Google

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Google is primarily used for searching the open web (where indieweb sites typically rank highly), but also produces end user software, and hosts a number of content silos and other services.

Utility services:

• Google Search
• Google Maps

Google also provides hosting (client) services / web apps:

• Gmail - hosted email service
• Google Sites

Notification services:

• Google Alerts - http://www.google.com/alerts
• Google now - http://www.google.com/landing/now/

Messaging services:

• Google Talk
• Hangouts
• Allo
• Duo
• Hangouts Chat
• Google Meet

Other services:

• YouTube Music
• Google Play Music
• Google Drive
• goo.gl
• Google Identity Platform
• Google Pay

Software:

• Google Chrome
• ...

Content silos:

• Blogger - one of the oldest blogging platforms, previously called "Blogspot" (and the software itself was called Blogger).
• Google Calendar
• Google Contacts
• Google Docs
• Google Slides
• Google feedburner
• Google Photos
• Google Keep - http://www.google.com/keep/ - for notes, thoughts
• Google+ (AKA "Google Plus", G+, GPlus)
• Picasa
• YouTube
• ...

Google Cloud services:

• Google App Engine
• Google Compute Engine
• Google Container Engine
• ...

Other development tools:

• Google Web Starter Kit
• Google Analytics
• ...

Various business tools:

• Google AdSense
• Google My Business

More: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_products

Exporting From Google

• Google Takeout allows you to export your data from Google's services.
• See: Data Liberation Front
• http://www.flailingmonkey.com/2013/03/26/moving-contacts-calendar-google/

Readonly Silos

Google has at least one silo that they've shut down login/write access to, but are seemingly still maintaining its post permalinks (in redirect form)

• Google Buzz
• ...

Dead Silos

Google has shutdown a number of silos:

• 2009-04: Dodgeball
• 2010-05-15: Etherpad
• 2012-04-30: Google Wave - https://support.google.com/answer/1083134?hl=en
• 2016-01-25: Google Code
• ...

See site-deaths for more.

Dead Services

Google has shutdown a number of services (most recent first):

• 2016-01[1] Google broke their original Google Profile URLs, e.g. this used to work in the Google Buzz days until 2015-12[2], but now (2016-02-14) just 404s:
  • http://google.com/profiles/tantek (with rel-me support too)
  • Workaround: they can be manually fixed by URL inspection and changing to e.g.:
  • http://profiles.google.com/tantek
• 2013-07-01 Google Reader shut down.[3][4]
• 2012-04-20 Social Graph API (launched 2008).[5]
• 2011-07-02 Google Real-Time Search shut down.
• 2011-05-26 Google Blog Search shut down
• ...

See also:

• 2013-03-22 The Guardian / Charles Arthur Google Keep? It'll probably be with us until March 2017 - on average

  How long do Google services and APIs survive? A Guardian analysis of 39 that have been killed off says just under four years, on average.

For more see:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Discontinued_Google_services

Outages

On 2015-10-09, Google Drive (and associated Docs, Sheets, Slides) were offline.

Articles

Articles and blog posts critical of Google's behavior with respect to the open web, indieweb, open standards etc.:

• http://blog.ouseful.info/2013/05/16/google-lock-in/
• ...

Search

Main article: Google Search

Google is primarily known for its dominant search engine.

Google Supports Microformats

Main article: Google Search: Supports Microformats

Google search will highlight results with microformats like those in IndieWeb posts.

Google Web History

You can save your Google search history by explicitly turning on Google Web History

• https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/54068?hl=en&ref_topic=14148

And then look up your past Google searches:

• https://history.google.com/history/lookup (requires login)

Search History

Google collects your search history for the purpose of gathering data for ad serving.

They do this whether or not you are logged in (e.g. with cookies), and whether or not your have opted into Google Web History (see below), though you can also opt-out of all ad-customization.

There is something apparently that shows your demographic and psychographic buckets according to this data, but only at a high level. It should be browsable and searchable.

Apparently they scrub logs after somewhere between 6 and 18 months, and much of the extra details stored in history they don't store at all, or only temporarily (until the log savers get to it, i.e. days).

