Archive for the 'google' Category

PRAISE JESUS!

Published on February 22, 2008 in google and pi. 2 Comments

Google has finally made Gmail search not suck!

If you’re a Gmail user, you’ve almost certainly had the sense that you were searching for an email that you know is in your archive, yet searches for words you KNOW for a FACT are in the email turn up empty.

It turns out that Gmail search got hopelessly confused by punctuation. If you searched for “meeting” but your email actually contained the word “meeting.”, Gmail wouldn’t be able to find it.

Did you catch that? It would match “meeting” but not “meeting.”

Honestly, this is an embarrassment for a product team that claimed that we should all give up folders and instead rely on Google’s state of the art search to manage our email. And it’s an embarrassment for a company that claims to be a search company.

I wrote a totally dumb search engine for The Daily Jolt’s marketplace several years ago and even that code, dumb as it was, could handle periods and commas. (Although it looks like The Daily Jolt has let it fall into disrepair. Facebook has all but destroyed them) But I digress. The real news is:

GOOGLE FIXED IT!

As of today, Gmail search is, at the very least not totally asinine. Evidence:

gmailsearch.png

I’m not sure if this is related to the suggestion I sent to them or what, but either way I’m relieved.

That said, this whole situation leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I want an explanation. What happened, Gmail team? How could something so basic slip past your radar? Do you not use Gmail yourselves?

Honestly, the whole episode is a crime against rationality. It seems excessive, but I almost think we deserve some sort of public apology.

Move your house on Google Maps

Published on November 21, 2007 in crowdsourcing, google, maps and pi. 0 Comments

Previously my house was a little off in Google maps.  If you searched for 1916 33rd St, you’d get the people about three houses down from me.  But Google just introduced the ability to tweak the location of your home.  Now the marker is spot on.  Find your house and put it in its place!

Online IDEs and Freedom

Published on June 6, 2007 in computing, forkolator, free software, google, internet, pi, technology and web. 2 Comments

Google released Google Mashup Editor today, which is an online IDE in the spirit of Forkolator. Google Docs is pretty similar to a design I had been playing with too. I guess Google and I have similar goals. The difference is, they implement their ideas, and I often just blog about mine.

But I’m getting a little scared. Google building a great, functional platform that’s going to entice a lot of people to spend the bulk of their time in Google software. But when we use Google products, we have no control over the software we’re using. We can’t change it. We can’t even prevent it from changing. Google has the keys to the car.

As a free software advocate, that’s scary.

As a user, it should be scary too. Yes, Google seems altruistic enough, but the fact is, they have interests. Often their interests align with the interests of many users, but what if you’re in the 5% whose interests are not being served? Your only option is to choose another product. Maybe find something from Yahoo or Microsoft.

But that’s not good enough for me.

And that’s why Forkolator is still important, even in the face of Yahoo Pipes, Microsoft Popfly and Google Mashup Editor. Forkolator is about giving people total control over the software they use, and encouraging uninhibited exploration of possibilities. Microsoft actively constrains our freedom to change our software. At best, Google is granting us a few limited freedoms because they’ve deemed those freedoms useful to some large segment of their user base. And because in this case, GME drives more traffic to their services.

Despite this minor detour towards proprietary software, I really believe the future of software is total Freedom. But for that to be true, we need to build infrastructure to compete with Google and we need to do it fast.

Gotcha

Published on November 22, 2006 in funny, google, pi and technology. 0 Comments

Google has recently improved their book search so that you can read more easily… dragging pages around, zooming in and out, and such. To try the new features out, I went to books.google.com and searched for “cuisine” and clicked the first book in the results.

Go ahead, click the link. Browse through a the first few pages. Keep going. Notice anything funny?

That’s right, someone’s nicely manicured thumb has been immortalized for the ages. 100 times. Helps you remember all the humanity that makes our technology hum along.