corewerkz

This isn’t the first time, but it’s the longest period of missing user review’s yet. At least a few dozen people have been caught up in this mess and at least 2000 reviews have gone missing. On Oct 25th, a Google employee posted this (and this) on the Google Places forum:

“We suffered a temporary indexing outage beginning of October that prevented us from correctly serving reviews for some listings. The reviews should now be restored. Very sorry for the trouble this has caused for some of you!”

However, the reviews have not been restored. There has been no mention of any updates or any progress towards fixing this problem on Google’s end while more and more people continue to reply with stories of their reviews missing (all occuring around Oct 20th).

Google, please help out us small business owners. Google Places is a fantastic business portal, especially for small businesses with customers willing to take the time to leave us positive feedback. But when the feedback disappears, it hurts business big time. Please let us know if/when this issue can/will be resolved.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Google just released a Safari plug-in that makes your Google Docs available offline — when you don’t have an Internet connection. The setup process is effortless, here’s a quick-start guide:

Using Safari, go to the Google Gears web site and install. After installation, you’ll notice some new menu items on the docs.google.com site:

Click the “Offline” link and you’ll see this pop-up:

Read more…

Popularity: 7% [?]

It seems like everyday something new is added to one of Google’s services. Since I use Google Maps daily, it’s there where I’ve been noticing some really cool additions:

- Less than two year ago, Google Maps added the ability to monitor Live Traffic conditions.

- About six months ago, construction sites and traffic accidents were added.

- A few month ago, they added “estimated traffic at a specific time/day.”

Now, you can type in the phone number of a person or business you want to Google Map search! Not every person is in there, but just about every business I tried, including mine, is there.

Try it for yourself: Google Map Search of 818-358-8541 (my business)

Popularity: 5% [?]

Just checking the traffic from Burbank to Venice today when I noticed that Google has expanded their “traffic” view to include traffic accidents and construction warnings, including a description of the accident or construction taking place!

Popularity: 1% [?]

Paranoid? Try Tor (free!), it bounces all your Internet activity around a network of thousands of other servers/proxies (people like you), making it impossible to track your location or activity.

Tor works on Tiger and Leopard, but it’s best if you’re using Firefox (because Tor includes a one-click enabler plug-in for Firefox). Tor installation is a breeze as the installer package actually installs and configures four smaller programs:

1) Vidalia – GUI for Tor
2) Tor – a system for using the Internet anonymously
3) Privoxy – a filtering web proxy that integrates well with Tor
4) Torbutton – a 1-click way for Firefox users to enable or disable the browser’s use of Tor

I tried both the Stable and Unstable Mac versions and they both installed correctly. According to the instructions, I should have been good to go (except they forget to tell you to “Open Vidalia”). I opened Vidalia, opened Firefox, enabled Tor within Firefox, and I was anonymous.

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Popularity: 4% [?]