Tag: Google

Google it!

The problem for me is that Googling it may lead to a discredited, or at least controversial, source.

Google.itSo an old, terrestrial friend of mine asked on Facebook:

Am I wrong when I ask someone to explain their post when it is confusing to me?
I don’t understand when people tell me to ‘Google it’.
In my strange little world, if I make a post that doesn’t make sense without additional information, I feel it is my responsibility to provide a link.
Am I wrong?

Well, I think this is obviously a correct interpretation; you are NOT wrong.

But apparently, there’s this OTHER meaning of the phrase, one I’m not quite picking up on. “It just means ‘I don’t know either’ or ‘I don’t have time to explain all of this,” I’m told. Rather like in this article.

I think “Google it” is a bit lazy UNLESS they are the argumentative sort who deny facts. “New York is larger than California” – no, it’s not. THAT they can Google.

Then Chris asked for Ask Roger Anything:

Sometimes you’re in a group of people debating a pretty simple fact (e.g. are nectarines just fuzzless peaches or are they totally different?) and no one whips out the $500 hunk of technology in their pocket and Googles it. Why not? It’s a basic fact thing.

It’s funny because people around me are ALWAYS pulling out their devices. I do it myself when a bit of information that I know suddenly escapes me.

The problem for me is that Googling it may lead to a discredited, or at least controversial, source. I could Google “climate change hoax”. That wouldn’t prove that climate change is a hoax. But I could imagine someone say it is, as “proof” of their theory.

I Googled the original name of AIDS, and I found at the Encyclopedia Dramatica that “Gay-Related Immune Deficiency Syndrome is the original term for the now politically-correct expression AIDS.” Politically correct?

Just this month, Google has announced that it will offer better medical advice when you search your symptoms, which suggests that the previous results were not as robust as they might have been.

Another person I know personally wanted to access a useful website to find good quotations. Someone jumped in to say to use Google; that was obviously an inadequate response. What he wanted was a link such as BrainyQuotes.com.

I guess, as a librarian, I find the belief that Google is the end-all disconcerting. And telling someone to use it is essentially blowing someone off. A better answer might be, “I don’t know.”

Shooting Parrots makes this point: “Whatever it is you need to know is just a click away on your computer… and yet does the fact that it is there, 24/7, mean that we value it less? Do we no longer need to bother with the tedious business of learning things, because there is an app out there that does all the learning for you?”

What bugs me even more, though, are the people who, when someone takes a position different from theirs, snarl, “Do your homework!” I saw this a LOT in debates between Bernie Sanders supporters and the backers of Hillary Clinton, especially leading up to the April 19, 2016 primary in New York.

And speaking of the Democratic candidate, there is no evidence that Google is manipulating searches to help Hillary Clinton.

 

Shouldn’t no Internet mean NO Internet?

I could access Google itself, though none of the links worked.

Internet.mouseIt was the Saturday afternoon of Memorial Day weekend when I realized that our home Internet was not working. Well, mostly.

The laptop computer would not connect to the Internet, even though the WiFi was clearly working, verified both by the computer itself and the guy on the phone from Time Warner Cable. Later, I saw that my wife’s Apple device had no Internet connection either.

So the problem is probably in the router, though I rebooted it at least thrice. Plugging it directly into the computer did not help.

But wait: this is weird. Operating the laptop, in Google Chrome (but NOT in Internet Explorer), I COULD get to an array of Google products. I could access Google itself, though none of the links worked. I could visit Google+, Google maps. My old blog, and others I write, are powered by Blogger, and I could compose blogs in Blogger, but I couldn’t preview them; I could even publish them, but I couldn’t read them to check for errors.

I commiserated with a bunch of my Internet buddies. Sunday afternoon, I took the laptop and iPad to the library, which was still closed, but I thought sitting outside, maybe I could access the signal; no go. Went to a local Internet cafe, and neither worked; ditto the closed bagel shop.

Back at home, the Google miracle no longer worked, and I had no Internet at all.

The guy from TWC arrived on time at 11 a.m. on Tuesday morning. It wasn’t theft of services or some other nefarious ploy. The short explanation is that he thinks that my router just wore out, and he replaced it. He also gave us a new cable remote that actually worked; previously we needed to use the TV’s remote to turn it on and off, and the cable remote to change channels and watch the DVR.

This explains why I was slow in answering emails, and visiting blogs, including for ABC Wednesday, last week. It also made my inclination to write ahead in my blog a good one, because I burned through six posts catching up with other things before I could write a new post, that being this one.

And the Google miracle STILL defies explanation.

The Android and me

I know I’m not maximizing the device’s utility, possibly because, since it actually doesn’t belong to me, I don’t want to become dependent on it.

“Do you want the use of an Android device?” our techie supervisor asked me a few months ago Sure, yeah, I guess so. There it was – an ASUS Android 7. First thing: plug it in, which I do. I can’t get it started, but that is a function of not squeezing these two prongs long enough. So it’s working. What should I DO with it?

I know; I’ll download – what do you call them? – applications? They say apps, I understand. But there are about a billion of them, many of them free; which ones should I get? I go to Google Play, which is already on the device, and type in various obvious ones: CNN, the local weather, the local mass transit, FEMA (hey, ya never know), a dictionary, and Free Cell card game. What’s cool is that I can search for apps on my computer and they magically would appear on the device; no plugs necessary.

