Archive — Google

Note — 2020-09-23

It’s nice to see that Google’s new Web Creators initiative has an RSS feed. Now maybe they could work on a product that helps people subscribe to those RSS feeds to foster this community of web creators…

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UK infosec experts flag concern over NHSX contact tracing app — Laurie Clarke — NS Tech

Mobile app displaying a text message from the government

This is the sort of reason why I don’t trust the state with my data as much as I trust many private companies. Apple and Google have worked together (itself a minor miracle) to develop a method of contact tracing that does not collect personal data and does not invade people’s privacy.

NHSX has rejected that model in favour of one that will enable them to deanonymise people, and store that information in a centralised database. This is the surveillance state. It risks reducing goodwill towards the NHS and other public institutions.

A statement for medical privacy campaign group Medconfidential reads: “Given NHSX has chosen to build an unnecessary massive pool of sensitive data, it must ensure that the data is well protected. With combined effort, GCHQ and NHS Digital will likely be good at defending the big pool of sensitive data. But there is no need to have that data. The best way to make sure data doesn’t leak, is to have chosen the method that never collected it.”

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Google is undermining one big reason why people flocked to Gmail in the first place

Google is undermining one big reason why people flocked to Gmail in the first place

Jordan Novet wonders why Google hasn’t updated storage limits for years.

One reason [Gmail] was revolutionary was its gigabyte of free storage space — the idea being that you wouldn’t have to constantly be deleting email in order to keep things going.

…

But today, I’m in a jam. I’ve run out of space across Gmail, the Google Drive storage service and the Google Photos app.

It’s a problem I felt, until I started compressing photos in Google Photos (and I haven’t genuinely noticed a downside of compressing them).

Once upon a time it felt like storage would never be an issue. Charles Arthur noted that perhaps the world is running out of storage. “Wouldn’t that be a thing? No room left on the internet.”

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The future of SEO has never been clearer (nor more ignored)

The future of SEO has never been clearer (nor more ignored)

I don’t always pay attention to SEO stuff, but I found this analysis of trends in search interesting. It seems that search engines are sending less and less traffic to websites. It’s interesting to compare this trend to the original Google ethos, which was that wanting to keep people on your own site was crazy. But that’s where Google seem to be now.

Much like how today I’d take 10 email subscribers to my newsletter over 1,000 Facebook “likes,” I think in the future, we’d all much rather have 10 Google searches for our brand name than 1,000 Google searches for phrases on which we’re trying to both rank and compete for a click against Google themselves.

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Designing Google Maps for motorbikes

Designing Google Maps for motorbikes

Some nice work from Google Maps on how they immersed themselves in their users’ world to understand how to improve Google Maps for motorbike users in places like Delhi and Jakarta.

The research team included engineers, UX designers, product managers, and marketing leads, all from different parts of the world. We met with two-wheeler drivers from Jaipur, Delhi, Bangalore, and Jakarta, in environments from bustling transportation hubs to kitchen tables in people’s homes. Our intention was to understand and relate to people in a way that felt authentic — we wanted to learn through immersion.

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“Google was not a normal place”: Brin, Page, and Mayer on the accidental birth of the company that changed everything

“Google was not a normal place”: Brin, Page, and Mayer on the accidental birth of the company that changed everything

Fascinating article about the early days of Google. One eye-popping section recalls how they originally tried to sell their technology to other search engines, only to be knocked back.

I remember going to this one meeting at Excite, with George Bell, the C.E.O. He selects Excite and he types “Internet,” and then it pops up a page on the Excite side, and pretty much all of the results are in Chinese, and then on the Google side it basically had stuff all about N.S.C.A. Mosaic and a bunch of other pretty reasonable things. George Bell, he’s really upset about this, and it was funny, because he got very defensive. He was like, “We don’t want your search engine. We don’t want to make it easy for people to find stuff, because we want people to stay on our site.” It’s crazy, of course, but back then that was definitely the idea: keep people on your site, don’t let them leave. And I remember driving away afterward, and Larry and I were talking: “Users come to your Web site? To search? And you don’t want to be the best damn search engine there is? That’s insane! That’s a dead company, right?”

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How a Google Maps update lead to the promotion of fringe views

How a Google Maps update lead to the promotion of fringe views

Google Maps made a small tweak to its interface so that the fully zoomed-out view displayed as a globe, rather than the Mercator projection it use before.

Peter Gasston noticed that the angle many news publications found was to cover the reaction from flat Earthers.

This gave ad-funded publishers their opportunity to get some attention money: a simple product update isn’t a story, but a manufactured controversy is…

The result is that a manufactured controversy about a minor product update has given false equivalency to the fringe views of a small band of crackpots so everyone can get a few pennies in advertising revenue. This is the attention economy in action, and it’s rotten.

Remember that repeating a lie — even while you make clear that it’s a lie — makes people more likely to believe it’s true.

This is how the media works these days. And it explains a lot about what’s going on in the world right now.

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Designing the UI of Google Translate

Designing the UI of Google Translate

I’m not too keen on user interface design showcases, because they usually boil down to: “look me make shiny thing”. But I really enjoyed this case study of how Google Translate redesigned their interface to make people more aware of some of the app’s most useful features.

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Google Duplex is not creepy

Google Duplex is not creepy

Further to my point yesterday about why I don’t agree that Google’s new AI-powered phone calling technology is creepy.

