Results tagged “google”

Since its official launch in August 2008, Google Suggest has been fuelling a new auto-complete meme that has taken off on social sites like Digg and Reddit and even encouraged news sites like Slate to take a pseudo-sociolinguistic look at Google's most popular searches. What we search can tell us a lot about who we are, so we thought it would be funny illuminating to use Google Canada's version of Suggest to find and dissect common queries about Toronto.

In the two rooms of Gallery 44 at 401 Richmond Street West, you can see planes take off from Chicago’s O’Hare and Tokyo’s International Airport at the same time. The gallery’s current exhibition, entitled "Google Earth"—running from October 23 to November 28—features a handful of the millions of images captured by the aerial photography internet program.

Contrary to what Google Street View indicates, Browns Line doesn’t have a huge gap in it. Although Google has mapped most of the city in 3D, Street View still has a few dark spots, including almost all of the neighbourhoods of Alderwood and Long Branch, an area east of the Greenwood Subway Yards, and a residential neighbourhood southwest of Finch Avenue East and Warden Avenue. We smell conspiracy, and based on the omitted areas, we can only conclude that Google is covering up some sort of secret government plot involving City Councillor Mark Grimes, outdated factories, subways, and 1960s-style bungalows. God help us all.

                                   

Yesterday's launch of Google Street View created a new wave of digital tourism, with most of us starting with our home address and then scouring the mostly anonymous bodies nearby for flickers of recognition. As is par for the course with the service, the camera sometimes captures some unusual, quirky, and mysterious events. Here are some of our local favourites (so far).

At long last, Google Street View has gone live for Toronto as of this morning. We're gonna be perusing the sights today, but if you spot anything great, email it to tips@torontoist.com.

Last Friday at Bloor and Lansdowne, Torontoist reader Caitlin Jane spotted one of Google's Street View cars, caught precariously in the middle of an intersection, as the cars are wont to do. Jane writes: "it was trying to turn right onto Bloor (heading west) and had to wait for the light, then waited for pedestrians, which was how I was able to take such a great picture. Then I waved, haha."

Last Friday, Torontoist visited Google Canada’s headquarters in the Toronto Life Square Complex to discuss Toronto and Google Maps with Mike Pegg, Google Map's product marketing manager and the founder of Google Maps Mania (a blog devoted to Google Maps mashups and tools) and Tamara Micner, Google Canada’s communications officer. For the last few months, Google has remained elusive about its plans for Toronto's Street View, and we were hoping that our meeting might shed some light on its "impending" release. But unfortunately, we couldn’t pry a date out of our hosts. "We want to launch as soon as we can," said Pegg, somewhat ambiguously.

Hey, what do you know—it's Google's Street View car, stuck in traffic! (Lesson learnt, we suppose.) The above photos, captured recently by Torontoist's Nick Kozak, provide a rare close-up of the roof-mounted device used to capture Street View's 360-degree shots, which looks unnervingly like the love-child of Bentham's panopticon and WALL-E.

One of the largest concerns about Google Street View, a concern echoed here now that the search giant continues to collect the photos they need to roll out a comprehensive street-level map of our city, is privacy. What if Google catches you with someone you don't want people to know you were with? What if Google catches you coming out of somewhere you don't want people to know you were inside? Or what if Google catches you in one of your lesser moments: throwing up at the side of the road, say, or, God forbid, appearing to break the law, your image preserved online for all eternity? Sure, faces and licence plates will get automatically blurred out, but that feature has proven a bit dodgy, and someone's face and licence plate aren't the only way to identify them.

Spotted! Again! One of Google's Street View cars! This time by reader Dan Gouge, who sent us the shot above, of a car prowling Leslie and Commissioners Streets at 10:30 this morning, which means that Google isn't resting like we are this holiday Monday. Like the car another reader caught at the start of this month, this one's a Chevy Cobalt sedan, but it's not identical: the first car was green and its license place was BFEM 862; this one's purple and its license plate is BFEM 859. We're sensing a trend.

Google Street View for Toronto will launch "in the coming weeks," according to the Post, who note some of the sightings of the car around the city and who interviewed Jon Lasiuk—the photographer in Torontoist's Flickr Pool whose photo of one of the alleged cars we featured this past weekend. The Star, meanwhile, chronicles all the groups in the city who are planning to "make a visual statement if one of the conspicuous sedans comes driving down the road," such as the Toronto Cyclists Union. The cars themselves? Still (somewhat hilariously and a little unnervingly) elusive. According to the Star, staff reporter (and Fixer) Jack Lakey "spotted one yesterday, but the driver told him he wasn't supposed to talk to media and hurriedly drove off."

