Google Ant

obli writes "In Google's official blog, Dr. Brian L. Fisher (an entomology researcher) writes about a newly discovered species of ant that he has named after Google (Proceratium google). The reason for this name is a tribute to the usefulness of Google Earth in his research. This is not the only species with a company name, there is also the GoldenPalace.com Monkey (Callicebus aureipalatii)." The California Academy of Sciences also has a short piece on the discovery along with a brief background of Dr. Fisher.

Finally, Google expands into animals

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't wait for Google Dog. I expect it to fetch the paper AND pick out the important stuff based on my personal tastes.

Re:Finally, Google expands into animals

[WilliamSChips]

And he'll replace all the ads with Google targeted text ads.

Re:Finally, Google expands into animals

[carl0ski]

Fine by me everytime i open the paper
a raft of annoying brousures and surveys fall out.
Then all the full page graphic ads disturbing my reading

Re:Finally, Google expands into animals

[sznupi]

I can't wait for Google Calendar...but perhaps I won't ahve to wait that long ( http://calendar.google.com/ [google.com] - yes, it points to search...but why does it work at all? in opposition to, for example http://nothingtoseehere.google.com/ [google.com] )

Re:Finally, Google expands into animals

[StarvingSE]

I can see this as the next big "google game."

I remember in college people would waste time trying to formulate a google search query that would return exactly 1 result...

Now people will waste time typing in http://insertrandomfeature.google.com/ [google.com] and see if it points to anything.

Re:Finally, Google expands into animals

[sznupi]

Not to worry, it was not me who wasted time like that :P (found on one of "Google blogs")

Re:Finally, Google expands into animals

[fm6]

Not funny! 5 years ago, when "Intelligent Agents" were all the rage, lots of people were envisioning little animated creatures on your computer screens that would "fetch" information for you. (Naturally a AT&T commercial featured an talking dog.) The reality never progressed beyond lame little projects like that company (its name escapes me) that soaked up huge amounts of venture capital, and whose only real product was a particularly limited PDA. And of course, there's Microsoft's agent technology [wikipedia.org], whi

Re:Finally, Google expands into animals

[Hephaestus]

Are you thinking of General Magic's Magic Cap? Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]

Re:Finally, Google expands into animals

[fm6]

Yes. Thank you for clearing that up.

Sorry

[ImaLamer]

Picking items out based on your personal taste is already patented by Amazon.

FUNNY lol lol lol (you get the point)

[drachenstern]

It's too bad nobody has mod points while looking at this article. This parent deserves mod + for funny.

Re:Finally, Google expands into animals

[cmacb]

I can't wait for Google Dog. I expect it to fetch the paper AND pick out the important stuff based on my personal tastes.

But will it also take a dump on your brand new carpet?

Re:Finally, Google expands into animals

[Frankie70]

  I can't wait for Google Dog. I expect it to fetch the paper AND pick out the important stuff based on my personal tastes.


You got it wrong. Google Dog fetches your paper & reports back on your personal tastes.

They need a google dog-COW

[kweg]

http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en& q=moof&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8 [google.com]

No they need a google dog-COW

[kweg]

http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en& q=moof&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8 [google.com]

RIAA sea cucumber?

[hobo sapiens]

What about it? It is a bottom feeder that disembowls itself when threatened! Sounds about right!

Re:RIAA sea cucumber?

[the-amazing-blob]

So what would the MPAA be then? I shudder to think. :P

Very appropriate

[mcgroarty]

Any webmaster who's watched his logs spike from ten megs to one hundred can tell you that, much like ants: Once Google finds something on your site it likes, you'll come back to find it's all over everything.

The real question:

[game kid]

Who pays for exceeding the ol' bandwidth limit, the site owner or the search engine?

I don't [yet] run a site for which I pay for data transfer; I wonder what hosts, if any, have SearchEngineCrawlsDoNotCountOnTheBill® technology...

Re:The real question:

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone who's seriously worried that Google is going to cost them money can simply make a robots.txt file. Personally, although my sites haven't exactly been comparable to MSN, Yahoo or Google, I can't say google took up that much bandwidth really, although yes, it sure did visit a lot. I guess it's because I like clean, tidy, efficient web design.

Re:The real question:

[game kid]

Ah, yes yes, robots.txt. One forgets the obvious things first...

Re:The real question:

[jrockway]

Robots.txt is nice if google feels like playing nice. But nothing is stopping google or anyone from completely ignoring it. If you don't want a search engine to find something, don't make it publicly available!

