Posts tagged google

Google Goes to the Moon Google and the NASA Ames Research Center have joined together to produce a collection of lunar maps and charts as a way to explore the Apollo missions. Things to see: Visible - A mosaic of images taken by the Clementinemission. This is a black-and-white version of what you would seeif you were in orbit around the moon. This composite imagery was prepared by the USGS. Elevation - A lunar terrain map generated by the USGSin conjunction with the The Unified Lunar Control Network 2005, and shaded using an airbrushed shaded relief map. This map is color-coded by altitude, so you can use the color key at the lower left to estimate elevations. Apollo - A collection of placemarks that tell the story of the Apollo missions that landed on the moon. This includes stories, quotes,images, panoramas, audio clips, and links to videos of the astronauts’ adventures on the lunar surface. Charts - A collection of geological and topographic charts of various regions of the moon. Image: Screenshot, Google Moon.

Google Goes to the Moon

Google and the NASA Ames Research Center have joined together to produce a collection of lunar maps and charts as a way to explore the Apollo missions.

Things to see:

  • Visible - A mosaic of images taken by the Clementinemission. This is a black-and-white version of what you would seeif you were in orbit around the moon. This composite imagery was prepared by the USGS.
  • Elevation - A lunar terrain map generated by the USGSin conjunction with the The Unified Lunar Control Network 2005, and shaded using an airbrushed shaded relief map. This map is color-coded by altitude, so you can use the color key at the lower left to estimate elevations.
  • Apollo - A collection of placemarks that tell the story of the Apollo missions that landed on the moon. This includes stories, quotes,images, panoramas, audio clips, and links to videos of the astronauts’ adventures on the lunar surface.
  • Charts - A collection of geological and topographic charts of various regions of the moon.

Image: Screenshot, Google Moon.

Pwning the Media, Take 02

In a rush to get there first, a number of media outlets reported today that Google purchased WiFi hotspot provider ICOA. Problem is, the story just isn’t true.

Via Ars Technica:

The stories were all attributed to an announcement made by Google. The only trouble is, Google didn’t make the announcement at all. And ICOA now says the story is entirely false.

So how did this story get so widely distributed? The answer is media outlets writing about it didn’t contact Google or ICOA before pumping out their stories, relying solely on a press release that wasn’t issued by either company. ICOA’s stock (worth less than a penny) soared on the fake news and then, just as suddenly, fell back down to earth. This leads to the natural assumption: someone must be profiting off this little mess…

…A story in BuzzFeed quotes [ICOA CEO George] Strouthopoulos as saying the source of the hoax is from Aruba. The Securities Exchange Commission has reportedly halted trading on ICOA’s stock at ICOA’s request.

So, current idea is that someone planted the press release on PRWeb to boost ICOA’s stock price.

More importantly though, as Ars Technical writes, “No one’s perfect. But a few minutes of digging, Google searching, e-mailing, and phone calling is usually enough to prevent false news from hitting the wire.”

Put another way, a press release isn’t a verification of fact. Contact your sources, report and then publish.

Bonus Pwnage: Here’s a story from a few months back about a man who offered himself up as an expert in all things. Even though he wasn’t, media outlets took the bait and quoted him extensively about all manner of topics.

Google Launches Worldwide, Mobile Alternate Reality Game

Via AllThingsD:

Meet Ingress, a new free mobile app and alternate reality game made by Google launching today (on Android first, available as soon as it makes it through the Google Play release process).

Ingress is a project of former Google director of geo John Hanke and his Niantic Labs, a start-up team wholly inside of Google…

…Ingress also aims to get people out in the physical world, both for physical activity and to see their surroundings in a new way.

Users can generate virtual energy needed to play the game by picking up units of “XM,” which are collected by traveling walking paths, like a real-world version of Pac-Man. Then they spend the energy going on missions around the world to “portals,” which are virtually associated with public art, libraries and other widely accessible places.

“The concept is something like World of Warcraft, where everyone in world is playing the same game,” Hanke said.

AllThingsD reports that Google plans to eventually turn the game tools into a platform for developers to build upon.

Game site. Ingress on Google Play.

