Google

Utah Mine Owner Makes Google News Comment

The owner of the Utah coal mine where six miners are missing has used the new Google News comment feature to respond to news coverage. Robert E. Murray posted the following comment to at least nine stories: Comment from Robert E. Murray regarding trapped miners - 18 hours ago August 22, 2007 - We are totally focused on the recovery of these miners and in administering to the welfare of their families. The trauma from this natural disaster has been great for many, but we will not be deterred, ... (read more)

2007/08/23

Google Works in Mysterious Ways

When things are slow on Workbench, activity on this weblog falls to the five subjects of enduring interest to visitors who make comments: Whether lottery winners should be able to hide their identities Whether Best Buy sucks Whether Target sucks Whether Art Bell sucks Whether Orlando Bloom dates outside his race On the first subject, people who support secrecy for lottery winners will enjoy a story from Canada this morning: A guy was caught planning to kidnap, rob and murder a couple who won ... (read more)

2007/06/20

Make Google Happy: Weed Out Duplicate Content

I spend a lot of time these days trying to master search engine optimization, the practice of making Google's great and terrible algorithm give you the love you never received from your emotionally closed off, impossible to please father1. A commercial venture like Wargames.Com, which I'm running as a bootstrap with no advertising budget, would be utterly hopeless without search traffic. Towards this end, I've created a sitemap for each of my sites -- an XML file that tells Google and other ... (read more)

2007/05/03

Searching for Ways to Move Up in Google

A year ago the RSS Advisory Board moved to its own domain, losing all Google juice associated with its old site. Because the search term RSS is enormously popular, we've found it difficult to attract search traffic and build a decent Google pagerank. It took nearly a year to crack the top 100 for that term on Google; we're currently up to the 80s. I've been using this experience to learn the arcane art of search engine optimization (SEO). The first SEO technique I undertook to make Google happy ... (read more)

2007/02/06

Some Maps Advise Dangerous Route Through Oregon

Today's Seattle Times reports that CNET Editor James Kim and his family, who became stranded while traveling from Grants Pass to Gold Beach in Oregon during harsh winter weather, were on a route that's recommended by some online and in-car mapping services. Yahoo and MapQuest offer Highways 199 and 101 as the preferred route. A Google map search, however, suggests the Bear Camp route, part of a web of Forest Service roads used mostly in summer. Authorities suspect that the Kims may have chosen ... (read more)

2006/12/05

Googlemilking: I Have a Small Penis

The talk of memes reminded me that it's been a long time since I milked Google. Last year I created Googlemilking, a game where you choose a search phrase that lends itself to off-color or self-revealing results in Google. The game only got as far as one mention in the Scotsman, but it has made me the top result for the term totally straight. My parents must be proud. So here's a new googlemilk. I have a small penis, but ... ... my fiance doesnt seem to mind. 1 ... I think size doesn't matter. ... (read more)

2006/12/01

Jason Douglas Joins RSS Advisory Board

Jason Douglas, the project lead on the RSS Platform at Yahoo and the cocreator of Channel Definition Format, has joined the RSS Advisory Board. The board now has members from Google, Microsoft and Yahoo. If we can find a member from Apple's RSS team, we'll be in an even better position to help the big companies and enterpreneurial companies like FeedBurner and Six Apart work together to promote RSS interop and resolve some incompatibilities between different software that supports syndication. ... (read more)

2006/06/21

Jason Shellen, Jake Savin Join RSS Advisory Board

The RSS Advisory Board has two new members: Jason Shellen, the product manager of Google Reader and a former strategist for the company that created Blogger, and Jake Savin, the lead developer at UserLand Software. Jason Shellen has spent three years at Google since the company acquired Blogger developer Pyra Labs. First launched in October 2005, Google Reader is a free web-based aggregator that reads Really Simple Syndication and all of the other syndication formats, supporting item sharing, ... (read more)

2006/04/24

Google Calendar Makes Date with Atom

Google Calendar can import and export calendars created as Atom feeds but does not support RSS, according to Byrne Reese: Only a small minority of people will care about this obscure technology fact, but in the syndication community I think this is tremendously significant. To an engineer, adding RSS support is trivial, so the syndication industry must ask themselves, and the RSS folks especially, why did Google only support Atom? Google also introduced their own proprietary Atom elements or ... (read more)

2006/04/13

Journey to the Center of the Earth

Wired News is running my story today about the center of the world: the Shamrock "K" Horse Center near Coffeyville, Kansas. Maggie Dew, the geocacher who journeyed to the center and brought back photos, has planted a cache not far from the city at a '60s landmark called Peace Point: Some friends and I had a little shop in downtown Coffeyville called the Hobbit Hole. We had a peace flag in the front window, and it wasn't long before someone decided to lob a brick through it. During the same ... (read more)

2006/02/22

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