Google life

Overdoing url removals

Posted by admin on 2011/04/03 at 5:54 am

If you have a lot of urls that you don’t want in Google anymore, you can make the pages return a 404 and wait for Googlebot to recrawl/reindex the pages. This is often the best way. You can also block out an entire directory or a whole site in robots.txt and then use our url removal tool to remove the entire directory from Google’s search results

30 day challenge: being thankful and going offline

Posted by admin on 2011/04/01 at 4:49 pm

It’s been a while since I reported on any 30 day challenges , so it’s time for an update. 30 days of Being Thankful I knew that January, February, and March would be crazy, including a bunch of stuff at work, traveling, plus several conferences

Google launches two-factor authentication

Posted by admin on 2011/02/10 at 5:40 pm

Google just launched two-factor authentication , and I believe everyone with a Google account should enable it.

How to strip JPEG metadata in Ubuntu

Posted by admin on 2011/02/07 at 8:02 am

If you want to post some JPEG pictures but you’re worried that they might have metadata like location embedded in them, here’s how to strip that data out. First, install exiftool using this command: sudo apt-get install libimage-exiftool-perl Then, go into the directory with the JPEG files

Announcing the winners of the Kinect contest

Posted by admin on 2011/01/29 at 10:42 pm

When the Kinect launched, Adafruit Industries ran a contest for the first person who released open-source code to extract video and depth from the Kinect. Adafruit also ended up donating to the EFF after the contest was over

An interesting essay on search neutrality

Posted by admin on 2011/01/25 at 7:23 am

(Just as a reminder: while I am a Google employee, the following post is my personal opinion.) Recently I read a fascinating essay that I wanted to comment on. I found it via Ars Technica and it discusses “search neutrality” (PDF link, but I promise it’s worth it). It’s written by James Grimmelmann , an associate professor at New York Law School.

An interesting essay on search neutrality

Posted by admin on 2011/01/25 at 7:23 am

(Just as a reminder: while I am a Google employee, the following post is my personal opinion.) Recently I read a fascinating essay that I wanted to comment on. I found it via Ars Technica and it discusses “search neutrality” (PDF link, but I promise it’s worth it). It’s written by James Grimmelmann , an associate professor at New York Law School

Are vaccines safe?

Posted by admin on 2011/01/08 at 6:34 pm

A lot of parents hear different things about the MMR vaccine (that’s measles, mumps, and rubella) or the flu or chicken pox or pertussis vaccine and wonder “How safe are vaccines?” It’s not a stupid question, given the conflicting information you might hear from different sources. I’ve been doing research about vaccines and vaccine safety because I recently caught a mild case of pertussis (whooping cough).

My predictions for 2009

Posted by admin on 2011/01/04 at 1:13 am

Everybody is throwing out predictions for 2011, so I thought I’d do something different. Here are some of my predictions for 2009.

Start the year off right: empty your email and take some time off from Twitter/Facebook

Posted by admin on 2011/01/01 at 6:30 pm

Want to get a fresh start on the new year? Here’s a few quick tips: – Start the year off with an empty inbox in Gmail. It’s pretty simple to do: you assign a label for everything in your inbox right now, then archive everything so your inbox is empty