An interesting image.

Herewith the story of my attempts to buy a Dora the Explorer Mr. Face Plush Backpack from ToysRUs using Google Checkout. In short, Google now has my credit card number. (It’s one I use for testing, however). It feels kind of odd, to be honest. It seems Google is obviating the merchant entirely vis the ongoing data relationship with the buyer

Matt talks about the parties at Pubcon and his favorite session. [Continue Reading >>]

When Alison entered the room, she looked, screamed and turned back. She wanted to cry and disappear. Google was great but dead. [Add a word to the post yourself!]

Google’s got a sense of humor (and an answer for just about everything).

See it for yourself, and then see Wikipedia to find out why 42 is the correct answer. [Continue Reading >>]

This doesn’t seem like Google’s normally polished way of doing things.

Drop spots is a new site made with Google maps. If you’re bored & looking for some fun, look up your area and see if there’s any drop spots near you. As explained by the introductory video, you find something you want to share, look for a public hiding spot and hide the item there. Then log into Drop spots and post it for others to find.

Via Download Squad.

Today’s the thirty-first of October and Google’s got lots of scary stories for you.

Read Dracula, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde or Frankenstein, or search for your favorite book.

Find out what Google thinks of you, your friends & family.

http://www.googlism.com/

If you’re looking for work, look no further than the Googlunaplex which will house “35 engineers, 27,000 low cost web servers, 2 massage therapists and a sushi chef formerly employed by the pop group Hanson”.

The Google Copernicus Hosting Environment and Experiment in Search Engineering (G.C.H.E.E.S.E.) is a fully integrated research, development and technology facility at which Google will be conducting experiments in entropized information filtering, high-density high-delivery hosting (HiDeHiDeHo) and de-oxygenated cubicle dwelling. This center will provide a unique platform from which Google will leapfrog current terrestrial-based technologies and bring information access to new heights of utility.

Giant lava lamps filled with biomass suspended in seawater generate oxygen for the complex

I’m not making this up, read it for yourself.

A hypothetical conversation between a user and “Google Brain”. In the end the user pays up.

Warning: This is old news, but if you havn’t heard it, read on.

15-year old Tom Vendetta submitted a free Press release through INewswire and really pulled prank on Google. The press release announced that Google had hired him to do security screening on Gmail, and made it through Google News’ spam filters right onto the front page.

The press release, no longer available on Google news or INewswire (obviously)

15 year old student, Tom Vendetta has been hired by search engine giant Google Inc. The student will receive a lowered salary, which will be placed into a bank account for future education, said Google CEO Larry Page. When asked what role Vendetta will play at the Tech Giant’s offices, Page said he wouldnt have a role at the Main Offices. Instead he would work from his home in the New Jersey suburbs. Vendetta will be incharge of working with recent security flaw’s in Google’s beta e-mail service, “Gmail”. Google said they first found out about him when they discovered the student’s blog, at http://www.tomvendetta.be. The media giant said they looked forward to working with Vendetta’s expertise in JavaScript and AJAX.

Vendetta says he never thought it would go this far and is sorry he posted the press release, hoping it won’t ruin a possible future with Google.

Via ModernSEO.

Hear President Bush talk about using ‘The Google’ and some Google program (he doesn’t remember the name), to look at his ranch.

Via Reddit.

Since just yesterday I was posting about Google domains, I thought I’d share one more tidbit. You can prefix this domain with anything, and it will still go to google.com. Oh, but the sub-domain itself doesn’t resolve.

svc-1.google.com (doesn’t resolve)
anything-i-want.svc-1.google.com
type.anything.you.want.here.and.then.svc-1.google.com
of.course-no.spaces.only.valid.domain.chars.svc-1.google.com
letters.numbers.dots.and.dashes.svc-1.google.com

Anyways… that’s the fun nothingness of the day

Niniane Wang talks about what went into creating Google Desktop Search 1, code-named “total recall” at the time.

Funny moments on Google Desktop search.

Since I’m over snooping around G Video anyway, I might as well post this for your viewing pleasure:

Joerund F. Pedersen and Matt Beightol’s Gmail SPAM commercial, created as a school project to explore green-screen extraction and matchlighting.

Doug Dyson creates a catchy little tune praising Gmail. Nice amateur video editing, I like it.

My one complaint? The credits at the end are so hard to decypher that I don’t know where to go to see more of this stuff!

