Court Orders Google to Remove Results for Man’s Criminal Record

Today, Google was legally required to hide someone from an online search. A British judge ordered the company to remove search results that referenced a man’s criminal conviction from ten years ago.

The legal basis for this ruling? The Right to be Forgotten, which allows people to request that outdated and irrelevant information about them be taken down. It’s explicitly laid out in the EU General Data Protection Regulation, a new set of laws designed to give European citizens more data privacy, which will be enforced in May (the United Kingdom will comply, despite Brexit). Google and the unnamed man first faced off in court for this suit in March after the company refused to take down the search results in hopes of being able to move on with his life.

Google initially argued that the Right to be Forgotten is not a way to “rewrite history.” But now it will comply with the court’s decision, according to a report in The Guardian. The search engine will no longer include links to news articles and other accounts of the man’s conviction of conspiracy to intercept communications. The articles and pages will not be deleted, but a Google search will not include them.

Full Story Here

HTTPS is a SEO ranking factor

Webmaster level: all

Security is a top priority for Google. We invest a lot in making sure that our services use industry-leading security, like strong HTTPS encryption by default. That means that people using Search, Gmail and Google Drive, for example, automatically have a secure connection to Google.

Beyond our own stuff, we’re also working to make the Internet safer more broadly. A big part of that is making sure that websites people access from Google are secure. For instance, we have created resources to help webmasters prevent and fix security breaches on their sites.

We want to go even further. At Google I/O a few months ago, we called for “HTTPS everywhere” on the web.

We’ve also seen more and more webmasters adopting HTTPS (also known as HTTP over TLS, or Transport Layer Security), on their website, which is encouraging.

For these reasons, over the past few months we’ve been running tests taking into account whether sites use secure, encrypted connections as a signal in our search ranking algorithms. We’ve seen positive results, so we’re starting to use HTTPS as a ranking signal. For now it’s only a very lightweight signal — affecting fewer than 1% of global queries, and carrying less weight than other signals such as high-quality content — while we give webmasters time to switch to HTTPS. But over time, we may decide to strengthen it, because we’d like to encourage all website owners to switch from HTTP to HTTPS to keep everyone safe on the web.

 

read full posting:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.at/2014/08/https-as-ranking-signal.html

Google Authorship Keeps Evolving

Google Authorship has been trending as a hot topic of over year now. There are 3 main ways you can claim your authorship and link your website’s content to your google profile / Gplus.
But once you have google keeping track of your online posting and allocating credit to you for the fine works you are contributing online, you must also be aware that you may take credit for things you never created or “Authored”. Google is still working out the bugs, but items that have meta-data and credits embeded.
In the article below discribes credits for VIDEO and PDFs
Go Read it now, share it, Plus it, tweet it

Bye Bye Google Wave

I never really found much use for Wave  and now it’s leaving…

Dear Wavers,

More than a year ago, we announced that Google Wave would no longer be developed as a separate product. At the time, we committed to maintaining the site at least through to the end of 2010. Today, we are sharing the specific dates for ending this maintenance period and shutting down Wave. As of January 31, 2012, all waves will be read-only, and the Wave service will be turned off on April 30, 2012. You will be able to continue exporting individual waves using the existing PDF export feature until the Google Wave service is turned off. We encourage you to export any important data before April 30, 2012.

If you would like to continue using Wave, there are a number of open source projects, including Apache Wave. There is also an open source project called Walkaround that includes an experimental feature that lets you import all your Waves from Google. This feature will also work until the Wave service is turned off on April 30, 2012.

For more details, please see our help center.

Yours sincerely,

The Wave Team

Android apps now playable on Windows PCs

The 117MB file creates a little widget on the desktop. When launched, it offers a list of available apps. As it stands there is no Android Market support, although Bluestacks has its own Apps Channel with a small selection of utilities and games.

The company has also released an app called Cloud Connect. It can be downloaded from the Android Market and lets users send apps from their handsets to a PC, thus opening doors for any Android software to run on the Windows platform.

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How cool is that?

Will try and test if I ever find time.

Enjoy fellow readers.

40 data centers, 900,000 Servers : It’s Google

Googlenet runs on ‘900,000 servers’

Google’s worldwide data center network spans about 900,000 servers, according to an estimate based on new information the company has deigned to share about its power use.

Previous estimates put Google’s server count at over one million.

In a new report from Stanford professor Jonathan Koomey on data center energy usage, Google estimates that it accounts for less than one per cent of the energy consumed across the world’s data centers, and Koomey uses this figure to extrapolate Google’s worldwide server count. The web giant does not divulge the number of servers used in its network of roughly 40 data centers, which stretches from California to Finland to Asia.

According to Koomey, Google’s servers account for about 2.8 per cent of the volume servers installed in data centers across the globe.

As reported by Data Center Knowledge, the Stanford prof puts the world’s 2010 data center energy usage at 198.8 billion kWh, which would mean Google’s facilities consume about 220 megawatts of power. “While Google is a high profile user of computer servers, less than 1% of electricity used by data centers worldwide was attributable to that company’s data center operations,” Koomey writes.

“To my knowledge, this is the first time that Google has revealed specific details about their total data center electricity use (they gave me an upper bound, not an exact number, but something is better than nothing!).”

Thus, Koomey says, Google’s custom built data centers are considerably more efficient than run-of-the mill corporate data centers, though he indicates that Google’s infrastructure is comparable to other “cloud computing” installations. The company is now operating chillerless data centers in Belgium and Finland, with the latter facility cooled solely with water from the Baltic Sea, and it has designed its own servers with built-in batteries that remove the need for a separate UPS (uninterruptible power supply).

Speaking with The Reg, a Google software engineer who recently left the company also indicated that Google’s data center technologies have moved well beyond what has been reported in the press, but he declined to provide specifics, citing a non-disclosure agreement with the company.

Though Google’s servers now number about 900,000, the company has plans to expand to as many as 10 million, according to a public presentation describing a new software platform dubbed Spanner, which automatically moves and replicates loads between its data centers when traffic and hardware issues arise. According to that same Google ex-engineer, the company was just beginning to roll out Spanner when he left the company this summer. ®


Source

Good By Google Video…Better make copies or move to YouTube.

Google‘s decided to shut down its Google Video service, and in an email sent Friday night (4/15/2011), reminded those who’ve uploaded videos to the site that they have until May 13 to download them before they are removed.

Google says that on April 29, Google Videos will no longer be viewable on the site, and the download function will still be available for a couple of weeks to allow users to retrieve their work. Perhaps many of those users will move their video clips to Google’s other video service, YouTube, which Google acquired in 2006.

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