Re:The real question:

[mcgroarty]

Google obeys robots.txt completely. Yahoo too. Some other spiders seem to treat anything listed in a robots.txt as a "start here first!" guide. Yes, the appropriate answer is to put it behind passwords if it's sensitive data. But for something you want available to any visitor without a login, but which you don't want indexed and rechecked completely - say a web-based dictionary with 100,000 words - it can be frustrating when bots don't respect robots.txt.

Big deal.

[bigtallmofo]

My dad's had an ant named after him for years and he didn't have to come up with a fancy search engine to do it. He's only a carpenter.

Re:Big deal.

[Meagermanx]

Just an ant? Pfft. You guys ever hear of the Industrial Painter Parrot? Yeah.

Re:Big deal.

[Verteiron]

As I recall, Gary Larson (the Far Side guy) has some kind of louse named after him: Strigiphilus garylarsoni. Lives on owls, apparently.

Re:Big deal.

[DonVictor]

Yes, here's the pubmed entry:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=P ubMed&cmd=search&term=Strigiphilus+garylarsoni [nih.gov]

Can we change

[zappepcs]

Can we change the /. icon for google now to an ant?

Re:Can we change

[tommertron]

How about they name the ant Keyhole? They were the ones who invneted "Google Earth" anyway.

Re:Can we change

[Wiwi Jumbo]

Unfortunately, there's always a difference between inventing and popularizing.

Sure Xerox invented the GUI, but Apple gets the credit for giving it to the people....

I agree!!!

[antdude]

I suggest an ant head icon!

Meh.... Nothing new

[technoextreme]

Im fairly sure that a bunch of scientists all ready have done this sort of thing before. Im fairly certain they named some of their discoveries after people like George Bush. Unfortunately, I have no idea which species of animnal they used his name for because almost all searches for any refrence of animal and George Bush gets me websites for how he is an idiotic monkey.

Re:Sllime mold beetles... Irony at it's best???

[technoextreme]

http://www.news.cornell.edu/Stories/April05/slime- mold.Bush.Cheney.ssl.html [cornell.edu] Im not sure if this is a great honor or a backhanded insult.

Re:Sllime mold beetles... Irony at it's best???

[tsunamifirestorm]

According to Popular Science the scientists who discovered the beetles are conservative.

Re:Sllime mold beetles... Irony at it's best???

[Meagermanx]

TFA also says they named one after Darth Vader. And their ex wives. Those might be clues.

Trademark Infringment?

[VikingDBA]

Did he ask if he could use that name for the ant? Hmmmmm?

Re:Trademark Infringment?

[ScrewMaster]

Why should he have to?

Confusing the transitory with the long-lasting?

[Oh the Huge Manatee]

Two hundred years from now, this ant species will probably still exist. But the name will seem just as silly and puzzling to the scientists of that day as if Dr. Fisher had named the new species Proceratium petsdotcom.

In the long run, this little stunt will probably harm Dr. Fisher's reputation more than it will help Google's.

Re:Confusing the transitory with the long-lasting?

[the-amazing-blob]

Why would it harm him? I personally think it's quite funny, and wouldn't dislike him in the least for it.

Re:Confusing the transitory with the long-lasting?

[WilliamSChips]

At worst, they'll think he misspelled googol.

Re:Confusing the transitory with the long-lasting?

[Bonhamme Richard]

Yah! He should have named it something meaningful, like some sort of vauge latin description that the average human being cannot understand.

At least he gave the name as a gesture of thanks, instead of naming it after himself or his pet.

Re:Confusing the transitory with the long-lasting?

[DerekLyons]

In the long run, this little stunt will probably harm Dr. Fisher's reputation more than it will help Google's.

Ah - the wonders of slashdot, anyone without knowledge can post and get ranked insightful.

The reality is that there are [dozens|hundreds|thousands?] of the types of joke/pun names scattered across the taxonomy tree. In the long run, this will be forgotten and no one's reputation besmirched.

Re:Confusing the transitory with the long-lasting?

[Idarubicin]

There's a longstanding tradition in biology of giving amusing names to species that are otherwise completely irrelevant or uninteresting. Two hundred years from now, nobody is going to know why somone named a spider Calponia harrisonfordi, either.

See Arnold Menke's Funny or Curious Zoological Names [ucr.edu] and Douglas Yanega's Curious Scientific Names [ucr.edu] for a lot more weird names.

