On the Googlers who are paid to look at the absolute worst things on the internet —

Buzzfeed reports that the people Google hires to screen for the worst possible stuff on YouTube (CP, beheadings, and this horrific stuff) suffer mental health risks (well, duh), and that they are unlikely to be hired as full-time employees who would receive health care benefits. That does not seem right. (via Joel Johnson) — Xeni •

Remember the bogus takedown of NASA's YouTube footage of the Curiosity landing? It gets worse. Lon Seidman uploaded some clips from the Curiosity landing to his Google+ hangout, only to have them taken down by five takedown requests from various scumbags who play the YouTube content matching system to force people to accept ads on their personal videos, payment from which goes to said scumbags:

Wow now I'm really getting angry over this Content ID disaster from +YouTube regarding the Mars landing. On Sunday night I hosted a live broadcast with contributors from CTTechJunkie.com and NASASpaceflight.com to watch the landing live. We brought in footage provided by NASA, including their live feed of the landing. NASA footage is released into the public domain and can be freely used by anyone.

I just came home to my inbox filled with dispute claims from no less than FIVE news organizations claiming this footage as their own. BS. It's mine. And now Youtube says it might start running ads against content I created and handing that money over to these crooks who are essentially bigger players with the ability to claim rights to content they do not own.

The worst part is that Google clearly is not requiring these "rightsholders" prove they actually own the content. But it's somehow incumbent upon me to prove my innocence. This is outright theft of my content - plain and simple.

Wow now I'm really getting angry over this Content ID disaster from +YouTube regarding the Mars landing (Thanks, Xeni!)

I don't know what the best words ever written in the English language are, but I'm willing to put "Top of Launch Pad 39A, Address is Approximate" up there on the short list.

Among the images you can now explore online with the click of your mouse are the space shuttle launch pad, Vehicle Assembly Building and Launch Firing Room #4. Gaze down from the top of the enormous launch pad, peer up at the towering ceiling of the Vehicle Assembly Building (taller than the Statue of Liberty) and get up close to one of the space shuttle’s main engines, which is powerful enough to generate 400,000 lbs of thrust. And even though they recently entered retirement, you can still get an up-close, immersive experience with two of the Space Shuttle Orbiters—the Atlantis and Endeavour.

I'm not sure when this went live, but it's seriously phenomenal. And it's part of a larger series of special Street View galleries with geeky appeal. There are sets for Antarctica (see Shackleton's shack!), historic Italy (wander around the Colosseum!), and UNESCO World Heritage Sites (includes Pompeii!). In general, discovering this could be a major time-suck for me, if I'm not careful.

See the NASA collection

Check out the other Street View Galleries

Google announced today that it had acquired Sparrow, the OS X email app much-loved for its uncluttered layout and minimal user experience. This HOWTO will help get you ready for all the enhancements and developments to come as it is integrated into Google's established mail and messaging services.

Daniel Russell is a search guru in the employ of Google. He addressed a crowd of journalists with a lecture on the super-advanced search techniques, and posed this riddle: "What’s the phone number of the office where this picture was snapped?" (solution here).

John Tedesco from the San Antonio Express-News took excellent notes on Russell's speech, and has summarized it for the rest of us. I consider myself a very proficient searcher, but Russell's tips were often surprising and enlightening for me. Here's a great one:

Force Google to include search terms.

Sometimes Google tries to be helpful and it uses the word it thinks you’re searching for — not the word you’re actually searching for. And sometimes a website in the search results does not include all your search terms.

How do you fix this?

Typing intext:[keyword] might be Google’s least-known search operations, but it’s one of Russell’s favorites. It forces the search term to be in the body of the website. So if you type:

intext:”San Antonio” intext:Alamo

It forces Google to show results with the phrase “San Antonio” and the word Alamo. You won’t get results that are missing either search term.

How to solve impossible problems: Daniel Russell’s awesome Google search techniques (via Making Light)

My latest Guardian column is "Google admits that Plato's cave doesn't exist," a discussion of how Google has changed the way it talks about its search-results, shifting from the stance that rankings are a form of pure math to the stance that rankings are a form of editorial judgment.

