Time to forget, Google

Google is releasing a new web service for EU citizens who no longer want to appear in Google search results. The service , which basically consists of an online form, is a response to the European Court's recent ruling in which a Spanish man were given the right to remove sensitive personal information from the search results. 

The European Court decision is a so called “prejudice” which means the all member courts have to follow the ruling. For the individual it means that all EU citizens now have the right to be "forgotten" by Google - if certain conditions are met.

The EU citizens who want to be forgotten by Google can now submit a request to Google via the new website. Attached to the request shall be a copy of the individual’s identity card, which country's laws are cited, and which particular search string that should be removed. 

Google will review each case individually and then weigh privacy against the public interest. A politician who made ​​a fool of himself for instance cannot expect to disappear from search results since it would probably fall under public interest.

Google has also put together a special task force to try to develop a long term strategy for dealing with the anticipated floods of requirements for clearances to come. The task force consist of both Google big wigs such as Chairman Eric Schmidt and Chief Legal Officer David Drummond, and externals as Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales and UN reporter Frank La Rue.

Want to get removed from search terms? Here is the web form.

Dubai PD utilizes Google Glass

Not only do the police in Dubai have a way cooler police car armada than most other countries, now their traffic cops will also be equipped with Google Glass. 

The whole thing is still in a testing phase, but the Dubai PD have already developed two new Google Glass apps; one that takes photos of traffic violations, and another that allows the officer to identify a car and its owner based on the car's registration number.

Currently Google Glass is officially only for sale in the US but the Dubai chief of police says to Gulf News that, if the test falls out well they will begin to provide more officers with Google Glasses, as the product becomes available in to the Dubai market.

Google Taking Action for Free Speech

In an obvious nod to the recent controversy surrounding the freedom of speech on the web, Google is now taking a clear stand, advocating for a free and unsupervised Internet. It was on Wednesday, January 18th, that Americans stood up in opposition to PIPA and SOPA – bills that would have censored the Web and imposed harmful regulations on primarily U.S. businesses, but also the entire world.

Individuals took action and closed down their personal blogs, companies closed their websites, and thousands of US citizens called their elected representatives in Washington, voicing their mistrust. Their voices were heard. Washington recognized the damage these bills could inflict on the Internet, and as a result, PIPA and SOPA have been indefinitely postponed. However postponed is not good enough; these bills needs to be buried forever. Google recognizes this, and is not petitioning everyone to sign up for a free Internet.

This development follows quite expected from the recent year’s disclosure of Internet espionage. It may seem like ages ago now, but it has not even been a year since former CIA employee Edward Snowden ,in a series of exposés beginning on June 5, 2013, publicized thousands of classified documents to several media outlets. The leaked documents revealed operational details of global surveillance programs run by the NSA, and the other Five Eyes governments of the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, with the cooperation of a number of businesses and European governments.

Within the immediate days that followed Snowden had gotten his passport revoked, fled to and from several different countries, charged with espionage, and quickly seen himself go from patriot to traitor. However some people would say that he has made the exact opposite journey, and gone from traitor to patriot. Seldom has one man been called so many different polar opposites; a hero – a villain, a savior – an enemy, a patriot – a traitor.

The disclosures have fueled debates over mass surveillance, government secrecy, and the balance between national security and information privacy. Two court rulings since the initial leaks have split on the constitutionality of the NSA's bulk collection of telephone metadata, and most would argue that NSA have greatly surpassed their jurisdiction.

Espionage and terrorism have always been the dark side of freedom of speech, and will probably continue to be so until the end of man. The Internet has since the beginning been open and free, and has lately played pivot roles in aiding freedom around the world. Countries like Alger, Tunis, Egypt, Syria, Libya, and Yemen would not have started their paths towards democracy had it not been for the Internet. The Internet has help to uncover racial prosecutions and injustices in Saudi, Oman., Iraq, Djibouti, Sudan and West Sahara, and has also recently shined a strong light on the homophobic nation of Uganda, leading to western countries boycotting the African nation.

I short the Internet was born, and shall remain, free.

