Computer Tips -Tech Info

Tag: Google

  • Time, value, ROI, Google and this site…. Googlebummed

    This is a fairly significant “state of this site” type post and well… if you’re a usual visitor you might want to read/skim this one. It’s been about 15 months or so since the last big redesign of this site and as some long time lurkers may know, the updates were FEW and far between before moving to WordPress and this new layout. I mean, a year or so between updates was not uncommon. In the last year+ I’ve had a few spans where a month or so has gone by without posting, but in many cases I’ve been posting multiple (in other cases MANY MANY) posts in a single day.

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  • Roll your own search engine… sort of…

    Several blog posts have heralded the arrival of Google’s newest toy, a custom search engine setup… sort of Through Google Coop you can design a search engine that only covers the sites you want it to cover (or favor, it can search the web and just be biased towards the sites you prefer.) Of course, this relies on googles existing index, so if a site has not been crawled and indexed by the googlebot, you seem to be out of luck. I’ve tried a test at http://www.southcarolinagenealogy.org/search for my North and South Carolina genealogy sites…. a merged search between the two would be handy…

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  • NO, Google has NOT cancelled click-to-call

    It was an odd message that started this on the official google blog. I saw it and thought this doesn’t make sense – it doesn’t sound like an official statement and it claims it was translated from another language???? Posted by “Maximal” here is the original Google Blog post…

    After concientiously considering, Google has decided not to continue with Google Click-to-call project. The project has been in the media on last days because of the notice of Google agreement with e-Bay. We finally consider click-to-call agreement with e-Bay a monopolistic aproach that would damage small companies in the CRM area.

    This message has been translated using Google language tools.

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  • Watch what things you store in public places…. part 342

    Not too long ago there was an article about how people reveal too much about their lives in Google (or other web) calendars AND MAKE PUBLIC…. well I think this takes it a step further. Gmail let’s you access your mail through an RSS feed…. well there are online services that let you subscribe/watch feeds and apparently the feeds are put in the public access folder…. (oooops.) Be careful what you make public….

  • Google puts historical articles online, searchable

    Wow, this is nice – and frankly, something I could probably spend hours with. Search Engine Watch tells us that Google will debut a searchable news archive that takes us back through around 200 years worth of news stories. Yes, folks, google is putting the last 200 years of history online. I remember the newsgroups being google-ized was a big deal and that just took us back to the beginnings of the modern internet…. Well, in actuality the articles aren’t hosted at google, but at either the content providers or their aggregation services….

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  • Project Gutenberg July 2006 DVD

    I just noticed over the weekend that Project Gutenberg has updated their downloadable DVD/CD of free etexts. (Tracker at this link.) The last update of the dvd has been a few years (as far as I can tell (2003?)) It should be noted that you can now create your own image of selected works through a web interface. Given all the hoopla over Google releasing free book downloads, I would have thought that there would be more people reminding us of Project Gutenberg which boasts 19,000 FREE downloadable ebooks (which has been quite a labor intensive process – they’re all in text or html format.)

  • Privacy concerns abound…

    Well, the weekend saw news stories of Google planning to eavesdrop over pc microphones to hear what you’re watching on tv to target ads….. (I’m not holding my breath on that one, but… I do know how to disconnect the microphone.) Also, there was the story of Browzar which was supposedly THE solution for private web browsing…. well, it turns out it set’s it’s own search engine as the default and uses your search information to give sponsored links. Sans also mentions that the last visited url may be saved to disk as well. Really, we have several places where information is kept on us anyway (ISP/etc.) But, if you’re really concerned about private browsing you might try out the vmware browser virtual machine (or a portable web browser on a usb-key.)

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  • Open Source OCR

    I remember several years back I tried out gocr which is an open source character recognition engine. I wasn’t thoroughly impressed, but it sort of worked. Yesterday, I saw the news that Google has released Tesseract as an open source Optical Character Recognition engine. It was originally developed by HP and has been shelved for some time, it’s supposed to be among the top 3 in accuracy according to testing by UNLV. The source code is available at their sourceforge.net page. It’ will be good to see this taken up and integrated as a backend by open source scanning applications. (Maybe even office suites as a “recognize text in image file” type option….)

  • Google will allow downloads of out-of-copyright books

    It’s certainly a brief story, but to the point…. Google will allow pdf downloads of the books in their book search that are already out of copyright. Of course, copyright law is a strange and peculiar thing to many people, so this doesn’t mean that EVERY edition of “The Canterbury Tales” is now freely downloadable. So, it may take a bit of digging to find the free downloads for some of the titles you’re searching for, but they can be found and downloaded. They do categorize by “limited preview” and “full view” books. It’s possible to JUST search “Full view” books as well.

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