The infamous Google cookie

Google have once again hit some big headlines. The context is often a negative one.

• Napster To Be Acquired by Google?
  Peer-to-peer is in question; Specifically, one of the father applications, wgucg put piracy at the hands of the common man. What was that slogan again? “Do no evil”?
• Newspaper Lobbyists Take Aim at Google News
  This comes after book scanning and some subsequent court battles. It revolves around Google’s scraping of content. This probably peaked with their snatching of UseNet content, which goes a few decades back and predates Google itself. Another similar lawsuit was recently unfruitful, as the court titled Google’s content delivery a case of “fair use”.
• Google Working on Desktop Linux
  Commercialisation of Linux (no exception to Red Hat and SuSE). I do not like the sound of that, yet I hope that they at least extinguish Microsoft after endless rumours about Google O/S and the recent Windows Distribution (software pack) from Google. Google’s affinity for Linux has been known for some time. Some false speculations about Google Linux were shattered recently too.

In relation to older news

• Google Toolbar v.4
  No controversy here, but I still abide by my belief that GoogleBar is better, among combination of other tool/searchbars. Google recently began to forbid greedy requests for search results from their Web interface, after years without any such restrictions imposed. Third-party Google toolbars are badly affected by that.
• Poor Spelling Beats Google’s China Filter
  The censorship of results in China has been discussed to death in the media. It was criticised across the blogsphere while I was away on holiday. Typos have always been a soft spot for search engines. I once noted that typos have SEO potential

More related items (primarily Google in a negative light):

• Search Engines and Biased Results
• Google Finally Invade Sites
• The Google Cookie
• Death of Privacy
• Search Engines and Spying
• Dangers of RSS Sitemaps
• Google and Pet Peeves
• Google: A Monopoly?
• Google Blind to Controversy

UPDATE (1/2/2006, 7:49): Google denies plans to distribute OS based on Ubuntu (Goobuntu)

UPDATE (1/2/2006, 7:57): Google Denies Napster Tie-Up, Music Store Plan

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 1st, 2006 at 3:31 am and is filed under News, Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.