John Lamansky

In addition to a phishing protection extension, Google has released a “Blogger Web Comments” extension for Mozilla Firefox, which shows you what bloggers across the Internet are saying about the websites you’re visiting.

Although Google gives the impression that it’s Blogger-only, their FAQ says in question 4 that it uses Google Blog Search, meaning it supports all blogs (yippee!).

The extension puts an icon in Firefox’s status bar. When you click on it, you get a context menu:

When you click “View Comments,” it shows you a list:

A neat idea, but I haven’t discovered any interesting blogs (except mine, of course ;-)) using the extension yet.

Google released a cool new extension for Mozilla Firefox on Wednesday called “Google Safe Browsing.” It alerts you when you visit a known phishing site. A phishing site is a website designed to trick you into divulging financial or other personal information, usually for the purpose of identity theft or fraud.

Of course, if you follow basic anti-phishing rules (mainly, don’t click links in any email asking for information; type the links in manually), you should be safe from phishing threats, but this adds a nice extra level of protection.

Here’s a screenshot of what the alerts look like:

The answer? “Yes,” according to Google’s PageRank, which is an indicator of how “important” Google considers a webpage to be. I have noted that Apple.com has a Google PageRank of 10 out of 10, whereas Microsoft.com has 9 out of 10. But then again, Alexa’s ranking system gives Microsoft.com a higher ranking than Apple.com. Rather interesting…

Yippee! On October 20, I checked the Google PageRank of my blog and it was 4 out of 10, up from 0 out of 10. Naturally, the zero was because my blog is only, what, 3 months old. Anyway, for those of you who aren’t familiar with the acronym “SEO,” PageRank measures how important Google considers a site to be. Google calculates a site’s “importance” by determining how many other sites link to that particular site. There are two types of PageRank: “actual PageRank” and “toolbar PageRank.” Only Google knows a site’s “actual PageRank”; that’s the PageRank used as a factor in search results. The toolbar PageRank is the PageRank that is visible in the Google Toolbar, and it is a good indicator of how high your actual PageRank is compared to other sites.

In order for you to understand what toolbar PageRank is, imagine that the web is split into ten equal slices (well, eleven, if you count zero), ordered from lowest actual PageRank to highest actual PageRank. The “slice” that you end up in is your toolbar PageRank. So that means I’m in the fourth-lowest (or sixth-highest) slice of websites. So I’m about in the middle of the Web in terms of importance. Not bad, in my opinion.

Google announced earlier this month that they’ve released a new RSS reader, dubbed “Google Reader,” in Google Labs. Like the Google Personalized Homepage, the Reader is designed to present the web user with personalized content, but the Reader is dedicated entirely to feed reading. Visit the Google Reader homepage to start subscribing. Oh by the way, my blog has an RSS feed.

I tried out the reader briefly, but personally, I think for now I’ll stick with Firefox for my RSS reading. In these early stages the reader just seems too… clumsy to use for my taste.

Who knew you could search for Google AdWords advertisements? Just go to http://www.google.com/sponsoredlinks and type in your query. This could be useful for finding out how many affiliate ads there are for a company/product, or for checking out your AdWords competition.

Occasionally, you’ll notice that the logo on the Google homepage has changed to celebrate a certain occassion. After some browsing around on the Google website, I’ve compiled this list of the various logos Google has had over the years.

All Logos By Year (FYI, some of these pages have links to more logo pages):

• 2005
• 2004
• 2003
• 2002
• 2001
• 2000
• 1999

What happens when you cross Google and Dilbert? You get a Google/Dilbert logo/cartoon, which you can find at the Google and Dilbert Doodle page.

You can also visit this page for another interesting read on the person who designs all of these Google doodles and logos.

And finally, the Google Fan Logos page contains more logos compiled by Google fans.

It looks like representatives from Microsoft and Google will be competing in a trivia competition at the Linuxworld Conference & Expo in San Francisco on August 8. According to this PCWorld article, “Bill Hilf, lead program manager and leader of the Linux/Open Source lab at Microsoft, will captain the Microsoft team, and Chris DiBona, Google’s open source program manager, will lead the Google side.”

It will be interesting to learn who the victor is. Personally, I’m rooting for Google

According to this article from PCWorld, Google can be used to provide information for hacking attacks.

An example the article mentioned is the ability to use Google to determine the server structure of a large network. If you type in site:nasa, apparantly you get a list of the servers on NASA’s internal network, which could possibly be used to discover entry points for attacking the server systems. The same goes for site:google, site:yahoo, and similar queries.

This wasn’t mentioned directly in the article, but the article gave me the idea: typing something like “warning mysql site:nasa.gov” into Google can allow a searcher to find MySQL error messages on the NASA website. This could allow a hacker to obtain information about the database structure.

When I went to visit the Google homepage today, they had a “Google Moon” logo and a sentence that read:

See what the astronauts saw on July 20, 1969. Try Google Moon.

If you follow the link to moon.google.com, you’ll get a version of Google Maps that shows satellite imagery from the moon, along with information about the various lunar landings. Also check out the Google Moon FAQ, where they mention their G.C.H.E.E.S.E. research center that was announced on April Fool’s Day of 2004.

And when you’re looking at the Google Moon maps, just remember - don’t zoom in too close.