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As one of the commenters on the article by Mr. Perez noted, many people who see Google Street View images as a significant privacy issue may ignore far more serious privacy issues, such as warrantless wiretapping.

You can see where Street View is available in the U.S. at http://maps.google.com/help/maps/streetview/.

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I came across the site by accident while doing a search on a company name. The site revealed that the president of the company had made a campaign contribution to George W. Bush in 2004. I tried a search on my zip code and the site returned a list of people in my zip code who had made contributions to either the Democratic or Republican party and the amount donated.

The site states the following:

All calculations are based on public records filed with the FEC of contributions by all individuals totaling more than $200 (and some totaling less than $200) to a single Republican or Democratic presidential campaign or national committee for the 2004 and 2008 election cycles.

FundRace is updated according to the reporting schedule set by the FEC. Public contribution data is geocoded using public U.S. Census Bureau data. Dynamic maps are powered by Google Maps.

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We're sorry...

... but your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application. To protect our users, we can't process your request right now.

We'll restore your access as quickly as possible, so try again soon. In the meantime, if you suspect that your computer or network has been infected, you might want to run a virus checker or spyware remover to make sure that your systems are free of viruses and other spurious software.

If you're continually receiving this error, you may be able to resolve the problem by deleting your Google cookie and revisiting Google. For browser-specific instructions, please consult your browser's online support center.

I had been accessing the spreadsheet, but when I attempted to enter a value in one of its cells, I kept getting a message stating I was leaving a secure connection. I would click on OK and the message would keep repeating until I finally got the message above..

I first tried deleting the Google cookies I found on the PC I was using. I was using Internet Explorer (IE), so the cookies were in C:\Documents and Settings\Username\Cookies, where Username was the account I was logged into the PC under. I deleted the following cookies and logged out of Google Docs, but still got the message about a virus or spyware application:

username@docs.google[1].txt
username@google[2].txt

That didn't resolve the problem./ I finally closed the instance of Internet Explorer I had open and then looked for Google cookies again. I deleted the one I found and opened another instance of Internet Explorer. I was then able to log into Google Docs again and access the spreadsheet.

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Microsoft is apparently ending the projects because it doesn't see them as revenue generating projects. Thankfully, Google, whose own efforts led Microsoft to embark on similar projects, will continue its efforts to digitize books. The Google Book Search Library Project allows one to view snippets of books still under copyright and to download the entire contents of books that are no longer under copyright.

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<?
$email = "yourname@example.com";
if( eregi("googlebot", $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT']) )
{ 
    mail($email, "Googlebot Alert", 
            "Google just indexed your following page: " .
            $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']); 
}
?>

You will, of course, need to replace yourname@example.com with your own email address.

On a Linux or Unix system, you can issue the following commands to see how many requests for pages on your site today have come from a Googlebot visit to your site.

grep "$(date +"%d/%b/%Y")" access.log | grep -i "googlebot" | wc -l

You will need to substitute the name and location of the log file that tracks access to your site for access.log.

The $(date +"%d/%b/%Y") tells grep to look for occurrences of the current date in the form dd/mmm/YYYY, e.g. 03/Apr/2007 . In my Apache log files, entries appear similar to the one below.

66.249.66.147 - - [03/Apr/2007:09:10:42 -0400] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 200 146

If the date is formatted in a different manner in your log file, you will need to adjust the format accordingly. You can obtain information on formatting the date with man date.

If you don't have IP addresses translated to a FQDN, e.g. if your log file records 66.249.66.147 instead of crawl-66-249-66-147.googlebot.com, which is the case for my log file, then you will need to look for the IP address range that is used by Googlebot. Googlebot's and Mediapartners-google's IP indicates that 66.249.71.x appears to be assigned to Googlebot, though reverse name lookups only work up to 66.249.71.208. You can use the following commands to search for the Googlebot IP address range 66.249.71.1 to 66.249.71.255.

grep "$(date +"%d/%b/%Y")" access.log | grep -i '66.249.66.' | wc -l

The Googlebot's and Mediapartners-google's IP article mentions that Google uses a separate bot that checks pages with Google AdSense ads on them. So, if you have Google AdSense ads on your site, then both the main Googlebot bot and the MediaPartners-Google bot will probably visit your site. The author of that article states he has seen the following IP addresses used for the Mediapartners-Google bot.

