Learn How the Google Search Engine searches the interNet.

Larry Page 2400 E. Bayshore Parkway Mountain View, CA 94043 [p]1.650.318.0200
Sergey Brin, Escondido Village #22D Stanford, CA 94305
1.415.497.0753 Fax +1.415.725.7411 or +1.415.725.2588 (2002)

The Google motto is "do no evil"
By their fruits you shall know them -- evil is as evil does."

Once their arrogance was intimidating and awesome. Now google just seems clueless. Systematic degradation, they seem to be rotting from the inside out. "The bleak reality of corporate growth" is that "efficiencies of scale are almost always outweighed by the burdens of bureaucracy."

"We are moving to a Google that knows more about you." — Google CEO Eric Schmidt

Google CEO Eric Schmidt says the company's "policy is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it. " The problem with Google is that Eric Schmidt is creepy. "People who don't like Google's Street View cars taking pictures of their homes and businesses "can just move" ".

Google Algorythm vs rank really done by Humans

Google human raters. Remember: “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” where Tom cajoles his guileless friends into whitewashing Aunt Polly's fence. They supply the labor, but he gets the reward. On the Internet, users supply the raw material that helps generate billions of dollars a year in online advertising revenue. Search requests, individual profiles on social networks, Web browsing habits, posted pictures and many Internet messages are all mined to serve up targeted online ads. Google is a black box. How to work with and not for google.

ABOUT THE GREAT GOOGLE BOOK GRAB
and Google's Monetization of Libraries

GOOGLE's "Don't be evil" motto was first revealed when the company filed for an IPO in 2004. In 2009 Google has quietly dropped its "Don't be evil" motto as part of a 350 page IPO document detailing its business ambitions. ~ Marissa Mayer, VP of Search Product and User Experience.

Google Apology for being Evil makes explicit an acknowledgment by Google that search engine results can have real impact on real people, and that the referenced Web sites in these results may at times be misleading, defamatory, or otherwise seriously damaging to actual lives.

9/2010 Privacy group sues to get records about NSA-Google relationship The Electronic Privacy Information Center takes NSA to court: says the spy agency should divulge information about its reported agreement to help the Internet company defend itself against foreign cyber attacks. the Google-NSA alliance shows that no single U.S. government agency is responsible for defending the country's private computer infrastructure from the daily onslaught of foreign-based cyber attacks

Government requests directed to Google and YouTube the Requests Tool clarifies how frequently governments ask Google to hand over users' personal data (mostly to assist with law enforcement investigations). The results can be interpreted as an index of governmental willingness to invade privacy. The letter from data protection bureaucrats is clear. Eight of the nine governments that complain so vociferously about Google's privacy policies also appear on this list of governments who take a keen interest in their citizen's private communications. The point is worth arguing. Governments might be keen on regulating Google, but they also represent a huge threat to privacy in their own right. Google itself acts as a restraining influence on their behaviour. This week, the company confirmed that it sometimes “refuses to produce information” or “tries to narrow” the requests for data made by governments.

March 22, 2010 Google Leaves China,closed its Internet search service there and began directing users in that country to its uncensored search engine in Hong Kong. State Council Information Office doesn't like it. Googles search engine based in Hong Kong would provide mainland users results in the simplified Chinese characters used on the mainland and that he believed it was entirely legal. Google said it would retain much of its existing operations in China, including its research and development team and its local sales force. While the China search engine, google.cn, has stopped working, Google will continue to operate online maps and music services in China.

The Lephone does not come with embedded Google search or any pre-installed Google apps, which are common on other Android phones. But a list of Lenovo app partners for the phone included Baidu.com, Google's main rival in the China search market.

