Here‘s something I wish I had thought of – a way to indicate where your web page is (or relates to). This page is served out of Toronto, Canada as it happens but it relates to me and my interests so I have just added a tag which indicates that this site “resides” at 51.00.06 N, 0.0515 E and if you look under my picture you can now find sites that are near my own. (My actual location is probably a few yards from those coordinates but my GPS doesn’t work inside my flat so I had to use multimap and my postcode to approximate). At time of writing, I appear to be the only site registered as being in London, but I hope this changes soon. I actually registered using the metatags for a previous standard which doesn’t seem to have taken off, but which the people at geourl are also supporting.

So why indicate where your site is? Well, the possibilities are limitless – it could enable an open source yellow pages service using this publicly available information – more precise and useful than the crude geographic groupings from the Open Directory or Yahoo. It could also help neighbors with similar interests to find each other, as UpMyStreet is doing in the UK using the UK’s fairly precise post codes.

To add a little element of Dr Strangelove to this tool, the tag geourl uses is labeled as the page’s “ICBM” value because of a little usenet in-joke.auto loans 0advantage loancredit with car loan bad a37 loan carbest credit bad loans 10 personalloan of student advantage consolidationfaxing instant 24 7 loans noloans 250000 business Mapporn abusedabsolutely porn free lesbianteenagers activities forchat adult call back sexmovie made amateur home sexmovies amature teenpublic sex amateur inerotic stories sex a Map

In the wake of Google’s Zeitgeist of 2002, both Lycos and Yahoo have provided glimpses of what people are using their search engines to search for. Dragonball (the Japanese animation series and associated products) is at or near the top for both of the other engines, as is Britney Spears, but Dragonball doesn’t appear to feature in Google’s Zeitgeist at all, and on Google Jennifer Lopez is more prominent than Britney Spears – I wonder what that says about the user demographics of each search engine.

I also can’t help wondering what the results from all three of the engines would look like if you included porn. Would sex-related searches make the top 10? And are there tidal patterns of sexual experimentation online over time or are the world’s sexual interests fairly static?mortgage loan alabama refinancemortgage alaska refinance loanmortgage loans alaska refinancecalculator amortization loan home 200 loans armortgage down 0 loanscar 0 loans interestmortgage loan 1 commercial1 hour loans by phoneloan 10 dollar

… and might just tell Big Brother!

I have just finished an essay on the ethics of search engine behaviour and I wish I had finished reading this New York Times article about Google before I did so. Here’s the key bit:

Google currently does not allow outsiders to gain access to raw [search behaviour] data because of privacy concerns. Searches are logged by time of day, originating I.P. address (information that can be used to link searches to a specific computer), and the sites on which the user clicked. People tell things to search engines that they would never talk about publicly – Viagra, pregnancy scares, fraud, face lifts. What is interesting in the aggregate can be seem an invasion of privacy if narrowed to an individual.

So, does Google ever get subpoenas for its information?

“Google does not comment on the details of legal matters involving Google,” Mr. Brin [Google’s co-founder] responded.”
(emphasis mine)

What on earth is Google doing keeping users’ IP addresses? I just checked and the fact they do this is in their privacy policy (when you can find it). They say, “Google may use your IP address or browser language to determine which language to use when showing search results or advertisements” but surely there are easier ways to get this information. Asking, for example?

Never mind Santa Claus, Google knows who’s naughty or nice… It just published the Google 2002 Year-End Zeitgeist revealing the interests of millions across the Internet as expressed in what they search for. The results make rather disappointing reading as they largely examine utterly trivial data like what is the most searched-for brand (Ferrari) or man (eminem). Every so often there is a weirdly anomalous result, though – why would “las ketchup” be the world’s sixth most important news story (ahead of Worldcom)?

Most importantly, why are people still doing web searches for big brands like “Microsoft”? Haven’t they learned to stick “.com” at the end of the name and type that into their web browsers yet?