Hey, it’s locked! How do I unlock it? I keep pressing the lock, when I should have been making a sweeping motion to the left and down, or right and down.

Here’s what it’s useful for: checking my e-mail while working with my daughter on her homework. It doesn’t require 100% attention. I watched a little bit of football, and checking e-mail with that is a good thing. But not so much watching a dramatic series, or JEOPARDY! or any program which I have to view actively.

I discovered where the Internet hot spots are in the area: certain businesses, the 905 bus from Albany to Schenectady. AlbanyNet works some places downtown.

I know I’m not maximizing the device’s utility, possibly because, since it actually doesn’t belong to me, I don’t want to become dependent on it. But I AM glad for the chance to figure out, if only a little, why people’s faces are always buried in some device.

It won’t be me always on the machine, because writing on it is too much work; I obviously just don’t have the thumbs for it, and I type with one finger, which is exhausting. I commented on a dozen blogs, and my neck hurt.

But there is one thing I do like, and that’s the ability to speak to the device and search for websites. Usually it’s one I’ve already been to, but still useful. And making pages bigger – now THAT’S quite user-friendly. I went to the Zillow app and found all the houses in my neighborhood for sale; not that I was in the market, but it was nice to check out, and expanding the page made the listings MUCH easier to see.

One last thing: it’s so big I’m not likely to use it.

Bad linkage, says the mighty Google

Does this ever happen to you? It happens to me roughly every 15 days, where someone will e-mail me a letter like this:

Dear Sir or Madam,

I hope you’re doing well. I’m writing to you because my domain RedactedDomain.com was struck by an unnatural links penalty from Google. You might be aware of how Google can penalize a site if they think that the site is or was using dishonest link-building techniques.

Well, I’m not an expert on what Google determines to be a harmful link, so I can’t be sure, but I have reason to believe that Google views hyperlinks from your website OneOfRoger’sSites.com to RedactedDomain.com as a violation of Google’s webmaster’s guidelines. That’s why I would like to ask you to remove links from the following pages on your website to the following pages on my website:

SpecificLinkOnOneOfRoger’sSites.com linking to SpecificLinkOnRedactedDomain.com

I must admit that the first couple of times I got these, I ignored them. Then I thought, “It’s not that big a deal,” and deleted the link, occasionally even deleting the whole post – though not on this blog – because the link was the point of the post. But the last time, I go to the link and can’t find the offending part. What a bother.

What I DID find, though, is a BROKEN link. Generally, I don’t go back and check old links, because that’s all I would do. But if someone comments on an old post, or I discover a broken link on something previously published, I will replace it if I can, remove it if I can’t.

Fellow bloggers, what’s your policy on these matters?

You thought they knew everything about you?

“Short of wearing a burka, we may all one day become Tom Cruise at the mall, because marketers who track us as we shop online and send us ads, want to do that as we shop in the real world.”

Did you see 60 Minutes recently or read the story ‘Say goodbye to anonymity’?

Lesley Stahl, CBS News 60 Minutes: Facial recognition is already in some of our home appliances like TVs. In our mobile devices, PINs and passwords are giving way to faceprints. And the technology can single us out in real-time as we go about our daily business, often without us ever knowing.

Joseph Atick, one of the first scientists to develop facial recognition software: What’s unique about face recognition is the fact that you can do it surreptitiously, from a distance, and continually.

Alessandro Acquisti is a professor at Carnegie Mellon who does research on how technology impacts privacy. “He says that smartphones may make ‘facial searches’ as common as Google searches and he did an experiment to show how easy it could be… He ran pictures [of random students] through a facial recognition program he downloaded for free that sifted through Facebook profiles and other websites. And he was able not only to identify many of them instantly, he also got their personal data, including in some cases, their social security numbers.

“Short of wearing a burka, we may all one day become Tom Cruise at the mall, because marketers who track us as we shop online and send us ads, want to do that as we shop in the real world.” That reference was to the 2002 Cruise film Minority Report. I’m somewhat horrified by this.

I’m happy that with their relationship on the rocks, Chris (Lefty) and Kelly Brown found a marriage counselor in their Xbox, but I wonder how much of privacy is given up to prove that new Xbox experience that’s being launched.

I can’t quite explain why, but this future automotive device weirds me out.

And it’s primarily commercial entities doing this, from the info we give out ourselves. I suppose I should unplug everything on social media and hide in my cave. But I won’t (yet).

As Tom the Mayor wrote on Facebook: “You know, You can’t ‘friend’ an Amish person on Facebook!”

Shooting Parrots wants to give Google the finger because “corporate giants like Amazon, Starbucks and Google [and Apple!] who have taken to biting the hands that feed them by avoiding paying tax where their customers live,” while, I would add, using the info we give them to get ever richer. SP is using DuckDuckGo.com in lieu of Google; its motto on the page: “Search anonymously. Find instantly.” It may lessen the “Google experience,” but it is a reasonable tradeoff, I think.
***
Some kid’s in jail for something he wrote on Facebook.

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