Tuesday, October 18, 2005

Google Earth Search

Google Earth, the site launched in June this year, offers maps and satellite images for regional searches. Although not all areas are highly detailed, some images are very high resolution, and some show sensitive military or government locations.
Countries like India and China expressed concerns about danger of this knowledge to be used in possible attacks against those locations. Debbie Frost, spokewoman for Google, noted that the software uses information already available from public sources however Google welcomes dialogue with governments, and we will be happy to talk to authorities about any concerns they may have.
In Australia there is strong opposition from Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation ANSTO for making the Sydney Lucas Heights nuclear reactor images freely available. And ANSTO demands for the Google Earth images to be completely obscured or at least the quality of imagery downgraded.

Wednesday, October 05, 2005

Search Engine Rankings

According to recent search engine rankings conducted by ComScore Networks Google accounted for 37.3% of searches (up 1.2% from July 2005 search engine rankings), Yahoo! had 29.7% of the search engine traffic, followed by MSN 15.8% , AOL Search 9.6% and Ask Jeeves 6%. Google is also recognized as the best news search engine, most SEO and webmaster friendly search provider and best search ads provider.

Monday, October 03, 2005

Spam Blog Crusade

There is a spam blog crusade going out there. And some people are attempting to explore this trend from a commercial perspective creating spam blog directories and generating lots of traffic to their sites where they usually have AdSense or other type of advertising. Just recently I have seen on Technorati big adds about making money from the blog by placing text links. So what is a spam blog? I guess it is all about where do we draw the line? It would be similar as a question: at which point a man who starts to lose hair becomes a bald man? Sorites paradox again.
For me one of the examples of spam blogging is what bloggers are doing with the keyword "failure". It is an old story I admit, but it will not go away. So, are we going to call all the tens of thousands of bloggers link spammers? I am not here to judge that. And I think that the First Amendment does guarantee freedom of speech and the freedom of links we can have on our blogs. And for those who don't like the results, they most likely missed out on this special sort of voting.