Google’s new internal search is a “thinly-veiled” attack on Google, according to Time.com. Given Google’s tardiness in doing something dramatic to improve search, I’m in favor of any attack on the search giant. Especially one that, Time speculates could spell the end of Google+. That wouldn’t bother me much, either.

I have the new Facebook search running on my iPhone, part of Facebook Inc.’s mobile-first strategy (also to beat Google). Some coworkers and I have been running searches, trying to figure out how useful the new feature might be.

Too useful may be the answer, as the results include not just items that appeared in my timeline, but also items that were, perhaps, qualified to appear, but were filtered out by Facebook’s algorithms. This makes the results longer and wider than expected. It’s probably a good thing, but I’m not yet ready to say.

Facebook should have offered search years ago, but when you think about it, searching Facebook is quite complex. The search has to deal with who my friends are, what my interests are and a matrix of privacy permissions. Making sure people only see what they are supposed to see seems like a tall order.

There is, as always, a downside: Until now, we’ve been posting to Facebook with some assurance that old posts would eventually become just too time-consuming for people to find. Those days are now over.

I’ve already flipped the Facebook switch that turned my old Public posts into Friends posts as a way to at least vaguely limit who reads my old FB rants. But the more friends you have, the less useful the switch becomes.

My next big Facebook project will be converting post of my friends into Acquaintances, which allows me to exclude them from posts that my true friends still get to see.

Honoring Alan Turing

In other news, if you only see one movie this holiday, make it The Imitation Game, now in limited cities and opening nationally on Christmas Day. It is the story of a man that you and me and the whole of humanity owes a tremendous debt.

He invented computing as we know it and broke Nazi Enigma cryptography. He is credited with saving as many as 14 million lives by helping end World War II sooner than expected.

So society persecuted him for being a homosexual, and he killed himself.

This is, of course, the story of Alan Turing and if you have somehow missed it, stop now and look him up in the Wikipedia. I’ll be here when you cut back over to this window.

The film has received five Golden Globe nominations and is seen as an Oscar contender. It is good that, because of the film, more people will know Turing’s story. Someday our collective shame should recede, but I hope not.

Yuck: Evernote, the high street boutique

Is anyone else tired of how, when we see something from Evernote in our inboxes, it’s not about what great things are happening with the software? Or even the not so great things. It’s about boutique water bottles, leather goods, bags, a fine-point stylus, an “Evernote edition” scanner, socks, Moleskine notebooks and other items that vaguely work (or not) with the Evernote service.

And, of course, logo wear. I am not sure why they are in the tech fashion business — I bet the answer is “why not?” They even include an icon to take you to their “Market” in the program itself. The store used to be called “The Trunk,” as I remember, playing with the company’s elephant logo.

On a positive note, if you aren’t using Evernote’s document camera feature with you smartphone, you should be. It makes great pics of documents and business cards, which it then runs text recognition on.

This is great, but I need for the card contents to be dropped into my contact manager, which I don’t believe the program can do. I hope the always feature-ambitious Evernote will realize it will never be most users’ contact manager of choice.

photo credit: Ksayer1 via photopin cc