Super Awesome Blog

I really like Google News, it’s usually a lot like reading the Drudge-report without an allegedly closeted fedora wearing paranoid conservative madly dreaming up bombastic headlines. For example, this is what today’s headlines on “Star Trek Online” look like:

As you can see, the Star Trek Online news is mostly relevant with news about the 2009 Star Trek movie sneaking in there sometimes. Now let’s try “Atheism”:

Articles like the one I’ve highlighted here that are not so much news and basically random blog posts fill up “Atheist, Atheism” searches in Google News.  Now, I obviously have no problem with people posting their opinions on blogs… but I don’t expect to see opinion blogs showing up next to New York Times articles… especially when said blog posts are often radically biased.  I can’t stand biased opinion in my news to the right or left, and it seems like I get a lot of it leaning right with Atheist News via Google. 

Now, Google News obviously isn’t perfect, but it does seem like stories about Atheists and Atheism end up with an unusually large skew than the rest of my Google News categories.  Anyone know of some way to filter out sites, or specify “reputable news sources only”?  Anybody? Anybody?

Google has added an interesting and dubiouisly useful feature to their Image Search: a color filter.   A dramatic example is to do a Google Image Search for “clouds”.

What you normally get looks like this:

When you select “red” you get some pretty awesome looking sunsets/sunrises:

Nifty Google.  To make things even more intersting you can also narrow your search to things like faces, clip art, and more:

A Walk In The Clouds huh?  I guess this is one of those Google features that I probably won’t end up using, but is handy to have around.

For some reason Google is one of those giant companies that feels like the things they do must be scary and evil, even though their motto says the opposite.  Probably because they keep inserting themselves into every facet of my life.

Recently I’ve phased out Outlook, and started using Web Gmail and Google Calendar for all my work. I can get to my data wherever I am, it’s fast, and it works really well. I even use their Chrome browser, only for Mail and my Calendar though -- I don’t like those cookies stored in Firefox and I find it irritating to delete my cache every time I want to do a Google search.

Enter GOOG-4111:

Of course there’s a creepy catch: the pleasant voice when you call says “Calls Recorded. Press star for more details.”  Upon investigation, it seems Google records the call, records your number, and adds it to their research to improve the service.  Just a little creepy.  Google’s privacy policy is fairly straightforward, but if you’re concerned you can protect your privacy when calling GOOG-411 by dialing *67 before you dial the 1-800 number to block your caller information.  Alternately, you have the option of deleting the data they store on your number with a few key presses… it’s much easier to dial *67 though.

OVERALL:

Wow, leave it to Google to revolutionize the 411 service, and to do it for free.  With *67 you have a fairly private voice recognition telephone/internet search.  Amazing.

5 STARS OUT OF 5   (SUPER AWESOME)