When my daughters start dating, and we talk about it, I may lead with this, what boyfriends and girlfriends search for on Google. That’s it in a nutshell, right there. Sigh.

Google has been censoring search results in China so they would be allowed to operate in that country. Now, after a series of hack attempts apparently targeting human rights activist accounts, Google has decided to stop censoring search results. Carefully worded, but they clearly say without saying that the Chinese government was behind the attacks! More at the NY Times.

Google’s logo celebrating the 40th anniversary of Sesame Street:

UPDATE 1: Cookie Monster on Thursday:

UPDATE 2: Bert and Ernie on Friday:

Very happy boy today, as Google rolled out face recognition with the latest version of Picasa. Tag some faces, and it will automatically find the similar ones. Can’t wait to play with this.

The prospect of using Google Books they way you might an actual library looks bleak:

Start with dates. To take GB’s word for it, 1899 was a literary annus mirabilis, which saw the publication of Raymond Chandler’s Killer in the Rain, The Portable Dorothy Parker, André Malraux’ La Condition Humaine, Stephen King’s Christine, The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf, Raymond Williams’ Culture and Society, Robert Shelton’s biography of Bob Dylan, Fodor’s Guide to Nova Scotia, and the Portuguese edition of the book version of Yellow Submarine, to name just a few.

(via tmn)

Here’s how Google’s book scanning machine manages to return page scans with no trace of binder distortion, while leaving the book completely intact.

Excellent graph: how many As do people use when Googling Khaaan!.

RIP, Ricardo Montalban.

Two via kottke:

• Novelists Strike Fails To Affect Nation Whatsoever
• A.J. Jacobs makes George Clooney Google himself, and then some. Fantastic.

I thought I was going to be really late to the party on this, but a quick Google Blog search doesn't turn up an inordinate number of matches, so...

You can now change your route in Google Maps by dragging and dropping the blue route line. Add waypoints, map alternate routes, etc. Very cool, great responsive UI, etc.

Google just launched My Maps, which provides a nice interface for creating your own custom maps with shapes, placemarks, etc. Idris posted the idea of using this as a tool for creating field maps.

Cool idea, I'm going to do this for our various pickup locations. I just played with this for five minutes, and it's really nice. You can draw fields. You can stick in placemarks, which users can click on to get the "directions to here" command. One thing: when you share the link, make sure you use the "Link to this Page" link. If you use your "My Maps" link then stuff like the Zoom and View (map, satellite, or hybrid) are not shared with the user, and the tool just zooms in as close as possible while still displaying all your custom objects (which is no good around here, since we live in the sticks and Google doesn't have imagery at that resolution).

Anyway, here's the result of my five minutes of fiddling.

The Story of Sergey Brin:

Since then, Google has grown from just another Silicon Valley startup into the world's largest media corporation; in fact, based on its recent stock price of $513 per share, Google, which has made searching the Web easy and even fun, is larger than Disney, General Motors and McDonald's combined.

So much for "do no evil." Although one must at least consider their stance.

The world according to Google.

A Google employee bought 250 pounds of Silly Putty, and runs into a surprising problem. I'll definitely keep that in mind for when I buy my own bodyweight in Silly Putty.