I guess the hint wasn’t good enough.

I’m sure this will be fixed in an hour or two, which may or may not break the link, but here it is anyway :)

Edit: They pulled the article about half an hour later.

Yes, they’ve finally done it. After months of talk about incorporating the mounds of real-time data to which Google has access, they’re finally piping it all into their own search results. The sources they listed are some pretty big names: Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed, MySpace, and Jaiku, among others — and that’s not counting the major media outlets they’ve also tapped to glean time-sensitive information.

See the official release for more details.

Annoyingly, of course, all anyone can say about this (aside from it’s about damn time) is that “Bing must be nudging them to be more competitive.” I can’t help but recall the fact that Google was in talks with Twitter regarding real-time search results several months before Bing ever existed.

Personalization without Google sign-in is enabled via anonymous cookie, while active accounts benefit from a beefed up version of already extant personalized search results — results now bolstered by location, search terms, search history, and web history. This all makes search results potentially more relevant to users, but not everyone is comfortable with this. I am, but I think I may become slightly more of a minority with every new release/advance/acquisition that Google makes. Either way, for the tinfoil-hat wearing masses out there, it only takes a couple of minutes to disable the whole thing.

Easy to Disable:

Logged into Google or not, the new personalized search is easy to deactivate. For Google account-holders, it’s as simple as removing Web History from their Google accounts.

The cookie that enables personalized search for users not signed-in to Google runs a lifespan of 180 days unless either removed by the user, or disabled via preference — at Google — here’s how:

1. In the top right corner of the search results page, click Web History.
2. On the resulting page, click Disable customizations.

Ironically, the preference to disable the cookie is in fact stored on the user’s computer as a cookie. Because of this, users should remember that clearing the affected browser’s cookies will reactivate the feature, which brings me to my last point.

Hate Google?

If, by chance, you despise Google and never meant to allow such a cookie on your system, completely removing it is as simple as clearing your browser’s cookies.

Official pages on the matter:

• Official Google Blog Post
• Google Code Overview
• Google Code Instructions

It’s as easy as entering two numbers in your internet connection settings. The payoff is minimal, but I’m quite happy to be using Google’s servers instead of Comcast’s.

That being said, it’s also rare, and I don’t think too much ill should be spoken of those at Downing St. who actually had the moral fortitude to push this through and actually carry it out. It’s not often that one of our advanced nations’ governments will commit to such an act of morality. Kudo’s go to them for this, even if it did take 30,000 signatures to make it happen.

Image via the Guardian

Image: Culture Smith Consulting

“Peter” in this case is the Facebook user logged in to his account. The woman in the “Hot Singles” ad is his own wife. According to Facebook, these ads “respect all privacy rules.” Personally, I think it’s just a nice obvious bit of proof that Facebook is truly sleezy under all the pretty blue makeup. Luckily there is a quick and easy opt-out for this nonsense, steps follow.

You’re automatically opted-in by Facebook

That’s right, you have to actually go into your settings to turn this off. Your face may have already been used to advertise any number of things to the people on your friends-list. Here’s how to do it:

• Highlight Settings at the top of the page, click Privacy Settings
• Click News Feed and Wall
• Hit the tab for Facebook Ads
• There should be a drop-down menu here, select “No One”

Firefox Users:Some Firefox users are unable to see a drop-down menu. This is a bug, and you’ll have to use a different browser.

Cheryl Smith was good enough to post this discovery to her blog when she was alerted by her (thankfully) good-humored husband.

I know it’s silly, I’m not a fool, but that doesn’t stop the little kid in me from getting excited over this. There are few things I can commend NASA for these days, and this is one of them. It brings back memories of visiting a national lab, or watching Nova on PBS. It’s the sort of thing NASA was meant to do, to inspire and put smiles on the faces of children while taking Mankind to the stars. It makes NASA fun again.

Enter your name here to ship it to Mars

Every so often, NASA does something like this. It hardly ever reaches the media and not many people ever take part in it, with the sole recent exception being the Colbert row over naming a chunk of the ISS in his honor. The lack of public support for these things is regrettable but expected. NASA just doesn’t “do it” for us anymore. They’ve lost their glamour, and little acts like this can be social life-support for the aging administration.

Now for the pragmatic side of it: How often do you get to throw your name into a chip getting shot to Mars? With the pitiful rate that our exploration of Space is progressing, it’s not looking likely that many of my childhood space-fantasies will come true any time soon.

At least this way, when I’m 50 or 60 years old, I’ll get to see reports of an old, abandoned Mars rover being recovered along with the names of some X thousand nerds people who sent them along for the ride. That’s fun for me, and honestly I don’t know why. It’s just the part of me that loves to watch bad sci-fi movies from my childhood, and ignore how wrong they tended to be about our future.

•The Mars Rover set to carry our names is slated to depart sometime in 2011.