Video: Ingress promo. Run Time ~1:40.

Digital Surveillance on the Rise Twice a year Google releases its Transparency Report outlining governmental requests for user information and content governments would like removed from search results.  The above graph shows the increase in user data requests by governments. Via the Google Blog: This is the sixth time we’ve released this data, and one trend has become clear: Government surveillance is on the rise. As you can see from the graph below, government demands for user data have increased steadily since we first launched the Transparency Report. In the first half of 2012, there were 20,938 inquiries from government entities around the world. Those requests were for information about 34,614 accounts. Leading the pack is the United States with over 7,900 requests, 90% of which Google “fully or partly complied with”, followed by India (over 2,300) and Brazil (over 1,500). Denmark’s been most mellow with 32 total requests. The report also shows copyright removal requests made by companies and takedown requests have spiked as well with upwards of 2,000,000 per week. Leading that group over the last month is a company called Degban (which appears to do it on behalf of porn companies), followed by the British Recorded Music Industry and the Recording Industry Association of America respectively. We find no irony in that. — MIchael Image: Government requests from around the world to hand over user data, via Google.

Digital Surveillance on the Rise

Twice a year Google releases its Transparency Report outlining governmental requests for user information and content governments would like removed from search results. 

The above graph shows the increase in user data requests by governments.

Via the Google Blog:

This is the sixth time we’ve released this data, and one trend has become clear: Government surveillance is on the rise. As you can see from the graph below, government demands for user data have increased steadily since we first launched the Transparency Report. In the first half of 2012, there were 20,938 inquiries from government entities around the world. Those requests were for information about 34,614 accounts.

Leading the pack is the United States with over 7,900 requests, 90% of which Google “fully or partly complied with”, followed by India (over 2,300) and Brazil (over 1,500). Denmark’s been most mellow with 32 total requests.

The report also shows copyright removal requests made by companies and takedown requests have spiked as well with upwards of 2,000,000 per week. Leading that group over the last month is a company called Degban (which appears to do it on behalf of porn companies), followed by the British Recorded Music Industry and the Recording Industry Association of America respectively.

We find no irony in that. — MIchael

Image: Government requests from around the world to hand over user data, via Google.

Google Presents The Fall of the Iron Curtain Today is the 23rd anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Google, as part of its online culture museum, has released a collection of online exhibitions titled The Fall of the Iron Curtain. It’s a detailed, powerful collection of multimedia exhibitions developed in parternship with Berlin’s DDR Museum, the Polish History Museum, Romanian broadcaster TVR, and Getty Images.  In the intro video, Google’s Mark Yoshitake explains: The aim of the Cultural Institute is to preserve and promote culture online. It’s about storytelling. It’s about access. And it’s about disseminating knowledge. For other exhibitions from the Cultural Institute, see here. Image: Screenshot from The Fall of the Iron Curtain

Google Presents The Fall of the Iron Curtain

Today is the 23rd anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Google, as part of its online culture museum, has released a collection of online exhibitions titled The Fall of the Iron Curtain. It’s a detailed, powerful collection of multimedia exhibitions developed in parternship with Berlin’s DDR Museum, the Polish History Museum, Romanian broadcaster TVR, and Getty Images. 

In the intro video, Google’s Mark Yoshitake explains:

The aim of the Cultural Institute is to preserve and promote culture online. It’s about storytelling. It’s about access. And it’s about disseminating knowledge.

For other exhibitions from the Cultural Institute, see here.

Image: Screenshot from The Fall of the Iron Curtain

Google Crisis Map: Sandy Edition

Embedded is Google.org’s Sandy Crisis Map with data pulled in from the US Naval Research Laboratory, the National Hurricane Center, the US Geological Survey and weather.com.

The pins show emergency shelter locations. 

Visit Google.org for a larger version, as well as the ability to filter the various data it’s pulling in.  

I Don’t Usually Post Advertisements, But When I Do…

DuckDuckGo, the privacy aware search engine, takes on Google over “search personalization” and the effect this has on the results we see when seeking information.

The ad is spot on. As we increasingly drive our technologies to produce information “just for us”, and get just the information we’ll “like”, we each become constrained in information silos of our making, oblivious to the serendipity and challenge of stumbling across ideas that differ from our own.

