Never seen the two together until just few hours back when I stumbled upon a sphinn story which took me to this article, the article is written by the guy behind Gbrain addon for Mozilla Firefox. Let me first tell you about this addon,
gBrain is a Firefox extension to automagically bookmark all pages you visit at the Google bookmark service. This effectively moves your browser history from your browser instance to a central place on the net (Google) where it is easily searchable from every computer.
Google contacted this guy requesting him to take down his not-so-popular-but-useful Firefox Extension. I wonder why they requested, they could have used cease-and-desist or something like that, but it’s good to see this anyway.
The guy asked Google out of his curiosity the reason behind this request. At first Google message bearer wasn’t able to answer, but after a day or two the developer of Google Bookmarks and Google Web History contacted him directly.
The Google engineer told him about potential scalability problems this extension could breed. The extension creates 1000s of bookmarks per person per month. Google search algorithm is taught to go through the person’s bookmarks every time there is a query. Ok, now it makes some sense. Google Bookmarks was never made to handle thousands of bookmarks.
Whatever be the reason for this take down request, it’s not very Google of them. One sweet thing Google did to the developer at the end was sending him a T-Shirt and a USB card reader. The guy has now taken down this extension completely. And another sweet thing was these things were of no use to the guy and he decided to give away to his readers. The world is getting nicer, or is it just me?
If you would like to make a comment, please fill out the form below.
really interesting to have google request ;)