Simon Willison on google

279 items tagged “google”

2005

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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