March 2010 Google's 'internal intercept' system increased the risk of all Google user data being pirated. If it didn't exist it would be very hard for outsiders to collect it. Wiretapping systems increase security risks and the target is perfect -- wiretap the wiretapper. That's the honeypot. Why buzz around collecting all that data when someone else has done it for you? Why did Google invoking 'human rights' as a pretext for possibly leaving China when it was embarrassed by its internal spying system being compromised by other spies? The hackers, who have not been apprehended, broke through the defences of at least 30 companies, and perhaps as many as 100.The common link in several of the cases that McAfee reviewed is that the hackers used source code management software from privately held Perforce Software Inc, whose customers include Google and many other large corporations. Google's source code had numerous security flaws that would allow easy compromise of a company's intellectual property. Competitive intelligence is commonplace and has a long and very dirty history. All Western allies have been spying on one another for decades, even for centuries

Dec 4, 2009
Google will now personalize the search results of anyone who uses its search engine, regardless of whether they've opted-in to a previously existing personalization feature. Google runs on a distributed network of thousands of low-cost computers and can therefore carry out fast parallel processing.

2009 - Now Google LOGS EVERYTHING YOU SEARCH FOR AUTOMATICALY.

2006
With that vast trove of search data, Google can now PREDICT behavior. Like with the movie studios. By analyzing search queries, Google discovered it could predict within a week of a film's release what the movie's gross would be with approximately eighty percent accuracy! But the studios said this was not helpful, because by the time this data snapshot was taken, they'd already spent their marketing wad, it was TOO LATE! So Google went back to the numbers. And found out, purely based on how often people were searching for a film, that SIX WEEKS OUT they could predict the gross of a movie with EIGHTY TWO PERCENT ACCURACY! ~Lefsetz

Google KNOWS where you go. NOW your search results are are delivered to you based on the fact that they know where you go - and will show you that sites' listings, perhaps when your searches wouldn't have brought that site up before. Google knows what sites you like and will show those to you before anything else. Also, just cause you can't see more than the last 30 minutes of your previous search history, Google's is storing much more than that!

• YOU CAN OPT OUT -- By DEFAULT all your searches are logged but you can delete it.
• GET RID OF YOUR SEARCH HISTORY
• Sign into your google accout (yes you have to have one) go to web history and click pause to stop them from recording where you go.
• How to Delete Past History You should know: To include the web pages you visit in your web history, you need to install Toolbar with PageRank enabled. PageRank will send information about these pages to Google and associate it with your Google Account.

• Personalized Search: Turning off personalization

  Personalized Search treats signed-in and signed-out users differently, the instructions for disabling Personalized Search are a little different in each case.
  Signed in searches
  To disable history-based search customizations while signed in, you'll need to remove Web History from your Google Account. You can also choose to remove individual items. Note that removing this service deletes all your old searches from Web History.
  Signed out searches
  If you aren't signed in to a Google Account, your search experience will be customized based on past search information linked to a cookie on your browser. To disable history-based customizations, follow these steps:
  1. In the top right corner of the search results page, click Web History.
  2. On the resulting page, click Disable customizations.(Because this preference is stored in a cookie, it'll affect anyone else who uses the same browser and computer as you).
     Or, if you'd rather just delete the current cookie storing searches from your browser and start fresh, clear your browser's cookies.

  Note: If you've disabled search customizations, you'll need to disable it again after clearing your browser cookies; clearing your Google cookie turns on history-based customizations.

• More

Learn how to work with google and use google hacks.

