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Showing posts with label Google. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Google. Show all posts

Wednesday, September 21, 2011

Santorum is Busy Doing the Opposite of Fixing His 'Google Problem'

Google definition of 'santorum'
Let's be clear here; Former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum will never, not in a million years, ever become the President of the United States. This is partly because Santorum's politics of hate are quickly becoming an anachronism and partly because the man is just dumber than a sack of hammers. The former reason is well-documented, while he's currently busy demonstrating the latter.

Politico:

A Google search for Santorum has generated some inappropriate results since gay columnist Dan Savage organized an online campaign to link graphic sexual terms to the socially conservative senator's name.

Now, the Republican presidential candidate says he's convinced Google could do something to remedy the issue, if the company wanted to.

"I suspect if something was up there like that about Joe Biden, they'd get rid of it," Santorum said. "If you're a responsible business, you don't let things like that happen in your business that have an impact on the country."

Monday, May 16, 2011

The Paranoid Mindset of the Rightwing Blogosphere

Blogger will be in read-only mode while we resolve some maintenance issues. Sorry for the inconvenience.

If you'd checked Google's Blogger Status on Thursday, you'd have found that message. When I found that I wasn't able to access my blogs to publish a post, the first thing I did was check Status. Google was down and it was confirmed. I would have to wait. Patiently or impatiently, I was going to have to wait.

One thing that I've learned about the internet over the years -- and have come to accept -- is that it doesn't really work. Not very well, anyway. Services are unreliable. Connections can be spotty. Machines break down and code, being written and configured by humans, can be faulty. In the early years, Blogger wasn't super reliable. But over time it's developed into a pretty solid and stable platform. This latest outage was the exception to the rule.

Others haven't learned that the internet doesn't really work. And those people went nuts. I cringed reading some comments on the Blogger Help forum. Another thing to remember when dealing with Blogger is that it's free. Pretty much the only thing Google does to make money off it is to make it easy to add Adsense ads. You get unlimited bandwidth and an infinite amount of blog posts for nothing. Let me emphasize that fact -- nothing. Yet people were "demanding" that their blogs be restored to their previous functional state, as if engineers were just sitting around waiting for someone to tell them to get on the ball. It was embarrassing. I'd imagine that many a middle finger was raised at many a monitor at Google's Blogger division this weekend.