Lyrics:

Oh yeah, E is for email and F is for female but G is Gmail and uh

Oh well, So they’re reading my email Find something … all » dirty I hope that they tell me, yeah…

Oh no, Where does the time go? I’m always archiving Just barely surviving and uh

So what If that’s not her real name And she’ll never write me Or ever see me again?

I know That you’re always filing When you should be smiling Out showing your styling and uh

Know what? Well I got a Gmail And I know you want one But you ain’t got one Uh huh…

Don’t be a looser Be bop a lula I got my Gmail The revolution Be bop a lula I got my Gmail….

Google’s master plan has gotten erased! What will they do now?

If you can’t figure it out, listen to Danny Sullivan’s podcast and find out. More pictures here. More talk here.

I already wrote about some Googlers who are going to take on the Moab bike race, well here’s an update. The one gal, four guys (and their dog) have a blog where they’re recording their adventures with pictures, video, and lots of interesting stories. If you’re into biking, you’re definitly going to like it. The race they’re hyping up is called 24 hours of Moab and takes place in Utah every year. You can read more about it.

So you like the snazzy new Google reader interface? I think it’s also pretty cool that when you’ve run out of new items to read Reader displays this.

Which leads you to this famous page.

For a long time, if you went to google.com you would get redirected to www.google.com via a 302 (Temporary) redirect. There have been many cases where Google de-indexes or at least hits a site with a ranking penalty for having duplicate content when a site uses a 302 redirect. The most cited example is business.com which was removed from Google’s index for having a 302 redirect in place from business.com to www.business.com. I can no longer rip on Google for their 302 from google.com to www.google.com because they recently changed it to a 301 (A permanent redirect). But I can rip on them for redirecting w.google.com and ww.google.com to www.google.com using a 302. Eric, you better get that fixed before your own algorithm de-indexes your star internet property!

Mildly interesting how these two guys got together to try an fool us. The only problem is I found it 3 days late…. oh well. Follow the story: Matt Cutts leaves Google and goes to Yahoo!, and Jeremy Zawodny leaves Yahoo! and goes to Google. Then Matt posts a couple of times on Jeremey’s blog, and Jeremy does the same on mattcutts.com. Hmm, now it’s April 3rd and neither one has posted…. maybe they both got fired? Maybe it doesn’t matter now that the People’s Republic of China bought Google.

This is some whacko site about Google. The main premise is they are going to take the money they earn from Adsense and buy Google stock, thus buying Google. But how many years will it take them?

Google will eat itself.

Well, in my quest to create a nice Google-remeniscent logo for this site, I came across some interesting information that may help you if you need to re-create the Google logo. The font face used to make the Google logo is “Catull”. This is not a free font and can’t be found on the net, you’ll have to purchase it for about $90 if you want it. If you don’t want to go that route, “Times new roman” and “Book Antiqua” turn out to be surprisingly similar. Approxomate colors for the Google logo are as follows:

• Blue #0039B6
• Red #C41200
• Yellow #F3C518
• Green #30A72F

So, you can create something like this:

G o o g l e

Anyways, I didn’t want the logo to look exactly like Google’s so I made it silver. Here it is.

And here is the first Gstories logo I was using. (Made with Times New Roman font)

Here’s some interesting reading (kinda), if you don’t have anything else to do.

If you are from the US, UK or Australia, you may not even realize (I realise I’ve tagged myself as an American) how many different languages/locales Google supports. Check out Google’s language tools page and see for yourself. They even have translations of the Google site in Klingon, Pig latin, Latin (a dead language), Elmer Fudd and Hacker.

This was one of Google’s famous April-fool’s jokes. This on from 2002. If you want to see how Google uses pigeons to produce their famed search results, read on.

You know how Google often has a special logo for the holidays etc? Well, if there’s no special Google logo up right now and you want to see them anyway, you can browse past ones right at Google.

Stickers || Holiday Logos || Customs Logos Here’s a few of my favorite holiday logos: Vote- November 2, 2004 New Year’s Day- 2005
Valentine’s Day- 2003

Louis Braille’s Birthday - January 4, 2006 Monet’s Birthday- November 14, 2001

If you are having a hard time reading the normal Google site, try visiting this Google mirror. It may not be exactly what you normally envision as being a mirror. If you have any questions, try checking out their FAQ.

Here’s a site that is just loaded with fake Google logos integrating the designs of competitors such as MSN search, Yahoo! and Bigfoot, among many others. I especially like the Salvador Dali-remeniscent, melting-clock Google logo. Fake Google Logos.