Google Zone

In the Google Help center the answer to the question "Does Google censor search results?" is updated. Here is what one can read now:

It is Google's policy not to censor search results. However, in response to local laws, regulations, or policies, we may do so. When we remove search results for these reasons, we display a notice on our search results pages. Please note: For some older removals (before March 2005), we may not show a notice at this time.

Here is what the answer was before the update:

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Many sites on the internet such as "Google Blogoscoped", "Digital Point", "JenSense" and others reported that Google has added this phrase about adsense referrals without informing users (The problem is with the "90 days"):

* An AdSense referral is counted when a publisher, who has never previously enrolled in AdSense, creates an account and earns at least $100.00 within 90 days of sign-up. The referred publisher must be eligible for payment to qualify as a successful referral.

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The news has spread over the internet at digg and many other sites: Google is changing its interface. Here is a picture of the new interface. It is the same old interface with one modification: a side bar to the left. It's not my picture and I haven't, as most of you, seen Google with the new interface. Some people say the the picture is false. Who knows!

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In a previous article entitled "Allied with the devil: Yahoo and now Microsoft" in the Web Zone I wrote about the cases of yahoo and microsoft that have censored some contents to be in harmony with guidance provided by Chinese government officials. And now it’s Google’s time. Google has agreed to censor its results in China.

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In the Google official Blog one can read in a post entitled "And now, News" by Krishna Bharat the Creator of Google News:

We're taking Google News out of beta! When we launched the English-language edition in September 2002, we entered untested waters with a grand experiment in news browsing - using computers to organize the world's news in real time and providing a bird's eye view of what's being reported on virtually any topic.

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Today I had a look at my server stats to see the daily statistics such as the number of visitors, the most visited pages, if there are new referers and so on. And I got a surprise: I got a visitor from the Wikipedia. Do you know what that means? It means that there is a link to my site some where in the Wikipedia. So I clicked on the user's link to see more details and from what page exactly in the Wikipedia he clicked. And here is the Wikipedia's page that contains the link to Must@p Zone:

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Leslie Walker from the Washington Post in an article entitled "Forgot What You Searched For? Google Didn't" published today says that the Justice Department may have done us all a big favor by issuing subpoenas to Internet search engines to find out what people are researching online.

And she raises the question: What, exactly, does Google know about us?

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There is a post entitled "Google Search Hacks" at A-Z Google blog explaining how to hack sites with Google. You can search for sites vulnerable to Cross-Sites Scripting (XSS) attacks or SQL Injection, or even WWWBoard Password vulnerability.

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Google announced that their Talk service is supporting the industry standard XMPP protocol (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol) now. The announce has been made public in the Google Official Blog by Mike Jazayeri, the Product Manager of GoogleTalk. What does this mean? Well, it means that anyone who has an IM service provider that supports XMPP can talk with GoogleTalk users and vis-versa. This is great! May be we are getting closer to the day where the IM service will be like the phone service. No matter who you have and who your friends have as provider, you can always talk to each other.

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(A link from Google Blogoscoped)
If you think that you know what Google Robots are and what they can do and are good for, you're wrong. Here is the official FAQ for Google Robots. The FAQ was last updated November 1st, 2030.

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I was querying google for the word "php". I got about 661,000,000 results. I know that Google does not serve more than 1000 results for any query. I wanted to see the last result served (number 1000). Instead of clicking the pages number at the bottom of the result page until I get the last page, I entered this URL:

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I visited the Google blog today to see if there is something new. There is a post entitled "Your Google Homepage, to go" by "Abhijit Kalamkar, Software Engineer" where he told about Google mobile personalized home page. Until now there is nothing abnormal. I clicked the link to the "Google mobile personalized home". I got "Page not found" error.

The post is 2 days old and there was, apparently, no one at google that checked that link, not even the writer.

mmmmmmmm!

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For April Fool's Day - 2002, Google submitted a page that explains its search technology. May be you have heard about it. PigeonRank is the heart of Google's search technology,a system for ranking web pages developed by Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Stanford University.

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May be you know it already, Xooglers is blog maintained by Ron and Doug two Google workers. They write interesting stuff about their experience in working with Google.

Recently, Google contacted them to talk about their blog. Ron tells in a post entitled "We are experiencing technical difficulties" that the message of Google was:

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To prevent your post from being archived on Google, add the following line to the headers of your Usenet post:

        X-No-Archive: yes

If you don't have the options to edit the headers of your post, make that line the first line in your post itself (with no additional text included on that line). Your post will be displayed on Google Groups for only seven days and removed after that.

That was the first words from Google co-founder Larry Page at the CES yesterday. He said that Google will begin selling videos for content providers and will also begin offering the Google Pack, a free bundled collection of its programs and those from other companies (Look at the complete list in the end of this post)

And what about the Google PC and the supposed Google OS? Larry wouldn't comment on whether such plans exists. I think that means there is no project for google at the moment to go in this direction. After all rumours about Google-PC, Google's stock increased to $465.66 per share. So, the best answer to the previous question is Larry's : "No comment".

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Philipp Lenssen is in the way to publish his new book "55 Ways to Have Fun With Google".

55 Ways to Have Fun With Google is my upcoming book to be released in 2006. I'm intending to self-publish via Lulu.com, but if you are a publisher or know one please contact me.

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The LA Times has published an article by By Sallie Hofmeister entitled "Industry Feeling Presence of the 800-Pound Google"

In this article there is a prediction ( rumor ) for the year 2006 about Google PC project : Google will unveil its own low-price personal computer or other device that connects to the Internet. The machine would run an operating system created by Google.

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Probably you know it already: A free service for Google called Google talk that permits you to talk with and send instant messages to your friends. This service is in beta and requires a Gmail username and password. So to use it, you have to have a Gmail account.

There is a good feature and a missing feature with Google talk:
The missing one: Google Talk is not multi language. It is currently available in English only.
The Good one is: No ads, no pop-ups or clutter, just a clean and simple interface.

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You probably know about Google's PageRank and if you don't:

PageRank Technology: PageRank performs an objective measurement of the importance of web pages by solving an equation of more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Instead of counting direct links, PageRank interprets a link from Page A to Page B as a vote for Page B by Page A. PageRank then assesses a page's importance by the number of votes it receives.

I was reading the source code of a perl script that uses the PageRank package(PageRank =>google pagerank of page) writeen by Yuri Karaban until I come to the line that shows the query string. Something like:

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Do you know that currently Google supply both RSS and Atom feeds for every news-group. To view a group's feed information, go to the group's homepage and click the "About this group" link under the group’s title. Under "Feeds," you can select "Latest 100 messages (RSS)" or click "View all available feeds (RSS and Atom)" to see all of your feed options. Most feed readers will accept both RSS and Atom feeds.

To get a feed from specified group use this format:

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