Linknote — — 147 words

Technology — Web

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.

Linknote — — 64 words

Technology

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).

Linknote — — 160 words

Human-centred approaches — Media — Technology

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.)