Spotted, cruising down the Gardiner Expressway on Thursday, by Torontoist Flickr Pool member Jon Lasiuk: Google's Street View car! Yes, the car that will expose your infidelity, encourage people to steal your stuff, and just in general bring all sorts of misery to your life, simply by showing what the public streets look like, is out and about around the city now. Sort of.

Last week, Google and Measurement Lab introduced a new web application called Glasnost that allows users to test the extent to which their ISP throttles or blocks their BitTorrent traffic. According to the statistics currently available on their site, Canada is one of the worst throttlers in the world—Canada ranks fourth for blocked hosts and second for blocked ISPs. All of the major Canadian ISPs admit to traffic shaping, but whether it’s necessary is difficult to determine as none of the providers are willing to publicly release their data. Glasnost’s timing couldn’t be better—in addition to providing much needed transparency, the data should also assist CRTC in its current investigation of traffic management policies.

          

Although the current business climate has caused a number of major corporations to scale back their workforces in and around Toronto, online giant Google, which first opened its local operation in 2002, recently bucked the trend by moving into a new custom-built space overlooking Dundas Square from the sixth floor of the Toronto Life Square complex. And unlike the company's old digs—a general-purpose office near Union Station—its new Canadian headquarters is very much in keeping with the legendary Google vibe.

Image of DEXTRE courtesy of NASA.

Fire at Queen and Bathurst. Adios to Duke's, the Suspect Video outlet, and a bunch of other cool places. Check out Torontoist's coverage of the fire here and here and here––Queen West will be closed until next week.

At first we assumed it was Scientology. After all, who else has the money to produce and purchase space for such glossy anti-pharmaceutical ads, which have been popping up all over transit shelters and buses in Ontario and Montreal? Google wasn't much help, and their Blog Search just pointed us to other people as perplexed as we were. And poor spellers with domination fantasies.

Frequent northbound travellers on the Bayview Extension have probably noticed the "Pottery Road" street sign pointing to a glorified supermarket driveway at the top of the hill, just south of Moore Avenue. Some may even have wondered how it relates to the more familiar street of the same name almost 1.5 kilometers to the south, winding up the valley wall to Broadview Avenue. The answer to this puzzle is that the two Pottery Roads used to be one, connecting Broadview and Moore Avenues, roughly following Cudmore Creek for much of its length.

Oh yes.

Google has always been known for its clean, lightweight, ad-free search page, but Canada's largest provider of broadband internet is under fire today for messing with it. Toronto-based Rogers has begun testing a controversial technique that allows the media empire to insert its own content into another entity's web page, angering net neutrality proponents. According to a tip passed to L.A.-based technology expert Lauren Weinstein, the system being employed is manufactured by the "in-browser...

A large part of the downtown core from College to Queens Quay and York to Bayview, was blacked-out for about 2 ½ hours yesterday. In response, Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty said that Toronto has the ability to generate all the power it needs and certainly wasn't getting any more from the Province, while Federal Finance Minister Jim Flaherty agreed, adding that Torontonians should stop whining and being all dependent on electricity.

While events like Luminato and Nuit Blanche are fantastic, Toronto is sorely lacking in quality, long-term public art. Last April, Henk Hofstra created an "urban river" in Drachten, Holland. The Blue Road installation is an example of what mind-blowing urban public art can be. Featuring 1000 metres of road painted blue and the phrase "Water is Life" written in eight-metre-high letters across it, the Blue Road is reminiscent of the waterway that used to be...

First the OPP, and now the Toronto Public Health department—everyone's getting Facebook! A few weeks ago, a woman went to the Toronto Wildlife Centre to drop off a bat that (unbeknownst to her) was infested with rabies. The health department wanted to warn her, so they tried all their top-secret official government methods of tracking people down (apparently consisting of the "telephone book" and "Google") but nothing panned out. So they did what any reasonable person would do and turned to Facebook (though they had to get special permission to use it, thanks to Gerry Phillips). They quickly found her.

A few weeks ago, Torontoist discussed a number of emerging collaborative gatherings, including Talk20 and Dorkbot, and a considerable omission was made when Drupal Toronto was left off that list. Toronto is quite renowned for having a very active and vital community contributing to the development of the Drupal Content Management System (CMS). What is Drupal and why should you care? Put quite simply, Drupal is an open source system for building websites. It is like Movable Type, the engine behind Torontoist and the Gothamist network, but it is extremely flexible and can be used to build any kind of site, from a simple blog to a social networking site. A global community of developers are working on modules that you can plug into the platform for all kinds of applications, from Google Maps mashups, to organizing a portfolio, to tracking recipes, Drupal is fantastic at organizing information at all scales.

When the TTC started mapping out its new future under Adam Giambrone, this probably wasn't what it had in mind.