Eli Pariser, Upworthy co-founder and author, calls this the filter bubble.

DuckDuckGo’s ad puts the concept to the test as it summarizes the search results of 131  volunteers.

Via Talking Points Memo:

The users, who weren’t signed into Google, did Google searches for the three chosen politically-themed terms — “abortion,” “gun control,” and “Obama” — and send in screenshots of their search activity to Weinberg and the DuckDuckGo programming team…

…The result was a wide variance in the resulting links that Google displayed, according to DuckDuckGo’s experiment. For example, in the case of searches for “abortion,” some users received information on Obama’s public stance on abortion, while others did not. Some users also received information on pro-life activist Gianna Jessen while others did not.

“I think we had a big enough sample to show pretty definitively that the ‘filter bubble’ is real,” [DuckDuckGo’s founder Gabriel] Weinberg said.

As TPM points out, Google’s own documentation on personalized search indicates that even “if you turn off personal results and sign out of your Google Account, you may still see personalized results and results based on the context of your search.”

As in, even when you don’t want it, Google (and legions of others trying to customize information to taste) give it to you. — Michael

Google Data Center: Douglas County, GA

Via TechSpot:

To the delight of nerds everywhere, Google has thrown together a beautiful exposè of its cutting-edge data centers located around the world. Glimpses inside the search giant’s facilities — data centers, in particular — are considered a rare treat, but the company has published several dozen gorgeous 3000x2000 photos in full HDR glory to: Where the Internet Lives. Google also allowed a select group of journalists and other industry professionals to tour their facilities.

Visit and you can view slideshows or take streetview tours through the data centers and learn how they work, and how Google addresses environmental issues such as water use and preservation.

Images: Pipes, Tubes and Servers in Douglas County, GA, via Google Data Centers. Select to embiggen.

Google’s Online Culture Museum The Google Cultural Institute has gone live with 42 online exhibitions that span the 20th century. Via the Daily Mail: Google have teamed up with the world’s museums for a massive update to their online ‘cultural institute’ that offers users the chance to learn about some of the major figures and events of the past century. The latest additions to the Google Cultural Institute archives, available to view from today, are intended as an online educational resource to preserve history in a place that is accessible to people when they need it. Major world events like D-Day, the Holocaust and the fight against Apartheid are described with a mixture of photos, historical account and contemporary quotes. Image: Screenshot, Nelson Mandela Prison Years, 1962-1990, via Google Cultural Institute.

Google’s Online Culture Museum

The Google Cultural Institute has gone live with 42 online exhibitions that span the 20th century.

Via the Daily Mail:

Google have teamed up with the world’s museums for a massive update to their online ‘cultural institute’ that offers users the chance to learn about some of the major figures and events of the past century.

The latest additions to the Google Cultural Institute archives, available to view from today, are intended as an online educational resource to preserve history in a place that is accessible to people when they need it.

Major world events like D-Day, the Holocaust and the fight against Apartheid are described with a mixture of photos, historical account and contemporary quotes.

Image: Screenshot, Nelson Mandela Prison Years, 1962-1990, via Google Cultural Institute.

After 7 Years of Litigation, Google, Publishers Cut Deal

Via the BBC:

Google has settled a seven-year legal spat with the Association of American Publishers (AAP).

The row blew up in 2005 over Google’s plan to scan and digitise books for a vast digital library.

The AAP said that the project could involve massive copyright infringement because it could make available digital copies of copyrighted works.

The settlement lets US publishers decide which works should, or should not, be in Google’s library.

This settles one of the main objections to the library project which planned to scan every book unless publishers and authors specifically objected…

…As part of the deal Google has also agreed to provide digital copies of the works that publishers and writers make available for the library.

FJP: That was a long time coming.

