Google has added the Grand Rapids area to their Street View feature on Google Maps.  Judging from the pictures, it looks to be from around September of last year.  Coverage mostly focuses on the area north of M-6, south and west of I-96, and east of Wilson / I-196.

I remember seeing one of the Street View cars near Byron Center & 52nd, but that area isn’t currently available for some reason.

If you find any interesting shots, post them here.  The pictures are all from daylight hours, so Division / 28th should be (relatively) clean.  Google is supposedly blurring the faces of people in Maps now, but I haven’t noticed anyone blurred out yet.

Tags: google, grand rapids, street view

From BBC News -

“The impact of heavy use and high temperatures on hard disk drive failure may be overstated, says a report by three Google engineers.  The report examined 100,000 commercial hard drives, ranging from 80GB to 400GB in capacity, used at Google since 2001.”

Google has found that, in their sample data, drives failed more frequently at lower temperatures, than drives at higher ones, unless the drive was older (3 years or more in this case).  It also found that drives which are used frequently are less prone to failure, compared with drives which see intermittent activity, even if the drives are the same age.

You can also read the original report from Google. 

Tags: google, storage

Google has changed the way they rank pages again, and this has inspired a search engine optimization group to accounce the DarkBlue SEO Challenge. The basic premise is that they made up a phrase (nigritude ultramarine), and are having people try to get the #1 ranking on Google after 2 months for that query. The winner gets an iPod when its all over.

I’m just a small site, not at all related to nigritude ultramarine. So I wont slip nigritude ultramarine into all my paragraphs. Why are they using some stupid phrase like nigritude ultramarine anyways? Its kinda silly, in a nigritude ultramarine sort of way.

Ok…enough of that.

Tags: contest, google, nigritude, seo, ultramarine