Posts Tagged: Google

Russia challenges Google and Yandex by unveiling plans for a new search engine called “Sputnik”

By vince, October 15, 2013

The world is familiar with Sputnik as being the first artificial Earth satellite, launched by the Soviet Union in 1957. But this time, the famous name is being used for another ambitious project that competes with the US industry – a search engine that would challenge Google and even the local Yandex. The project comes [...]

Facebook now supports search within the timeline

By vince, October 10, 2013

It is becoming more and more obvious that Facebook wants to have a piece of Google’s cake. Not long after Facebook’s newest updates to its Graph Search, the social query tool is getting yet another refresh. In a recent blog post, Facebook just announced that users are now able to search for “status updates, photo [...]

Google unveils new “Hummingbird” search algorithm

By vince, September 30, 2013

On par with its 15th anniversary, Google just recently revealed a few updates to its search engine, containing a major refresh to its search algorithm which has been given the name “Hummingbird”. Amit Singhal, senior VP at Google, mentioned that the new algorithm influences about 90% of all searches and its purpose is to sustain [...]
Albert Einstein was quoted for saying “Never memorize something that...

Google is knowledge. Yay or nay?

By vince, August 30, 2013

Albert Einstein was quoted for saying “Never memorize something that you can look up”. Of course, at that time, looking up something meant actually going through books and finding information. Nowadays, with Google being a few keystrokes away, not knowing something means you simply have to “Google it”! But is the act of using a [...]
Cross posting from my KMi blog (which has paragraph level...

Evaluating Google as an Epistemic Tool

By admin, December 4, 2012

Cross posting from my KMi blog (which has paragraph level commenting enabled to facilitate discussion). I’ve just read an article which explicitly considers the evaluation of search engines with respect to their epistemic functions under a social epistemological perspective. There’s a pre-print available http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/teaching_staff/simpson/simpson_index.html and the citation is: Evaluating Google as an Epistemic Tool, Metaphilosophy [...]

Googling “9/11”: A cross-cultural comparison of suggestions for a loaded term

By admin, October 1, 2012

In my recent blog post I explained the politics of autocomplete, a feature that suggests queries while they are being typed. We may wonder how this is affected by the trend of creating tailor-made search engine results for specific audiences. How do Google´s suggestions differ from country to country (and language to language)? Methodology and [...]

The politics of autocomplete

By admin, September 20, 2012

In September 2010 Google introduced autocomplete (also Google Suggest) to its search engine. Based on previous queries, it tries to predict what we want to search for while we are still typing. How does this impact search engine usage and what to do the suggested queries tell us about our societies? Already now it is [...]
The website searchengineland.com featured a live blog coverage of the...

Dylan Casey on Google’s Real Time Search @ TWTRCON 2010

By admin, June 17, 2010

The website searchengineland.com featured a live blog coverage of the interview with Dylan Casey, Search Product Manager at Google from the TWTRCON – a one-day conference focusing entirely on the business use of Twitter, held on 14 June 2010. In brief, Google launched the Real Time search last December, a feature that shows results based [...]
Since Google shut down its mainland Chinese-language portal Google.cn on...

Google’s China move irrelevant to Internet experience?

By admin, March 28, 2010

Since Google shut down its mainland Chinese-language portal Google.cn on March 23 and has started rerouting searches through its acclaimed uncensored Hong Kong site, reports on the move have varied in tone from appraisal (Google defying the censorship and bullying of the Chinese government) to a fair amount of skepticism (Google relocating to Hong Kong [...]
The essay Critical Masses, Commerce, and Shifting State-Society Relations in...

Ying Zhu and Bruce Robinson on Critical Masses, Commerce, and Shifting State-Society Relations in China

By admin, March 11, 2010

The essay Critical Masses, Commerce, and Shifting State-Society Relations in China, recently published on The China Beat blog, is based on the script of a talk that Professor of Media Culture at the City University of New York Ying Zhu gave at Google’s New York offices on February 12, 2010. In her talk, Zhu focused [...]