currybetdotnet Google archive
The Sun relying on 'copyright thieves' Google and Yahoo! for their Wrightys XI campaign
Despite Murdoch's stance that search engines steal his newspaper's content, The Sun are using search keywords as the main marketing thrust for their 2010 FIFA World Cup competition.
Evening Standard fails African Cup Of Nations geography test
Whilst the Evening Standard gets confused about whether the African Cup Of Nations is being held in Angola or Ghana, The Guardian is making available an open public sporting events calendar which knows for sure.
Google Chrome - now with added Mariah Carey
Google have recently put together a huge marketing push for their Chrome browser - but should they be making more of the fact that it comes with an optional Mariah Carey theme?
Google's recursive lunar image swirls
Google Image Search has been in the news this week for all the wrong reasons, but I've been concentrating on playing with a Labs version of Image Search - Google Image Swirl. It is an interesting variation on the usual grid view that has become the industry standard. I'm not sure that I'd use it exclusively, for a start the data indexed is limited, but it does give you a different way of researching images. And you can generate some...
Carbon, clippings and checking out Wave - more cool stuff on guardian.co.uk
Last week, when I was writing about the Jane Bown interactive gallery on The Guardian site, I mentioned that there were several other things done recently that had really impressed me. In no particular order, and stressing again that these have been nothing to do with me, here are another three things that stood out over the last few weeks. Quick carbon calculator I remember a conversation I had a while back with Simon Willison where he was explaining the...
Paid search and politics - still some learning for the parties to do
A couple of days ago Peter Moore wrote an interesting post about politics and paid search, pointing out how Channel 4 had used Google AdWords to catch some of the search traffic generated by the BNP appearance on BBC's Question Time. He pointed out that: "Paid search has the potential to make an enormous difference [in an election]...It’s possible to carefully study and collect keywords, to manage and monitor huge campaigns that include short and long tail terms as well...
Google ads battleground between The Sun and Labour
Labour vs The Sun on GoogleGoogle Ads drag the Hillsborough disaster into the recent spat between the party and the newspaper
English Defence League advertises Muslim dating agency on their forum
Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words - one of the best 'When Google Ads go bad' I've seen in a while......
"Graceful Hacks" - UX, IA and interaction design tips for hack days
"Graceful Hacks"UX, IA and interaction design tips for hack days
Social media unplugged: Part 4 - Google Bookmarks, Fark and Mixx
During the course of this week I've been studying the user experience when you encounter social bookmarking services for the first time. This has varied greatly, from something like Yahoo! Buzz with a comprehensive registration process which ends up asking you to confirm your 'buzz up' for the article that started your journey, to Newsvine, which just seems to throw up a browser security error if you are not logged in. In today's final part I'll be looking at Google...
Michael Jackson and search at The Guardian
With the memorial service over, it looks like we'll now gradually see diminishing amounts of column inches devoted to Michael Jackson. I wanted thought to put down some of my thoughts about what the reaction to his death tells us about search on the Internet, and on news sites. There were a lot of articles looking at the reaction of search engines to the news. This is always one of the cases that fascinates me about the whole problem of...
Activate 09 at The Guardian: Notes and take-away quotes - Part 4
This time last week I was gearing up to attend The Guardian's first Activate summit at Kings Place. I've blogged about Gerry Jackson's heart-breaking mission to get independent news into Zimbabwe, Nick Bostrom's presentation about 'the end of the world', a politics panel featuring Tom Watson and Adam Afriyie, and the thread of data release and story-telling that ran through the day. I wanted to conclude with a final set of observations about what had caught my eye, made...
A Google-eye view of the European Elections
A lot of people do their primary research these days using Google as their only gateway to the Internet, and I wondered what they would be finding if they were looking for information on the parties standing for Thursday's European Elections in London. The mainstream parties All of the mainstream party listings in Google are pretty similar. The initial homepage metadata in all cases stresses the name of the party leader. Who says personality politics is dead? The second...
Tracking the "Credit Crunch" with Google Street View: Crouch End
Yesterday I posted some comparison photos between Muswell Hill now, and Muswell Hill when the Google Street View cars visited, to illustrate how the "Credit Crunch" had been affecting local businesses. Actually, there only appeared to be three casualties - The Fine Burger Co., A-1 Wines, and Woolworths. In Crouch End, it was a different story. The biggest closure again appears to be Woolworths, which occupied a big store near the Henry Reader Williams memorial Clock Tower. You'll also spot...
Tracking the "Credit Crunch" with Google Street View: Muswell Hill
Tracking the "Credit Crunch" with Google Street View
Comparing recent pictures of shops in Muswell Hill and Crouch End with how they appeared when the Google cameras were in town
When RSS ads go bad...
One of the risks of context-driven text advertising is that occasionally there will be some uncomfortable juxtapositions of editorial content and advertising. It happens on currybetdotnet from time to time. I particularly recall Google deciding that one of my lengthy pieces about working in a record shop and collecting records suited adverts saying "Do you need help with your autistic child", which I took slightly personally. It can be even worse when the adverts are being served in an RSS...
Press silence on Alfie Patten DNA test result broken by Google News
Yesterday, The Mirror was reporting a further development in the story of the 13 year old boy named as a father. The initial coverage of this story was a significant factor in boosting The Sun from #5 to #1 in the UK newspaper online charts. Today, The Mirror has pulled the story from their site. It is an interesting test case of whether legal deletions should also cover SEO-orientated keyword stuffed URLs. They might have pulled the story, but I...
