A dozen years ago, the web started to reshape itself around major companies like Google. We can understand the genesis of today’s algorithmic arms race against the tech titans just by looking at a single character. This is all ancient tech history...

Noticing a pattern here? Paul Kedrosky, Dishwashers, and How Google Eats Its Own Tail: Google has become a snake that too readily consumes its own keyword tail. Identify some words that show up in profitable searches — from appliances, to...

Today, in a surprisingly botched announcement, Google announced Chrome, their upcoming open source web browser. The subject of a Google browser is something I’ve opined on a few times over the years, but Jason Kottke’s compiled an even more...

Theory of mind is that thing that a two-year-old lacks, which makes her think that covering her eyes means you can’t see her. It’s the thing a chimpanzee has, which makes him hide a banana behind his back, only taking bites when the other chimps...

Google’s changed a lot in the past few years, going from underselling their efforts to shamelessly promoting themselves as leaders, even when it’s leadership over initiatives that are still very tenuous or nascent. The best example to me was looking...

From eWeek’s “Upcoming” section, which I’d praised a few weeks ago, comes this interview with Java creator James Gosling. The key quote, for me: Of Google, Gosling said: “I guess part of me has almost a moral problem with, ‘What do you mean the...

I found some really interesting responses to the launch of Google Web History that are all well worth visiting. CNET’s Margaret Kane has a roundup of news on their news blog. Mark Blair’s SMOblog (which stands for “Social Media Optimization”, a term...

Many years ago, when the web was a simpler place, one of the scariest monsters conjured up to describe the privacy threats that lurked on the Internet was the DoubleClick cookie, used for tying your ad-viewing behavior on the web to your real-world...

A little while ago, my friend Michael Sippey, whom I had the pleasure of interviewing the other day, sent me a link to the new Google Voice Local Search. Now, this new services seems like a good product, and I know I’m supposed to say “Wow, cool!...

A few years ago, I wrote a post called Portalization which showed a Yahoo homepage screenshot with certain services grayed-out, as an indicator of which corresponding tools Google offered. It was a look at how Google’s feature set had expanded with...