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How Can I Get My Girlfriend/Boyfriend To…

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We’re approaching that time of year when we tend to reflect on what we have accomplished over the last year and what we want to strive for over the coming year.

And often this exercise also involves reflecting on our relationships and what we want from them. I decided to use googles predictive search feature to get a hive mind idea of what people want from their boyfriends and girlfriends.

How Can I Get My Girlfriend/Boyfriend To

How Can I Get My Girlfriend/Boyfriend To

There is a lot of the same themes going on from both searches. I both love and hate how Google allows a window each other’s fascinating, curiosities and troubles.

100,000 Stars: Interactive 3D Visualization Of Our Galaxy

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100000 Stars

Are you ready to space out? 100,000 Stars is an interactive 3D map of our Milky Way Galaxy created by the folks over at Google. It accurately plots 100,000 local stars pulling data from a range of sources, including NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA), and the Bright Star Catalog.

100,000 Stars is an interactive visualization of the stellar neighborhood created for the Google Chrome web browser. It shows the real location of over 100,000 nearby stars. Zooming in reveals 87 individually identified stars and our solar system. The galaxy view is an artist’s rendition.

Instructions: Pan using your mouse and zoom in/out using your touchpad or mouse wheel. Click a star’s name to learn more about it.

Warning: Scientific accuracy is not guaranteed. Please do not use this visualization for interstellar navigation.

Be sure to take the tour. This is a WebGL Google Chrome Experiment, so it’ll run best on Chrome or Safari and with a decent graphics card. Damn nature, you pretty.

The 20 Most Expensive Keyword Categories In Google AdWords

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A company called Wordstream has done some research to discover which keyword categories fetch the highest costs per click (CPC) in Google’s AdWords solution.
According to Wordstream these are the top twenty keywords that demand the highest costs per click:

1. Insurance (example keyword: “auto insurance price quotes”)
2. Loans (example keyword: “consolidate graduate student loans”)
3. Mortgage (example keyword: “refinanced second mortgages”)
4. Attorney (example keyword: “personal injury attorney”)
5. Credit (example keyword: “home equity line of credit”)
6. Lawyer
7. Donate
8. Degree
9. Hosting
10. Claim
11. Conference Call
12. Trading
13. Software
14. Recovery
15. Transfer
16. Gas/Electricity
17. Classes
18. Rehab
19. Treatment
20. Cord Blood

According to Wordstream the words ‘insurance’ and ‘gas/electricity’ can net Google up to almost $55 per click while the words ‘claim’ and ‘loan’ can bring in $45.

The word The list of most expensive keyword categories is clearly a result from people who, en masse, turn to the Web in search for help, whether it’s for financial, educational, professional services or medical aid. WordStream concludes that the keyword categories with the highest volumes and costs represent industries with very high lifetime customer value: in other words, companies that can afford to pay a lot to acquire a new customer because of the nature of their business.

Postcards From Google Earth

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Deception Pass

Golden Gate

Brooklyn-based architect and designer Clement Valla is the creator of “Bridges” a screenshot collection made from bridges and roads from Google Earth. The collection concentrates on capturing Google Earth’s alogrithmic mishaps in elevation. The screen caps show surreal landscapes of twisted 3D & 2D aesthetics where stringy bridges slouch across caved in canyons and highway seem to melt with gravity.

The images are screenshots from Google Earth with basic color adjustments and cropping. I am collecting these new typologies as a means of conservation – as Google Earth improves its 3D models, its terrain, and its satellite imagery, these strange, surrealist depictions of our built environment and its relation to the natural landscape will disappear in favor of better illusionistic imagery. However, I think these strange mappings of the 2-dimensional and the 3-dimensional provide us with fabulous forms that are purely the result of algorithmic processes and not of human aesthetic decision making. They are artifacts worth preserving.

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Deep Reading

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In a recent interview with Foreign Policy, Google CEO Eric Smit had an interesting answer when asked if there is a downside to hyper-information access?

I am worried about the decline of what I call deep reading. In other words, the sort of “here I am on the airplane, there’s no Internet connection, I am reading a book thoroughly” reading. You do less of that in a world where everything is a snippet, everything is an instant message, everything is an alert.

What is Eric Smit currently “deep” reading? Ghost Wars. If you have any interest in this subject you should read Nicolas Carr’s book: The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

Google Alarm

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It’s no secret that Google is monitoring and recording tons of personal information and documenting your surfing habits as you cruise around the internet. Gmail, Google Analytics, Google AdSense, YouTube embeds, API calls… all of this data can be used to monitor & track your personal web browsing habits

The fine folks over at F.A.T. Labs have created a firefox add-on and chrome extension that visually and audibly alert you to whenever your personal information is being sent to Google servers. It also keeps running stats that give you the percentage of sites you have recently visited. Downloads of the add-on/extension can be found below:



No-sound version (workplace-friendly)

is also available: click to install



UPDATE: Chrome extension now available (beta): click to install


A video showing the plugin working is posted below. If you’re interested in building on-top of this extension, you can find the MIT Licensed source code on github. More information can be found on jamiedubs.com.
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