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Google takes on Pandora, Spotify

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Google Street View maps Fukushima nuclear ghost town

Google Street View maps Fukushima nuclear ghost town - CNN.comvar cnnCurrTime=new Date(1365091427000),cnnCurrHour=12,cnnCurrMin=3,cnnCurrDay="Thu",cnnIsIntl=true,clickID=212106,cnn_cvpAdpre="edition.",cnnCVPAdSectionT1="edition.cnn.com_asia_main_t1",cnnCVPAdSectionInPage="edition.cnn.com_asia_main_inpage",cnnShareUrl="%2F2013%2F03%2F28%2Fworld%2Fasia%2Fjapan-google%2Findex.html",cnnShareTitle="Google%20Street%20View%20maps%20Fukushima%20nuclear%20ghost%20town",cnnShareDesc="",cnnFirstPub=new Date('Thursday Mar 28 04:34:16 EDT 2013'),cnnSectionName="world",cnnSubSectionName="wrd : asia",cnnPageType="Story",cnnBrandingValue="default";cnnPartnerValue="";cnnOmniBranding="",cnnAuthor="Peter Shadbolt, CNN",disqus_category_id=207582,disqus_identifier="/2013/03/28/world/asia/japan-google/index.html",disqus_title="Google Street View maps Fukushima nuclear ghost town",cnn_edtnswtchver="edition",cnnIsStoryPage=true,cnn_metadata = {},cnn_shareconfig = [];cnn_metadata = {section: ["world","wrd : asia"],friendly_name: "Google Street View maps Fukushima nuclear ghost town",template_type: "content",template_type_content: "gallery",business: {cnn: {page: {author: "Peter Shadbolt, CNN",broadcast_franchise: "",video_embed_count: "2",publish_date: "2013/03/28",photo_gallery: "Google Street View maps Fukushima nuclear ghost town"},video: {video_player: ""}}},user: {authenticated: "",segment: {age: "",zip: "",gender: ""}}};if (typeof(cnnOmniPartner) !== "undefined") {if (cnn_metadata.template_type_content === "") {cnn_metadata.template_type_content = "partner";}}var photo_gallery = "Google Street View maps Fukushima nuclear ghost town";if(typeof CNN==='undefined'){var CNN=Class.create();}CNN.expandableMap=[''];function _loginOptions(){};var disqus_url=(typeof disqus_identifier!=='undefined') ? 'http://www.cnn.com/2013/03/28/world/asia/japan-google/index.html' : 'http://www.cnn.com'+location.pathname;cnnad_newTileIDGroup(['970x66_top','300x250_rgt','300x250_rgt2','336x280_rgt','336x850_rgt','300x150_rgt','728x90_top','728x90_bot','BG_Skin','120x90_bot1','120x90_bot2','120x90_bot3']);cnnad_newTileIDGroup(['607x95_adlinks','336x280_adlinks']); CNN

EDITION: INTERNATIONAL U.S. MÉXICO ARABIC TV: CNNi CNN en Español Set edition preference Sign up Log in Home Video World U.S. Africa Asia Europe Latin America Middle East Business World Sport Entertainment Tech Travel iReport SHARE THISPrintEmailMore sharingRedditStumbleUponDelicious/* push in config for this share instance */cnn_shareconfig.push({"id" : "cnn_sharebar1","url" : "http://www.cnn.com/2013/03/28/world/asia/japan-google/index.html","title" : "Google Street View maps Fukushima nuclear ghost town"});Google Street View maps Fukushima nuclear ghost townBy Peter Shadbolt, CNNMarch 28, 2013 -- Updated 0926 GMT (1726 HKT)if (typeof cnnArticleGallery=="undefined"){var cnnArticleGallery={};if(typeof cnnArticleGallery.currentImageList=="undefined"){cnnArticleGallery.currentImageList=[];}}var expGalleryPT00=new ArticleExpandableGallery();expGalleryPT00.setImageCount(4);expGalleryPT00.setAdsRefreshCount(3);//cnn_adbptrackpgalimg("Charting a ghost town", 1);.cnn_html_slideshow_metadata > .cnn_html_media_utility::before{color:red;content:'>>';font-size:9px;line-height:12px;padding-right:1px}.cnnstrylccimg640{margin:0 27px 14px 0}.captionText{filter:alpha(opacity=100);opacity:1}.cnn_html_slideshow_media_caption a,.cnn_html_slideshow_media_caption a:visited,.cnn_html_slideshow_media_caption a:link,.captionText a,.captionText a:visited,.captiontext a:link{color:#004276;outline:medium none}.cnnVerticalGalleryPhoto{margin:0 auto;padding-right:68px;width:270px}