GOOGLE FACTS

• Google DNS and OpenDNS vs CDNs - Google Will Own ISP DNS; knows everything you do. Most Internet providers will outsource their DNS functions to Google.
  If Google partners with say Comcast or Time Warner, they can make the change at the server level and it will be done automatically. The ISPs get major cash, Google gets the overwhelming share of the DNS function and users never know anything changed. (DNS RSS Feed)
  Introducing Google Public DNS as part of the ongoing effort to make the web faster, we're launching our own public DNS resolver called Google Public DNS -
  Stupid DNS Tricks - Google DNS is way slow, slower than Comcast's default DNS service, and slower than OpenDNS, both of which are quite speedy.
  David Ulevitch (Founder of Open DNS) responds to Google DNS
• What Google Knows About You and what you can know about Eric from Google.
• Keyhole, the satellite imaging company that Google acquired in October 2004, was funded by the CIA
• GOOGLE WATCH
  Looks at how Google's monopoly, algorithms, and privacy policies are undermining the Web. PageRank: Google's original sin, Google mum on privacy policy.
• 2006 Google hired Ori Allon, a doctoral student at the University of New South Wales for his Orion search engine. Google will display your search results with other relevant info in the form of expanded text extracts giving you the relevant information without having to go to the Web site so that search engines can steal web site content without paying for it.
• Matt Cutts, a software engineer at Google since January 2000, used to work for the National Security Agency.
• Google hired Dan Senor as a vice president, who was the chief spokesman in U.S.-occupied Iraq.
• GOOGLE means the number 1 with a 100 zero's after it. "Googol" was coined in 1938 by Milton Sirotta, age 9.
• GOGGLES, eyes. See ogles. Goggle eyes, large prominent eyes; to goggle, to flare. ~ A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue by Francis Grose 1785

Excerpt:
"Google's corporate philosophy is based on the model which brought them success: organizing and giving away other people's content, creating space for advertisements in the process. The enormous success Google found with that model in the search engine business List of Google Search Engines spurred it to try and impose it in every arena. In the Google worldview, content is individually valueless. No one page is more important than the next; the value lies in the page view.

Infographic by PPC Blog Click for Larger Picture

2007
Jimmy Wales Open-source Wikia search engine gangs up on Google
Wikipedia's co-founder Jimmy Wales attempts to overturn Google's domination of the search market. Their weapon? The transparency provided by open source software. The idea underpinning their search engine - is that its search algorithm, which determines which web pages appear top of the lists of links it serves up, will be made public. Wikia's search engineers think this will elicit the trust of users in a way that Google, which keeps its algorithm a closely guarded secret, never will. Open source search results will also be more relevant, as the algorithm will continually be tweaked by its users, keeping it up to date with new technologies as they are deployed, Wales says.

Clarance Briggs AIT Corporation speaks http://media.webmasterradio.fm/episodes/audio/2006/googlestory/googlestory1.mp3 WebmasterRadio.FM investigative journalist Jim Hedger:
AIT - x military found google in the al caida blog asked where is the money going? - is how this got started with the FBI google helps pro terror fund themselves. WebmasterRadio.FM series on the implications of click fraud on the industry and on national and global security. WebmasterRadio.FM is initiating an industry wide initiative to further examine and confirm issues raised by this series. The series starts with an interview with Clarence Briggs, CEO of hosting firm AIT.com. Mr. Briggs was a lead proponent in one of the class action lawsuits Google settled in the spring of 2006. Because the case was settled out of court, Google was never forced to show how they charge for some clicks and dismiss others as invalid. Mr. Briggs maintains Google is doing business as usual, just as they did before the class actions were initiated.
During the interview, Mr. Briggs noted the use of click fraud by criminal and terrorist organizations. Our investigation has found several incidents of this type of activity. We have also found evidence of bot-nets used to facilitate click fraud, primarily against Google advertisers. This series has been in research and production for over three months. In that time, Jim Hedger and a number of well-known search marketing experts and analysts have studied log files supplied by AIT. Each of the search marketing experts and analysts worked in exclusion of each other, without a lot of background information, in order to ensure non-biased examination of the data.

IPO filed week of 4/26/04
$27 billion - a figure based on the six-year-old company's market valuation after its first day of trading. 95 percent of all Web searches in the United States are handled by two companies, Google and Yahoo, either directly or through other sites that use their technology. In the case of Google, whose shares started to trade publicly last week, the company holds the world's largest index of Web content, at more than four billion pages, and handles more than 200 million searches a day.

Since 2000, Google has recorded your search terms, the date-time of each search, the globally-unique ID in your cookie (it expires in 2038), and your IP address. This information is available to governments on request. If your favorite site features a Google search box, ask them to install their own local site search. They could also use our site search for webmasters, which shows the same results without the tracking.
http://www.scroogle.org/masters.html

Since March 2007 Google
announces it will start anonymizing their server logs after 18-24 months.