I doubt that the reputations of these scientists are harmed by the knowledge that they may have had senses of humour.

Re:Confusing the transitory with the long-lasting?

[Helios1182]

My dad named a virus (maybe a bacteria) after his Medical Practice. He got a little blurb about it in some journal. It was a new strain of something common, although the details escape me.

Re:Confusing the transitory with the long-lasting?

[Kohath]

If Google goes out of business, just eradicate the species of ant.

Do I have to solve every problem for you people?

wtf?

[Phil246]

I thought it was apache :(

Whatever.

[game kid]

If it can build a pile of spider eggs as well as Apache Ant can build programs, then I'll accept either.

Louse!

[students]

There is a louse named after Gary Larson [salon.com].

I pitty the species that gets named after SCO Group.

Re:Louse!

[0rionx]

Actually, although it's not as well known as the louse tidbit, there's also a butterfly named after Gary Larson...

Entomologists have named a louse and a butterfly after Larson. [wsu.edu]

I will name my children...

[TheCarlMau]

I am going to name my child "Google" or "Googlina"!

Poor kids.

[game kid]

Not for their name, just that they'll grow up to become geniuses that get asked for trivial information (and to bring the mail) all the time.

Re:I will name my children...

[NanoGator]

"I am going to name my child "Google" or "Googlina"!"

When I was a kid, my name was "What'd you break?!" My nickname was "Dammit!"

Re:I will name my children...

[$RANDOMLUSER]

I named my son "Microsoft" and girls won't date him :-(

Re:I will name my children...

[nacturation]

Just don't name your kid GPL, as everyone will want to stay away to avoid the virus effect.
 

Re:I will name my children...

[kaligraphic]

Yeah, but he'll be a real playa. He'll have hundreds of illegitimate code forks... er, bastards.

Naming rights

[milgr]

Why not sell the naming rights to your kids on Ebay? Perhaps it would help defray the cost of college, and councelling for being stuck with a name like "Grease Monkey Jones"

Sim Ant?

[adolfojp]

For a moment I thought that Google had adquired the rights to a Sim Ant Sequel.

So much for google games :-(

About the Golden Palace Monkey. I think that having private coorporations sponsoring this kind of research in exchange for branding is a great idea. It benefits all of us. And the name "Golden Monkey" doesn't sound half bad after all. ;-)

Re:Sim Ant?

[obli]

What if someone hoarded a lot of money to call it spanked monkey, then?

Re:Sim Ant?

[adolfojp]

It would be the greatest moment in science in history! :-D

Re:Sim Ant?

[AndroidCat]

Isn't Golden Palace the place that one of their "monkeys" jump into a swimming pool during the Olympics with their URL marked on his body? (Or maybe it was the streaker at the Superbowl? After a while, the jerks all blend together.)

Re:Sim Ant?

[NexFlamma]

Well, at least it wasn't so bad until they made the monkey tattoo GoldenPalace.com across it's ass...

Googleverse

[Guy LeDouche]

When deep space exploration ramps up, it'll be the corporations that name everything, the IBM Stellar Sphere, the Microsoft Galaxy, Planet Starbucks.

Re:Googleverse

[emurphy42]

Hey, you forgot Disneyplanet!

Re:Googleverse

[Archangel_Azazel]

Mod points....damnit....don't have any..

nice one anyway :D

A.A

Re:Googleverse

[Raynach]

Aye, nice one. But, alas, no mod points.

No, NO.

[game kid]

We live on Planet Earth Sponsored By GamesOfGondor.com!

Golden Palace

[Speare]

I am getting very tired of Golden Palace's penchant for putting their name in every possible attention-grabbing place. Paid tattoos, Jesus sandwich auctions, and now taxonomy for hire. All for a stupid casino ad campaign. I swear that they're gonna pay Carly Simon some obscene amount just so she'll announce that her 1973 hit song is about their business.

Re:Golden Palace

[nucal]

Can you really feel that way after seeing their Official Monkey Website [goldenpalacemonkey.com]?

GoldenPalace.com is doing what any other company is doing, matching their advertising to their clientele ... mainly folks who like goofy tech, web oriented stuff, quasi-religious objects and who are despirate to strike it rich.

Re:Golden Palace

[bombadier_beetle]

Maybe you'll be gratified to know that at least one person, me, has never even heard of Golden Palace and has no idea what it is.