The Google Street View car takes images with its roof-mounted camera amid the devastation of Namie-machi.cnnArticleGallery.currentImageList[cnnArticleGallery.currentImageList.length]={"currentPicture":true,"x":0,"y":0,"pos":1,"title":"Charting a ghost town"}Authorities have not been able to enter the exclusion zone to clean up earthquake damage from two years ago.cnnArticleGallery.currentImageList[cnnArticleGallery.currentImageList.length]={"currentPicture":false,"x":0,"y":0,"pos":2,"title":"Charting a ghost town"}A fishing trawler remains by the roadside where it was deposited by the tsunami of March 11, 2011.cnnArticleGallery.currentImageList[cnnArticleGallery.currentImageList.length]={"currentPicture":false,"x":0,"y":0,"pos":3,"title":"Charting a ghost town"}A screen grab from Google Street View of one of Namie-machi's now-deserted main streets.cnnArticleGallery.currentImageList[cnnArticleGallery.currentImageList.length]={"currentPicture":false,"x":0,"y":0,"pos":4,"title":"Charting a ghost town"}HIDE CAPTIONCharting a ghost townCharting a ghost townCharting a ghost townCharting a ghost town<<<

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(CNN) -- Cars remain where they were crushed by falling walls two years ago, drink vending machines stand in gloomy isolation outside shuttered shops and traffic lights still blink amber in deserted streets.

It might sound like the Hollywood setting for a post-apocalyptic dystopia but in Namie-machi, Fukushima, the scene of desolation is all too real.

Two years after Fukushima's nuclear power plant meltdown forced the 22,000 residents of Namie to flee -- snap-freezing the ordinary Japanese town at the moment the disaster struck on March 11, 2011 -- Google Street View has posted striking images of the devastation inside Fukushima's 12-mile evacuation zone.

"Most of the damage that we all remember and saw was the tsunami damage because it was much more drastic," said David Marx, head of product communications, Google Asia-Pacific, who accompanied the Google Street View vehicle as it took 360-degree pictures along Namie's gloomily abandoned and overgrown streets.

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Ghost town: Japan's exclusion zone "The earthquake, even though it was big, there was very little seen of just earthquake-damaged buildings -- so many buildings were either completely demolished or tilted or bent."

He said the scenes became even more dramatic as the Google vehicles approached the city's waterways.

"That area right next to the river is just covered in boats -- there are just huge piles of wreckage that haven't been cleaned up," he said. "It's pretty intense to see."

Google's Street View cars began taking the images this month at the invitation of the city mayor who wanted a way for evacuated residents, many of whom are still in temporary accommodation, to take a virtual tour of their abandoned properties.

"Two years have passed since the disaster, but people still aren't allowed to enter Namie-machi," Mayor Tamotsu Baba said on Google's official blog.

So many buildings were either completely demolished or tilted or bent
David Marx"Many of the displaced townspeople have asked to see the current state of their city, and there are surely many people around the world who want a better sense of how the nuclear incident affected surrounding communities."

Marx said the Google drivers took precautions and their cars were monitored in line with the Fukushima Prefecture and Namie-machi guidelines.

"I was wearing protective gear," he said. "The good news is that it's safer to be in a car than out."

While a recent WHO report says the cancer risk from Fukushima is low, Japanese authorities are taking no chances. The 12-mile exclusion zone is likely to remain in place for the foreseeable future and Mayor Baba concedes that generations of Namie residents may never see their homes again.

"Those of us in the older generation feel that we received this town from our forbearers, and we feel great pain that we cannot pass it down to our children," he said on the blog. "We want this Street View imagery to become a permanent record of what happened to Namie-machi in the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster."

Authorities took more than a month to begin looking for bodies in Namie due to the danger of radiation.

"After being set off-limits, we have not been able to clean up the wreckage on the side of the road, including the many fishing boats that were washed several kilometers inland," Baba said

"Ever since the March disaster, the rest of the world has been moving forward, and many places in Japan have started recovering. But in Namie-machi time stands still. With the lingering nuclear hazard, we have only been able to do cursory work for two whole years."

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Bing takes on Google over shopping

Bing's Scroogled campaign takes aim at Google's paid shopping listings. Google Shopping is the target of a nationwide attack ad from Microsoft's Bing search engineGoogle now only includes paying vendors in its search results Bing also includes paid vendors from third-party sites, but ranks paid and free listings equallyAmazon, the biggest online shopping portal, no longer lists products on Google

(CNN) -- If Black Friday lines and stories of violence, vehicular assault and child abandonment taught us anything, it's that the holiday shopping season is a dark, competitive time.

Now search engines are getting into the cutthroat holiday spirit. In a new attack on Google, Microsoft's Bing search engine accuses its rival's Google Shopping tool of being dishonest by only including paying vendors, ranking listings by how much they pay, and not clearly marking the results as sponsored.

