theodp writes "GeekWire reports that Microsoft is seeking a patent on the concept of applying the persona of a celebrity to Internet searches, allowing people to see search results shaped by the personalities and preferences of Hollywood celebrities like Miley Cyrus, Taylor Swift, Megan Fox, and Jessica Lange. A search for an evening dress using the persona of Jessica Lange, explains Microsoft, would return dresses that reflect the actress's 'style and/or fashion preferences,' including 'color, fit, designer, cut, etc.' Your move, Google."

jfruhlinger writes "Nearly four years ago, Microsoft tried to buy Yahoo, but eventually withdrew the offer in the face of resistance from Yahoo's leadership. This week rumors resurfaced that Microsoft was once again bidding on the struggling Internet pioneer, this time for significantly less money. But even at a discount, it might be a pretty bad idea for Microsoft to get involved in the unfocused, money-losing Yahoo."

jfruhlinger writes "Alibaba is a company that most Americans probably haven't heard of, but it's a hugely important Internet player in China, owning the Yahoo! China site as well as a host of other marketplace Websites. It's 40 percent owned by Yahoo, but now, in what seems a bit like a snake eating its own tail, Alibaba CEO Jack Ma has declared his interest in buying the embattled Internet portal outright." The San Francisco Chronicle has a Bloomberg News article with more details; they report that Alibaba is actually one of three parties looking into a joint bid for Yahoo, the others being the equity firm Silver Lake and Russian tech investor Digital Sky Technologies.

An anonymous reader writes "Google TV, TiVo, iTunes and virtually every big consumer electronics maker have promised 'universal search' engines that enable users to quickly find and play movies, music and other content, no matter where it is stored. But Crestron Electronics, a developer of home automation systems, just filed a patent for 'Searching Two or More Media Sources for Media.' In other words, universal search, specifically for both local and cloud-based content."

daria42 writes "A long-running Australian court case debating whether Google has done enough to differentiate paid advertisements from normal organic search results has come to an end, with the search giant the victor over the country's competition regulator. The landmark case influenced how Google discloses which search results were advertisements — with the result that it now labels ads as 'Ads' rather than as 'Sponsored links.' In addition, Google now prohibits companies from advertising products or services with which they are not associated — making it much harder for competitors to artificially take valued positions in Google's rankings."

Landing on slashdot for the first time, MightyMartian writes "According to CNN Money, Microsoft has lost $5.5 billion on Bing since its launch in 2009. But it gets even better. If you include Microsoft's other online offerings, all the way back to 2007, the losses are somewhere in the neighborhood of $9 billion. But not to worry, analysts expect Bing to become profitable in 'three to four years.'"

Google announced today the availability of Flight Search, the product of their acquisition of ITA Software last year. "Starting today, when you search for flight information on Google, for example 'flights from Chicago to Denver,' you will see a 'Flights' link in the left-hand panel. This link leads to our new Flight Search feature, and is offered in addition to the flight schedules which have been available since May." Google says they're continuing to develop the service, and added that the results are "not influenced by any paid relationships."

judgecorp writes "the UK's culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt will this week ask Google to stifle sites deemed to be pirates, pushing them down the listing and cutting off their advertising revenues. The UK government has already outlined plans to make ISPs police copyright breaches by users."

tekgoblin writes "Google plans to use data from its +1 button to re-order search results and keep spammers at bay. While this would bring Google’s search engine into the social networking era, it would also create a new avenue for blackhats to manipulate search results. From the article: '"Google will study the clicks on +1 buttons as a signal that influences the ranking and appearance of websites in search results," a spokesman wrote. "The purpose of any ranking signal is to improve overall search quality. For +1's and other social ranking signals, as with any new ranking signal, we'll be starting carefully and learning how those signals are related to quality."'"

David Gerard writes "Eric Schmidt has revealed that Google+ is an identity service, and the 'social network' bit is just bait. Schmidt says 'G+ is completely optional,' not mentioning that Google has admitted that deleting a G+ account will seriously downgrade your other Google services. As others have noted, Somewhere, there are two kids in a garage building a company whose motto will be 'Don't be Google.'"