Take that, Golden Palace, whoever or whatever you are!

Text of Google release

[Oh the Huge Manatee]

Ants unearthed with Google Earth

9/30/2005 10:37:00 AM Posted by Brian L. Fisher, Associate Curator of Entomology, California Academy of Sciences

At a time when the power of information technology doubles every 12 to 15 months and extends to capture every scrap we have, digitizing biodiversity information is a final frontier for IT. It's an essential step to ensure society maintains and hopefully increases bio-literacy. Toward this end, there's Antweb. It's a project from the California Academy of Sciences that has incorporated the Google Earth interface to provide location-based access to the diversity and wonder of ants: from your backyard to the Congo Basin.

As society advances, literacy increases and bio-literacy decreases. If you're illiterate, you may view a library as thinly sliced stacks of firewood; a Google search engine is meaningless. If you are bio-illiterate, a forest is at best a green blob to be consumed. If you are bio-literate, you see the diversity of the forest and understand that each animal, each plant, tells a story and has a place.

Google has helped us achieve free and democratic access to information, but now, with Google Earth, it's taken an important step to promote bio-literacy. Together with other institutions in the Bay Area, Google is uniquely poised to take on this enormous task.

There are two ways people need to access information on biodiversity: either have a name for which they want more information, or they are at a location and want to know what they will find there. On Antweb, you can access information about ants via location - and Google Earth allows for any scale of access via location. So you can be in Santa Clara County and see what ants you are likely to find. Soon you will be able to create a field guide for ants in any location defined in Google Earth.

We tried to get NASA's help to develop such a system for years with their mapping expertise and data, but Google Earth answered the call first. I am so impressed with Google that I have named an ant I recently discovered in Madagascar Proceratium google. Its bizarrely-shaped abdomen is an adaptation for hunting down obscure prey: spider eggs. Here's what it looks like.

I hope that Google will continue applying its skills to serve biodiversity data to conservation planners and the general public. Google has given us a tool to connect the 6 billion people on earth with our remaining biodiversity. Antweb welcomes any form of collaboration to help achieve this goal - and may the ants be with you.

Google

[miffo.swe]

Where i live google is even a verb. When you want to search for something you google for it. I imagine this is pretty annoying for the other search engines *cough*MSN*cough*. Im sure Microsoft would like to have their name on some bugs too...
ohh, wait, forget that last one....

Re:Google

[MichaelSmith]

you google for it.

Yahoo!ing for something doesn't have quite the same ring.

Finally it fits the original quote

[Viper Daimao]

"I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords."

Re:Finally it fits the original quote

[ettlz]

...and this poster thinks it's about —king time.

Re:Finally it fits the original quote

[$RANDOMLUSER]

I killed an ant in my kitchen, and now none of my relatives want to come to visit.

Re:Finally it fits the original quote

[nacturation]

"I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords."

Two things: I can't believe it took over a half hour for someone to post that. Secondly, I can't believe the parent post got modded offtopic given that the Simpsons episode it's from had ants as the inspiration for that quote.
 

The Ants

[airuck]

For those of you who have not seen The Ants [amazon.com] by Bert Hölldobler and Edward O. Wilson, it is definitely worth a read. The drawings alone are worth the price of the book.

For those of you how are not impressed by ants, try to build one.

One more example.

[utenaslashed]

There's a butterfly named "Deudorix eagon" after the company named "Eagon" http://www.eagon.com/ [eagon.com]. The story I heard : the company(they make paper so they need lots of big logs) made a tremendous contribution to Solomon Islands and a doctor (John Tenant? I'm not sure) named his new discovery after the company's name.

ahahah what

[Anonymous Coward]

Google has helped us achieve free and democratic access to information

which is why they allow the chinese to block stuff?

Re:ahahah what

[Jeremi]

which is why they allow the chinese to block stuff?

us, man, helped us. The Chinese are "them". (The ants, on the other hand, are "Them")

next: Goatsezemia

[Tablizer]

A condition whereby your ass keeps itching so bad that you scratch your anus off.

MJ's nose

[Gertlex]

There should be a chameleon named after Michael Jackson's ever changing nose.

I can see it now, Ballmer "Kill Google!"

