Why can’t Google tell me what time it is? I know that my IP address and it’s corresponding ISP location aren’t an exact match to my physical address but why can’t Google just take a whack at it, and tell people that they *might* be wrong?
Here’s a quick little graphic I worked up in Fireworks showing where My IP registered (geographically) and where I’m actually located.
Not a huge distance in miles, and definitely within the same time zone (EST), therefore Google could easily tell me what time it is.
I have to object with Arrington’s analysis of Alexa and scold him for yet another blog article about how Alexa is inaccurate and needs a “re-work”.
Alexa is just a tool, no more no less. We all know HOW Alexa gathers data, and we all know the flaws. It should be used along with Compete and Comscore to gain an overall picture of where a website ranks in comparison to other sites in it’s field. Just like your FICO score is calculated from 3 credit reporting agencies, your overall website rank is the summation of different traffic and influence measurements.
I can find flaws in any web service. How easy it is to show a bad rank order in Google? How easy is it to spot inaccuracies with the Technorati Top 100? Singling out tools and highlighting how inaccurate they are when you fully understand how it collects data is foolish. It also means that you can’t discount a tool completely just because it isn’t perfect. Will I post a blog article about how Google is useless because it could give me a good result set for “car insurance”? Of course not, I’ll just use another tool in my virtual “tool belt”.
Posting’s like this one are useless and contribute nothing to the discussion. Have I learned anything besides TC pointing out that more Alexa users visit YouTube than Google? No, I could have gone to Alexa and seen for myself. The content of this posting is just blogosphere flame bait spewed out by anyone who wants to make a name for themselves or attract the largest crowd (in this case the latter).
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We’ve gotten a few “tips” that YouTube has actually grown larger than Google in terms of page views according to Alexa .
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This is, of course, complete fiction. And it shows just how useless Alexa has become as a method for measuring web traffic and reach. Comscore tells a much different (and more accurate) story – Google is nearing 100 billion monthly page views; YouTube sees around 16 billion.
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Even newcomer Compete, which measures traffic in a similar way as Alexa, seems to be getting it right. Alexa needs an overhaul. It’s long since become less than useful.
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TorrentFreak has the story on Google censoring torrent search results. It’s nothing new, as Google has been removing results for years on the requsts of various media companies like the RIAA/MPAA etc.
Which brings me to my call for an open source, offshore (possibly) search engine that allows the community to determine what gets censored.
Google Filters Torrents From Search Results
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Google has been filtering its search results for years. That’s proven very useful for the Chinese government, and of course content owner representatives like the MPAA and RIAA. According to Google, the filtering of torrents from the search results is a response to the DMCA complaints they receive.
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So, apparently one day Google decided that it is illegal in nearly every country of the world to host a .torrent file that (allegedly) links to infringing material. Strange, because there is no legal precedent for this decision in most countries.
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The owner of SumoTorrent told TorrentFreak that he discovered that A search on Google for sumotorrent now triggers the following message at the bottom of the results page:
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Everyone is up in arms lately about Google’s TOS and search robot lockout. People point to the hypocrisy of the situation citing that Google relies on ‘openness” from other web properties for it’s news service.
Everyone in the blogosphere needs to get over it, and realize that Google is a typical competitive corporate establishment that doesn’t always “do the right thing” and will aggressively look to protect and grow their business model.
Why do you think they are crusading against paid links? ( Ad Words anyone)
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One thing that bugs me: they’re now hosting original news content, yet they prohibit other aggregators from crawling it (per robots.txt restrictions and TOS). Of course Google News relies on the openness of other organizations with original news content.
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Google crawls news sites and grabs their content for republishing on Google News. They rely on the willingness of those news sites to get distribution on Google. But Google restricts others from crawling Google News itself via their robots.txt file and terms of use, which state that “you may not…use any robot, spider, other device or manual process to monitor or copy any content from the [Google News] Service.”
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