Google, “ungoogleable”: From trademarks to words

Google doesn’t like the word, “ungoogleable”. Naturally. You can’t google the world’s total nuclear arsenal, the precise age of the universe, the bottom line of unlisted companies, the actual – not estimated – wealth of billionaires, what the Queen of England had for breakfast yesterday, or locate heaven on Google Map. Even the world’s greatest search engine has its limitations which, of course, Google doesn’t want to be bandied about through expressions like “ungoogleable”.

“Google”, as another word for “search”, entered the third edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, in 2006. But I am not surprised that Google set its foot down on “ogooglebar”, the Swedish word for “ungoogleable”, and prevented it from being officially accepted by the Swedish Language Academy.

English, thank goodness, has no official watchdog minding the language, deciding what is acceptable and what isn’t. Google’s crackdown on “ungoogleable” has given the word new momentum, I think. It is being bandied about freely, far and wide, by every media outlet with newspapers, websites or air time to fill.

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Google+, minus Google Reader

Google Reader is being shut down because people are not sharing enough content on Google+, says a former Google Reader product manager. The Reader was being kept alive to drive content to Google+, but it did not do so, says Brian Shih, speaking from his own experience.

Google’s big hit in social media has been YouTube rather than Google+. In a blog post last week, YouTube announced: “YouTube now has more than a billion unique users every single month.”

Powering this growth, it said, is Gen C (C stands for content) – youngsters born between 1988 and 1993 — who, according to the Google Agency Blog, watch YouTube “on all screens, all the time”.

That brings YouTube neck and neck with Facebook which reports “more than a billion active users as of December 2012.”Continue Reading

Google censoring blogs just as India wanted

Google has started censoring blogs just as India wanted The news comes just a week after Twitter announced a similar move.

Just as Tweeter can block tweets from being seen in countries where they fall foul of local laws, so can Google block access to Blogger blogs in specific countries which want them removed.

Google is introducing a country-specific URL scheme for Blogger blogs. An internet user in India, for example, trying to access a blog with the URL mjakbar.blogspot.com may be redirected to mjakbar.blogspot.in

Google has already made the change in India, Australia and New Zealand.Continue Reading

Facebook’s growing revenue and net income

Facebook's growing revenues

Facebook's growing revenues

Facebook’s revenue and net income have grown phenomenally. It had a net income of $1 billion last year when its revenues totalled $3.7 billion.  And it’s all because of you, Facebook users.  In its registration statement filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission preparatory to its initial public offering, it says:Continue Reading

India cracks down on Google, Facebook and social media

Sonia Gandhi is taking after her mother-in-law, Indira Gandhi. Not only is she the undisputed leader of the Congress party; her government is also trying to curb freedom of expression.Continue Reading

Singapore Pools OK, not the casinos?

How much money does the Singapore government make from the lotteries run by Singapore Pools and its other bookmaking activities?

Today reports that Singapore Pools will give S$164.8 million to charity over the next three years. The money will be put into the Tote Board Social Service Fund for the National Council of Social Service to use.

What the report doesn't say is how much money Singapore Pools collects from the punters every week.

Singapore Pools and the Singapore Turf Club are both owned by the Tote Board,  a statutory board under the Finance Ministry.

That puts the government in the same business as the casinos, from which it is trying to protect Singaporeans.

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Times on the Net: You can’t beat the traffic

The New York Times is the newspaper with the best website and gets around four million daily unique visitors (estimated cookies) – way above the other newspapers I checked on Google Trends and Double Click Ad Planner. (See the charts at the end of this post.)

The Straits Times resembles the American, not the British, newspapers shown in the charts in one way.

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Twitter developing tech to evade censors

Twitter is developing technology aimed at preventing the governments of China and Iran from censoring Tweets, co-founder Evan Williams told an audience at the World Economic Forum in Davos, reports Wired, quoting the Financial Times.

Williams can be followed on Twitter here.

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Google real-time search with Twitter updates

Announced on the Official Google Blog two days ago, here's Google real-time search in Singapore. Not an awful lot was being reported or said about Singapore when I did the search, as you can see from this video.

News and messages filtered in slowly on the Updates page. But I could see the updates immediately because the screen refreshed every time they came.

It's just like Twitter. In fact, tweets were all I got. But that's fine because the Straits Times and Channel NewsAsia tweet every new story, so you might as well check the headlines on Google or Twitter.

How to do a Google real-time search for Singapore?

I typed "Singapore" in the Google search box.

And there in the middle of the search results page was a scrolldown box with new messages appearing at the top of the box.

If you want to see updates only, look for the "Show options" button with a plus sign above the search results.

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Ken Auletta talks Google

American journalist Ken Auletta says Google once discussed buying the New York Times but decided that would damage its "neutral" identity.

Google "is not obsessed with killing competitors," he adds. "They're obsessed with eliminating inefficiencies."

Auletta, the New Yorker media columnist, has come out with a new book, Googled: The End of the World as We Know It.

This C-Span interview with Auletta is long but interesting for anyone interested in new and old media. He talks about Google, its founders and its search algorithm among other things.

Here's an interview he gave, which appeared in I Want Media.

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