Privacy experts praise Google+ rollout so far
Ultimately, the key issue may not come down so much to pure privacy features but to whether Google+ lets users share online in a more natural, intuitive manner, like they do in real life, than is possible with Facebook today, F-Secure's Sullivan said. Whether it succeeds and beats Facebook in that respect remains to be seen, he said.

Google News! In the coming months, we’re going to retire two products that didn’t catch on the way we would have hoped, but did serve as influential models: Google Health (retiring January 1, 2012; data available for download through January 1, 2013) and Google PowerMeter (retiring September 16, 2011). Both were based on the idea that with more and better information, people can make smarter choices, whether in regard to managing personal health and wellness, or saving money and conserving energy at home. While they didn't scale as we had hoped, we believe they did highlight the importance of access to information in areas where it’s traditionally been difficult.

Panizzi, Lubetzky, and Google: How the Modern Web Environment is Reinventing the Theory of Cataloguing: This paper uses cataloguing theory to interpret the partial results of an exploratory study of university students using Web search engines and Web-based OPACs. The participants expressed frustration with the OPAC; while they sensed that it was "organized," they were unable to exploit that organization and attributed their failure to the inadequacy of their own skills. In the Google searches, on the other hand, students were getting the support traditionally advocated in catalogue design. Google gave them starting points: resources that broadly addressed their requirements, enabling them to get a greater sense of the knowledge structure that would help them to increase their precision in subsequent searches. While current OPACs apparently fail to provide these starting points, the effectiveness of Google is consistent with the aims of cataloguing as expressed in the theories of Anthony Panizzi and Seymour Lubetzky

In 2009, I wrote posts where I suspected that Google was screwing with me when it showed me search results.

"Do a search for yourself one day and Google will use its standard search algorithm to find standard results. But do that same search a different day, and Google will run its special beta algorithm and return results that it thinks you want. Then it looks to see what you do next. If you click on page after page of results, it assumes you, the person, are somehow related to those results since you read through more of them than a casual searcher might. And Google learns from this and becomes smarter."

So I'm glad that the new book, The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You, is confirming my suspicions: the internet knows who I am, but it loves me, anyway.

But as librarians, this hidden internet sucks. What happens when you share a computer at the service desk? And you do a search and click some links and the Google wraps you in that safe, protective bubble? What happens at the shift change? A second librarian sits at the desk and enters your bubble. And now all the searches are filtered for you, but the second librarian isn't you... won't is seem to the second librarian that Google suddenly started sucking? That it can't find anything the second librarian wants? -- Read More