The news of Google’s Street View cars collecting WiFi data has been echoed around the internet for a while now. Now, obviously this is a Bad Thing that they shouldn’t have been doing, and there should have been internal checks in place to make sure it didn’t happen. Fine, I agree. But the fact that it did happen doesn’t make them evil, as a lot of people seem to be saying. According to the official blog entry at least (which I don’t have any particular reason to doubt), it was a mistake. Mistakes happen, and a large organization like Google is going to have a correspondingly large number of them.

Now, think about it from the perspective of the Google people. Once they found out this happened, they couldn’t go back in time and prevent it. The data had already been collected, the news had already been released. Under the circumstances, deleting the data and shutting down the WiFi scanning was pretty much all they could do. Rereading the blog post, it occurs to me that this is pretty much the kind of reaction I’d want to see from a company in their …

The New York Times is apparently in love with Microsoft’s new search engine. They have a review of Bing that touts it as better than Google… but I don’t get it. I’ve tried Bing a few times and as far as I can tell, it seems like just a Google clone with flashier background images. The search results certainly aren’t any better, in my experience, and the features that the NYT seems so trippy over aren’t actually that much to get excited about.

For instance, displaying the first few paragraphs of each result in a popup box. As I recall, showing the initial paragraphs of the result page was one of the things Google dumped — Google was among the first to highlight the context of your search terms back in the old days when everybody else just displayed the first paragraphs of the page. Showing them in a popup box doesn’t make them any more useful, although to be fair it doesn’t really hurt.

The new panel to the left of the search results is kind of nifty, but it’s really just a list of related searches. Google has been offering related …