Hiding from Google Ads
Google has just updated its advertising system to do “behavioral targeting”, in essence they track you as you move around the web and display ads that are targeted towards you based on what the perceive are your interests.
For instance if you visit a bunch of sports related sites then Google will determine that you are into sports and serve up sports related ads to you.
This is all done using tracking cookies and is built around the Doubleclick tracking infrastructure.
Google have also asked anyone who displays Google ads on their to update their privacy policy information. Since I display Google ads on this blog (and make 0 dollars to be honest, why don’t you click on some of the ads?) here is my updated privacy policy:
We use third-party advertising companies to serve ads when you visit our website. These companies may use information (not including your name, address, email address, or telephone number) about your visits to this and other websites in order to provide advertisements about goods and services of interest to you.
You are warned :)
More importantly what if you don’t want to be tracked ?
Well Google has two pages for you. The first lets you opt-out of the tracking system and the second lets you adjust your Google Ads preferences.
The preferences page is a particularly interesting, in that it shows you the “interest” areas that Google has derived based on your surfing habits. You can also manually add interest areas if you want!
My advice however is to just use a browser add-on such as Adblock Plus for Firefox and you will never have to worry about seeing those ads ever again (you will however disable the blocker for rabidgremlin.com, won’t you? )
Search the web, destroy the planet
Apparently doing two Google searches produces half the amount of CO2 that boiling a kettle does ! At least that what has been recently claimed by the Telegraph in the UK.
Google has hit back, saying that, actually they are far more efficient then that. They claim:
- a single search uses the same amount of energy as an adult body burns in 10 seconds (a very Matrix comparison)
- a 1000 searches produces the same amount of CO2 as driving an average car 1km (which actually doesn’t sound that good)
Since Google claims to have some of the most energy efficient data centres in the world, one has to wonder what the planetary impact is of other search providers such as Yahoo and Microsoft.
I wonder if there is a marketing angle here for search providers: “We are the most eco-search engine so use us instead of them” :)
Of course at the end of the day using the Internet is far more efficient and eco-friendly the driving to the local library!
[Update] Turns out the the paper got it all wrong and completely misquoted their “source”. Interestingly the guy they misquoted works for a company called C02Stats which helps you make your website carbon neutral.
Google’s Friend Connect
So I’d thought I’d give Google’s Friend Connect a whirl. Friend Connect allows you to embed social networking components onto your website. Out of the box you get a members gadget, a wall gadget and a review/rate gadget. Since it is all based on OpenSocial you can add any other OpenSocial gadgets to your site as well.
Here is the quick intro video:
Getting set up is very easy, you simple add two .html pages to your site and then embed some Javascript whereever you want the gadgets to appear.
It took all of 5 minutes to set up the members gadget as the “Friends” box in the left bar of my blog.
Google Friend connect is a direct competitor for Facebook Connect which lets you do similar functions but built around the Facebook API. Facebook Connect is much harder to set up but seems to be gaining more traction with big sites such as Digg. It’ll be interesting to see who wins this race and if this whole thing takes off.
Google gets into games and watches you from space
Two interesting bits of news from Google today. The first is adsense for games which allows game developers to place Google ads inside games.
Only flash games are currently supported and there are some fairly hefty entry requirements for early adopters:
- Game plays: Minimum 500,000 per day
- Game types: Web-based Flash only
- Integration: Must be technically capable of SDK integration
- Traffic source: Must be 80% US & UK Traffic
- Content: Family safe and targeted at users age 13 and up
- Distribution: Must be able to report embed destination and have control over where games are distributed
I’m having visions of playing Counterstrike and seeing dynamic ads on bullet-ridden billboards in the future…
The second bit of Google news is their first images from the new satellite GeoEye-1 which will be used to update Google maps and Google Earth imagery. Apparently GeoEye-1 is the world highest resolution commercial sattelite with a resolution of 50cm ! Google sightseeing should get really interesting now and those naked sunbathers better have satellite position timetable handy.
Google Timeline – the last 10 years
It’s Googles 10th birthday and they have put together a neat little timeline showing major milestones during their history.
I was particularly impressed with how their home page has evolved over the last 10 years, nice and simple all the time with just minor tweaks and content changes along the way, all hiding more and more features.
