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Google is primarily used for searching the open web (where indieweb sites typically rank highly), but also hosts a number of content silos and other services.
Content silos:
- Blogger - one of the oldest blogging platforms, previously called "Blogspot" (and the software itself was called Blogger).
- Google Calendar
- Google Contacts
- Google Docs
- Google feedburner
- Google Photos
- Google Keep - http://www.google.com/keep/ - for notes, thoughts
- Google+ (AKA "Google Plus", G+, GPlus)
- Picasa
- YouTube
- ...
Google also provides hosted client services / web apps:
- Gmail - hosted email service
Notification services:
Other services:
Google Cloud services:
- Google App Engine
- Google Compute Engine
- Google Container Engine
- ...
Other development tools:
Various business tools:
More: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_products
Contents |
Exporting From Google
- Google Takeout allows you to export your data from Google's services.
- See: Data Liberation Front
- http://www.flailingmonkey.com/2013/03/26/moving-contacts-calendar-google/
Readonly Silos
Google has at least one silo that they've shut down login/write access to, but are seemingly still maintaining its post permalinks (in redirect form)
- Google Buzz
- ...
Dead Silos
Google has shutdown a number of silos:
- 2009-04: Dodgeball
- 2010-05-15: Etherpad
- 2012-04-30: Wave
- 2016-01-25: Google Code
- ...
See site-deaths for more.
Dead Services
Google has shutdown a number of services (most recent first):
- 2016-01[1] Google broke their original Google Profile URLs, e.g. this used to work in the Google Buzz days until 2015-12[2], but now (2016-02-14) just 404s:
- http://google.com/profiles/tantek (with rel-me support too)
- Workaround: they can be manually fixed by URL inspection and changing to e.g.:
- http://profiles.google.com/tantek
- 2013-07-01 Google Reader shut down.[3][4]
- 2012-04-20 Social Graph API (launched 2008).[5]
- 2011-07-02 Google Real-Time Search shut down.
- ...
See also:
- The Guardian / Google Keep? It'll probably be with us until March 2017 - on average
How long do Google services and APIs survive? A Guardian analysis of 39 that have been killed off says just under four years, on average.
For more see:
Outages
On 2015-10-09, Google Drive (and associated Docs, Sheets, Slides) were offline.
Articles
Articles and blog posts critical of Google's behavior with respect to the open web, indieweb, open standards etc.:
Search
Google is primarily known for its dominant search engine.
Google Web History
You can save your Google search history by explicitly turning on Google Web History
And then look up your past Google searches:
- https://history.google.com/history/lookup (requires login)
Search History
Google collects your search history for the purpose of gathering data for ad serving.
They do this whether or not you are logged in (e.g. with cookies), and whether or not your have opted into Google Web History (see below), though you can also opt-out of all ad-customization.
There is something apparently that shows your demographic and psychographic buckets according to this data, but only at a high level. It should be browsable and searchable.
Apparently they scrub logs after somewhere between 6 and 18 months, and much of the extra details stored in history they don't store at all, or only temporarily (until the log savers get to it, i.e. days).
Aaron and Tantek met via Google Search
On 2009-09-23, IndieWebCamp co-founders Aaron Parecki and Tantek Çelik met at an event Tantek organized, that Aaron found, via Googling for that date[6] and meetup san francisco[7] on the day of.
Aaron Parecki was visiting San Francisco (from Portland), used Google on 2009-09-23 to search for meetups in San Francisco, and found:
Aaron showed up, met a bunch of the microformats community in San Francisco:
Including Tantek. They kept up remotely and met again at the Federated Social Web Summit 2010, which provided inspiration for them to co-found the IndieWebCamp community, and co-organize (with Amber Case and Crystal Beasley) the first IndieWebCamp two-day event in 2011.