Governments alone should not determine the future of the Internet. The billions of people around the globe that use it and the experts that build and maintain it should. A free society depends on free expression. The flow of ideas and open access to information on the web helps communities grow and nations prosper.

https://www.google.com/intl/en/takeaction/

This may be the most important stand we ever make, and Google is leading the way. Please read the petition and get opinionated.

Do you think governments should be able to restrict the Internet? Please comment below.

Google's expanding their AI Mind

Google is expanding its ambitions in Artificial Intelligence with the acquisition of AI company DeepMind for a reported $400 million.

It’s no secret that Google has an interest in AI; after all, technologies derived from AI research help fuel Google’s core search and advertising businesses. AI also plays a key role in Google’s mobile services, its autonomous cars, and its growing stable of robotics technologies.

With the addition of futurist Ray Kurzweil to its ranks in 2012, Google also has the grandfather of “strong AI” on board, a man who forecasts that intelligent machines may exist by midcentury.

If all this sounds troubling, don’t worry: Google’s acquisition of DeepMind isn’t about fusing a mechanical brain with faster-than-human robots and giving birth to the misanthropic Skynet computer network from the Terminator franchise.

DeepMind's Web site describes the London-based company as "cutting edge" and specializing in combining "the best techniques from machine learning and systems neuroscience to build powerful general-purpose learning algorithms." The site says the company's initial commercial applications are simulations, e-commerce, and games.

Google has been particularly focused on advances in artificial intelligence recently. Scientists working on the company's secretive X Labs created a neural network for machine learning by connecting 16,000 computer processors and then unleashed it on the Internet. The network's performance exceeded researchers' expectations, doubling its accuracy rate in identifying objects from a list of 20,000 items.

I wrote about Artificial Intelligence as a part of my article series The Conscious Internet. Do you think the age of Artificial Intelligence is upon us? Comment below...

Google Misogyny?

A recent campaign by UN Women, has caused some controversy on the web. The campaign depicts women gagged by the Google auto-complete function, which then suggests what "women should ...". The results that the auto-complete function suggests are not really the results you would want women to do nor get subjected to. 

What the UN wanted to show with this campaign is that there still is a lot of misogynistic ideas circulating the web, and draw attention to this. However, this campaign has also raised the question; what blame is Google to carry in this debate?

To debunk this we first have to come clear concerning what the auto-complete function really does, and to do so we first need to understand how the search function is set up. Google's search does actually not return the most accurate answer, but rather the most popular one, in short the most frequently visited answer.

There is a lot more to this, but handling Google search parameters is a different story, so for now we will have to simplify this process and just set it as the most popular one. 

The effect this has on the auto-complete function is that it will also display the most commonly used search terms that starts with a specific search parameter; "women should ...". As a result of this programming method, if a large number of people search for "women should obey men" this will automatically yield a high position in the auto-complete function.
On a personal note: I use Google to find answers to questions, and in these examples above it seems to me that the asker already has the answer set. This is not as much a question as it is a statement. 

So, how much blame does Google have in this? While it is true that Google has developed a function for censoring this feature (searching for "bitch ..." will not yield any auto-complete suggestions) one cannot really blame them for what the users search for, and therefor how the system will continually be built up. If users, en mass, started searching for "women should be independent" then that would yield a totally different result. This may seem like a fruitless endeavor but it is worth noting since it underlines the fact that the system is built for the user, and the user also, to some extent, dictates how it is being used. 

Personally, I think this is a case of missed screening on Google's part. Everyday more than 5 billion searches are done using Google, and to demand Google to police all of them is asking to much. However, one must also ask oneself; is that really the way we want the system to work? 

I think what has happened here is a perfect example of the system actually working the way it is suppose to work. Google provides the tool for us to botanize an almost infinite amount of knowledge, and we, as the users, will then help Google to point out when this knowledge is flawed - or, as in this case, out right deprecatory. Google will then review the claim, and possibly remove or censor the input. 

Right now we just have to see how Google reacts to this information provided by the UN. Hopefully (most likely, anything else would be brand-suicide) they will censor these ill informed auto-complete suggestion. 

