Tag Archive: google

Copyright fun with Vimeo and Google

Vimeo folks wrote me a nice letter a few days ago, noticing me they have removed a bunch of my videos from my account, videos that were breaking their rules. From 100+ videos, they removed half. I reviewed a few of them and asked myself, and them, how is this video, par example, breaking the rules. It wasn’t, they were too eager to delete videos, without even thinking or viewing the videos.

On the other hand, Google has a favorite phrase when dealing with copyright issues: “we have decided not to take any action, but we encourage you to resolve the issue with the blog owner instead”. I sometimes want to reply with “bitch, if i could resolve the issue with the people stealing my content, you think i would bother you” or “dear imbecile, if they realize they are stealing my content, they would not be stealing it anymore”.

Tumblr are another story. They will sell and disclose user information to third party companies they pay them to, but they will protect their users from someone like me, asking for my content to be removed from their servers. It’s in their TOS.

Google Reader design fix

Google managed to really fuck up Google Reader’s design. But there is help. I compiled two greasemonkey scripts (Google Reader Fixes and Google Reader Absolutely Customizable) and got one good one that produces a usable interface.

greader-script

Let’s go bowling!

chloeSO, last week I met what seo guys are calling "google bowling". Some guy was upset he showed up first in google for his name with some spamming he did 3 years ago and used xrumer to enter 300.000 links to my blog. Google deleted my front page and the results for both my nick and my name from SERPS. After reported the problem (i don;t think anybody is stupid enough to buy 300.000 links to his site and hope to grow), my site was back in results (thanx to Bogdana and the Webmasters Tools Team) with just one point drop in PageRank

And I noticed a change in google algorithm: I got a lot of pages with PR 1, 2 and even 3, pages with good content, not necessarily linked content, but content people find useful. A lot of pages show now higher in SERPS. Before this i deleted about 1.000 empty posts (with missing youtube clips or images) and worked on my copywriting skills to change about 300 one-word post titles.

The web should be smaller

Imagine all the duplicate videos from youtube removed. All the sites that are just reblogging the information from TechCrunch and AllThingsD without adding any value or opinion. All the duplicate images from blogger.com removed.

The web is getting bigger, but not getting any better.

You nkow all about the war. Everybody does.

So, my point is simple: Google created some random queries with bogus results and feed them to Microsoft via it’s toolbar. Google » bogus results. Google » handpicked results. Google just admited it fixes search results. Simple. 

Of course, not all the time. Of course, never, they say. But…