Google has, to date, always refused to frame itself in those terms. The pagerank algorithm isn't like an editor arguing aesthetics around a boardroom table as the issue is put to bed. The pagerank algorithm is a window on the wall of Plato's cave, whence the objective, empirical world of Relevance may be seen and retrieved.

That argument is a convenient one when the most contentious elements of your rankings are from people who want higher ranking. "We have done the maths, and your page is empirically less relevant than the pages above it. Your quarrel is with the cold, hard reality of numbers, not with our judgement."

The problem with that argument is that maths is inherently more regulatable than speech. If the numbers say that item X must be ranked over item Y, a regulator may decide that a social problem can be solved by "hard-coding" page Y to have a higher ranking than X, regardless of its relevance. This isn't censorship – it's more like progressive taxation.

Google admits that Plato's cave doesn't exist

Google believes that it can distinguish run-of-the-mill hack-attacks on Gmail accounts from state-sponsored spies trying to gain access to dissidents' email. When it detects the latter, it will display a warning for the legitimate owner to see, "We believe that state-sponsored attackers may be attempting to compromise your account or computer." The warning comes with a link to instructions for improving your password security.

You might ask how we know this activity is state-sponsored. We can’t go into the details without giving away information that would be helpful to these bad actors, but our detailed analysis—as well as victim reports—strongly suggest the involvement of states or groups that are state-sponsored.

Security warnings for suspected state-sponsored attacks (via Wired)

Google alerts Chinese when results censored —

"It ... seems likely to irritate Chinese officials, who have already employed an array of techniques to punish the company since a clash over censorship led Google to move its servers to Hong Kong in January 2010." — Michael Wines at The New York Times. — Rob •

For many years, Google has published a "Transparency Report" with the number of non-copyright-related takedown notices it receives from governments, police, courts, individuals and corporations. Now, the company have added copyright takedowns to the mix. Sadly (and weirdly), this part of the report isn't searchable, as Alan at Copyfight notes: "I cannot search to see if someone has requested that, say, material owned by me be removed from any domain. This is important because in the past organizations that didn't actually own copyrights sent takedown notices. Only a copyright holder should be entitled to do that. Like any other 'big data' source the uses to which these data could be put are varied, but lack of search will hamper most efforts."

Today we’re expanding the Transparency Report with a new section on copyright. Specifically, we’re disclosing the number of requests we get from copyright owners (and the organizations that represent them) to remove Google Search results because they allegedly link to infringing content. We’re starting with search because we remove more results in response to copyright removal notices than for any other reason. So we’re providing information about who sends us copyright removal notices, how often, on behalf of which copyright owners and for which websites. As policymakers and Internet users around the world consider the pros and cons of different proposals to address the problem of online copyright infringement, we hope this data will contribute to the discussion.

For this launch we’re disclosing data dating from July 2011, and moving forward we plan on updating the numbers each day. As you can see from the report, the number of requests has been increasing rapidly. These days it’s not unusual for us to receive more than 250,000 requests each week, which is more than what copyright owners asked us to remove in all of 2009. In the past month alone, we received about 1.2 million requests made on behalf of more than 1,000 copyright owners to remove search results. These requests targeted some 24,000 different websites.

As TechDirt points out, many of the takedown notices that Microsoft sent to Google were for sites that were not removed from Bing, Microsoft's competing search engine.

Copyright Removal Requests – Google Transparency Report

Transparency for copyright removals in search (Google Blog)

(via Copyfight)

Update: A day after this story broke in the LA Weekly, NBC LA runs a contradictory report, and the Weekly says Google's still scheduled to start renting in July 2014, but according to staff writer Simone Wilson, "They just might let Gold's stay in the space, strangely. (Kind of a sublet deal?) And Google won't comment on the other 170,000 square feet." (via Brad at YoVenice)

The nerds finally beat the jocks. The historic Gold's Gym location in Venice Beach, "mecca of bodybuilding" where former governator and movie star Arnold Schwarzenneger once trained, will soon be occupied by Google. This gym site opened in the late 1960s (and, to be honest, it was somewhat shabby in recent years—I was a member for some time). Ahnold is shown in the vintage stock reel here, along with other beefy Gold's Gym dudes of the seventies.

Update: Bret of the micro-local Yo Venice blog, which covers all things Venice, corrects my Gold's Gym location history, below.

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