Google is working with the social media service Twitter and major news publishers like The Guardian and The New York Times to create a new kind of web link and article storage system that would load online news articles and digital magazine pieces in a few milliseconds, according to several people involved in the project. That is a fraction of the five to 10 seconds it can take to load a typical website.
From Google, Twitter and Publishers Seek Faster Web – The New York Times
For regular folks, like me that want to make stuff and get work done, it is not an easy feat to do so with 100% privacy. To keep private you should spend a lot of time and work on it to setup and maintain the complicated systems. You have to change burner phones all the time and live like Harold from Person of Interest.
Today, the project sits in a kind of limbo. On one hand, Google has scanned an impressive thirty million volumes, putting it in a league with the world’s larger libraries (the library of Congress has around thirty-seven million books). That is a serious accomplishment. But while the corpus is impressive, most of it remains inaccessible. Searches of out-of-print books often yield mere snippets of the text—there is no way to gain access to the whole book. The thrilling thing about Google Books, it seemed to me, was not just the opportunity to read a line here or there; it was the possibility of exploring the full text of millions of out-of-print books and periodicals that had no real commercial value but nonetheless represented a treasure trove for the public. In other words, it would be the world’s first online library worthy of that name.
Building a Google-quality search engine is an extremely challenging task and requires years of investment in people and resources. Bing, as a project, has been a huge undertaking for Microsoft, but it still lags Google in terms of quality and market share.
From Why Google is better than Bing and it’s likely to continue that way — Medium
Google Play has been criticized as a sort of vast and unruly garden compared with Apple’s impeccably mowed lawns. In Forbes recently, Erik Kain called Google Play “an ugly, poorly organized store filled with myriad knockoffs, dubious ‘games’ and other apps.” That sounds a bit harsh to the Haggler, a Google Play regular who has had mostly positive experiences.
From Rousting the Book Pirates From Google – The New York Times
There have been a lot of rumors about the decline in traffic Google is sending Wikipedia’s way. There have been reports from SimilarWeb that Wikipedia has shown a “sudden” and “massive” decline in traffic from Google’s organic search results.
But Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia, said this week that this is not a sudden or drastic drop in traffic from Google, but rather a “long-term issue with decreasing traffic from Google.”
From Jimmy Wales Says Wikipedia Is Losing Traffic From Google
“Being able to provide the resources and technology that people can’t afford on their own is something that the library—that’s what the library should do,” says Watson from the Queens Library. “The library is the equalizer.”
From How libraries can compete with Google and Amazon – Quartz
Billions of times per day, consumers turn to Google for I want-to-know, I want-to-go, I want-to-do, and I want-to-buy moments. And at these times, consumers are increasingly picking up their smartphones for answers. In fact, more Google searches take place on mobile devices than on computers in 10 countries including the US and Japan.1 This presents a tremendous opportunity for marketers to reach people throughout all the new touchpoints of a consumer’s path to purchase.
Book Review of the title Biblio Tech: Why Libraries Matter More Than Ever in the Age of Google (nice title!!) http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/book-party/wp/2015/04/23/when-google-is-your-librarian-and-starbucks-your-wifi-do-we-still-need-public-libraries/
In his new book, author John Palfrey, former head of Harvard Law School Libraries writes about the necessity of maintaining public libraries as one of the essentials of society.
Libraries are repositories of books, music and documents, but above all of nostalgia: the musty stacks, the unexpected finds, the safety and pleasure of a place that welcomes and shelters unconditionally.
John Palfrey shares these memories, but he is also wary of them. After all, fond recollections of pleasant reading rooms can cloud our judgment of what libraries offer us — and need from us — today. In an era when search engines, online retailers and social media are overtaking some of libraries’ essential tasks, “nostalgia can actually be dangerous,” Palfrey warns. “Thinking of libraries as they were ages ago and wanting them to remain the same is the last thing we should want for them.”
Art Project masterpieces from Google Cultural Institute in your browser tabs
Breathe a little culture into your day! Discover a beautiful artwork from the Google Art Project each time you open a new tab in Chrome.With this extension, you’ll see masterpieces from Van Gogh, Degas, Monet and other iconic artists from museums around the world in every new Chrome tab. The artwork is refreshed every day, or change the settings to see a new image every time you open a new tab.
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