Marcel Weiss's Library tagged google →  View Popular

• Movies. Use the "movie:" operator to search for a movie title along with either a zip code or U.S. city and state to get a list of movie theaters in the area and show times.
• Music. The "music:" operator returns content related to music only.

Google is looking to help web applications get offline, releasing a new Gears open source project. At a demonstration, today it is releasing a version of Google Reader that works offline via a manual sync.

Google Gears is a developer release with new JavaScript APIs for data storage, application caching, and multi-threading features, the company says. In a demo today at headquarters in Mountain View team members said it should work for everything from spotty Internet access to total offline status. They said Google applications like Gmail would be a natural extension

The OpenDNS article on this issue also focuses on the software application
that sends people to this page, if they enter non-working URLs, and suggests it's spyware:

This page isn’t being shown to Dell owners just because they have the
Google Toolbar. In fact, uninstalling the Google Toolbar won’t get rid
of it. Dell and Google are now installing a second program on
computers that intercepts all sorts of queries that the browser would normally
try to resolve. This program has no clear name and is very hard to uninstall.
In some circles, people would call this

spyware.

I wouldn't consider it spyware, but it certainly isn't friendlyware. But you
can understand why some people would think it's spyware, when their computers
seem to be acting in a strange way. Some

searches brought up
plenty
of

people who are confused by the software and what it is doing.

Fear Of Google. FOG. It’s all over the blogs today. I just got done reading my feeds and here’s the posts that have FOG all over them:

Mary Jo Foley: Google is failing the Microsoft litmus test.

James Robertson: Is Google Big and Stupid Already?

Sebastien St-Laurent: Does Google Have a Double Standard?

Todd Cochrane: Google is Buying FeedBurner, this is pure Evil!

Philipp Lenssen: Is the Google Video PlusBox Fair?

Shelley Powers: Your Life, Googled.

Scott Karp: Google’s Video PlusBox May Be Its Most Disruptive Feature Ever.

Janet Driscoll Miller: What the Heck is Google’s Business Plan?

OpenDNS Blog: Google turns the page … in a bad way.

Danny Sullivan: Google & Dell’s Revenue-Generating URL Error Pages Drawing Fire.

More of the Dell and Google thing is being talked about over on TechMeme.

Actually, I think FOG is changing into DOG. Distrust/Disdain Of Google. What do you think?

Me? Google is too secretive. Too unwilling to engage. Too aloof. Oh, and Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO, has lost touch with how normal people think (if these quotes are correct, and that’s a big “if”). If they are correct I think it’s evidence that he’s been hanging around too many advertising execs lately. Their goal is to put impulses into your mind so you take certain actions (like buy Diet Coke instead of Diet Pepsi). Believe it or not advertising execs talk like that. So, when Eric is reported to have said, during a visit to Britain this week: “The goal is to enable Google users to be able to ask the question such as ‘What shall I do tomorrow?’ and ‘What job shall I take?’” we all get a little freaked out. We don’t want Google to know that much about us.

Or do you?

Also, the secrecy at Google is rubbing off on its PR in other ways — when we meet Google employees at events like Maker Faire (I met several on Saturday) and many of them can’t tell me anything about what they do beyond “I work in networking.”

Have people really thought about the ramifications of this? Google will not only know what you search for, what ads you click on but they will also know EXACTLY what you are subscribed to at a very intimate level.

Google has been trying to close the loop for a long time and while this purchase is smart for them, they are now going to know more about some people than their own family members may.

They are going to be able to share that data, cross correlate and target you on so many levels that if you look at what they are collecting already is pretty damn scary.