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Today’s Guests:

  • Sebastian Rupley, Co-Crank, PCMagCast.com
  • Cade Metz, U.S. Editor, The Register
  • Vanessa Fox, Founder, NineByBlue

The Topics:

  • Is the Google Search Model Broken?
  • Intel Mulls Free Energy for Mobile Devices
  • Wal-Mart To Start Selling iPhones
  • British ISPs Censor Wikipedia



  1. WhoKnu says:

    most the time Sebastian Rupley is just an idiot who has no idea what the hell he’s talking about, but in this CG he’s a total insufferable prick. i was praying for someone to stand up and beat him in the face with their chair. do the show a favor and ban him; ASAP.

  2. WmDE says:

    John C. Dvorak spokesmodel for eHarmony!?

    What kind of match does eHarmony do when the discount code is ehcranky?

  3. Motown says:

    I second the concerns about John C. Dvorak as an eHarmony.com spokesman.

    But my comment on the show’s debate, posted a few minutes ago as a comment at her blog:

    The lovely Vanessa and her defenders have no defense for Google and SEO other than what Churchill said about democracy: “It’s the worst of all possible systems … but there are none better.”

    Never encountered unrepeatable searches? Parked sites at the top of a search result? And you claim to be a tech journalist — or whatever it is you call yourself? Come on. You must really be in a “fairyland”.

    “[A]nd in their defense, they’ve got lots of people working on it, all the time” — Awwww, isn’t that sweet. They’ve got people working on it. Yet at the same time they position themselves in the public mind as the center of gravity on the internet, the “observer” that essentially gives the internet its form by presenting it in a navigable form to web users. So on one hand, in the concrete and tangible realm, they make the websurfing experience suffer by providing crappy search results (note: ‘better than the others’ still doesn’t mean good). On the other hand *they try real hard* and have all sorts of institutional mechanisms in place to poorly combat the noise threatening to overwhelm the signal.

    It’s no secret that with Google Desktop, the advent of cloud computing, and so on, Google is trying to be more than just a friendly, neutral search engine. It’s trying to take the point of interface away from the OS to Internet-as-Google/Google-as-Internet. Any discussion of its relative success providing search results a la SEO and other methods has to occur in this light. People like Vanessa seem surprisingly like a bunch of reactionaries with their “Heck of a job, Brownie” Google-friendly views.

  4. nom de plume says:

    i get the message drilled through out this epsiode – that google has issues with its products. that’s all fine with a newscast since i do believe these problems are factual but for a blog i expect something more – maybe some insight as to what has to be done, solutions to these problems if you will. but i guess the ability to look beyond the problem differentiates adults and infants. you might think googleplex is the chocolate factory mr. cade metz, but to some of us readers, you and your fiends at the register are just a bunch of whinny babies relying on the nanny to get their diapers changed.


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