9 Years of Google… so far

Today is Google’s ninth birthday – as witnessed by the cute pi&ntilda;ata in their home page logo*. So that means it’s been nine years since that clean, simple page with just a logo, a search box and a button appeared and changed the way the web worked. Again.

I won’t rehash Google’s history, Wikipedia does the usual splendid job on that, suffice it to say they are still a great example, along with many others such as youTube & Facebook, that nothing is written in stone in this Internets business. That idea you just had may seem a little crazy/obvious/impossible to you right now, but in nine years time me and many others could be blogging about how your idea changed the world. Of course it won’t be ‘blogging’ then but memelizing…. coff. Excelsior!

* And no. Nothing happens if you ‘hit’ the pi&ntilda;ata unfortunately..

Face the Search

Google have started integrating a behind the scenes feature that allows you to do an image search for faces. It’s pretty darn cool – first check out a normal search for the wonderful ‘Douglas Adams‘, now check out the same search for his face.

Of course this is now raising a lot of discussion about privacy and the amount of information Google holds, especially when combined with their new street view feature. They can now take pictures of your house, and recognise your face staring out the window. Ultimately someone is going to do pull all this data together, and personally I’d rather it was Google than Microsoft. Boing Boing raises the point that would we be more scared if the NSA or CIA were doing this, somehow I suspect they already are – as well as voice recognition on every phone call in the country for key words. Is complete public transparency better than Government sanctioned spying and private records of your movements/actions? It’ll be interesting to watch how this plays out. Google could get sued for privacy invasion but that’s a harder prospect for the current administration.