They tried Adsense on StackOverflow. It was a "crushing disappointment". See http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/08/podcast-64/

I don't think design should ever be slapped on. But I do think it makes the most sense to test and launch a first version with what amounts to a functional wireframe/prototype, if possible.

According to this April 2011 LA Times article [1], six senior VP's now oversee these areas: mobile, social, Chrome, YouTube/video, search, and ads.

[1] http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2011/04/exclusive...

I agree. I've also found this perl script handy for recursive find/replace: http://www.neilgunton.com/doc/deep

$ deep replace "foo" "bar" "*.html"

Great concept. Love it. Adding to my toolkit.

Maybe consider leveraging/partnering with http://userstyles.org.

Site is down for me. Here is cached page: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...

Yeah, sorry about that. Not sure what happened, attempting to bring it back up now.

It's back up. Sorry for the outage, seems to have been unrelated to load.

From above stream, a shot of people waiting to be rescued: http://twitpic.com/48e4r4

Personally, I would love to see Google in the carrier business, but it would be a huge risk to their brand/image.

Most everyone loves Google right now. Most everyone hates wireless carriers. So, it sounds like it could be a good opportunity. But there are reasons people hate carriers that are either outside of the carriers' control or too costly to fix completely on a global level (ie. spotty coverage, slow connections, great expectations, etc)

Even if Google became the #1 carrier, their valuable, mostly unblemished image could take a big hit.

Google's ability to simplify/scale technology for the masses (Google search, Gmail) won't help as much when it comes to dealing with frustrated customers on the telephone who want to speak to someone right now.

Joel Spolksy posted about this problem on his blog last year: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2009/10/08.html

Here's the related ServerFault post: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2009/10/08.html

Correction: ServerFault discussion here... http://serverfault.com/questions/72767/why-is-internet-acces...

Yeah, me too. Hate those popups. To remove: (1) download Stylish add-on for chrome or firefox, (2) add CSS style below

  #vspb, button.ws, button.vspib { display: none !important }
  .vspi { background: none !important; border: none !important }

Works great, thanks a lot!