| He didn’t announce it via cake, but Doug Bowman quit his job as head of Google’s visual design team last week, citing the company’s “reliance on data” for design decisions as the main reason for his departure. Bowman writes on his blog that he’ll miss Google’s “incredibly smart and talented people” and the “occasional massage,” but not “a design . . .
Nearly two years ago, I blogged about my fear of global pandemic and how I thought Google might be the thing that saves us by providing an early warning system. Since that time, Google.org has instituted a system that provides real-time measurement of flu queries. (By the way, Google flu trends shows that this was not a bad year at . . .
One of my earliest and happiest memories was being released from a hospital oxygen tent when I was a small child. I had developed pneumonia and was in pretty bad shape. They not only kept me under an oxygen tent for several days at St. Luke’s Hospital in Kansas City, but they also gave me massive amounts of tetracycline. The . . .
Limiting child access to TV and Internet can lower their weight. (Earlier) Is online therapy the future of mental health treatment? Is Google recession-proof? (Earlier) 140-year-old math problem solved. (Earlier)
Who will win in Texas? The MySpace poll. (Earlier) Do fewer ad-clicks really matter for Google? (Earlier) Can everyone learn from online classes? (Earlier) Company charges for “privilege” of stopping junk mail-outs to customers. (Earlier)
Last week, we solicited your questions for Google chief economist Hal Varian. Here are his answers. Thanks to Hal for his generosity and to all of you for the good questions. Q: Google’s recent announcement that it will be investing in energy research suggests that management now thinks it can earn better returns from investing in fields other than its . . .
MySpace is to Facebook as Yahoo! is to ___________. The answer, according to Hitwise, is: Google. Just as Facebook users are higher on the socioeconomic ladder than MySpace users, people who use Google as their search engine are better off than those who use Yahoo!. Google is most popular among users defined as “Affluent Suburbia,” “Upscale America,” and “Small Town . . .
I was already a big fan of Hal Varian‘s columns on everyday economics in the Times when I had the good fortune to meet him at Google headquarters, when Levitt and I were out there a couple of years ago. He was even more impressive in person. Now you have a chance to ask him whatever you’d like. As Google’s . . .
Is the “Google generation” really so Internet savvy? 2007 tied for Earth’s second-warmest year. (Earlier) See it to believe it: the eco-friendly Hummer. (Earlier) A complete guide to Marginal Revolution’s “Markets In Everything.” (More)
In my last post, I promised to say a bit more about prediction markets at Google. Google has been running internal prediction markets for a couple of years, and Eric Zitzewitz and I were fortunate enough to team up with Google whiz Bo Cowgill to analyze these markets. Ask any economist about the “theory of the firm” (what firms do . . .
Google directions soon to be available at gas pumps. Pet rental business thrives in New York. The economics of newspaper Web sites: do subscription models beat advertising models? What’s the all-time record high for oil prices?
Magazine introduces “pay what you want” subscriptions. (Earlier) Which U.S. natural disasters have been the most expensive? (Earlier) Do “superagents” really exist in professional sports? Could Google’s slides spell the end of PowerPoint? (Earlier)
Google creates digital fingerprinting to enforce copyrights. Is ambiguous racism more harmful than blatant racism? (HT: BPS Blog) U.S. cancer deaths on the decline. Are iPhones toxic to your health? (Earlier)
Are cows really the next energy source? U.S. Internet surfing time to surpass TV time. Good thing stars don’t care about privacy: Google Earth launches. (Earlier) Do Jim Cramer’s picks make money? (Earlier)
Dubner weighs in on Google News’ new feature, which allows the subjects of news articles to comment on the pieces about them.
A reader named John Grund wrote in to lament the relative unpopularity of Paul McCartney — relative, that is, to John Lennon. Grund bases his assumption on a Google Trends search of the two men’s names. Indeed, aside from the occasional spike, McCartney lags behind his long-deceased mate (Lennon is in red): “You might think that if McCartney ever had . . .
Daniel Gross is a very good and quite prolific writer on the economy, from his “Moneybox” columns in Slate to his “Economic View” columns in the New York Times; soon, he will be taking his skills to Newsweek. His new book, Pop! Why Bubbles are Great for the Economy, tells the story of various American investment bubbles, from frenzied railroad . . .
Google’s new Street View feature has caused a predictable sort of hubbub. Privacy advocates are upset; one woman freaked out when she could see her cat through the window of her house; one man was caught peeing by the side of the road. (We interviewed Google’s project manager on our site; his answers, hardly earth-shaking, were still interesting.) I understand . . .
Reader Sean Swanzy alerted us to Penny Postcards, a wonderful Web site that allows private collectors to share images of postcards from every county and state in the union, with mailing dates spanning the twentieth century. Not that we’re geographically biased, but the New York City collection is particularly impressive. From the Gainesville Sun via Consumerist: Florida’s Sun State Credit . . .
As every writer knows, beginnings are hard. Endings are perhaps even harder. So how hard is it to satisfyingly end a series like The Sopranos? If you like the show, you already know what happened; if you don’t like it, you don’t care. But one measure of just how unsatisfying many viewers found the finale can be gained by conducting . . .
Last week was a busy one for the visual wizards at Google. First, the company launched Street View, which offers street-level photos of San Francisco, New York, Miami, Denver, and Las Vegas; the remarkable new service promptly drew controversy as bloggers and surprised photo subjects raised privacy concerns. Then came word that the alleged JFK bombing suspects had used images . . .
Here’s a new twist to our ongoing discussion of child-naming: The Wall Street Journal reports that new parents may be choosing more “unique” names for their children in the interest of making them more prominent in Google searches. While a name like “Jason Smith” is easily swallowed up in the search-engine depths, a first name like “Kohler” or “Stella” is . . .
Hunter Walk, a brand manager at Google and a friend of ours since he invited us to give a talk at the Googleplex, has an interesting post on his personal blog. Here’s the brief background: Hunter was helping run Google Video and, since the Google acquisition of YouTube, he has been working with the YouTube folks. The point he makes . . .
Although it is in a fairly primordial stage, this new home-finding tool from Google may turn out to be as formidable a challenge to Realtors as the Department of Justice. It does little more than aggregate public information (as is Google’s wont), but when the public information in question is the listings of homes for sale in any given city, . . .
If you are going to murder someone, be sure to not leave your fingerprints behind all over Google, as this woman apparently did. Her searches included “how to commit murder,” “undetectable poisons,” and “fatal digoxin doses,” as well as searches on local gun laws. And while I don’t mean to heap even more dishonor on Walgreens, guess where she bought . . .
That is my conclusion after seeing this Google Book Search Page for a book called How to Build Your Own Furniture. The page lists three “Related Books,” including How to Make Your Own Recreation and Hobby Rooms, How to Build Your Cabin or Modern Vacation Home, and … Freakonomics. Huh? I am trying to think of what may have fooled . . .
The last stop on our recent California tour was at Google headquarters in Mountain View, Ca. This appearance had come about kind of casually, so we hadn’t thought about it much beforehand. The Google folks asked us to blog about our impressions, to be posted on the Google blog, and we did. Here’s what we had to say. To: All . . .