Simon Willison on google

295 items tagged “google”

2007

The bright side: web spam is an evolutionary force that pushes relevance innovations such as trustrank forward. Spam created the market opportunity for Google, when Altavista succumbed in 97-98. Search startups should be praying to the spam gods for a second opportunity.

— Rick Skrenta # 15th February 2007, 11:15 am

Add OpenSearch to your site in five minutes. OpenSearch is easy. DeWitt demonstrates how you don’t even need a site search engine to implement it if you take advantage of Google’s site: operator. # 9th February 2007, 12:52 am

This site may harm your computer. Tom Dyson’s personal weblog was flagged by Google as hosting malicious software, without any clue as to what the problem was. Sure looks like a false positive to me. # 5th February 2007, 9:26 am

On Space Art in Sebastopol... Awesome. Our giant mosaic space invaders are going to show up on Google Earth! # 22nd January 2007, 10:44 pm

Designing Google Reader’s trends. “But beyond the visualization, this serves as a good example of collecting and understanding the ambient information that flows through our digital lives.” # 15th January 2007, 12:53 am

Details of Google’s Latest Security Hole. For a brief while you could use Blogger Custom Domains to point a Google subdomain at your own content, letting you hijack Google cookies and steal accounts for any Google services. # 14th January 2007, 1:36 pm

MacFUSE: FUSE for Mac OS X. Mac support for user-space custom file systems, API compatible with those already written for Linux. Amit Singh runs kernelthread.com; I hadn’t realised that he had moved to Google. # 12th January 2007, 9:47 am

2006

How is Google giving me access to this page?

Google have an open URL redirector, so you can craft a link that uses that:

[... 35 words]

2:38 pm / 27th December 2006 / askmetafilter, authentication, google, security, web

Beginning of the end for open web data APIs? Google just ditched their SOAP API in favour of a crippled Ajax widget. What are the implications for other free-as-in-beer APIs? # 20th December 2006, 12:44 am

Google Code gets wikis and file downloads. Someone finally wrote a project wiki that stores its pages inside the Subversion repository. # 16th December 2006, 12:35 pm

Google’s own cornershop. Google groups has an undocumented API for generating rounded corners. # 14th December 2006, 7:34 pm

Making GWT Better. Explains the philosophy behind GWT. It’s all about the tools! # 12th December 2006, 5:53 pm

GWT 1.3 Release Candidate is 100% Open Source. At least you can see how the code generator works now. # 12th December 2006, 5:50 pm

Google Mondrian. Internal Google application, powered in part by Django! # 1st December 2006, 11:27 am

Good Agile, Bad Agile. Includes interesting insight in to Google development processes. # 27th September 2006, 3:10 pm

2005

Chris Shiflett: Google XSS Example (via) UTF-7 is a nasty vector for XSS. # 24th December 2005, 5:21 pm

Google Base is interesting

I’m still trying to get my head around Google Base. Here’s a brain-dump of my thinking so far. First, some links.

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12:34 pm / 16th November 2005 / google, googlebase

Dissecting the Google Firefox Toolbar

Google have finally released a Firefox version of the Google Toolbar, with some nice praise for XUL in to the bargain. Of course, the most interesting part of the toolbar from a geeky point of view is the bit that queries Google’s servers for PageRank. Sure enough, if you download the google-toolbar.xpi file, unzip it, then unzip the google-toolbar.jar file within there’s a file called pagerank.js with all of the juicy details.

[... 234 words]

10:10 am / 8th July 2005 / firefox, google, reverseengineering, toolbar

Fighting RFCs with RFCs

Google’s recently released Web Accelerator apparently has some scary side-effects. It’s been spotted pre-loading links in password-protected applications, which can amount to clicking on every “delete this” link — bypassing even the JavaScript prompt you carefully added to give people the chance to think twice.

[... 353 words]

8:39 pm / 6th May 2005 / csrf, google, http, rfc, security, standards

Google cruft

New Google feature: Google Movies. Displays aggregated movie reviews (like Rotten Tomatoes), looks up local movie times based on your zip code saved in Google Local (more evidence of the fabled Google cookie), and even handles recommendations.

[... 120 words]

12:34 am / 24th February 2005 / cruft, google, search

Google Maps and XSL

I’ll probably write more on this later, but it seems that Google Maps is using XSL. I spotted it loading the following pages while sniffing its activity with LiveHTTPHeaders:

[... 174 words]

2:19 pm / 8th February 2005 / google, googlemaps, maps, xsl

Maps released. Google Maps Safari support is being worked on. # 8th February 2005, 12:03 pm