Productivity Booster

Posted by Scott Hughes Fri, 03 Feb 2006 00:52:00 GMT

I found out about this amazing browser plugin via Chris Pirillo. His pitch for it completely sold me on it:

I don’t care who you are - you need this free plugin. In FireFox or IE, you’ll finally know what you’re walking into. For example, if you did a search for ”gnome” on your favorite search engine with SiteAdvisor installed, you’d see a set of results with colored checkmark images next to ‘em. These things will tell you everything you ever wanted to know about an unknown site. Hover over a spidered site, and it’ll tell you how many pop-ups it serves, how many links to other “green” (good) sites, how many emails per week it sends, how many “green” downloads it points to, etc. Click the image for even more information.

It makes googling a lot easier… Now when I construct a poor search phrase and get garbage results, I can visually filter out the sites I don’t want to even check immediately.

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Our politico's aren't so different...

Posted by Scott Hughes Mon, 30 Jan 2006 22:31:00 GMT

In China, they force American websites to censor the results of certain searches, so that they can ensure that the populace only gets the Chinese Government’s version of the story.

In America, they use a legion of staffers to assault the editorial efforts of an open encyclopedia, so that the populace only gets their version of the story.

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Frightening Look into Censorship

Posted by Scott Hughes Mon, 30 Jan 2006 00:45:00 GMT

via NoodleFood:

What does Google’s collusion with the Chinese government to censor its search results mean? It’s the difference between fact and illusion.

I found the difference between those two search results to be quite disturbing. To recap (if China is liberated tomorrow, I’ll look like an idiot when those links don’t work), if you search for “tiananmen” on the Chinese Google image search page, you get pictures from happy tourists and travel websites. If you execute the same search on our Google image search page, you get pictures of brave Tiananmen Tank Guy (the student who stood alone in front of a row of tanks sent to quell a student demonstration).

Here’s some more I tried:

Chinese Arrest and Chinese Arrest Censored Chinese Arrest Censored

Chinese Dissent and Chinese Dissent Censored Chinese Dissent Censored

Chinese Activist and Chinese Activist Censored Chinese Activist Censored

Perhaps the most disturbing are images of members of the banned religion Falun Gong… Pay close attention to the pictures of Falun Gong practicioners, specifically the healthy physical condition of any practicioner that happens to be shown on the Chinese site.

Falun Gong and Falun Gong Censored Falun Gong Censored

I don’t know how much you can fault Google for this. They can make a lot of money in China, and that’s the price of doing business there. Giving the Chinese people easier access to information than they had before can only help, so it’s a limited win-win. The only people in the way of making it a complete win for the Chinese people would be the Chinese government, not Google. It’s not the fault of American businesses that the Chinese people haven’t overthrown the tyrants yet.

Update, 1/30/2006
I corrected the search links to the Chinese Google home page. While constructing the links, I mistakenly thought that Google may be changing the results based on the country of origin of the IP address that was conducting the search. I though that appending “&cr=countryCN” to the url would fix it, but this actually tells Google to search only the websites that are hosted in China. After modifying the links, the differences between the two searches becomes very subtle. It appears that I did not find any other keywords that were being censored. Tiananmen is the only obvious one, and I would’ve thought Falun Gong would’ve been on the list but the results are identical.

Speaking practically, if Google is not filtering by the IP address of the originator, the censorship of whatever keywords on the Chinese home page makes no difference… Since a Chinese citizen can just choose to use the US (or standard) home page for Google and get all of the results back.

Update Again, 1/31/2006
Apparently, there were some early issues with capitalization on the chinese search page, but Google has fixed those now. I realize now I have no idea what the “cr=” in the url means. If you go to http://images.google.cn and search for keyword “Falun Gong”, you will get censored results. Go into your address bar and remove the “&cr=countryCN” from the url that was generated by Google’s Chinese search page, and you will now see the uncensored results. Is this all the Chinese citizens have to do to see all the results? You know, this whole “censoring the web” idea isn’t making a lot of sense.

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GVisit

Posted by Scott Hughes Mon, 29 Aug 2005 03:10:00 GMT

Found a neat website recently, called GVisit, that shows a Google map overlaid with pins to indicate the location of the last 20 visitors of your site. You can track more visitors if you donate. You can see my last 20 visitors, which shows an interesting international trend, thanks in part to Justin. He’s working on a project in South Africa now and he’s registering on my GVisit map as a visitor from Pretoria, Gauteng. With him and some anonymous visitor from Limassol (looks like it’s a city in Cyprus, an island south of Turkey), my blog looks well visited by the international community.

Update: Since posting this, I can add Tel Aviv, Tokyo, Zurich, and several cities in England to the list. It’s strange to think about some Tokyo schoolboy who is going to be telling his friends tomorrow about this lame American blog he found the previous night. =)

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