Why is Google called Google? Apparently Google thinks I know the answer.

Google loves me. Don’t believe me?

Google loves me so much that they want me to explain why they call themselves Google. Out of over 32 million pages, Feross.org is the #1 result for the query “Why is this website called Google?” (click here to see for yourself!).

See!… they love ME! I told you! And Google chose my April Fools day prank to be #1, because they love my sense of humor, too! (or because the phrase “website called google” appears prominently in the title, but I bet its mostly the first reason).

Ahh… the mysteries of The Google.

Prediction

I want to make a prediction here. That this post that you are reading right now will become #1 for the same query “Why is this website called Google?” within ONE WEEK. If Google liked my off-topic April fools post so much, then they will surely love this post, perfectly titled and targeted for this query.

I will check back in one week and report on this prediction!

Update (9/5/09): It’s been one week!

So, this post fell short of my predictions. It’s currently #2 for said query (screenshot below) losing out to my original April Fool’s post. I guess Google liked the joke much more than I originally thought.

I still think it will eventually move up to #1, and I’ll update this post when/if it happens!

Update #2 (9/7/2009): This post is number one!

It only took two more days, but now this post is the #1 result! Not bad SEO, eh? Ten days to position #1.

#1 for "Why is this website called Google!"

Related Posts

1. I Just Discovered a Cool Website Called “Google”
2. Post to Tweetie from Google Reader
3. Searches Climb 5% in July; Google Loses Share

I just read an interesting opinion column about technology illiteracy over at TidBITS. The author, Adam Engst, argues that as technology becomes easier to use and hence more transparent, society has lost the ability to converse about technology.

With that, comes a generation of people who can find information on the Internet proficiently, text message at ridiculously high speeds, and do any number of standard computing tasks (word processing, email, IM, etc.) fluidly – until something goes wrong, at which point they become completely helpless and haven’t the slightest clue how to fix the problem on their own.

At this stage, these people will probably throw away their “broken” iPod and buy a new one, or bring their computer into the shop for costly repairs. Even if they realize that the problem is fixable, they lack the vocabulary to express the problem clearly and so they find themselves unable to coax Google into giving them useful search results that help them to fix their problem.

Here are some highlights from the article, but I recommend reading it for yourself:

Dissatisfaction is the mother of exploration – only if Safari or Internet Explorer isn’t meeting your needs do you have much impetus to learn about and switch to Firefox. So the better technology works, the less we’ll learn about how it works.

I’d argue there was a more insidious effect from the loss of manuals – it caused an entire class of users to become technologically functional while remaining technologically illiterate. When I asked my mother-in-law, Linda Byard, what browser she used, she became somewhat flustered and guessed at Outlook. This is a woman who uses the Web fluidly and for all sorts of tasks far more sophisticated than simply browsing static Web pages. And yet, the fact that she used Internet Explorer to do so escaped her.

. . . Being fluid with technology doesn’t mean you understand how it works or can fix it when it breaks. Being able to dash off text messages on a mobile phone demonstrates fluidity; being able to troubleshoot a dead Internet connection down to a corrupted preference file or flaky cable demonstrates understanding.

Before Apple, before the IBM PC, we had mainframes and minicomputers that we interacted with via dumb terminals. You couldn’t do all that much, and you were sharing resources with many other people, but you also didn’t have to worry about things going wrong as much, because when they did, the computer operators would fix them.They were the gatekeepers, the wizards who controlled access and could say who was allowed to do what. Personal computers were supposed to democratize computing so anyone and everyone could do their own work. While that’s come to pass in some ways, it seems to me that we’ve returned to the days when you need a wizard to solve problems or do anything beyond the norm. It’s a somewhat uncomfortable situation, since those of us who grew up with personal computers are finding that we’re the new wizards.

via TidBITS Opinion: Have We Entered a Post-Literate Technological Age?

Update 10/07/2009:

I just stumbled upon a cool video from Google that attempts to explain what a web browser is to non-techies. Props to Google for mentioning Chrome competitors Firefox, Safari, and even Internet Explorer in the video! I love Google!

Related Posts

1. Post to Tweetie from Google Reader
2. I Just Discovered a Cool Website Called “Google”
3. Searches Climb 5% in July; Google Loses Share

Now that Yahoo Search is officially dead, replaced by Bing, I thought it would be nice to post a couple of videos about the good ‘ol days of The Big Three: MSN, Yahoo, and Google.

MSN vs. Yahoo

Google vs. Yahoo

MSN vs. Google

Related Posts

1. I Just Discovered a Cool Website Called “Google”
2. Google Killer?: Twitter’s New Layout Highlights Twitter’s New Focus on Search
3. Why Is This Website Called Google?

As I cave in to using yet another Google service, Google gets one step closer to becoming a hive mind.

I recently decided to ditch NetNewsWire and use Google Reader as my main RSS reader. Google Reader helps me keep up on the latest tech news and important internet trends.  I’ve been really happy with it so far, except for one thing.

Google allows you to post articles that you’re reading to various social networking sites, like Twitter, Facebook, and Digg. But, Google’s built in “Post to Twitter” feature opens up a new window (or tab in Firefox’s case) at Twitter.com just to post a new tweet. Lame!

I already use an amazing Twitter client for Mac, called Tweetie. I’ve gotten used to it’s slick interface that opens a tiny little tweet window when you want to write a new tweet. It’s so much better than opening a whole new tab!

