Search results

Google Earth, surveillance, and the power of digital cartography

Pokémon Go, Facebook check-ins, Google Maps, public transport apps and especially smartphone apps are increasingly becoming traceable and locatable. As ‘check-in’, features in social media and games grow in popularity they pinpoint users in relation to everything else in the network, making physical context an essential input for online interactions. But what are the practical consequences of the increased proliferation of devices that can determine our location? Could one say that surveillance is already taken for granted as we passively provide our coordinates to others?

Finding restorativeness in urban greenscapes using Google Maps & Google Streetview

Interest in booter services and distributed denial of service attacks: Insight from Google search data

Cybercrime as a service is lowering the barrier to entry for crime. Aspiring criminals can access cybercrime services through the clear web using search engines. One such cybercrime service is booters, web platforms that offer affordable distributed denial of service attacks for hire. Law enforcement agencies have tried to counter this trend by running online ad campaigns on platforms like Google. For these campaigns to effectively divert and deter potential cybercriminals, they must first reach the intended audience. Yet, it remains uncertain whether this is the case. This study assesses Google online search data from two campaigns deployed in the Netherlands in 2021 to determine whether the campaigns actually reached potential cybercriminals. The results indicate that certain online searches likely had criminal intent, implying that the campaigns – to some extent – successfully reached the intended population. Furthermore, the findings reveal that online searches can serve to identify active booters, providing valuable assistance to law enforcement agencies in taking down such services.

Shopping with Google Glass

Mapping ‘Women in Technology' Issue Networks across Bulgarian, Croatian, and Serbian National Google(s)

This article explores the intersection between women and technology with an experimental research design that uses online search engine data and digital methods (Rogers 2002, 2004, 2013). We respond to Blagojevic’s (2016) call for online mapping of gender equality stakeholders by incorporating the practice of ‘issue mapping’, which Rogers et al. (2015) conceptualise as a series of techniques that can be used to map the network of actors around a public issue, and to understand the ways they associate with one another. Specifically, we apply the software tool IssueCrawler and its co-link analysis of relevant queries to study national Google search result pages for Bulgaria, Croatia and Serbia. We ask, what types of stakeholders are prevalent around the topic of ‘women in technology’ in the local contexts (demarcated by the national Google result pages) of these three countries? Are they country-specific or do they cross national borders? To what extent do they associate with each other? Which actors are in the centre of the identified networks and which are on the periphery? The authors found that the issue networks of all three countries were heavily dominated by media and government actors, followed by business, entrepreneurial and nongovernmental sites, and websites containing information on EU grants. The national specificity, however, was mostly embedded in the groupings of these actors; whether they were densely or loosely interlinked with each other, and whether they were present or absent from the maps.

Branding and Google Trends: Software companies’ names, the metaverse and virtual reality.