T-Mobile Ge 1

I Will Ask Google Before Asking Dumb Questions

Today’s lesson is a look into phonetic spelling, and the ramifications of including those in your posts! You may notice that the title of this post, “T-Mobile Ge 1″ is meant to refer to the HTC T-Mobile G1 (Android) phone, but the “G” is spelled phonetically. I decided to do this upon a discovery using my G1 after I received the RC-33 update adding the functionality to perform a Google web search by utilizing voice-to-text. When I attempted to search “T-Mobile G1″ it came out as “t mobile g 1,”which gave me pretty much the same results as if I had searched “T-Mobile G1.” This led me to perform searches based off of variations of “T-Mobile G1.” While I searched, Google provided suggestions, one of them being “T-Mobile Ge 1.”  Google suggests queries based of off similar terms with relative popularity. I figured if “T-Mobile Ge 1″ appeared in the suggestions, then enough people must be searching it. Plus, once I executed the search, nothing immediately obvious appeared, though, a few blog postings returned based off the occurance of “T-Mobile” and the official site was listed second. So, this post will serve as an experiment to see if people will come here after searching for “T-Mobile Ge 1.” Though, I suspect once the search results are returned, he or she will immediately realize it was spelled incorrectly. But… I shall see!

More Views of More Streets (Google Street View)

Google just doubled their Street View coverage of the United States and released more views from overseas.

Ridiculous? Nearly.

Completely awesome? You betcha.

Google Blog Search RSS [Narcissism Delivered to YOU!]

I’ve been meaning to post about this since the post listing the uses of my Creative Commons -licensed photos across the web. Google Blog Search allows you to perform normal search engine functions, but limits the search results to the ever-growing blogosphere.

The best part was when the added support for feeds of any search (Old news now, I know).

Originally, I found post that had used my photos by checking stats on Flickr.com and this blog for referrers. After that, I Googled (using both traditional web and blog searches) the pseudonym I had been using on Flickr.

But now, thanks to Google Blog Search RSS feeds, I simply add feeds to my reader that include my full name and pseudonym and I’m alerted whenever someone in the blogosphere uses a photo (with credit, of course) or refers to me (for good or bad!). Using the feeds, I’ve been able to keep my previous listing up-to-date as most new results are fed to my reader within hours of the new post.

On a similar note, I find it funny that I also get results whenever I post on this blog since my author name is attached to the feed. Also, since the blog automatically pings Google blog search whenever I post, the update usually occurs within an hour. Today, this resulted in Google Blog Search alerting me to the new post here on 365D before the feed that comes directly from 365D! In my blog’s defense, I run feeds through Feedburner, and those of you who subscribe get your feed from Feedburner, so, there’s a little delay.

Go blog search yourself today! Who knows what you might find!

Maybe its Karma [Google Left Navigation]

I’ve been laughing at my friends who were chosen, apparently at random, to be guinea pigs for what appears to be some kind of sick experiment for a left navigation on iGoogle. Today, I was hit with it. It sucks. I don’t like it… and while it did add some functionality to the Gmail widget, I don’t like the robbed screen real estate.

LET ME GO GOOGLE!!

Update: After reading the Google blog, it turns out everyone in the US now has this “feature.” I want the feature to turn it off.

The Odd Things People Search For

I noticed today that the word “penis” or a phrase conatining the word “penis” brings the most people to this blog, and specifically the post “The Penis Threat Level [The Daily Show].” While CHMODing with Dreamweaver is still popular, it’s dropped to 2nd place… behind penis.

Just for kicks, here’s the top 10 search terms for the last 30 days in descending order for this blog… the word penis almost doubles the number of hits brought in by 2nd place:

An Easter Egg in Google Reader

Open Google Reader

Type “up up down down left right left right b a”

(source) (source’s source)

—

Spoiler alert!

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A ninja will appear behind your listings. But one thing my sources didn’t mention, even in one source with screen shots, is that all of the “new items” change to 30. In other words, I had 30 new items in each feed. When you do the code again, the ninja disappears and the new item counts reverted to their original numbers.

Nick Burns: Computer Guy

I hope I’m not like this…

SNL: “Nick Burns: Your Company’s Computer Guy” w/ Jamie Fox video

P.S. That post last week about Google’s new fav icon became this blog’s most popular post in matter of a few hours.