To make its point, Bing has launched a detailed site accusing Google Search of unsavory business practices and coined a new word: Scroogled.

"In the beginning, Google preached, 'Don't be evil' -- but that changed on May 31, 2012. That's when Google Shopping announced a new initiative. Simply put, all of their shopping results are now paid ads," reads the campaign's mission statement. It goes on to say "when you limit choices and rank them by payment, consumers get Scroogled."

The accusations are based on real changes. To appear in Google Shopping results, merchants must now pay for Google's Product Listing Ads. The company publicly announced the switch from free listings to a paid-inclusion system in May, and the transition was completed on October 17 in the United States. The new Google Shopping will roll out in more countries starting in February.

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Bing's own search results also include results from companies that have paid to be listed. Weitz says the majority of its listings are from vendors that signed up for free, but it also includes products from third-party aggregators like the eBay-owned Shopping.com. Bing has actually shut down its free sign-up for the holiday season, and any new vendors interested in being listed are directed to Shopping.com, where they will have to pay to be included in search results.

Bing does not visually differentiate between the free and paid listings, so shoppers don't know if a vendor paid to be listed. But the search engine also doesn't use any of that information to determine its rankings.

By default, both sites sort shopping search results by their own custom "relevancy" algorithms. Google's now weighs relevancy by how much a vendor bids, though it also takes into account quality and how relevant the results are to the search terms. To get past this biased listing, searchers can choose to sort by price.

"If you actually were looking at pure price, they would be more comparable," said Weitz.

$To see this disclaimer on Google Shopping results, you just click on the \$ To see this disclaimer on Google Shopping results, you just click on the "Why these products?" link. The disclosures that all Google Shopping results are paid are somewhat hidden. On the main Google Shopping page, a disclaimer that Google is "compensated by some" vendors is buried at the bottom of the page. Search results are formatted to look like a typical Google results page, and you must click on a link that says "Why these products?" to see a similar disclaimer. (Bing's big Scroogled marketing push might actually address this problem for Google. Now, everyone will know they're paid.)

By working closely with vendors instead of scraping public product feeds, Google is attempting to tap into more current data, with up-to-date inventory and price information. As a result, the quality of the individual product search results should improve.

The trade-off is that it is missing some major retailers that do not want to pay to play, most notably Google's actual biggest competitor when it comes to online shopping, Amazon.

Bing Shopping still includes Amazon results, but Amazon has positioned itself as an entry point for online shoppers in direct competition with Google and Bing. A Forrester report released in July found that 30% of online shoppers start researching products on Amazon, while only 13% started on Google.

The Scroogled page claims the exclusion of free listings could result in "not getting the best price when you thought you were," but cursory test searches of major tech products found prices were comparable on both sites. A camera might have a lower price on one, and a tablet come in a few bucks cheaper on the other.

Google Shopping claims a larger volume of product choices than Bing's product tool. Google Shopping currently has around 100,000 vendors and over a billion products in its listings. Bing has 15,000 vendors and "hundreds of millions" of products.

The Scroogled.com page is just one part of a spirited national campaign that will include digital, print and TV ads that attempt to vilify the first-place search engine.

"This was meant to be a fairly lighthearted holiday campaign," explained Weitz. He clarified that Scroggled is a reference to Ebenezer Scrooge, not the similar sounding naughty verb.

Seasonal hijinks aside, Weitz said he has real concerns that this could be the start of a trend at Google, spreading to other Google services such as news.

Google is not addressing the Scroogled attack directly, but did release a statement touting the benefits of its Shopping service, saying, "With new 360-degree, interactive product images, social shopping lists and a fast growing inventory of more than a billion products worldwide, Google is a great resource for shoppers to find what they need."

Luckily, with access to browsers that support multiple tabs and basic math skills, shoppers can easily comparison shop their comparison shopping tools.

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Peliculas Online

How fake Google story spread online

PR Web issued a retraction of its Google-ICOA post, saying that "even with reasonable safeguards" it was a hoax.Fake news report about Google sheds light on Web news pitfallsPress release saying Web giant bought Wi-Fi company was a hoaxIn rush to publish, many online outlets failed to double-check accuracyNEW: CEO apologizes, promises changes

(CNN) -- It was big news in the tech world -- or at least it would have been if it had been true.

Google, so the story went, had purchased ICOA, a Wi-Fi provider, for $400 million. Some news organizations pounced, with everyone from long-established outlets like The Associated Press to new-media tech blogs like TechCrunch reporting the news Monday.

But hours later, both companies would deny the story, which PR Web, a site that distributes press releases for a fee, says was planted by someone falsely claiming to represent ICOA.