References:

1. Googlebot Alert
   By Philipp Lenssen
   June 23, 2004
   Google Blogoscoped



2. Googlebot's and Mediapartners-google's IP
   By Tim Johansson
   gurka.se



3. FQDN
   Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia



4. Internet bot
   Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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[ More Info ]

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Linkdomain Operator Supported

MSN Search
AltaVista
AlltheWeb

Linkdomain Operator Not Supported

Google
AOL Search
Ask.com
Gigablast
LookSmart

With MSN Search you can also use "links to", e.g. links to support.moonpoint.com. See Search Builder and advanced search options for other MSN Search operators.

Google does not provide a linkdomain operator, but I could search on " support.moonpoint.com" to find pages that contain pages that contain the "support.moonpoint.com", though that will find only instances where the website name appears on a page, not instances where a link points to the site.

References:

1. Who is linking to my website?
   By Raghavendra Prabhu, a developer in Microsoft on the MSN/Windows Live Search backend team

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The Wayback Machine aka Internet Archive is an attempt to preserve a historical record of the Web, just as libraries perserve written materials for posterity.

In the words of its maintainers:

The Internet Archive is a 501(c)(3) non-profit that was founded to build an .Internet library,. with the purpose of offering permanent access for researchers, historians, and scholars to historical collections that exist in digital format. Founded in 1996 and located in the Presidio of San Francisco, the Archive has been receiving data donations from Alexa Internet and others. In late 1999, the organization started to grow to include more well-rounded collections. Now the Internet Archive includes texts, audio, moving images, and software as well as archived web pages in our collections.

I've encountered instances where I or someone else had a bookmark to a site with needed information that was once there, but when I attempted to visit the bookmarked webpage again, the site no longer existed or the relevant information was no longer there. And I couldn't find it anywhere else on the web. But in several such instances I've been able to go to the Wayback Machine, type in the site's address and locate the information in an archive of the website within the Wayback Machine. The Wayback Machine will often have snapshots of the site at various points in time. So, if the site existed two years ago, but is no longer present, you may still be able to retrieve information it contained from the Wayback Machine.

Since this site wasn't there, I wanted to add it. The FAQ for the site states that you can go to Alexa Web Search -- For Webmasters to submit your site to an Alexa search, which will result in it being incorporated into the Internet Archive. The FAQ states "Sites are usually crawled within 24 hours and no more then 48. Right now there is a 6-12 month lag between the date a site is crawled and the date it appears in the Wayback Machine."

I submitted my site, but then realized I probably should have waited until power is restored to the facility where the webserver is housed, since I don't know what will occur if the Alexa webcrawler tries to access it, but finds it isn't accessible. Will it try again later or just discard the request? I suppose I should resubmit the request once the site is available again.

Some of you may recall another "Wayback Machine". There was a cartoon, "Peabody's Improbable History", which I used to watch as a boy. In it a boy, Sherman, and his erudite talking dog, Mr. Peabody would travel back in time each episode using Mr. Peabody's time machine, which was called the "Wayback Machine". They would then fix problems to make sure history would turn out the way we know it.

References:

1. Internet Archive
   Universal Access to Human Knowledge
2. Peabody's Improbable History
   Don Markstein's Toonopedia
3. Mr. Peabody
   Wikipedia
4. Hollywood on Shakespeare and Bacon
   Sir Francis Bacon's New Advancement of Learning

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The interview with David Vise also mentions that the former chef for the Grateful Dead was the executive chef for Google for awhile, but has since left to start his own restaurant.

References:

1. Google Vs. the Government
   MSNBC.com
   Date: January 25, 2006
2. Internet Filtering in Singapore in 2004-2005: A Country Study
3. Censorshipo in Singapore
   From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
4. Internet Censorhip - China

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