...until Image Spam.
That's where Google for Domains came in. At the behest of a number of people (including Steve Johnson, Shawn Van Ness, and Curt Hagenlocher) I moved my domain to Google's GMail for domains. I now have all of my mail at wildermuth.com hosted by Google. So far I am very impressed. Not a single piece of image spam has gotten through. Over the past 2 days no false positives.
I am using it as my mail provider, so my working pattern of using Outlook has not changed at all (POP/SMTP supports seems to be pretty good). The spam collection is so good that I've actually had to go out to Google a couple of times to make sure I was getting mail correctly. I was so used to getting lots of spam that with only 20 pieces of spam (none of them image spam) that fell through their filters, SpamBayes did a great job of cleaning up the little that snuck through.
My suspicion is that since they are such a big provider of mail that they are getting lots of human feedback as to what is and what is not spam so as to improve the spam cleasing.
I am using the IE7 that is installed in Vista RC1 and while the new Google Toolbar does seem to work, it is causing problems with the context menu so I uninstalled it. Interestingly I can't figure out how to tell Google its not working. Does anyone know of a feedback mechanism (e.g. connect.microsoft.com) for Google?
I was installing the new Google Earth when I noticed that Google is becoming Yahoo/Real/Microsoft these days. Why can't we just have options in your setups that don't try and cross-promote? Its cheap and makes me lose faith in companies.
This is just like the "Do you want to install the Yahoo Toolbar" that has snuck itself into every shareware/free app i've installed in the last year. If you are going to insist on this kind of promotion, you should make it off by default. Putting these sorts of options with the hope that the user isn't paying attention and just pressed Finish without reading sucks.
Bad Google...no gmail...
After hearing about Goggle's concerns about the MSN default search box in IE7, I decided to try and change the default search in IE7. I have to agree with Balmer on this one.
I was able to change the default search for the IE7 search box with 2 clicks and Google was one of more than a dozen choices. I don't see the fact that it makes MSN the default as a competitive advantage. When google let's me set the search engine to use in their Google Bar to one of their competitors search engines, i'll listen to them complain again.
