Google has now improved open ended question searches. I like a lot of things about Google!

According to the google blog, Google now offers it’s news in two feed formats, RSS and Atom as of today.

I just discovered another handy Google feature, automatic reverse look-ups of phone numbers. If you type 555-555-5555 or (555)555-5555 (replace 5’s with real numbers in a telephone number to try this — I have to explain that in case the University of Kansas Financial Aid Department is reading this — see prior story today) into the google search box and hit search, it will return the owner of that number together with an offer to draw a map to the address associated with it using Google Maps, Yahoo Maps or Mapquest. It will then continue on to show pages containing that phone number as you might expect.

Yet another nice feature at Google.

Sometimes a new feature comes along that leaves you unsure if it’s a good or bad development. This is one such development. A company by the name of Remote Approach has developed a system whereby PDF files can be tagged with the addition of some code so that it reports home every time someone opens the file and reports the IP address and other details, including any unique identifiers the makers choose to add, back to the author. They are also apparently working on a method of denying access to the PDF if the reader is not online at the time.

My concern is that this could become yet another tool for tracking users habits, and also that companies will start using the facility to require users be online to read ebooks, so that they can track piracy. Since ebook readers and other such tools are unlikely to be online most of the time, this could create serious usability issues. My laptop has been very handy for reading long PDF’s while sitting on a deck chair out in the back and out of range of the Wireless network. I’d hate to lose that ability due to a restrictive new tool. I’m also not convinced that such a tool should allow collection of IP address’s and other such explicit information about users as it increases the likely hood that in future such a tool might be used by unscrupulous types. This particular tool is subscription based and as such will be under the control of Remote Approach, but there is a good likelihood that the technology can be co-opted by people of less moral fibre and that worries me somewhat. Trends seem to strongly indicate that the days of the anonymous Internet are drawing to a close. As John Bielby of Remote Approach points out, such information gathering takes place already with Web server logs, but what they don’t mention is that web users can use an anonymizer service to hide their details from web servers if they chose to do so. No such facility is currently available for the new PDF system.

We have just been offered one suggested solution (along with a $30 donation for mentioning it through December 13, 2007) to the offline use dilemma is to use a PDF to HTML Converter. This would allow you to instead use the document in straight html that would be available offline. That suggests an intriguing solution. For a long time, Google has converted pdf documents to html, and I often use that method when searching to get a sense for what is in the document because of the relatively lighter download that I have to take. Unfortunately I have not been able to test able2extract because the donation didn’t come with a copy of the software. It suggests that unlike Google, it will convert images as well as text. Google mainly converts the text portion in my experience.

I’ll admit, I have yet to actually encounter one of these files that isn’t available offline, so perhaps we are thus far tilting windmills? If it becomes common place, then I’ll definately try something like able2extract.

WordPress is a very popular Open Source PHP blog software, one which we use ourselves. It comes as a something of a shock to hear that it’s founder, Matt Mullenweg is alleged to have used the WordPress website to game the search engines by containing cloaked advertising words. He was apparently paid a flat rate by Hot Nacho Inc to hide the terms in the pages. While I strongly disagree with his decision to do this, based on the information as we know it currently, I don’t think it should reflect badly on the WordPress blog application itself which is a professional quality piece of software. Google will be removing all of the questionable pages from it’s index as a result of this apparent lapse in judgement.

Google has given Mozilla based browsers like Firefox a little present. Basically when a Firefox user does a Google search, Google will preload the most likely result for you so that if you click on the first result, you will see the page much more quickly then you otherwise would.

Not everyone is happy with the functionality, many believe that it could be a waste of bandwidth and a possible future security concern. I’m of the opinion that as long as they give you an option to turn it on, (and leave it off by default) then it’s a useful additional service to Mozilla users. My own tendency is to do searches based on lists of words, so it’s quite unusual when the first result is the one I want, the result is that this is not likely to be of that much use to me and might waste bandwidth (which is why I’d like the option to turn it on or off.) The prefetch feature isn’t available on non-Mozilla browsers like Internet Explorer as they don’t currently support it.

What I’d like to see, is a Google Firefox extension that works with Firefox and Google’s results page so that checkboxes are put next to each result, you then mark all the checkboxes next to possible positive results and then click a “Open in tabs” button and have all the check marked pages open in new tabs. That would really speed up my search experience.

At least not for any of the reasons sited by Scott Granneman in his March 3, 2005 article: Where is Google Headed? As the bad guys start using Google more and more, the company wrestles with some new security and privacy issues with AutoLink.

Scott suggests that Google should somehow stop bad guys from exploiting sites with security flaws, giving an example where Google stopped the activity after just ten hours. Ten hours! That isn’t a very long time for something that was unknown until the day it hit. If guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns as the old saying goes. Likewise, guns don’t kill people, people kill people. Google didn’t do anything wrong. The authors who created the security problem did. Bad things happen to good people sometimes. That is just life.

He goes on to question the ethics of Autolink, something that only works with Internet Explorer thus far, adding links determined from term searching the page. As he points out, it only works IF EVERY TIME the reader manually hits the autolink button (thereby indicating he wants the auto links.) Google is not rearranging the page, changing the text, or doing anything else untoward — it is doing what the reader asks, providing other possibly relevant links.

I need better examples than these to convince me Google did anything wrong on these issues.