My tumblr friend, Mr. Sheeper, shared an image from a Japanese language website, アンティーク アナスタシア on his tumblr. I am always happy to hear from him, as he has remained in Japan since the earthquake and Fukushima nuclear aftermath of April 2011. (Note section about the Radiation Network toward the end, in particular.)
In English, the website name is “Antiques Anastasia”. The focal point is a lovely 18 kt gold slide pendant, in a style evocative of 19th century France. I’ll take the liberty of sharing here.
Queen of Heaven pendant in 18 karat gold
The original webpage metadata is リュフォニー作 天の元后 レジナ・チェリ 金無垢ペンダント フランス製アンティーク or pendant of antique gold: Celi Regina. Celi Regina means “Queen of Heaven”.
This is religious jewelry. The page includes narrative as well as photographs for context. So far, so good.
Original text, prior to Google Translate, side-by-side Latin and Japanese:
Regina Caeli, laetare, Alleluia.
Quia quem Meruisti Partare, Alleluia.
Resurrexit, sicut dixit, Alleluia.
Ora pro nobis Deum, Alleluia.
After Google Translate, Japanese to English, side-by-side Latin and English:
Regina Caeli, laetare, Alleluia,
Quia quem Meruisti Partare, Alleluia.
Resurrexit, sicut dixit, Alleluia.
Ora pro nobis Deum, Alleluia.
By Queen of heaven, joy to feed. Hallelujah.
The feed is allowed to give birth to the Son to go through Onmi, Hallelujah.
Reside sag as if to supply helicopters to supply Su noon language itself. Hallelujah.
We have to pray to God for feeding. Hallelujah.
In 2012, Google discontinued its highly-regarded code search. It was freely available for open source projects residing on Google Code project hosting. This is the only description of the pre-2012 Google Code Search I could find:
…it was designed to help people search for open source code all over the web [and] will be shut down along with the Code Search API on January 15, 2012.
Now, when you type a function, you’ll see it graphed… You can graph more than one function at a time by separating them with commas. Once the graph is drawn, you can zoom and pan to see the sections and details you want. And the Google colors are a nice touch.
One doesn’t quite replace the other.
Surprise! It’s BACK
Google Code Search has returned! Google Developers provide a reference document and the presumably comprehensive User’s Guide. All the user’s guide pages are dated March 12, 2020. Continue reading →
There has been a lot of press coverage of Google data centers recently. Historically, Google has been very secretive about the technology and power usage for its data centers:
In one Silicon Valley data center, [Google] is so paranoid about competitors catching a glimpse of its gear, it’s been known to keep its server cages in complete darkness, outfitting its technical staff like miners and sending them spelunking into the cages with lights on their heads.
This makes sense, as both performance and energy efficiency are sources of competitive advantage. However, the veil has been lifted, to some degree.
Hardware
Google offered a detailed view of its data center technology to Wired recently. There was even an up-to-date photo gallery; much better than those murky images of Google servers with all the wires hanging out! That is all I’ve seen about Google servers for more years than I can remember.
YouTube is something of a cesspool, with pockets of exceptional quality here and there. Even the higher quality videos have an ephemeral aspect, mysteriously vanishing or being marked Private, from one day to the next. Others succumb to the more prosaic, account suspended due to multiple copyright violations. Illegal uploads of major recording label artists abound, or did. YouTube is also becoming a go-to destination for low-fidelity live concert recordings.
There’s no shortage of fee-based alternatives, so I’m not complaining.
Google Search has a well-known competitor, Microsoft Bing. Google is first, but Bing (and Yahoo, who contracts search to Bing now) has the second largest share of U.S. domestic internet search volume. Globally, Google is also first, with Baidu, Bing and Yandex in varying relative share positions depending on geographical locale.
Today’s post is about a (no longer) recent entry on one of the five* official Bing blogs.
Old version of Bing Webmaster
Chickless in Seattle
The Chicken Has Landed (5 June 2013) offers guidance on how to improve search rank, website quality and traffic volume. It is applicable to e-commerce, blogs and most publicly accessible websites.
I found a broken link. It was important, being the contact URL on Google Research’s official Twitter account! I told them about it. Google Research wasn’t aloof! I was thrilled.
Google Research finally joined Google+ in August 2012.
Inviting Google Research to Google+
I tried to coax an earlier arrival in July 2011. Click on the image if you would like to read our conversation. I remember feeling bold, and daring!
Odds and Ends
Indirect Content Privacy Surveys: Measuring Privacy Without Asking About It, Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS), 2011. Abstract (an excerpt that I extracted from the abstract, that is):
The emotional aspect of privacy makes it difficult to evaluate privacy concern. This effect may be partly responsible for the dramatic privacy concern ratings coming from recent surveys, ratings that often seem to be at odds with user behavior…
This is SO true! Dramatically vocalized privacy concerns are highly inconsistent with actual user behavior! The gist of the article was to figure out a way to get at people’s privacy concerns without asking about privacy directly. Merely broaching the subject tends to cause survey respondents to get skittish, thus impacting their answers.