Anonymizing Google's Cookie :
Why and how to anonymize your Google cookie

TIPS: How to Work With Google

Google Inconsistencies: Google does not always behave as advertised nor deliver the results expected. This page aims to document both ongoing and short-lived inconsistent search behavior on Google.

Danny
http://searchenginewatch.com/searchday/article.php/3437471
Gary
http://www.resourceshelf.com/2004/11/wow-its-google-scholar.html

• 11/ 2004 Google now searches over 8 billion pages
• 2003 they administer more than 100,000 servers.
• 2002 Google index now searches 2,469,940,685 pages that is almost 2.5 billion pages which is still only searching a fraction of the Web!! Google is now indexing flash pages and reading the text in it, alltheweb.com also does.

TOOLS

• SEARCH FOR FREE by David Dillard All you need is a public library card which gives you online access to the very expensive databases where you can get everything for free.
• Pro's and Con's of working with Internt Search engins vs. Databases found at public or university Libraries.
• BioMed Central has developed a Google Scholar search plugin for FIREFOX
• 2006 Download Google Cheat Sheet
• Google Book Search Beta
• Google special search engine for BSD + Macintosh
• Google's Book Search offers snippets that help you write right that term paper.
• Google Print (TM) Service, of which this deal is to be a part, provides links to booksellers as well as to libraries. Though they have not announced plans to offer the full text of copyrighted materials on a pay-per-view basis, with fees turned over to copyright owners, it is a technical possibility with the natural force of an economic vacuum in the corporate context.
• Google Scholar allow users "to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research." This includes results from the Open WorldCat program, which is particularly important since much of this material isn't available in electronic format yet. It will be even more useful after Google has harvested all 57 million WorldCat records, instead of the 2 million records in the pilot subset. It's a single search tool, and no single search tool searches the entire bibliographic universe. It does not offer full disclosure about content (what is and is not included) in the database. Current research appears late in the database. Indexing is incomplete. It does not provide equal coverage of all subject areas
• "Google in Your Language" Check your preferences
  A machine translation of search results, which will only give you the main idea of what you are reading. All your search results in Spanish, German, French, and Portuguese will have a "translate this page" link beside them. Click on it and you'll get a translated page framed by Google. If you have "Search only these selected languages" checked, and none of the languages are the ones named in the last paragraph, you won't see the "translate this page" link. You can now specify that you want titles and page summaries in Spanish, German, French and Portuguese translated directly on the results page but it doesn't always work.
• GOOGLE just for the US GOV
• Google Earth http://earth.google.com/
• Googlematic
• Google Smackdown
• Remove a site from Google
  With a vast system of more than 10,000 computer systems constantly collecting new information on more than 3 billion Web sites, the company cannot and does not want to police or censor what goes on the Web, said Craig Silverstein, Google's chief technology officer. "I think Web masters have to be careful," he said. "The basic problem is that with 3 billion [Web sites], there's a lot of information out there." It offers a tool on its own Web site, "Webmaster guidelines," on how to remove Web sites from Google's system, including Google's vast store of cached pages that may no longer be available online, Silverstein said.
• Year End Google Zeigeist
• Googlewhacks

Google Hacks

For hacking experts, Google-hacking has a kind of populist allure: any one with Internet access can do it if they know the right way to search. Search strings including "xls," or "cc," or "ssn" often brings up spread sheets, credit card numbers, and Social Security numbers linked to a customer list. Adding the word "total" in searches often pulls up financial spreadsheets totaling dollar figures. A hacker with enough time and experience recognizing sensitive content can find an alarming amount of supposedly private information. The availability of private information contributes to rising incidence of Identity Theft, which for the last four years has been the No. 1 consumer problem for the Federal Trade Commission.
Last year the FTC received nearly 215,000 complaints about identity theft, up from about 152,000 in 2002. Since 2001, the FTC has settled cases with Eli Lilly & Co., Microsoft Corp. and clothing maker Guess Inc. for not taking "reasonable" measures to keep medical or financial information secure, said Jessica Rich, assistant director of the commission's bureau of consumer protection. Letting customer information reside on an unsecure server can open up a business to such liability. "There are unique vulnerabilities because of databases that are accessible through the Web," Rich said, adding that the FTC anticipates bringing more security-related cases in the future.

