Google

From IndieWeb

Google is primarily used for searching the open web (where indieweb sites typically rank highly), but also produces end user software, and hosts a number of content silos and other services.

Utility services:

Google also provides hosting (client) services / web apps:

Notification services:

Messaging services:

Other services:


Software:

Content silos:

Google Cloud services:

  • Google App Engine
  • Google Compute Engine
  • Google Container Engine
  • ...

Other development tools:

Various business tools:

More: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_products

Exporting From Google

Readonly Silos

Google has at least one silo that they've shut down login/write access to, but are seemingly still maintaining its post permalinks (in redirect form)

Dead Silos

Google has shutdown a number of silos:

See site-deaths for more.

Dead Services

Google has shutdown a number of services (most recent first):

See also:

For more see:

Outages

On 2015-10-09, Google Drive (and associated Docs, Sheets, Slides) were offline.


Articles

Articles and blog posts critical of Google's behavior with respect to the open web, indieweb, open standards etc.:

Search

Main article: Google Search

Google is primarily known for its dominant search engine.

Google Supports Microformats

Google search will highlight results with microformats like those in IndieWeb posts.

Google Web History

You can save your Google search history by explicitly turning on Google Web History

And then look up your past Google searches:

Search History

Google collects your search history for the purpose of gathering data for ad serving.

They do this whether or not you are logged in (e.g. with cookies), and whether or not your have opted into Google Web History (see below), though you can also opt-out of all ad-customization.

There is something apparently that shows your demographic and psychographic buckets according to this data, but only at a high level. It should be browsable and searchable.

Apparently they scrub logs after somewhere between 6 and 18 months, and much of the extra details stored in history they don't store at all, or only temporarily (until the log savers get to it, i.e. days).

Criticism

See Also