Google, the Bing Edition: an exercise in hard of thinkingness
By Davey Winder in Editorial
Posted in Search, Blog, Google on
Google should be man enough to admit it gets it wrong every now and then, rather than blame the most unlikely sounding of bugs for a hard of thinking moment.
There I was on Thursday morning, sitting in the DaniWeb offices in New York with the CEO, both of us recovering from an Internet Week after party the night before. I needed to look for something on Google and to the surprise of us both a hideous thing happened: instead of the slick and minimal Google page everyone is used to, a monstrosity appeared before us. The full-screen colour image was so distracting that it was actually hard to remember what I had gone to search for. Text on the page below the search box had all but vanished in the eye-straining confusion.
“Is this for real” asked Dani, the CEO sitting beside me “and can I switch it off?” My answer, after doing a quick bit of ironic Googling, was yes and no. Yes, it was for real and according to the newsfeeds at the time it was some kind of nod to those users who like to customise everything, and anyway, Bing has images. No, you could not switch it off but you could change the image. Great, I could have a picture of a tree or something else from the very limited set on offer, but I could not go back to what made Google great, a whole page of nothing much.
Neither of us could believe what we were seeing, and both agreed it was bad news. Then I went and started a 17 hour journey home via Dublin. By the time I reached Dublin airport and ‘borrowed’ the business lounge WiFi to check my email, a funny thing had happened: Google had gone back to normal. It was no longer Google, the Bing Edition.
So what, exactly, had happened here?
I could speculate with some humorous ideas, but even the most ridiculous of arguments would not be as unbelievable nor silly as the official version of events so I’ll stick with that. It seems that the Bingness of Google was ‘an experiment’ that was meant to last just for a day in order to gauge user reaction. Instead it was pulled 10 hours early due to ‘a bug’ that caused a link which explained all of this to vanish.
Yeah, right. One of the biggest names on the web let an experiment free on its home page, used by hundreds of millions of people every day, without checking that everything worked first. NOT. Let me repeat that, NOT. I’m sorry go ogle but I plain don’t believe you, unless you put Mr Hardofthinking in charge for the day and I doubt that happened either. Or there really is a bug whose only effect is to make an important link vanish from view. Actually, there could be such a thing and it could be called the ’someone forget to include the link’ bug I guess.
However, it seems much more likely that so many people had he same “WTF?” reaction to this image madness that both the DaniWeb CEO and myself experienced, and enough of them complained to Google to make the company realise the folly of it’s decision and pull the thing before it managed to do the impossible and kill the web’s biggest property stone dead withy a single well aimed if rather daft bullet.
Rated: 60% (2 votes)
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Warning: Johnny Depp Death Video
By Davey Winder in Editorial
Posted in Twitter, phishing, Search, Blog, Spyware, Security, Spam, Internet on
I’ve been all over the Johnny Depp is NOT dead story this weekend like a nasty rash. Seriously, how this could have spread quite so quickly is beyond me. It has run broad as well as deep, which is unusual for a Twitter hoax. However, it does serve to demonstrate not only how important Twitter is becoming as a breaking news source but also how badly things can go wrong if you treat Twitter Trending Topics as gospel instead of Chinese Whispers.
It only took me a few minutes of Googling to dig up the fact that the supposed car crash was actually an old hoax resurrected from 2004, and it wasn’t a very good one back then to be honest. The lazy hoaxer just pasted an image over an existing CNN news story page but couldn’t be arsed to remove the original text. So one minute it was talking about Depp in an alcohol fuelled death crash and the next about some British Navy types having a lucky escape from a caving accident. Sigh.
Sure, I had the advantage of being an online news guy so am blessed with one of those ‘I’ve heard that somewhere before’ kind of memories which comes with the territory. So when my wife woke me up and was all “the man I love is dead” on my ass I knew it was a hoax. Obviously I also knew my marriage was not, perhaps, as secure as I had thought but that’s another story.
What else I knew, once I’d done my investigating and written it up in the forlorn hope it might help stem the tide of misinformed tweets (it didn’t) was that it wouldn’t be long before the RIP Johnny Depp malware hit the web. Another forlorn hope that a security journalist warning the public to be alert might stop link clicking idiots doing just that. Still, the news stories went out yesterday.
Today the inevitable has happened and Graham Cluley over at Sophos has the video evidence of malware scammers using the web to direct people expecting to find video footage and news of the Johnny Depp death crash to something even nastier. Part of me wants to say that look, if you are searching for video footage of a celebrity perishing in a car crash then you deserve everything the malware scumbags throw at you. But then again, I’ve seen how devoted Depp fans react to the news that their idol may be dead (waves at wife across the office) and know that logic can often be thrown out of the window in an attempt to get at the truth.
To save you the trouble, here is the truth:
Depp did not die in a car crash in 2004 or 2010 and there is no video footage as a result.
Twitter should not be treated like News at Ten, but more as a load of people down the pub - and you wouldn’t necessarily believe Bob at eleven when he tells you that Gordon Brown has resigned over a sex scandal and he knows it is true because Fred told him and he heard it from the barman. Would you?
Rated: 60% (2 votes)
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Happy Birthday Google, or is it?
By Davey Winder in Editorial
Posted in Search, Blog, Google, Internet on
Is Google really 11 years old? Is it really that long ago that we all used AltaVista and couldn’t imagine anyone doing search better than that? The answer to both questions is yes, possibly.
Happy 11th birthday Google. Well at least I think that’s right. Maybe.
To celebrate, Google has a special logo of course. No UFO inspired nonsense to get the conspiracy theorists conspiring, just a rather clever use of a double ‘l’ to represent the number 11 instead. Nice. I actually prefer this one to the 10th birthday effort which seemed a bit forced, although the cupcake for the first o was inspired, replacing the e with an 0 just didn’t work on anything but a surrealist level.
The odd thing is, of course, that the 10th birthday logo did not appear on the 27th September 2008, but instead celebrations started on the 2nd. I’m a little confused as to why that might be, especially as the Google domain name was registered on the 15th September while company incorporation papers were submitted on the 4th. If anyone has a clue as to how Google picks a birthday date, please do let me know.
Actual date aside, Google was definitely launched upon the world in 1998 and this got me to remembering what I was doing PG: pre-Google. Well, I was doing the same as everyone else who was online at the time, and that was thinking that AltaVista was the dogs doo-dahs. Nobody expected the Google upstart, despite the wonderfully minimalist interface, to be anything other than a minor distraction in the world of search back in 1998. If you were not using AltaVista, and I’d have to ask why not as it really did rock back then, you were probably searching courtesy of some other long forgotten by most engine with names like Magellan, Excite, Infoseek, Lycos, HotBot or even Yahoo! OK, the latter has not been forgotten although it did go through a period when most of us would have been happy to forget it, truth be told. Oddly, back in 1997, Microsoft wasn’t really considered a search player although the launch of MSN Search around the same time as Google if my memory serves me well did start to change all that.
Now, and I’ll admit it, I cannot imagine using anything other than Google as my primary search weapon. It’s always primed and ready to fire, generally hits the target without too much collateral damage, and I don’t need to read an instruction manual before I pull the trigger. Happy Birthday Google - I wonder if you will still be king of search in another 11 years, or whether you will just be remembered as the new AltaVista?
Rated: 100% (1 votes)
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