Googleplex

From the comments for “Who’s Trackin’ Who?”:

Church: Interesting…  so– did you look? [at the package tracking link that G-Mail called up unbidden, when it noticed a tracking number in the text of my outgoing e-mail]

Well…  yeah.  It didn’t say “Link to the FedEx tracking site”;  it just said “track package # (xxx)”.  I was curious to see whether or not it had any idea what it was talking about (so to speak.) Are you suggesting that I justified its inclusion by pressing it?  ;)

Actually, I probably shouldn’t have been surprised.  Anyone who uses G-Mail already knows that it searches the body text of all your incoming and outgoing e-mails for keywords, and then puts up targeted advertising links in the sidebar based upon what it finds (although I don’t see them, thanks to the Firefox modding package Greasemonkey;  props to my good friend Neuro for pushing me over that barrier.)  And Google itself does the same thing if you type the tracking number of any package into it manually-  at least for FedEx, UPS and the US Postal Service.  Along with quite a few other tricks, most of which I was happily oblivious to…

You can find a quick list of some of them provided by Google itself here, or search the Web with a term like “things you can do with Google” to find plenty of articles about it.

(Do it with the Yahoo search engine.  They love that.)