Ball is in your court Google, lets us see that you still want to play fair!

note: to read up more on this story I recommend this post by Jessica Lee. As always please let me know what you think in the comments below!

Dr Who Google Easter Egg

One minute you're walking down a London street, minding your own business, when you accidentally step into a police call box and all of a sudden you're inside the TARDIS and the Doctor has enlisted your help fighting aliens.

Google are famous for their pranks and plays with its users. We have all once been Rick Roll'd and the trend seems continuing. I cant do anything but laugh and look forward to the next one.

You Go Google!

Here is the address to the famous phone booth:

https://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&ll=51.492159,-0.19092&spn=0.005291,0.013937&sll=51.492140,-0.193028&layer=c&cid=12502927659667388442&panoid=c9UMhWP_MWm9U0L48xEjYw&cbp=13,291.8,,0,18.86&gl=US&t=m&cbll=51.492132,-0.192862&z=17

Serving the Hive-mind

Always had a feeling that individualism really doesn't matter? Have you always strived for the greater good of the colony? Want to live life mindlessly serving the almighty hive? Want to be an drone?

The new game Swarm!, currently under development for Google Glass, may soon fulfill all your dreams! Created by Daniel Estrada of the University of Illinois and Jonathan Lawhead of Columbia University, the game will connect Google Glass wearers to a virtual ant colony vying for prizes by solving real-world problems that vex traditional crowdsourcing efforts.

Similar to the pheromone trails laid down by ants, players leave virtual trails on a map as they move about. These behave like real ant trails, fading away with time unless reinforced by other people travelling the same route. Players will also be encouraged to seek out virtual resources to benefit their colony, such as food, and must avoid crossing the trails of other colony members. They can also monopolize a resource pool by taking photos of its real-world location. The photos and location data recorded by Google Glass could then be used to generate a map that anyone could use.

At a larger scale game data collected from Swarm!, and similar crowdsourcing applications, could help city planners optimize a transport system by having fine-grained data about where and when people tend to travel. For example, if the developers wanted to create a map of the locations of every power outlet in an airport, they could reward players with virtual food for every photo of a socket they took.

The team is currently seeking donations for Swarm! to get the project moving. Please check out their video below:

This is why I'm Leaving You

So people are not really into what you're selling. And subsequently leaving you. Gone. Alone. But why? On the Internet people don't smell (yet), but people do smell when they are being served crap - and this is usually why users, customers, clients, and potentially new business leave websites. The Internet is cluttered with information, and if your website is not interesting enough or serving up the right info, the visitor is going to leave. This is your bounce rate.

So, what is a good bounce rate? Sadly, there isn’t a golden number for bounce rate or average time on page. Also, many factors can go into these metrics, such as what kind of traffic your site is attracting and the SEO that’s been done.

In general, a good bounce rate would be anything under 50%-60%. A large factor influencing bounce rate is what kind of page you’re looking at and what the content is on that page. If the page is largely informational on a topic without many links to other parts of your site, then a bounce rate above 60% wouldn’t be out of the norm. However, if the page is mainly a directory of links to, say, products you make or services you offer, than you should see a much lower bounce rate than 60%.

If your bounce rate is high, the first place to look is your site design. Make sure that links are easily identifiable, relevant, and intuitive on each page. Main site navigation links should be located on every page of your site, with the exception of landing pages. The aesthetics of your site should also be up-to-date since an ugly or out-of-date site can cause a user to turn away instantly. Unfortunately, your flashy confetti animations on the sidebars are not as attractive as they were last decade.

Finally, look at how long it takes to load pages on your site. If you have a ton of large, high-resolution images, pages may take too long to load. People are impatient and will most likely hop off your page and go onto the next one if the load time is excessive.

For more about bounce rates, check out this infograph from KissMetrics.

Searching AltaVista Never More ...

Yahoo has, under the supervision of  Marissa Mayer, started to cut away some services and products in order to focus on a core range instead. Classics like the search engine AltaVista is discontinued, along with eleven other are more or less known offerings.

On June 28 cleansing began with Yahoo! BrowserPlus, Yahoo! Axis and Citizen Sports. Tomorrow July 7 marks the last day that AltaVista is left running. 