I wanted this functionality to be available to me in Google Reader. What was I to do?

Well, the company behind Tweetie, AteBits, offers up a handy bookmarklet to help users easily tweet stuff while surfing the web. You just create a new bookmark and set the URL to be:

javascript:window.location='tweetie:'+window.location

But, we can improve this by adding the title of the website to the Javscript code, which looks like this:

javascript:window.location='tweetie:'+document.title+'%20'+window.location

Then when you click on this bookmark, a new tweet pops up that looks likes this:

Awesome, right? Now, I just need to add this custom Javscript URL to Google Reader’s “Send To…” section, right?

This is the Google Reader interface for adding custom "Send To..." buttons

But, it’s not that easy! Google blocks Javascript URLs (probably for security reasons or else it’s just an oversight on their part) and you get presented with this sad error mesage:

No Javascript URLs!

But, I want Tweetie in Google Reader, darn it! So, I whipped up a little PHP/Javascript workaround. I’ll post it here, because I imagine that others have had this same problem.

<html>
    <head>
    </head>
    <body>
        <script type="text/javascript">
        <!--
        window.location='tweetie:'+'<?php echo $_GET["title"]; ?>'+'%20'+'<?php echo $_GET["url"]; ?>';
        window.close();
        //-->
        </script>
    </body>
</html>

This is the final result!

This trivial script just looks for a title and URL passed in via GET parameters, redirects the browser there, and then closes itself to get out of the way. All that remains is your new tweet window in Tweetie and Google Reader in the background.

This is what it looks like in action!

Then, I just uploaded this file to my server (It’s located here: http://feross.org/tweetie.php in case you want to use it).

Then, I just filled out the Google Reader settings window like this:

Set up your settings like this! Remember, in Google Reader, ${title} and ${short-url} stand for the article title and URL.

Feel free to copy these settings if you’d like to set up the same functionality for yourself!

Now, I can tweet any/all the interesting stories I read from Google Reader super easily. If you follow me on Twitter, then get ready for a firestorm of tweets!

Hopefully someone finds this useful!

Related Posts

1. Why Is This Website Called Google?
2. Google Killer?: Twitter’s New Layout Highlights Twitter’s New Focus on Search
3. I Just Discovered a Cool Website Called “Google”

Total US searches increased 5% from June 2009 to July 2009, though Google’s (GOOG) share of the total search market decreased from 66.1% to 64.8%, according to search-share rankings from The Nielsen Company – compiled using a new methodology.

via Searches Climb 5% in July; Google Loses Share — Seeking Alpha.

About time we start to see some serious competition and a challenge to Google! Don’t get me wrong… I think Google is awesome, but more competition is better for consumers and will force Google to do even better.

These are exciting times!

Related Posts

1. I Just Discovered a Cool Website Called “Google”
2. Why Is This Website Called Google?
3. Shame on You, Comcast!

I am glad I just discovered this website today.

Today while perusing the Internet, I discovered this really cool website. It’s called a “search engine,” which Wikipedia defines as:

• “A Web search engine is a tool designed to search for information on the World Wide Web.”

It lets you search for all sorts of cool information on the Internet, like news articles, videos, blog posts, and more. One thing, though — it has a funny name, Google — but don’t let that turn you off, it’s a great website and I highly recommend it.

Check it out! Just type http://www.google.com into your Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator browser and see for yourself!

UPDATE: This was a post I did for April Fools Day 2009.

Related Posts

1. Why Is This Website Called Google?
2. Searches Climb 5% in July; Google Loses Share
3. Search Engine Rap Battle

575 Inactive Forum Users on StudyNotes.org

When I launched the the StudyNotes.org family of websites in mid-2008, I created a discussion forum so that members could interact with each other. The sites got off to a great start — the AP section alone received 150,000 page views and 55,000 unique visitors from its launch in mid-2008 until the end of the year. Pretty impressive for an incomplete site that I did not promote at all.

The discussion forum, however, was a different story. The forum didn’t see much activity at all, with less than 70 posts at the end of the year. Unfortunately, part of the reason for the forum inactivity was due to an error on my part.

The Damage

Users were registering for the forum, but not receiving activation emails. Thanks to one user who emailed me, I was prompted to investigate. That’s when I discovered the problem: misconfigured SMTP (email) settings in phpBB (the forum software that runs the StudyNotes.org forum).

So, when I checked out the “Inactive Users” section of the Admin Control Panel, I was amazed to see 25 pages of inactive users!

That’s 575 Inactive Users!

Some users have been waiting for activation emails since August — that’s over 6 months. No doubt, they’ve been constantly refreshing their inboxes for 6 months straight, waiting for that email.

It’s pretty obvious that having 575 additional users on the forum would have been a boon to forum activity over the last 6 months.

So, what caused the problem?

The problem was incorrect SMTP email settings in phpBB. Obviously, I initially entered the correct information. A typo wasn’t the problem. The problem arose when I decided to switch to Google Apps for my website email. The switch to Google Mail required me to change all my domain’s MX records to point to Google, which, of course, made the old phpBB SMTP settings invalid. Bad, bad, bad…

Lessons learned?

Don’t epically fail in the future.

Related Posts

1. Post to Tweetie from Google Reader