SpeedPlexer Blog

Turns out Google search users like all the white space. Google found this out over the course of the week, when their experiment to add large photos to the search page was answered by a sudden surge in the search term “remove google background”. When it became the seventh most popular search in the United States on their Google Trends tool, they got the picture (Get it? Picture?) with internet speed.

I guess if people wanted photos, they’d be using Bing. Of course Google wanted to one-up Bing by letting users choose their own photos – either from those provided by Google or from their own files – but this message didn’t make it out to the public, who only saw Google’s sample photos without an explanation. It might have been cool, if it weren’t so instantly hated. It’s too bad, it seems like they worked hard to make people happy.

Google’s vice president of search products and user experience, Marissa Mayer, wrote on the Google Blog, “We’ve collaborated with several well-known artists, sculptors and photographers to create a gallery of background images you can use to personalize your Google homepage.” Awww….that’s so nice! 

She added later, “We had planned to run an explanation of the showcase alongside it—in the form of a link on our homepage. Due to a bug, the explanatory link did not appear for most users. As a result, many people thought we had permanently changed our homepage, so we decided to stop today’s series early. We appreciate your feedback and patience as we experiment and iterate.”

Who would have thought a simple little arcade game would still have any relevance today? But for most grown-ups, it absolutely does. In 1980, the only place you could play Pac-Man was in an arcade, inserting quarters as you went. It wasn’t until 1981 that it was available for the Atari game system, but it sold 7 million cartridges.

In celebration of Pac-Man turning 30, Google created their first-ever playable Google doodle. It was only available for 48 hours (because it was too cool to keep for just one day) and you could either press the “Insert Coin” button to hear the original opening music, or just wait for a few seconds to start, navigating your little munching yellow circle around the Google logo. They worked hard to make it authentic. In the Google blog they said “PAC-MAN seems like a natural fit for the Google homepage. They’re both deceptively straightforward, carefully hiding their complexity under the hood. There’s a light-hearted, human touch to both of them. And we can only hope you find using Google at least a quarter as enjoyable as eating dots and chasing ghosts. You know, without actually needing any quarters.”

Now that the Google doodle celebration is over, you can go to WebPacMan.com to play online for free, and see if internet speed helps Pac-Man run any faster from the ghosts.

According to the Washington Post, the game was originally called Puckman. The name was changed to Pac-Man when marketers realized that American teens would probably replace the P in Puckman with an F.

And Pac-Man has a future too. There are even movie deals, like an Adam Sandler-produced feature length version of “Pixels“, the brilliant French short that features Pac-Man chomping through the New York City subway system.

So you’re traveling across Europe, haven’t had time to learn all the languages, and find yourself in front of a sign that reads DANGER in English, but the rest is in another language. Now, you can just take out your Android-based cell phone, snap a photo, and highlight the portion you need.  The Google Goggles app will evaluate the text and translate it into your preferred language with internet speed.  Pretty cool, huh?

Google Googles is an Android-specific application that has been available since last year. The original use was to let people take pictures of objects with their mobile phones that could then be used to search the Web. For example, taking a picture of a monument or painting to search Google for information about it.

Thursday’s new addition to the service allows a user to take a picture of a snippet of text using their mobile phone and then run it through Google’s free translation service to decipher its meaning. As Google writes in a blog post, a simple scenario for this application could take place when ordering food from a menu that is written in a language you can’t read.

The service can currently read English, French, Italian, German and Spanish, but can translate texts into several other languages. Google also said it plans to extend the text recognition feature to work with other “Latin-based languages,” and it eventually hopes to read Chinese and Arabic.

While some media coverage has compared it to a sci-fi universal translator others have suggested that maybe you shouldn’t rely upon it too much. Just to be on the safe side, don’t give up on phrase books and language lessons just yet.

It may sound like a radio station taking song requests, but it’s really Google’s attempt to deal with the issues of censorship and user privacy around the world. With this new government requests tool, they’ll make it public when a government agency requests that content be removed from its services or to supply information about its users. And they’ll do so with internet speed.

Google’s FAQ on the tool says that their map doesn’t include things they already do — like identify and remove child pornography whenever they become aware of it or for violation of their content policies (for example, hate speech) in response to user complaints.

Google said the tool is another way in which it attempts to make its actions transparent to users. When they remove web pages from search results in accordance with specific country laws, they only  remove them from the search results for that country’s domain and not globally.

In their Government Requests overview they say, “We believe that greater transparency will give citizens insight into these kinds of actions taken by their governments. We also hope this tool will be a valuable part of discussions about the appropriate scope and authority of government requests and that other companies will make similar disclosures.”

And about data requests, “At a time when increasing numbers of governments are trying to regulate the free flow of information on the Internet, we hope this tool will shine some light on the scale and scope of government requests to censor information or obtain user data around the globe – and we welcome external debates about these issues that we grapple with internally on a daily basis.”

Yesterday, April 8, 2010, scientists announced a new hominid fossil discovery in the Cradle of Humankind World Heritage Site in South Africa, and Google Earth helped them discover the site. 

The Cradle of Humankind is a complex of fossil-bearing limestone caves that was declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1999. In March 2008, Professor Lee Berger from Witswatersrand University in Johannesburg started to use Google Earth to map various known caves and fossil deposits to share the information with other scientists. When he began there were approximately 130 known cave sites in the region and around 20 fossil deposits.

Then he found that he could also use Google Earth to locate new fossil deposits by learning to identify what cave sites looked like in satellite images. With the help of the navigation facility and high-resolution satellite imagery in Google Earth, Professor Berger went on to find almost 500 previously unidentified caves and fossil sites, even though the area is one of the most explored in Africa.

One of these fossil sites yielded the remarkable discovery of a new species, Australopithecus sediba. At least two partial hominid skeletons dating to between 1.78 and 1.95 million years were found in remarkable condition, It’s one of the most significant palaeoanthropological discoveries in recent times.

Google shared on their blog:

We’re absolutely thrilled about this announcement. Our efforts to organize the world’s geographic information are ongoing — but at the end of the day, seeing the way these tools are put to use is what most inspires us.

Although people criticize technology for taking us away from our natural human-ness, it seems that moving forward with internet speed can actually help us to look back more effectively to gain an understanding that encompasses more of the human experience.