Criticism

• Google News is broken
• @ohunt - September 20, 2019
  • "Today is my last day at @Google. Despite the incredibly talented engineers, I cannot bring myself to continue working for a company that favors money over ethics every time it comes up." @ohunt September 20, 2019
• 2019-10-11 The Guardian UK: Revealed: Google made large contributions to climate change deniers
• block all Google cookies you can for this reason at a minimum: 2013-12-10 BoingBoing: NSA uses Google's tracking cookies to target and "exploit" their subjects
• Google Activity controls across numerous Google services. <-- Find and manage other data associated with your account
• Post Brexit moving user data from UK to US
  • "This is unacceptable, Google. No. I do not agree to have the data controller of my data be a US entity. @PrivacyMatters what is the legality of this? Isn't this counter to UK data protection regulation?" @torgo February 22, 2020
• right to be forgotten: Guardian articles have been hidden by Google
• 2018-02-28 Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself - Promotion Committee, shipping new things vs maintenance
• 2018-09-21 & thread
  • "NEW: Google bosses have suppressed an explosive memo circulating inside the company revealing its censored China search plan. The memo said the search system would store users' location data & share their search records "unilaterally" w/ a Chinese company:" @rj_gallagher 21 Sep 2018

See Also

• silos
• 2017-09-12 TNW: Google is suffering a meltdown as Gmail, Maps and YouTube go down

  According to the outage heat map, it appears that users in the American East Coast, Central Europe and Japan are most severely affected.

• Google Account
  • "NEW: Google bosses have suppressed an explosive memo circulating inside the company revealing its censored China search plan. The memo said the search system would store users' location data & share their search records "unilaterally" w/ a Chinese company: https://theintercept.com/2018/09/21/google-suppresses-memo-revealing-plans-to-closely-track-search-users-in-china/" @rj_gallagher September 21, 2018
• Alt-text in images in Google slides (Ctrl + Alt + Y on PC)
• No More Google - alternatives to Google's products and services
• 2018-07-09 How I Fully Quit Google (And You Can, Too) / My enlightening quest to break free of a tech giant

  Today, I am Google free, part of the western world’s ultimate digital minority, someone who does not use products from the world’s two most valuable technology companies (yes, I don’t use Facebook either).

• 2019-02-20 https://joshondesign.com/2019/02/20/google-free
• Google Nest
• https://www.wired.com/story/google-tracks-you-privacy/
• Google Search
• Chromebook
• Google One
• "Google to pay Apple $15 billion to remain default Safari search engine in 2021" https://9to5mac.com/2021/08/25/analysts-google-to-pay-apple-15-billion-to-remain-default-safari-search-engine-in-2021/
• Criticism: another shutdown, larger pattern of turnover by those doing acquiring: https://twitter.com/defunkt/status/1669814114259202048
• ^

  Just heard that Google is selling off Google Domains. And people ask me why we didn't sell GitHub to Google. Seriously? Not one high level person I spoke to during negotiations is still at Google today. Meanwhile, everyone on the Microsoft side still works there...

• Google Fonts service, seemed to have an outage on 2024-02-05 per https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/fonts.googleapis.com
  • via https://friend.camp/@darius/111881129164067505:

    "Ooof. "down for everyone or just me" is reporting that fonts.googleapis.com is, in fact, down. No wonder half the sites I'm trying to access are stalling. I thought it was a problem with this public wifi network I'm on...https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/fonts.googleapis.com" @darius February 5, 2024

  • However it turns out the fonts.googleapis.com (and googleapis.com for that matter) return a 404 "normally" which is not indicative of any problems with specific use of those API services, e.g. https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Roboto
• ^ https://mastodon.social/@everyplace/111881603312765455
  • "@darius ok so believe it or not I got a really helpful answer almost immediately. TLDR it’s not down, but the url being used to test should be more specific to get the right answer. https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Roboto //should always return a 200https://fonts.googleapis.com //not necessarily going to return a 200" @everyplace February 6, 2024
• Criticism, fails to invest in simple cheap maintenance https://queer.party/@ticky/112809928477768537

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