Rants and Raves | ZoomZoom Blog

Did Google kill Anna Nicole Smith?

February 21st, 2007

The bodyguard who tried to revive Anna Nicole Smith in her hotel room has spoken out for the first time, telling the New York Post that Smith was becoming extremely depressed during the last days of her life.

“She always had a laptop and she Googled her name, and she would read these articles that spoke badly about her,” said the bodyguard, who goes by the name of Big Moe. “She was just, was sad about that.”

Moe said he was especially worried about Smith during her final four days in Florida, because her baby daughter Dannielynn was in the Bahamas and not around to cheer her up.

Although I’d expect all of us have done a vanity search on Google at least once for our own name, how would you feel if all you could see on the front page was negative stories about yourself?

That brings me to thinking that what would happen if a top result from Google was a page slandering you - could Google be legally asked to remove that page from their results if you can’t get in contact with the original site? I’d doubt it, and don’t think that they *should* be held responsible for their search results (Come on Germany/China, stop trying to censor the net!), but can you imagine how frustrating and upsetting it would be to have untrue things said about you which are shown to anyone interested in searching for you?

I think that would help push any unstable person over the edge.

Posted by RobZZ
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Google taking the L out of Love?

February 19th, 2007

Seth Godin pointed out that Google seemed to make a mistake with its valentines doodle, missing out the “L”

However, I don’t believe Google would make such a basic mistake, if you look at their normal logo, the “L” is usual green and even though it takes a bit more searching, it is present in their valentines logo.

Posted by Mark
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Bored of Google? Spice things up a bit

February 2nd, 2007

Google is known for it’s simplistic interface (unless you have personalized homepage). This however, can get quite boring.. Here’s a nice tip for you:

1) Go to www.google.co.uk or www.google.com

2) Delete everything from the address bar

3) Copy & paste this into the address bar:

javascript:R=0; x1=.1; y1=.05; x2=.25; y2=.24; x3=1.6; y3=.24; x4=300; y4=200; x5=300; y5=200; DI=document.images; DIL=DI.length; function A(){for(i=0; i-DIL; i++){DIS=DI[ i ].style; DIS.position='absolute'; DIS.left=Math.sin(R*x1+i*x2+x3)*x4+x5; DIS.top=Math.cos(R*y1+i*y2+y3)*y4+y5}R++}setInterval('A()',5); void(0);

4) Hit enter

5) Enjoy

Posted by Mark
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Traffic drop on 1st Feb?

February 2nd, 2007

It’s quite usual for there to be a smooth increase and decrease of visitors during the week, with most sites you can stop some nice trends as to which days of the week your site is most popular (people doing a bit of shopping during lunch hours etc). However, we seem to have recorded around a 10-20% drop in traffic over 30 websites, all of which are on seperate hosting, some have marketing, some don’t, some are even personal sites owned by staff here.

I’ve compiled this quick overview of a few sites from Analytics:

I was wondering if anybody else has experienced this drop, or can shed any light on it? Did I miss a big world event? Was the 1st Feb national “No Internet Day”?.

Posted by Mark
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