Chad's News

This guy wanted to determine if dynamic web content (such as that generated by javascript) would show up in Google search results. He created a web site with two nonsense words in static HTML, two in dynamic javascript, and two in another form of javascript. Only the static words were indexed by Google. So if you have a web site that relies on dynamic content, don’t expect it to show up in search engines. This does not apply to PHP-generated content, because PHP runs on the server—unlike javascript which runs on the client.

The Googlebot ignores both javascript and cookies, which has been known to cause problems with poorly designed web sites.

Link: http://www.brainhandles.com/…
(via Slashdot)

Google has a huge hard-drive farm for which they frequently take (and store) state-of-health information. Researchers decided to use this database to analyze the key factors in hard drive failures. Surprisingly, they found there was “very little correlation” between hard drive failure and elevated temperature or high activity. They also determined that certain SMART parameters were good predictors of hard drive failure, but that the opposite was not true—many hard drives failed without a consistent pattern of SMART parameters. Of most interest to me was the fact that certain models and manufacturers had a higher failure rate, but unfortunately Google did not publish the specific names. The full study (13 page PDF file) is available here.

Thanks to Josh for suggesting this topic.

Link: http://news.bbc.co.uk/…

Link #2: http://www.engadget.com/…

This week’s big news is North Korea setting off a nuke Google’s decision to purchase YouTube, a highly popular video site. Internet analysts, as well as anyone with an iota of common sense, have been predicting the implosion of YouTube. A vast majority of the content uploaded to YouTube is copyrighted, and the internet community has been holding its breath, waiting to see who would file the first lawsuit of the many that are expected. But we may all be disappointed. YouTube announced a deal with multiple music labels to provide music videos and other content free of charge—so it will no longer be necessary to upload pirated copies. In addition, Google must have some plan to avoid the lawsuits. Why else would they pay $1.65 billion just to take on a huge liability?

http://arstechnica.com/…

This one’s a bit technical, but it goes something like this: A company designed a web site such that if you (1) disable javascript, (2) disable cookies, and (3) visit every link on the site… then you will delete all content on the site.

Unfortunately for the site owners, the Google web crawler meets all three of the criteria. And the site content was deleted.

http://www.thedailywtf.com/…

Userfriendly is a tech-oriented web comic that I read daily. Over the last couple of weeks, it’s been spoofing Google, leading up to today’s (2/21/2006) strip, in which Illiad (the author) hits the nail dead center on the head. Go check out today’s strip, then read on for my commentary.

A company may have a certain culture/environment, a set of ethics, or a good privacy policy. Yet once it goes public, sooner or later, these things have a tendency to change. Sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly, the mantra of “increased shareholder value” becomes the real priority. And when ethics, culture, or privacy policies get in the way of shareholder value, they go out the door.

Google has some really good services. This blog, for example, is generated and hosted by Google [update: not any more]. Their stated goal is to index all known data, and they expect this to take about 300 years. But now that Google is public, they’re not going to be able to justify indexing information unless they can make money from it.

So I suggest being cautious about how much personal information you give to Google.

By the way, if anyone wants a gmail invite, I have some available. :)

UPDATE: According to this article, the publicly-traded shares of Google do not, and never will, have the ability to control the company. So the two founders of Google have complete control over the the company’s direction. But I still say caution is warranted—what happens when they die, or if they decide to sell off some of that stock?

Another day in the life of Google, as well as an example of why it’s always a good idea to diversify your financial portfolio.

http://www.valleywag.com/…

This is disturbing in two ways: first because the government is trying to access Google’s search records, and second because Google keeps a record of everyone’s searches. I have a feeling that Google is going to lose this one.

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/…