GOOGLE PRIVACY

User Tracking

OrgName: Google Inc.
OrgID: GOGL
Address: 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
City: Mountain View StateProv: CA PostalCode: 94043 Country: US NetRange: 66.249.64.0 - 66.249.95.255
CIDR: 66.249.64.0/19 NetName: GOOGLE
NetHandle: NET-66-249-64-0-1
NetType: Direct Allocation
NameServer: NS1.GOOGLE.COM
NameServer: NS2.GOOGLE.COM
Comment: RegDate: 2004-03-05 Updated: 2004-11-10 OrgTechHandle: ZG39-ARIN OrgTechName: Google Inc. OrgTechPhone: +1-650-318-0200 OrgTechEmail: arin-contact@google.com

Govt claims warrantless access to e-mail via third party servers and Google GMAIL POLICY
Google doesn't delete your gmail emails when you trash them, but continues to keep them on their servers in storage.

[... The subpoena asks for not only current e-mail but also deleted e-mail: "All documents concerning all Gmail accounts of Baker...for the period from Jan. 1, 2003, to present, including but not limited to all e-mails and messages stored in all mailboxes, folders, in-boxes, sent items and deleted items, and all links to related Web pages contained in such e-mail messages." Google's privacy policy says deleted e-mail messages "may remain in our offline backup systems" in perpetuity. It does not guarantee that backups are ever deleted. Baker estimated he may have tens of thousands of e-mail messages in his Gmail account.In a Jan. 31 ruling, Laporte rejected Baker's request. She said his attorney could withhold "truly protected" information but must "err on the side" of disclosure. ] Police Blotter

Email privacy is an enormous issue.

The EFF informs us that companies which offer both internet search and email storage can collect a massive amount of personal information about users. It's possible to extract information about you from the searches you make. It's also possible for an email host to scan your emails to collect other personal details about you. Not only possible, but the big players like Yahoo, MSN and Amazon do this.
Google Watch reports that Google scans all of its clients' emails and reserves the right to "give this information to whomever they wish. . . After 180 days in the U.S., email messages lose their status as a protected communication under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act.

EPIC explains Google's email privacy policy

Google has a great image as a good company. They have engendered a great amount of trust through their "Don't Be Evil" motto. They are getting dangerous. The fact is that they are stockpiling a perilous amount of personal information about their users. Google logs every search request with its IP address. Google has acknowledged this log in a number of interviews. But, they have never answered why they keep such a log. The search log by itself is not too harmful since the IP address identifies a computer and not a person. The searches cannot easily be traced to a particular person without help from the ISP.
THEY KEEP THE INFORMATION FOREVER!
"A bigger problem is that many Google search users are also Gmail users, and a cookie is shared between Gmail and Google search (because they use the same domain, google.com). Therefore, if a person uses Gmail and Google search from the same computer, even with a long period of time in between, Google will know the identity of the person responsible for those search queries.
Google doesn't need to infer your identity from the content of your other web searches; it already knows it, if you're a Gmail user. This identification can be retroactive. If you used Google search for 3 years on a particular PC, and then signed up for a Gmail account, your search cookie from that PC would be sent to Google and the name you provided for your Gmail account could then be associated retroactively with your entire saved search history.
Google cookies last as long as possible -- until 2038. If you've ever done a Google search on a given computer with a given web browser, you probably still have a descendant of the original PREF cookie that Google gave you upon your very first search, with the very same ID field (a globally unique 256-bit value).
This problem is ubiquitous in the web portal industry, and Google is right to say that its privacy policy is better than many of its competitors'. However, Google is still assembling a treasure trove of personal information, possibly stretching back for years, that Google may release in response to any civil subpoena or "governmental request": http://gmail.google.com/gmail/help/privacy.html#disclose"

Seth David Schoen http://www.loyalty.org/~schoen/

--

Question: Does Google retain logs of personally identifiable search data?