[layer3switch]

"Obligatory"
Dr. Flake: Mr. Ballmer! Mr. Ballmer! They found new ant! The news was even slashdotted!
Ballmer: Just tell me it's not Google.
Dr. Flake: umm.. yes, it's google.. but...
Ballmer: What the fuck! Ants? Google now searches ants now?
Dr. Flake: umm... actually no...
Ballmer: Fucking Eric Schmidt is a fucking pussy. I'm going to fucking bury that guy, I have done it before, and I will do it again. I'm going to fucking kill that ant.
Ballmer: .. ? C'mon! Speak up, damn it! I didn't hire you with big money to mumble!
Dr. Flake: This entomology researcher named Dr. Fisher used Google Map to find his ants, sir...
Ballmer: FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! (throws chair across the room)
Dr. Flake: It's quiet facinating and in his research which it recites ...
Ballmer: Shut the fuck up, Flaky. You talk too much.
Dr. Flake: ... umm.. yes, sir.
Ballmer: Flaky, Quick! Find me one of them smart research scientist to find me a diabolical giant ANTEATER!
Dr. Flake: umm.. yes, sir... but our search doesn't cross link between search and map, sir...
Ballmer: Geee, Flake! Do I have to think of everything? Just fucking Google it!
---

Re:I can see it now, Ballmer "Kill Google!"

[computerdude33]

FLAKY! GET ME A DANISH!

Re:I can see it now, Ballmer "Kill Google!"

[WilliamSChips]

No, Strong Bad is too cool to be Steve Ballmer. I'd go with the Blue Laser guy with the raspy voice. Something like this:

Minion(Kai-Fu Lee): Sir, I'm leaving.
Commander(Ballmer): For where?
Minion: Google, sir.
Commander: I'll "freaking"(The Brothers Chaps want H*R to be family-friendly, and they've talked about how hard it is to make Strong Sad not say "Oh, fuck this". Now back to your regularly scheduled program.) bury Google! I've done it before and I'll do it again!
Minion: Sir, they've always beate

Am I the only one...

[cr0sh]

When I first saw this headline, I had visions in my head of Google rolling out some new kind of search engine technology based on "ant trails" (not literal ants or trails, but "digital droppings" or something - maybe user cookies?) to enhance their current system.

Oh, well...

From Google

[DJStealth]

I'll see you ants in court

savy

[xipho]

Dr. Fisher is an awesome collector- he has taken many new ant species (and passed on many other undescribed species to other experts in the field). Systematist like him will likely name tens or hundreds of species in their lifetimes, coming up with names for all of them is just a little icing on the cake- but it can get boring too. Fisher's website is one of the better "biodiversity" sites out there in terms of "web-tech". Perhaps his ulterior motive- associating his work in any way possible with a giant like google can only help his work in the long run, particularly in biodiversity/systematics studies which are notoriously underfunded...hint hint.

Anyone else do a URL search?

[saskboy]

I tried going to ant.google.com but nothing came up. I guess the Google ant was Slashdotted or something? ;-)

Better to start early

[Frankie70]

Since the USA (and then the world) is going to become
one big Google company town, I guess it's best to start
early with the naming thing.

Evil naming

[simgod]

Similar things happened half a century ago...

Where do you think the name Anophthalmus Hitleri for a CAVE BEETLE comes from:

http://slonews.sta.si/index.php?id=12&s=1 [slonews.sta.si]

I'll call my next cheese Googonzola

[Begemot]

as a tribute to the usefullness of the full zoom at Google moon [google.com]

Proceratium spiff-arino

[marciot]

In other news, man unearths fossilized remnants of giant man-eating ants [snopes.com] in his backyard and sends it in to the Smithsonian Institute with the proposed taxonomy of "procreatium spiff-arino"

Dominican Republic

[nictuku]

I wonder if that will return to the Dominican Republic. IMHO it's wrong to remove fossile and major cultural pieces (like mummies) from its original locations. These important findings should stay there, fostering local economy development.

Obviously it's not the case here, but many countries see their so valuable fossile disappear in the black market. Private collections in Europe seem to be the primary destination of these artifact. Only if it went to public, serious museums..

Disappointed

[fbg111]

What, an insect? I thought this story was announcing a cool new Google version of Ant [apache.org]. :(

Re:Slashdot

[shitfuck]

Slashdot has become a cess pool of Google fanboys. Hopelessy unfunny people jockeying for Karma.

I'm going back to Tubgirl...

Re:Pronunciation

[donutz]

Sounds about right to me. At least, if you go by this Latin pronunciation guide [byzantinec...ations.com].