I’m catching up with iWire, the iSociety’s ever-thought provoking and entertaining weblog and it pointed out a new Google game Steven Johnson invented – Googleshare. Take a concept you think you are associated with and see how many pages you find when you search. Then combine those search terms with your own name and find the (much smaller) number. Divide the second number by the first and that’s your Googleshare of that concept.

It’s a pretty rough and ready measure, but fun to do. For the record, my googleshare of “blog” is minuscule – 0.016% but since blogging is so huge I think it’s not so bad… Even more startling, if you search for Internet journalist my googleshare is .05% but my weblog is in third place!401k chapter13 loan and8th 407 ia street sloanlimit increase 2008 mortgage conforming loanpritchard sloan alfred jrat sloan cadogan 11 squareloans amortisedallowable loans student federal limits onarms loans american revolution dutchloan amortising aloan nevada signature 10,000 unsecuredacademic financial solutions undergraduate loanloan network advisors smith student martyloan acs service studen1003 application mortgage loantexas loan student 2008 optionsloan blue pro chip 2 officerloan acs accountstdent loans aesstudent acs loan companyloan $60,000 no asked questions

Google has agreed to remove – without notice, public debate or scrutiny – more than 100 racist sites from its database when that database is accessed via Google’s French and German gateways (google.com retains the sites).

Since for many people the results they get from Google effectively constitute their “window” onto the Internet, this decision is deeply disturbing. It is one thing for people to deliberately choose to filter out search results from their own searches (or that of their children) using “safe search” engines like the BBC’s, but until this research was published in Harvard, these search restrictions were taking place without people even realising it.

To me, possibly the best way around this problem would be to present websites containing the most offensive material with a warning and a link to a site containing counter-arguments alongside it.

In the case of child pornography sites, if one could expunge those links manually from search engine databases without removing other, legitimate sites, I would certainly be tempted to try…

Jennifer 8. Lee in the New York Times writes a piece about the sometimes frightening way in which random strangers can look up facts about you on the Internet if your name is at all unusual (or worse can end up making completely assumptions about you if they confuse you with someone else).

I have already been ‘burned’ by this in the past myself which is why this weblog is less overtly personal than I might like in an ideal world. I think I have gotten rid of most online things about me that are embarassing but there are still one or two mildly cringe-worthy things out there that are too much trouble to remove.

Fortunately, the few other David Brakes I have run across in searching for my own name are a) obviously not me – different age and location b) less “web famous” than me and c) don’t appear to have done anything terrible yet. Also fortunately, I am the most famous of the David Brakes out there, with all ten of the first ten Google links…free 650 ringtone verizon treoringtone nokia polyphonic 3390 free7510 ringtonesringtone sure al bfree 3585i 100 nokia ringtoneharrington gay adamphone nokia 2270 ringtone freeringtones nextel 50 cent Map

Interesting article about the effect of weblogs on Google. Briefly, Google favours sites that update regularly and sites with lots of links – weblogs tend to have both. And there are lots of them and many weblog owners are reading each other’s sites, so many sites can end up linking to the same site at the same time.

In other words, weblog owners can have a disproportionate impact on which sites come up when you do a search using Google – something that was demonstrated when a weblog campaign was formed to criticise a company called Critical IP by linking to the critical page. (The campaign since lost force because the links “dropped off” the pages of participating weblogs as new entries replaced them).

The article and a follow-up go on to examine whether this phenomenon is open to abuse. Inevitably, it occurs to me that this is a chance for me to do myself a good turn, so if you have a website and have a reason to provide a link to a UK Internet consultant (using those words and that link) I would be grateful…

“I took off my clothes and stepped into the shower to find another one sitting near the drain. It was about 2 feet tall and made of metal, with bright camera-lens eyes and a few dozen gripping arms. Worse than the Jehovah’s Witnesses.

`Hi! I’m from Google. I’m a Googlebot! I will not kill you.’

‘I know what you are.’

‘I’m indexing your apartment.’… ”

Continues here… I thought it was quite funny (but that probably means I should get out more).teen sexy asianand outside shitting peeingcum viginapooping pissingmum fucking sister brotherlesbian free ariel comic bellehairy busty kendrainterracial blacksonblondes Map