yanw

It's the result of PR attacks and sadly they seem to be working.

Some of those writing are just parroting PR pitches and some just seem to depend on their limited experience with he service.

Also considering that the number of active users is but a fraction of the overall number of those who signed up (yet still a considerable amount) it's not fair to divide active minutes between all registered users. It might be a "ghost town" in comparison to Facebook but so is every other social service the tech blogs seem to be paddling, it's just that + is a bigger target for PR attacks.

I think that Streetview didn't enforce too many strict guidelines as it was thought of as a low-risk, non-user-facing product.

He got thoroughly debunked by Danny Sullivan:

http://marketingland.com/debunking-senator-al-franken-on-goo...

Grandstanding and pandering is what politicians do best. Franken is no exception.

At first search signals were mainly provided by the content itself and now signals from the user are being incorporated.

There is already an established term for this and it’s not “filter bubble” or “tailoring” the term is “relevance” and it’s the core of search.

If the author is suggesting that data about a user’s identity, history, and location isn't usefully to providing her with the best possible results then he should stick to writing about stuff he actually comprehends and not be the umpteenth author resorting to use “Google” in the title to whore traffic.

So go to other sites, I assume your browser has an address bar.

Also: SEO is killing America: http://www.informationdiet.com/blog/read/the-information-die...

If Google is killing SEO then they are making the world a better place.

Not this nonsense again.

Larry Page: "we want to get you out of Google and to the right place as fast as possible"

That was pre-IPO Google! if you haven't noticed the web changed quite a bit since then and companies do evolve, especially the ones who want to remain relevant.

Also It's not like Google is selling the items in shopping search it's just a different view for shopping results, and I'd argue that sending users elsewhere and not computing the solutions (results) or visualizing them immediately is a weakness that I'm glad to hear Google is working to address.

Doesn't seem that genuine posted on a corporate blog.

Not sure about the logistics but when the IE team announced that P3P circumvention "story" through a PR agency, it got me thinking that it's PR initiated. They are in the habit of hiring these firms: http://falkvinge.net/2012/03/02/how-microsoft-pays-big-money...

Between attack ads and blog posts it seems like Google is all that Microsoft have to discuss lately. Not sure if Google is flattered by this obsession.

Wonder why the author chose not to post on his personal blog, a Microsoft employee bashing Google on an official Microsoft blog rings hollow, specially with the use of the same generic talking points.

And using engineers as PR people isn’t the most sepathetic thing either.

"The Economist" on a similar Microsoft/ICOMP/Burson-Marsteller anti-Google event that took place in London:

http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2012/03/microsoft-v-g...

How come Facebook wasn't included in Microsoft's PR-agency announced P3P "revelation"?

So the WSJ publishes another one of it’s alarmist articles about Google and Safari during the weekend and Microsoft wants to capitalize by pretending it just now discovered that P3P (a defunct and shitty protocol) is useless and no one uses it.

NYT September 17, 2010:

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/17/a-loophole-big-enou... If you rely on Microsoft’s Internet Explorer’s privacy settings to control cookies on your computer, you may want to rethink that strategy. Large numbers of Web sites, including giants like Facebook, appear to be using a loophole that circumvents I.E.’s ability to block cookies, according to researchers at CyLab at the Carnegie Mellon University School of Engineering. A technical paper published by the researchers says that a third of the more than 33,000 sites they studied have technical errors that cause I.E. to allow cookies to install, even if the browser has been set to reject them. Of the 100 most visited destinations on the Internet, 21 sites had the errors, including Facebook, several of Microsoft’s own sites, Amazon, IMDB, AOL, Mapquest, GoDaddy and Hulu.

Google doesn’t support a broken feature that is exclusive to IE somehow it’s their fault. If anyone ever doubted Microsoft's PR sleaziness and propaganda tactics that blog post is proof.

A thorough hatchet job by the WSJ, "Google" mentioned 44 times in that piece.

Then get an Apps account and don't complain if there is a fly in your free soup.

Their algorithms know more about you than you do yourself. There is your FUD.

Also sender and recipient "identity" have central role in identifying spam. Microsoft is building a profile about you as well and owns an ad network, which makes their propaganda video hypocritical as well as deceitful.

A machine parsing text is not the equivalent of a human "reading" it, all webmail services parse emails either to check for spelling errors or combat spam, Gmail uses adsense as well which is a much less annoying ad system than most.

The "reading" analogy is FUD employed by competitors to scare the uninformed, HN community should know better.

HN never lacked in Google-bashing. You could have chosen an example less worth of being flagged though, a post with substance that doesn't depict Microsoft as a deceitful FUD peddler.

Are you seriously commending Microsoft on a deceitful and misleading ad campaign!? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3544095

Anthropomorphizing webmail are we?

Equating machine parsing to a human "reading" email is just straight out deception and preying on the uninformed. Hotmail and every other webmail service parses emails either to check for spelling errors or combat spam, Gmail uses adsense as well which is a much less annoying ad system than Hotmail's display ads.

Oh and Google Apps, the primary target to this Microsoft propaganda is ad free.

They did that as a response to those lawsuit (in France and elsewhere) It's a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation.

Didn't they start charging because they started getting sued for offering it free of charge?

And according to other reports it's apparently illegal in France to offer something for free if it costs money to develop. But what about those who enjoyed using the free stuff and even built businesses on top of it?

Why bother though? I mean "fairsearch" and Microsoft? why not just shrug it off like the obvious propaganda it is, nothing good can come out of referencing them.

Yes: http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/01/31/on-the-go...

Opt-out for a privacy policy!? and for a policy which aims at reducing the amount of policies!? read it and if you don't like it then don't use that product, there is your "opt-out".

As for the changes in question, my point is that they do not warrant that sort of reaction, and seeing as Microsoft is in the habit of hiring big DC PR firms to blast competitors it's not unfeasible that it's them behind all this, the difference is that this time it's public.

Won’t be the first time Microsoft used propaganda against a competitor (this manufactured brouhaha over the new privacy policy could be their doing for all I know).

I'm not sure what they find so objectionable about the new privacy policy seeing as Google isn't collecting additional data, isn't selling it and is not removing the tools they already have in place to control it; and they've significantly reduced the text involved and gave a notice more than a month in advance.

I think this is the best take on this whole issue: http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/01/31/on-the-go...

Isn't that why operating systems let you make separate password protected profiles?

Firefox does the same btw except they offer a master password, but what happens when you misplace that password? Chrome seemingly assumes that the profile password is that master password which seems like expected behavior to me, I mean how many nested passwords do you need to be satisfied?

Also if you have access to the machine saved passwords can still be dug up regardless.

Contrary to that headline it's actually more of a counter-censorship measure:

http://support.google.com/blogger/bin/answer.py?hl=en&an...

By utilizing ccTLDs, content removals can be managed on a per country basis, which will limit their impact to the smallest number of readers. Content removed due to a specific country's law will only be removed from the relevant ccTLD.

So after a local authority demands that a blog post be removed, it will still be available at *.blogspot.com

Well put. Also worth noting that there is an anti-Google PR mechanism in place (honed over the years) that is used to feed the flames every time.

Use the toggle to turn off the social stuff then.

Yeah but social relevance is soon becoming a big part of web relevance and that stuff will be sorted with time when a balance is achieved between social and other signals, the concept is sound it will just have to be subject to iteration to get it right. Until then you can use the toggle to ignore the social stuff (the globe button).