Google Recommends Microformats and RDFa

Google’s own webmasters help site recommends microformats and RDFa structured data to improve indexing and usefulness of the data. Review metadata appears to have full support, while people, product, and business data are in beta.

Understanding, Leveraging Google Image Search

Above is Peter Linsley speaking about Google Image Search at SMX West in February, 2009.
Meanwhile, Stefan Juhl suggests some JavaScript to break your site out of the image search result pages:
Many Google image search users are quickly clicking on to the direct image URL and thereby not seeing the page with the image. Also, it [...]

Google Street View Camera Sightings

What happens when one of Google’s street view camera vehicles encounters a low bridge or a muddy Australian road?

Google Labs: Similar Images and News Timeline

New releases from Google Labs: Similar Images and News Timeline. I count it as a failure for Google that the news timeline doesn’t show future events.

Google Brings Video To GTalk, But Why No iChat/Skype Interoperability?

Google yesterday introduced video chat to the web-based version of it’s Google Talk app (think GMail), but doesn’t appear to interoperate with any of the many existing video chat apps, iChat and Skype tops among them.

Google Minus Google

From The Register:
Inspired by a recent New York Times piece that questioned whether the Mountain View search monopoly is morphing into a media company — which it is — Finnish blogger Timo Paloheimo promptly unveiled Google minus Google. Key in the word “YouTube,” and the first result is Wikipedia.

Google’s Own Satellite

It’s not truly “Google’s own,” but the internet giant will get exclusive use of the images for mapping purposes, according to Reuters:
GeoEye Inc said it successfully launched into space on Saturday its new GeoEye-1 satellite, which will provide the U.S. government, Google Earth users and others the highest-resolution commercial color satellite imagery on the market.
Of [...]

Evil Google

Aaron Swartz’s Bubble City, Chapter 8:
He sent the report to his superior and wandered off for a bit to dwell on the power he had as a faceless person deep inside an office park in Mountain View to know every detail of another person’s life. He wondered what it would be like if he came [...]

Google PageRank Is/Is Not/Is All Machine Generated

Google’s always been in the awkward position of claiming that PageRank is algorithmic, not editorial, while also explaining that they’re constantly adjusting their algorithms to ensure that PageRank reflects editorial judgments of quality. Here’s a peek inside the machine.

Google Pumps OpenID Too

Following news that Yahoo! is joining the OpenID fray, it appears Google is dipping a toe in too. While those two giants work out their implementations, others are raising the temperature of the debate on IDM solutions. Stefan Brands is among the OpenID naysayers (David Recordon’s response), while Scott Gillbertson sees a bright future. [...]