…we live in a world where most restaurants and shops can only really be dealt with by phone – which is very convenient and nice, but (to varying degrees) it doesn’t work for deaf people, introverts, anyone with a speech impediment or social anxiety, or people from Glasgow. Those people have every right to a nice dinner and this makes it possible – or at least much easier.

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Note — 2018-05-12

Lots of people think Google’s new AI-powered phone calls are creepy. I don’t quite follow this. Big companies have been making normal people speak to robots for decades. This isn’t a new concept. The difference is that this gives ordinary people the opportunity to do to big companies what big companies have been doing to them all along.

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Google AMP for Email: What it is and why it’s a bad idea

Google AMP for Email: What it is and why it’s a bad idea

I have been following the controversy around AMP fairly closely. A lot of people whose opinions I respect are against AMP generally, although I still cautiously think AMP is generally a good thing. At least, it is in my view clearly better than Facebook Instant Articles.

So if AMP is Google’s response to Facebook, I am in favour of it. Facebook’s interest is clearly to keep people in the Facebook ecosystem. AMP may give Google some a bit of control over content, but it still keeps it fundamentally of the web. At least you don’t have to use Google to use AMP.

However, AMP for Email seems far more obviously bad. Not least because, as this article points out, it appears to be a solution looking for a problem.

There may be cause to be wary of Google’s intentions after all.

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Publishers haven’t realised just how big a deal GDPR is

Publishers haven’t realised just how big a deal GDPR is

With the media still consumed with scrutinising Facebook, Thomas Baekdal once again points out that it is the media who appear to be less prepared to deal with privacy trends and comply with new regulations like GDPR.

It’s interesting that Thomas Baekdal has emphasised that this is not only important for compliance. But because it is becoming a fundamental expectation.

He notes the clear changes that Google and Facebook have made in reaction to GDPR. In contrast to publishers.

I have yet to see any publisher who is actually changing what they are doing. Every single media site that I visit is still loading tons of 3rd party trackers. They are still not asking people for consent, in fact most seem to think they already have people’s consent…

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Underscores, optimisation and arms races

Underscores, optimisation and arms races

The story of how one character — the underscore (_) — provided an early glimpse of the problems we now face with dominant tech firms exerting their power over the web.

We found ourselves resistant to what felt like a coercive effect of Google’s rising domination, especially since Google’s own Blogger platform was a competitor of ours. Our expression of that frustration was expressed by a debate over a single character: We were using _ because we thought it looked nicer, so why should we change to – just because Google liked it better? Weren’t they supposed to adapt to what we published on the web?

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If Google wanted to get found in Google

If Google wanted to get found in Google

If you ever have to say you’re simple, you’re not. Because if you were truly simple then you wouldn’t have to waste time telling people you are. You’d just be simple. Only those with complexity syndrome feel the need to explain that they are simple. The more you have to write about how to use your product or service, the more you have failed as a designer.

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Google Chrome’s now blocks dodgy ads by default. Which is great for Google


Google Chrome’s now blocks dodgy ads by default. Which is great for Google

An interesting piece on the conflict of interest surrounding Google’s move to block the worst ads in Google Chrome.

I might have more sympathy for the publishers if they hadn’t systematically destroyed their own websites with terrible ads, reducing the trust of their readers, and giving the web a bad reputation as a result.

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Google memory loss

Google memory loss

This is interesting. It appears as though Google is losing older documents (such as 10-year-old blog posts) from its index.

I’m in two minds about this.

On the one hand, Google has long been something other than a mere web search engine, and rightly so. They want to get you relevant answers to your query. And old blog posts will rarely be the answers to many people’s queries.

But on the other hand, someone ought to be indexing the web. And if Google can’t (or don’t want to), who can?

My men­tal mod­el of the Web is as a per­ma­nen­t, long-lived store of humanity’s in­tel­lec­tu­al her­itage. For this to be use­ful, it needs to be in­dexed, just like a li­brary. Google ap­par­ent­ly doesn’t share that view.

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Google Maps’s moat

Google Maps’s moat

A brilliant analysis of recent improvements to Google Maps, and why Google is so far ahead of Apple.

Just two years after it started adding them, Google already had the majority of buildings in the US. And now after five years, it has my rural hometown — an area it still hasn’t Street View’d (after 10+ years of Street View).

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The media perspective on burger emoji: An unexpected analysis

The media perspective on burger emoji: An unexpected analysis

The burger emoji: A first-hand analysis of the media coverage

Media analyst Thomas Baekdal unexpectedly went viral last month when he tweeted about the inconsistencies between the burger emojis for Apple and Google. He has published two articles about it. The first examines why his tweet went viral. The second investigates how the media reacted.

The analysis paints a rather negative picture of the media.

…look at the very familiar pattern of the stories posted by the media. They are all focusing on Google’s CEO saying he will do something.

Think about all the other stories that journalists cover on a regular basis. How many of those have the same inherent problem of being antagonistically focused, with a scandal-first lens regardless if the underlying topic is politics, business, or general human interest?

For what it’s worth, of course the cheese should be on top.

(I have written before about ambiguous emojis.)

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The web began dying in 2014, here’s how

The web began dying in 2014, here’s how – André Staltz

Highly interesting article about how the dominance of Facebook, Google and Amazon is beginning to damage the web. Facebook and Google are silently conspiring to specialise in social and knowledge respectively, further increasing their dominance. Meanwhile, the weakening of net neutrality threatens to move to goalposts even further in their favour.

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