London's abandoned Underground Stations on Google Street View
Abandoned Tube Stations on Street View
Peek at the disused bits of London's Underground that you can see overground using Google Street View
Guardian Open Platform launch trends on Twitter
I'll have more comment about The Guardian's Open Platform launch in due course, but it was very nice to see that despite another incidence of #gfail stealing some of the thunder, both Guardian and Open Platform were trending on Twitter search during this morning's announcement....
How to turn Google's Gmail failure into an opportunity to make money
Some smart AdWords buying in the wake of today's widespread Gmail outage. A couple of firms have booked adverts against people using 'gmail' as their search term. LCN.com are advertising their reliable email hosting, whilst craftbarrow.com are urging you, without email, to take a break and go and do something less boring instead. Smart work from their respective creative teams....
Google thinks Google may harm your computer
Is 'Search online for "Act on CO2"' costing the taxpayer unnecessary pay-per-click money?
'Nofollow' and Twitter's crisis of trust
Local search: Seeing the UK's regional press through the eyes of Google
"Darwin: Big idea, big exhibition" at the Natural History Museum
Chipwrapper now available with time-slices
Thoughts, notes and quotes from the Online Information 2008 Seminars: Part 4
Local RSS: Google Reader subscriber numbers for the UK's top regional papers
Reactions to my post on the Mumbai terrorist attack search engine response
5 essential Google Labs features to improve your Google Mail experience
Top 75 British newspaper RSS feeds in Google Reader
Mumbai terrorist attacks show that search engines still can't get breaking news right
Taking the 'Ooh' out of Google: Getting site search right - Part 9
Taking the 'Ooh' out of Google: Getting site search right - Part 8
Taking the 'Ooh' out of Google: Getting site search right - Part 7
US newspapers in the Google time tunnel: Part 1
UK newspapers in the Google time tunnel
Google error reports - non-geeks need not apply!
Mac users very unwelcome at the Google Chrome download party
Google Street View spycams spotted in Walthamstow
More thoughts on Google's sitelinks algorithm
Is this evidence that Google hand-edits 'sitelinks' for small sites?
Castrol's Euro 2008 Performance Index not performing on Google AdWords
There is the BBC's new media overspend...and then there is Google
Google News and the missing Mayor from Henley
Newspaper widget review: Google Gadgets
Newspaper "Site Search Smackdown": Round 6 - Google vs The Search Engine All-Stars
Newspaper "Site Search Smackdown": Round 5 - The Newspapers vs Google
7 years of Google April Fool jokes
Google hijacks traffic from newspaper site search
The online fall-out of the Daily Express apology to Madeleine McCann's family
Making the most of blog comments: Part 4 - Do people read comments via RSS?
Google blocks access to the Biased BBC blog via search
Google DMCA complaint follow-up
Issuing a DMCA take-down notice to Google over splogger
BBC RSS subscription league table for English & Scottish football teams
Top 50 BBC Podcasts in Google Reader
Top 100 BBC RSS feeds in Google Reader
British newspaper RSS subscriptions in Google Reader
Top 100 British newspaper feeds in Google Reader
Pavarotti and Jane Tomlinson's deaths test search
Shonky email etiquette after 18 months away from my BBC email address
BBC iPlayer search plugin for Internet Explorer and Firefox, and an iPlayer Google Toolbar button
Gary Lineker isn't leaving comments here
ITV advertise using the keyword 'iPlayer' on Google and Yahoo!
Google Toolbar buttons for British newspapers including headline feeds
BBC related custom Google Toolbar buttons
A level playing field for the BBC on Google AdWords?
Quickly setting the default Google Analytics dashboard view to show a week or 48 hours
Today is the deadline for opting out of Feedburner handing all of their usage data to Google
Google search results promoting YouTube's Premier League copyright infringement
Twitter polluting Google search results for news topics
How much did shingles cost in 1963?
Questionable eBay adverts on Google "Jewish cemetery" searches
DirectGov's indirect use of Google Ads
Will virtual representations of sporting events become part of the online rights economy?
Google putting Wikipedia extracts at #1 - for Bruce Hornsby anyway
My 'biased' view of the Biased BBC blog - part two
Where do you go to complain about spammy Google adverts in the UK
Turkish YouTube ban unleashes the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast within
Google's anti-American stance on spelling the Habsburgs will upset Conservapedia
Google kills the political Googlebomb - well, unless you are French
Yahoo! door-stepping ex-Google Answers researchers
Sitemaps in search engine news
High rankings for Wikipedia doesn't mean the net has been hi-jacked by teenagers
Google Talk's latest update doesn't behave gracefully offline
Smarter searching: liberating information from the Internet - Google's personal search services
I'm loving Google's Blogger Web Comments for Firefox extension
Using Bloglines to snoop on people's private Gmail
Erratic search quality on Google Earth
Testing Google Reader - part two
Google and Yahoo! Playing With Video Search
Adobe? Never heard of them says Google
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"Journalism in the digital age"
I'll be appearing on a panel with Sarah Hartley and Iain Hepburn at the Edinburgh International Science Festival on Sunday April 11th. More details...
Posts of the moment
Day of the Triffids
If everyone suddenly went blind, how long would the Internet survive, and could you still publish news on it?
With professionals of this quality, who needs 'citizen journalist' enemies?
It is hard to argue that ethics and quality set the 'professional journalist' apart from the amateur blogger, if the 'professional' keeps publishing articles so wrong that they have to be deleted.
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