Hugh Pickens writes "Google search anthropologist Dan Russell says that 90 percent of people in his studies don't know how to use CTRL/Command + F to find a word in a document or web page. 'I do these field studies and I can't tell you how many hours I've sat in somebody's house as they've read through a long document trying to find the result they're looking for,' says Russell, who has studied thousands of people on how they search for stuff. 'At the end I'll say to them, "Let me show one little trick here," and very often people will say, "I can't believe I've been wasting my life!"' Just like we learn to skim tables of content or look through an index or just skim chapter titles to find what we're looking for, we need to teach people about this CTRL+F thing, says Alexis Madrigal. 'I probably use that trick 20 times per day and yet the vast majority of people don't use it at all,' writes Madrigal. 'We're talking about the future of almost all knowledge acquisition and yet schools don't spend nearly as much time on this skill as they do on other equally important areas.'"

mikejuk writes "Researchers have devised and tested a system called Theia that can perform an efficient parallel search of mobile phones to track down a target photo. It could be used to perform a realtime search for a missing child accidently caught in a photo you have just taken or the location of a criminal or political activist. You might think that the security and privacy aspects were so terrible that you just wouldn't install the app. However exceptional photos of a sporting or news incidents are worth money and the profit motive might be enough for you to install it."

Xiph1980 writes "Experian Hitwise claims Bing and Bing-powered search to be more effective than Google. The success rate for Bing searches in the U.S. in July was 80.04%, compared to 67.56% for Google. The market watcher defines 'success rate' as the percentage of search queries that result in a visit to a website. Searches made through sites owned by Yahoo, which farmed out search to Bing under a deal struck in 2009, were also more efficient than Google. Those searches yielded a success rate of 81.36%. The claims of Hitwise don't explain why I keep finding things like Microsoft service pack download pages better through google than through bing."

Peter Eckersley writes "The Netalyzr research project from the ICSI networking group has discovered that on a number of U.S. ISPs' networks, search traffic for Bing, Yahoo! and sometimes Google is being redirected to proxy servers operated by a company called Paxfire. In addition to posing a grave privacy problem, this server impersonation is being used to redirect certain searches away from the user's chosen search engine and to affiliate marketing programs instead. Further analysis is available in a post at the EFF."

alphadogg writes "Given the seemingly non-stop battle between Google, Microsoft and others in Web search, you might think this is a pretty fertile area for new ideas. But a University of Washington computer science professor thinks otherwise and is calling on academia and industry to get way more creative. Timed to coincide with this year's 20th anniversary of Tim Berners-Lee springing the World Wide Web upon us, Oren Etzioni Thursday will have a commentary titled 'Search needs a shake-up' published in the journal Nature. The main obstacle to progress 'seems to be a curious lack of ambition and imagination,' Etzioni writes in the piece, which he acknowledges 'is meant to be provocative.'"

msmoriarty writes "Bing is a still a money loser for Microsoft, and the calls for the company to sell it off are growing. But according to long-time Microsoft watcher Mary-Jo Foley, dumping Bing is just not going to happen. 'While the world sees Bing as a distant No. 2 search engine, Microsoft brass and bean counters see Bing as a reusable component and asset that will be built into more and more products. Those who think Microsoft will discard Bing or sell it to the highest bidder are dead wrong — that won't happen now or any time soon.'"

CWmike writes "Microsoft disabled the search tool on its Safety & Security Center on Saturday after attackers poisoned results with links to pornographic URLs. The company restored the website's search field early Monday afternoon ET. Alex Eckelberry, the general manager of GFI Software's security group and CEO of Sunbelt Software, said search poisoning is not unusual — but this is different. 'This is crafty,' Eckelberry said. 'This isn't normal search poisoning. It's poisoning the results with actual searches. Users were getting back a prior search as a search result.'"

tekgoblin writes "Google has taken the attack on malware into its own hands today as it blocks the entire co.cc subdomain. The block removed about 11 million results from the Google search index which should dramatically clean up much malware in search results."

splitenz writes "Google's other social networking site, Orkut, which has been around for about seven years and has tens of millions of users worldwide, will continue to operate alongside the new Google+ for now. However, Google is leaving its options open regarding the possibility of fusing the two through some sort of integration further down the road."

countertrolling writes with news that Microsoft has struck an agreement with Baidu.com, the most popular search engine in mainland China, to provide results for English-language queries. From the NY Times: "Baidu, which dominates Chinese-language search services here with about 83 percent of the market, has been trying for years to improve its English-language search services because English searches on its site are as many as 10 million a day, the company said. Now it has a powerful partner. 'More and more people here are searching for English terms,' Kaiser Kuo, the company’s spokesman, said Monday. 'But Baidu hasn’t done a good job. So here’s a way for us to do it.' Baidu and Microsoft did not disclose terms of the agreement. But the new English-language search results will undoubtedly be censored, since Beijing maintains strict controls over Internet companies and requires those operating on the mainland to censor results the government deems dangerous or troublesome, including references to human rights issues and dissidents."