Google Street View is a pretty nice implementation of street level maps (originally implemented by A9, which is dead now, sadly). However, check this awesome view of Lombard Street in San Francisco. Notice something? The license plate numbers of the person are clearly visible! It seems that unlike the normal Satellite View which attempts to clean up as many people as possible, the Street View just gives up and shows whatever you see.

Click to zoom in on the number plate

Anuj claims public photographs are public record, so no one should care, but I don’t know… I would have a problem with every single person on the internet knowing that my red Chevy Cobalt numbered 5NEX174 was criss-crossing down the crooked street with someone in the passenger seat on a nice summer day.

Update: More “interesting pictures”:

* Man coming out of strip club — Another man
* Guy checking out woman
* Reflection of the camera car

Google buys personalized search start-up: I'm betting they're going to come up with a Copernic clone soon.

Regarding Maya, the spam harvester trap that I've set up; I forgot to add that I didn't write the script I'm using. While I did have a related idea about thwarting spammers (who happen to be sending about 60-70 junk emails every day to my TimepassTown.com inbox), I discovered a host of spam harvester traps that people have written in various languages. If you would like to contribute your bandwidth and set up a trap on your website, pick up a script from here. Be careful though. Make sure you properly configure your robots.txt file to stop the well behaved indexers like Google, etc.

Is Google striving to become the uber-input-box? If you type in an address, the corresponding street map appears. Type in a company stock name, and it will fetch you the stock quotes. And then there's phone book and spell check; and the latest calculator facility.

I guess it's not just about document search anymore - it's about information. Whatever kind of information that may be. They want everyone on the internet to have that Google window open on their desktop, all the time. If you want to know something, type it in. Goo

Google churns out the most amazing things! I was looking for comments/ articles about Blogsnob, and saw that we'd been featured in the Hindu Business Line!! We did do an interview with Mr. Nair a long time ago, but since he did'nt contact us after that, we didn't know if we got featured or not.
Go check out the article here. It was published on July 29th - and we didn't even know! Also note the number of time he writes "says Nandi".