Google Roundup: Cookies, Getting Rid of Wikipedia (Results), Song

Links for the underheard, in a futile gesture to whip the Long Tail.

Did you hear? Google will lower, to two years, the expiration time of its universal spying device, I mean, cookie. It'll just link to Michael Zimmer on Google cookie expiration:

My hunch is that the brilliant data-mining minds at Google recognize that if someone hasn't searched on Google in two years, their past history probably isn't a good indicator of their current needs. So, if linking to two-year-old data isn't all that valuable, they might as well just dump the cookie altogether. It doesn't harm their data-mining needs - and it's good PR.

[See also "More of Peter Fleischer Misleading on Google Data Retention" - he said it, I didn't.]

From the everybody talks about Wikipedia taking over Google results but finally someone did something about it department:

Will Critchlow: Search Google without wikipedia - a Firefox search plugin

Here at Distilled, it's something that came up in conversation a few times, so we decided to do something about it - we have created a Firefox search plugin that enables you to search Google without getting wikipedia results

[See also the CustomizeGoogle solution]

Humor: Lauren Weinstein - "I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major Googler"

And if you're really good it seems to us that you at least possess,
The skill to quote from memory full source of the Linux OS.

[Rumor has it that this line is only a slight exaggeration of what they expect]

Seth Finkelstein's Infothought blog (Wikipedia, Google, censorware, and an inside view of net-politics) - Syndicate site (subscribe, RSS)