So if you want to relive old memories from the time the engine was dominating the Internet - now is the time to do so!

Other companies that have begun to cut their services are Google and BlackBerry. On July 1 popular Google Reader disappeared, and BlackBerry have tightened the amount of products on the market drastically. While Google is taking over the searches it is losing ground in several other areas. Are we seeing the start of a streamlining of products? 

Cant be Googled = unGoogleable?

A few weeks ago a global controversy arose in the northern outskirts of the world. A small language was challenging the entire existence of one of the worlds largest corporations - and they where not having any of it!

Many search engine users are currently googling "ungoogleable" following a lexical skirmish between Google and Swedish wordsmiths – a spat sparked by the proposed word ogooglebar - Swedish for "unGoogleable".

The Language Council of Sweden was considering the word, defined as something that cannot be found with any search engine, among their annual list of new entries to the Swedish language. But Google contested, arguing that the definition should be narrowed to refer only to information that cannot be found on the wildly popular Google search engine. What's more, they argued, the dictionary entry should come with a disclaimer that notes Google is a trademarked word.

The council promptly pulled the word from its list of contenders, but news of the disagreement nevertheless created what the Swedish call a Bloggbävning – in English: a "blogquake", or "the process by which a topic explodes in the blogosphere and is then picked up by more mainstream media outlets," according to The Atlantic. 

How this will end is not yet settled. The initial chock has now subsided, however there will surly be after chocks and trembles. However, it seems clear to me that no one, not even the company itself, can decided upon how to use the search language, nor what truly is unGoogleable!

Google Kills!

... some of its own products anyhow.

Through the history of this creative company lots and lots of ideas have seen the light of day, but almost just as many has also been buried in the dark again. I recently came across this funny info graphic of different Google ideas that have been cancelled. These applications have been retired, either because of integration with other Google products, or through lack of support. Among the discontinued products we find a few noteworthy entries:

• Google Buzz – social networking service integrated with Gmail service allowing users to share updates, photos, videos, and more at once. It let users make conversations about things they found interesting. It was released on February 9, 2010. Discontinued by end of 2011
• Google Wave – Online communication and Collaborative real-time editor tool using richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more. Development ceased on August 4, 2010. This product support is no longer available (turned off completely on April 30, 2012 by Google).
• Shared Stuff – web page sharing system, incorporating a share bookmarklet to share pages, and a page to view the most popular shared items. Pages could also be shared through third party applications, such as Delicious or Facebook. Discontinued on March 30, 2009.

Question now is naturally: why does Google+ still exist? And when is the Google Car going to be available for the open market? Find the full graph below:

SEO for Newbies

Search Engine Optimization (SEO for short) is pure rocket science - and beyond. Not even actual rocket scientists can always make SEO work for them, as proven by the fact that if you search for "rocket science" on Google your result will rather yield movies and memes, than physics and math.

However, as the inventors and creators of this new field of study, Google have also release a guidebook vital to anyone slightly confused by SEO - I dare to say that this document is bread and butter for web-novices and PHP-dragons alike. It details what to work with, how, to which extent, and probably most importantly; why?

Find the guide here.

Google Trends

If you haven't played around with Google Trends yet, now is high times to start. If you have an interest in statistics, pretty much any at all, and also fell like you want to know how people are spending their time using Google then this is your lolcats. I have easily spent hours upon hours weighting different searches against each other, looking at what the hottest searches trends are for this week, and trying to figure out why the Kardashians no longer are more popular than Justin Beiber.

However, Google have now upgraded their Trends with a new visual interface, and you can now find out what's trending in any given month with a new Top Charts feature from Google Trends.

Updated monthly and going back to 2004, Top Charts is built on Google Knowledge Graph, so it's smart enough to house related keywords under one term for more accurate rankings. For example, searches for "giants baseball" and "sf giants" would go toward pushing "San Francisco Giants" up the ranks in a sports-related chart.

Right now there are more than 40 top ten lists with more than 140 time periods available for your perusal. In addition to the charts, the Trends team has also rolled out a new visualization tool for "hot searches" that displays trending topics in a large colorful layout -- enjoy!