Google News at 10: How the Algorithm Won Over the News Industry

There is, on the one hand, an incredibly simple explanation for the shift in news organizations’ attitude toward Google: clicks. Google News was founded 10 years ago — September 22, 2002 — and has since functioned not merely as an aggregator of news, but also as a source of traffic to news sites. Google News, its executives tell me, now “algorithmically harvests” articles from more than 50,000 news sources across 72 editions and 30 languages. And Google News-powered results, Google says, are viewed by about 1 billion unique users a week. (Yep, that’s billion with a b.) Which translates, for news outlets overall, to more than 4 billion clicks each month: 1 billion from Google News itself and an additional 3 billion from web search.

As a Google representative put it, “That’s about 100,000 business opportunities we provide publishers every minute.”

Google Takes Mapping Underwater

Google added its first underwater panoramas to Google Maps yesterday.

From their blog:

With these vibrant and stunning photos you don’t have to be a scuba diver—or even know how to swim—to explore and experience six of the ocean’s most incredible living coral reefs. Now, anyone can become the next virtual Jacques Cousteau and dive with sea turtles, fish and manta rays in Australia, the Philippines and Hawaii.

See the camera details here.

ReadWriteWeb brought up the other news this week:

Since Apple’s lukewarm launch, the press has begun to wonder whether Google will deliver a standalone mapping app for iOS to compete with Apple’s. Google appears to be buying time by showing off this undersea Reef View as a demonstration of its planet-wide prowess.

FJP: I really need to get outside more. — Blake.

Forget the Paywall, Consider the Surveywall

About 150 US news sites have some sort of paywall (give or take 150 or so). Some are hard, some are soft and some are in between.

All have been written about extensively.

But what if we looked at walls from an entirely different direction? Google’s done this with their Consumer Surveys. Instead of asking readers to pull out their wallets to access content, they’re asked to answer a single question. Think of it as a Surveywall.

Frédéric Filloux describes it like so:

Eighteen months ago — under non disclosure — Google showed publishers a new transaction system for inexpensive products such as newspaper articles. It worked like this: to gain access to a web site, the user is asked to participate to a short consumer research session. A single question, a set of images leading to a quick choice.

The solution is one that’s beautiful in its simplicity. Market research is an almost $30 billion industry. And while a lot of it is much more than having people answer surveys, a lot of it is people answering surveys.

So what if you target surveys to, say, readers of certain sections of The Miami Herald, or Wired, or Car and Driver. The researcher wins because it’s a lower cost solution than traditional outreach. The publisher wins because they’ve gained a revenue stream by running the surveys. The reader wins because her wallet stays in her pocket.

There are caveats, of course, which Frédéric outlines:

In theory, the mechanism finally solves the old quest for tiny, friction-free transactions: replace the paid-for zone with a survey-zone through which access is granted after answering a quick question. Needless to say, it can’t be recommended for all sites. We can’t reasonably expect a general news site, not to mention a business news one, to adopt such a scheme. It would immediately irritate the users and somehow taint the content.

I’m not so sure it’s unreasonable. Different, yes, but the entire digital enterprise and the economics behind it is different.

The solution though reminds me of reCAPTCHA, an initiative started at Carnegie Mellon and now run by Google to crowdsource book digitization by harnessing a few seconds of millions of users’ time by having them enter the text they see in a traditional CAPTCHA box (the first word is machine readable, the second isn’t and that’s the one that Google hopes you can decipher).

As Google explains:

About 200 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that’s not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day. What if we could make positive use of this human effort? reCAPTCHA does exactly that by channeling the effort spent solving CAPTCHAs online into “reading” books.

In theory, the micro-surveys of a Surveywall would work similarly. With enough scale to conduct a full survey one question at a time, market researchers gain the insights they’re looking for. The publisher earns more for running the survey than it would get with traditional display advertising.

The question, as it always does, comes back to the reader.

Will she take a few seconds to answer a question, or think it intrusive, close the page and move on?

And that, most likely, comes back to the king of it all: just how valuable is the content that the publisher is providing? — Michael

Google said it had received copyright removal requests for over 4.3 million Web addresses in the last 30 days, according to the company’s transparency report. That is more than it received in all of 2009.

Amy Chozick, New York Times. Under Copyright Pressure, Google to Alter Search Results.

The News: Beginning next week Google will update its search algorithms to prioritize Web sites with “legitimate” content over those that have been identified as having multiple, valid complaints over copyright infringement.