I enjoyed this post from the Google Blog showing the doodles of some school children from England. The winner by an eleven year old girl enjoyed a day on the front page of Google in the UK. It really is very creative and very “professionally” done. I really like her use of color. Neat stuff.

There has been a reported glitch in Google’s new site map statistics program. Apparently, some were able to exploit a header in a 404 page to gain verification and thus view site statistics for competitors’ and strangers’ sites. This was reported here by David Naylor and he attaches a screen shot to demonstrate his success.

For those who missed the announcement, Google recently made the sitemap statistics a free service available to the masses. It appears that a small glitch allowed external users to actually view your statistics. I might add that the glitch results apparently from your server being misconfigured to return a 200 OK header for 404 pages that should show not found in the header. This is a known condition to Google according to a post dated September 7th, 2005. Did Google update that post and not redate it, or has there been no desire up until now to take out that problem?

I was playing with google print beta today. It started last week and is expected to bring to the public three major university libraries in word searchable format. I found it tough to figure out what books were or were not available.

They did have a nice feature to permit you to report a bad page. For example I found a crooked page that was only partially visible.

Not long ago Google launched a beta service enabling web site owners / developers to create and submit a sitemap. The aim of this is to assist Google / Googlebot with the indexing of every page in your web site, using a standard XML format that lists every URL.

Popular reaction was undoubtedly to embrace this opportunity and start creating sitemaps straight away. Call me simple if you like, but when I started reading Google’s instructions I found it very confusing and very daunting. I consider myself to be highly competent in (x)HTML, JavaScript, and CSS, but like many have had no exposure to XML format. The link to the Sitemap Generator looked promising (I was hoping for “Sitemaps for Dummies”) only to find that you need to have / understand Python to use it. It all looked too hard when I first saw it, so I shelved the idea for another day.
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It has been going around for a couple of years now, and it seems to be popping up again and again. I’m talking about that e-mail we regularly receive from friends and contacts along the lines of:

“Those funny guys at Google are at it again! Go to Google, search on the phrase ‘miserable failure’ and hit the ‘I feel lucky’ button.”

If you don’t already know this one then I suggest you try it and see for yourself.

Having done that, do you think Google have weighed-in to political opinion? I’m afraid not.

This trick is the result of a Google Bomb, or multiple web page links to the White House page that are linked by the text “miserable failure”. Google’s search program (Googlebot) crawls through millions and millions of pages and indexes what it finds, and in this case it found many sites linked to George W’s page using this term. In fact the (deliberate) linking was so common that it drove the page to the #1 Google Page Rank for that search term.

Back in 2003 when this was “new news” BBC News reported on it, while urban legends site Snopes.com further explained how this came to be. A Google Bomb simply takes advantage of Google’s indexing and page rank algorithms, and could be manipulated by any of us in this way if we tried.

So the next time you receive this funny little e-mail from one of your friends or contacts, you’ll know what to tell them (while perhaps raining on their parade).

According to a press release today, Google plans to ramp up to raise more capital. It says:
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – August 18, 2005 – Google Inc. (Nasdaq:
GOOG) announced today that it has filed a registration statement with
the Securities and Exchange Commission for a proposed public offering
by the company of 14,159,265 shares of Class A common stock.

For those who missed the initial offering and currently regret it, perhaps it will free up some more shares. What it will not do is drop the price so long as Google continues to perform so profitably.

Google announced an ambitious project to scan entire libraries and make the work available on-line. They have apparently pulled back a bit from the project in light of some comments from the publishing industry. According to a googleblog article posted a few days ago, they are now allowing publishers to exclude works from the scanning (and indexing) process. You can read more about it at SouthofBoston.com.