• December 16th, 2007
• Filed in
  • Google
  • Rants

Remember when Google was a spider that returned relevant search results? Yea, me too. Now Google wants it all. Back in the day, I specifically (in the good old “focused on search results” times) remember Sergey Brin stating that Google’s purpose was to make all the world’s information indexed and available.

Lately, it seems Google isn’t satisfied with just indexing the worlds information, but owning it as well (email, documents, analytics, social networks, online advertising, videos, etc etc ad nauseum).

I can see the discussion amongst Google engineers that sparked Google Knol.

Engineer #1: I’m tired of sending so much of our traffic to Wikipedia, they should come to us instead! Engineer #2: OWN IT!

Google Knol is designed to be a Squidoo, Mahalo, Wikipedia killer - Google Knol is in closed beta presently, but they’re hoping that it does better than Brazilian social network Orkut.

As if the whole internet doesn’t suck off Google’s teet enough already. They’re going after the only major untarnished Interweb destination that’s left: Wikipedia.org.

Is anyone scared yet?

Why did I get flashbacks of Dr. Edward Nygma aka the Riddler from Batman Forever, hooked up to his mind draining super crazy device pilfering all of the knowledge from unsuspecting Gothamites?

Google Knols All

What happens when “Don’t be evil” gets boring? Far in the future when Sergey and Larry are no longer the moral leaders of a powerful company, who becomes Google’s conciousness? What will be the next position posted on the Google job board when that happens, Chief Ethicist?

This Google is super ambitious and I love that - they raise the bar for the rest of us, but no one is safe from the Google machine. If they think they can do something better than you (and often they can), be afraid, be very afraid.

Sidenote: When Google gains it’s own consciousness we are so screwed.

Popularity: 18% [?]

• September 7th, 2007
• Filed in
  • Google
  • Life Hacks

I love gmail and it’s spam filtering. I probably have about a dozen email addresses all pointing to my gmail account. Good for me, bad for my disk quota, so I like to clean it up from time to time. I was very surprised when two searches let me hone in on a plethora of disk-space-sucking email which freed up approximately 50% of my available space, the later of which didn’t really contribute but made me feel better.

Search for: has:attachment before:2007/01/01 and FW: before:2007/01/01

And wipe those suckers out. Happiness ensues.

You might want to backup all of your mail by downloading it first by configuring your own POP client.

Popularity: 10% [?]