My full blog Answer posting
When Google launched "My Search History" in April 2005, Google's VP of Engineering, Alan Eustace told InternetWeek: With 'My Search,' however, information stored internally with Google is no different than the search data gathered through its Google.com search engine, Eustace said. "This product itself does not have a significant impact on the information that is available to legitimate law enforcement agencies doing their job."
As I asked in a blog posting at that time: Is he really saying that Google already captures and stores search data tied to unique users? Unfortunately, Google's privacy policy is pretty vague on the issue. ... Eustace may have misspoken... but really he didn't. According to the "My Search History (Beta) - Privacy FAQ," you may feel free to edit the logs, but Google is still keeping copies of the unedited searches.
So there you have it: a comprehensive log of your searches tied to your identity, available to law enforcement bearing warrants and litigious people bearing civil subpoenas. Signing up for the service simply provides them an easier way to wrap the data into a tidy duces tecum package! So, in other words, you are already using My Search History, and you didn't even know it!

1. Google is not just a company. If any company wants to be found by customers, wants to make sales on the web, or wants to be part of the modern world, it has to be findable in Google. People under 35 don't use telephone books, magazines, or newspapers anymore. They use Google. It's not a choice "to not be on Google". Google isn't a company: it has become the infrastructure for the delivery of information.
2. Lauren Weinstein writes about the privacy issues at Google. It's far more serious than privacy. Very few people understand how Google works. There isn't "one Google" and the results you see in your search in Miami are not the same as the results someone else sees in Seattle. - Google constantly adjusts the results according to many parameters, incl. user personalization (Google Toolbar), the length of the user's search session (you may get different results during your session), your physical location, and so on.
   - There are millions of searches and results, and these constantly shift. This means it is literally impossible for anyone outside of Google to track the search results.
   Results don't appear consistently. They can appear intermittantly. Instead of appearing 100% of the time, a result can appear for 90% of searches or 80% of searches. There is no way to track this.
   - It would be easy for Google to slightly suppress a result. So a search for a particular company would only appear for 97% of searches. That's a small amount, but it is significant for ecommerce. This means Google can manipulate the sales and valuation of companies.
   - It works the other way too. Google can "over-produce" results for a publically-traded company. Their earnings and valuation rise slightly.
3. Google's ability to suppress (or enhance) results isn't theory. Google has a secret team that suppresses the ranking of people who criticize Google. Never complain about Google in Gmail, in a public forum, or wherever your comments will be found by Google. Your rankings will slide down just a bit. You will lose web traffic to your website, your blog, or your company.
   This means that Google doesn't have to blacklist you. Nothing that blatant. They just lower your ranking. End of problem. Nobody can prove anything, because Google is an informational black hole; they never reply.
4. The privacy issues are thus both ways: the right to keep one's information private, and the right to publicize one's information. It's bad to lose privacy, but what is it when one's public persona is downranked by Google and one can't be found in searches? Professors, researchers, journalists, etc. can be removed from public access. And remember: Google doesn't have to blacklist you. They only have to lower your ranking. Or show you in the results only intermittantly.
   Microsoft was (and still is) a monopoly. But you can use your copy of Microsoft Word to write whatever you like.
5. Google is a far greater danger than Microsoft. Write your emails in GMail, use Google word processor, the Google spreadsheet, Google video, or any of the endless Google tools, and they correlate everything about you. Google can read all of your emails, docs, and spreadsheets. By merely suppressing or enhancing results, they can make vast profits, erase careers, and literally control economies. This creates spectacular power. No company has ever been able to resist that kind of temptation.