Hoaxes have slipped their way into the public eye for as long as journalism has existed. But media experts say the way bad information spread so quickly casts a light on how reporting can go wrong in the fast-paced world of Web journalism.

Long gone are the days when newspapers and the evening TV news were the only game in town -- when reporters had hours, if not days, to sift through a report before sharing it with the masses. In their place is an info-hungry Web that wants news now and rewards the quick with a currency of page views, Twitter links and Facebook "likes."

"With something like this, there are a lot of blogs and websites that build their reputation on the tech world," said Kelly McBride, a senior faculty member at the Poynter Institute, a nonprofit devoted to the study and teaching of journalism.

"If Google is spending $400 million to buy something, there are people who are expected to have something to say about that and they want to be in that mix."

The Onion: We just fooled the Chinese government!

While a rush to get into that mix as quickly as possible probably played a role, McBride said there were multiple breakdowns in the Google-ICOA nonstory.

The first, obviously, was the person who -- according to PR Web owners Vocus -- impersonated an ICOA representative.

"Vocus reviews all press releases and follows an internal process designed to maintain the integrity of the releases we send out every day," the company said in a written statement. "Even with reasonable safeguards identity theft occurs, on occasion, across all of the major wire services. We have removed the fraudulent release and turned the matter over to the proper authorities for further investigation."

On Thursday, Vocus CEO Rick Rudman published a letter apologizing for the gaffe and promising that the company had improved it's process.

"It's clear that we have to hold our service to an ever-higher standard, so PRWeb will continue to evolve," Rudman wrote. " We will continue to deliver a service that's valuable to our customers, valuable to our readers and valuable to our distribution and media partners -- and we'll work tirelessly to deliver on these promises."

Financial experts say the hoax looks like an illegal effort to inflate ICOA's meager stock. Shares, which trade for a fraction of a penny, jumped in price dramatically Monday and hundreds of millions of shares changed hands before the stock was frozen.

ICOA CEO George Strouthopoulos told Mashable, a CNN content partner, that the release apparently originated in Aruba and was sent from an e-mail account designed to look like an official ICOA address.

But the most damning gaffe may have been PR Web's, McBride said.

Acquired by Vocus in 2006, PR Web aims to compete with the decades-old PR Newswire and other press-release outlets.

"Their quality-control process in printing out press releases obviously has some problems," McBride said. "It's not just that they got 'hacked' -- but that it was a pretty crappy press release."

The release had several grammatical errors, included no contact information for representatives of Google or ICOA, and didn't include biographical information about the companies that is typical in releases from major corporations.

In a post titled "How PRWeb Helps Distribute Crap Into Google & News Sites," Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land searched PR Web and found one of the Internet's ubiquitous "how to buy cheap Viagra" posts and other content that would seem more at home in a spam e-mail than on a news site.

The final error, McBride said, was on the part of reporters. Whether racing to publish fast or working on analysis of the supposed purchase, news outlets missed what should have been red flags.

"Journalists who were looking at it should have spotted those same weak spots in the press release and questioned whether it was real or not," she said. "Those journalists were relying on PR Web to do that and they shouldn't have.

"It would be easy to conclude that we're all going too fast. But it could be that we placed way too much trust in PR Web ... and assuming it had the same checks and balances and safety nets that other PR wires have."

(Full disclosure: Last year, this reporter, like others at numerous news outlets, was duped by pranksters who created an entire website for a fictional consulting firm to release a phony survey comparing the IQs of users of various Web browsers.)

Perhaps helping push the fake ICOA story, McBride said, was the Web's ability to share news stories in real time.

"Once one organization does it, other organizations tend to place even more blind faith," she said. "Once the AP (for example) does it, then everyone does it."

The Associated Press retracted and issued a correction for the story. When contacted, an AP spokeswoman referred CNN to the wire service's retraction, which cited ICOA and "a person close to Google" as saying the original report was untrue.

TechCrunch apologized to its readers, both owning up to the error and appearing to take a shot at PR Web in the process.

"We were wrong on this post, for not following up with Google and the other company involved but posting rather than ... waiting on a solid confirmation beforehand from either source," read an editor's note atop the original post. "We apologize to our readers, to the companies involved, and we'll be sure to act in a more responsible manner for future stories, rather than trusting the word of a website that doesn't necessarily hold itself up to any journalistic standards."

Forbes and Reuters were among the other news outlets that reported the fake purchase, as were popular tech sites PC Magazine, The Next Web, Business Insider, Engadget, VentureBeat, The Verge and GigaOM. Other outlets, like MSNBC and USA Today, ran the Associated Press account.

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My Technology

Google takes on Pandora, Spotify

Google Street View maps Fukushima nuclear ghost town

Bing takes on Google over shopping

How fake Google story spread online

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