Google Hummingbird has brought significant changes to the web, for Google search engine users as well as webmasters. The impact seems more likely to affect smaller e-commerce merchants than large companies with brand name recognition and large budgets to pay for multiple advertising channels.
The first change that caught my attention was encryption. All Google search queries are now encrypted, i.e. it is no longer optional to connect to Google search by https instead of http. SSL makes Google search safer, in a general sort of way.
Keyword tool using broad match
For webmasters
Keyword data is not as accessible as it was prior to Hummingbird. Google Keyword Tool has been replaced by Keyword Planner. Now, certain archival keyword data can only be accessed by Google AdWords customers. Google Analytics is free; Google AdWords is not.
Functionality such as broad match is no longer available.
If you don’t want web searchers to be able to access a cached version of your page, use the noarchive meta tag like this:
<meta name="robots" content="noarchive">
The page will still be crawled and indexed by Google, but users will not see a cached link in search results.
Similar to your website
The related: operator displays websites similar to the site you are looking for. It returns the same results as clicking Similar pages next to a result on the search results page.
I was curious about the results returned by Similar pages, as its intent is to return overlapping resources. Specifically, I was worried whether it indicated anything potentially detrimental, for search engine optimization purposes. According to Google, there’s no need for SEO concern, not for the moment:
The quality of the sites returned has no impact on your ranking or on how Google indexes your site.
This is an especially short post, as it is a high-level summary of an even higher level summary. Of course, we all know how meaningful THAT is :~
Nostalgia
Zeitgeist is a borrowed word, from an English language point of view. It means “signs of the times”. Yes, I realize that zeitgeist is singular, but somehow we seem to have made it plural in the process of adoption from German. Or maybe not, as it is sometimes capitalized, as a proper noun, the Zeitgeist. Perhaps it is one of those mysterious, uncountable words?
Quartz took the top results for the 34 countries for which there was data for the Zeitgeist “How to…?” category. He then rank ordered by frequency, chose the most common result for each country, and asked around, to assure that everything was translated correctly.
Do the results accurately capture each country’s national character?
In most instances, I think the answer is, “Yes”.
The number one “How to….?” query for The Netherlands was “How to survive”.
There has been an accumulation of Google account-related news, focused mostly on email and calendar services.
Where’s my Gmail?
Gmail outage
On 11 December 2012, many Google accounts lost access to Gmail. As soon as I heard about it, I checked the Google Apps Status page, and watched as Gmail remained offline for many users, for at least 45 minutes. (I wasn’t affected here in Arizona.)
I suggest bookmarking the Google Apps Status Dashboard. The information is relevant to consumers as well as Google Apps business customers. It lists time, date, and cause for disruptions in Gmail and many other Google services.
POP3 versus IMAP
POP3 and IMAP give the ability to access email even when you are offline. You can download messages from Gmail to your computer, then access them with other, non-Google programs such as Microsoft Outlook. There are three protocols that allow this, POP, IMAP and SMTP. I recall using SMTP at work, in the days when Netscape Navigator was my browser.
POP3 is prone to losing messages or downloading the same messages multiple times, IMAP avoids this through two-way syncing capabilities between your mail clients and your web Gmail.
More services discontinued
Google recently announced, as part of its regular “cleanings” i.e. shutdown of valued services, that some Calendar Labs features will be removed. Also, Google Sync will be discontinued. Syncing between Gmail, Calendar, and Contacts via the Microsoft Exchange Server on mobile devices will be disabled, effective 31 January 2013.
CalDav for Google Calendar, with limitations when used for Apple devices.
Google Apps seems to be transitioning to a primarily fee-based service for small businesses, enterprise and non-profit organizations. Given decreasing levels of support for Gmail, it is probably a good idea to bookmark the new Gmail Known Issues Help page.
Verdict of the Herd
There is an unofficial Is Gmail down? service to determine whether or not Gmail is down. It reminds me of a project run by The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard, named Herdict.
Herdict collects globally observed incidents of filtering, denial of service attacks, website unavailability, in order to determine if a website is down for everyone or has limited access based on IP address, geography, etc. It provides a holistic measure of overall internet infrastructure reliability. Input data is crowd-sourced.
The herd keeps watch over the web
In contrast, services like “Is Gmail down” are not crowd-sourced, nor do they give a comprehensive, real-time map of global Internet health. Information collected by Herdict can be broken down to various degrees of granularity.
“Herdict” is a cute pun, based on sheep! That is to say, its findings are the aggregated results of all participants, the verdict of the herd 🙂
This two-minute video explains, and even features friendly Shaun the Sheep.
Herdict reports on website inaccessibility, regardless of cause. It can be useful for gauging regional blockages of websites known for activism and as a result, subject to politically-motivated internet censorship, even at a national level. Repressive regimes such as the People’s Republic of China and its Great Firewall, as well as North Korea come to mind.
In the Googleplex 