×
Google

Google Tweaks Algorithm; EHow Traffic Plummets 286

Posted by CmdrTaco from the small-mercies dept.
jfruhlinger writes "For some time there's been rumbling that Google's search results have been gummed up by low-quality pages from 'content farms,' written at low or no cost specifically to score high on common Google queries. Now it looks like the latest update to Google's search algorithm is having an effect, cutting into traffic to eHow (and cutting down the stock price of eHow's owner, Demand Media, in the process)."
EU

Google Loses Autocomplete Defamation Case 258

Posted by timothy from the why-italy-and-google-shouldn't-date dept.
superglaze writes "Google has been found liable in an Italian court for defamatory comments made against an anonymous plaintiff — the complainant's name, when googled, elicited autocomplete suggestions that translate as 'con man' and 'fraud.' Google was found not to qualify for EU 'safe harbour' protection because the autocomplete suggestions were deemed to be Google's own creation, and not something merely passing through its systems."
The Courts

Yahoo! Liable In Italy For Searchable Content 145

Posted by Soulskill from the how-does-internet-work dept.
h3rr d0kt0r writes "A recent decision of an Italian court could spark considerable discussion over the liability of a search engines. The court actually ordered Yahoo! to remove any link to any site containing unlawful copies of a movie. Under EU Directives 2003/31, liability of search engines is not regulated (save for caching activities). In the case brought to court regarding the film About Elly, it was not the caching activities of Yahoo! that were questioned (or any content hosted on Yahoo!'s servers), but the mere fact that searching for the film made it possible to reach websites allowing the streaming or downloading of the movie (actually, illegal sites got a better ranking then the official one)."
Google

Google Is Introducing the +1 Button 218

Posted by CmdrTaco from the where-have-i-heard-that-before dept.
An anonymous reader writes "It seems Google refuses to give up and is trying to push once again its way into the social space by introducing a new feature called +1, which basically has the same functionality as the Facebook 'Like' button (share recommended content with other people)."
Businesses

If Search Is Google's Castle, Android Is the Moat 209

Posted by Soulskill from the how-about-a-moat-full-of-androids dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "Warren Buffet once said that the best businesses were economic castles protected by unbreachable moats. Now, Erick Schonfeld writes that if search is Google's economic castle, Android is a moat, Chrome browser is a moat, and Google Apps is a moat — all free products, subsidized by search profits, intended to protect the economic castle that is search. 'Android, as well as Chrome and Chrome OS for that matter, are not "products" in the classic business sense. They have no plan to become their own "economic castles,"' says Benchmark Capital VC Bill Gurley. 'They are not trying to make a profit on Android or Chrome. They want to take any layer that lives between themselves and the consumer and make it free (or even less than free).' So don't measure the success of Google's new businesses by how much revenue or profit they generate directly but measure it by how much they shore up Google's core search business. 'Google is ... scorching the earth for 250 miles around the outside of the castle to ensure no one can approach it. And best I can tell, they are doing a damn good job of it.'"
Cloud

IsoHunt To Court: Google Is the Bigger Problem 270

Posted by CmdrTaco from the where-have-i-heard-that-before dept.
Krystalo writes "isoHunt is still fighting its legal battle with the MPAA. In the latest episode, the torrent website filed a reply brief to the US Court of Appeals in which it suggests that Google, and not IsoHunt, is the largest BitTorrent search engine on the Internet."
Google

Google Introduces Domain Blocking To Search 323

Posted by Soulskill from the see-you-later-yahoo-answers dept.
An anonymous reader writes "We recently discussed a new Chrome extension that was introduced to block specified websites from appearing in search results. Now, Google has introduced a new feature that hide results from unwanted domains right from the search page. This is yet another way to find more of what you want on Google by blocking the sites you don't want to see at all in search result. The so-called 'experts exchange' or 'online eHow to guide' would be first on my blocked list." Another neat recent addition was the introduction of Recipe View, which adds depth to food preparation searches.
Education

Is Software Driving a Falling Demand For Brains? 622

Posted by timothy from the tell-me-when-neo-takes-his-pill dept.
Hugh Pickens writes writes "Paul Krugman writes in the NY Times that information technology seems to be reducing, not increasing, the demand for highly educated workers (reg. may be required), because a lot of what highly educated workers do could actually be replaced by sophisticated information processing. One good recent example is how software is replacing the teams of lawyers who used to do document research. 'From a legal staffing viewpoint, it means that a lot of people who used to be allocated to conduct document review are no longer able to be billed out,' says Bill Herr, a lawyer at a major chemical company who used to muster auditoriums of lawyers to read documents for weeks on end. 'People get bored, people get headaches. Computers don't.' If true this raises a number of interesting questions. 'One is whether emphasizing education — even aside from the fact that the big rise in inequality has taken place among the highly educated — is, in effect, fighting the last war,' writes Krugman. 'Another is how we [can] have a decent society if and when even highly educated workers can't command a middle-class income.' Remember the Luddites weren't the poorest of the poor, they were skilled artisans whose skills had suddenly been devalued by new technology."
Google

Bing Becomes No.2 Search Engine at 4.37% 366

Posted by CmdrTaco from the now-that's-a-gap dept.
suraj.sun writes "Bing overtook Yahoo for the first time worldwide in January, and increased its lead in February, according to web analytics company, StatCounter. Its research arm StatCounter Global Stats finds that globally Bing reached 4.37%, in February ahead of Yahoo! at 3.93%. Both trail far behind Google's 89.94% of the global search engine market." Just a little more plagiarizing to go!
Google

Google's Fight Against 'Low-Quality' Sites Continues 220

Posted by Soulskill from the no-more-subsidies-for-content-farmers dept.
nj_peeps writes "A couple weeks ago, JC Penney made the news for plummeting in Google rankings for everything from 'area rugs' to 'grommet top curtains.' Turns out the retail site had a number of suspicious links pointing at it that could be traced back to a link network intended to manipulate Google's ranking algorithms. Now, Overstock.com has lost rankings for another type of link that Google finds to be manipulation of their algorithms. This situation has led Google to implement a significant change to their search algorithms, affecting almost 12% of queries in an effort to cull content farms and other webspam. And in the midst of all of this, a company with substantial publicity lately for running a paid link network announces they are getting out of the link business entirely."
Android

New Android Malware Robs Bandwidth For Fake Searches 236

Posted by timothy from the what-would-the-appropriate-penalty-be? dept.
adeelarshad82 writes "We've been hearing about various Android malware spreading through the Chinese markets. Well, here's another one to look out for: meet ADRD (aka Trojan:Android/Adrd.A) which is expert in sucking your bandwidth. The malware downloads a list of search URLs and then performs those searches at random in the background, which as the screen shots [in the linked article] show leads to excessive data charges. Similar to other Android malware this too is distributed through wallpapers which are infected repackaged versions of legit wallpapers." Adds reader Trailrunner7: "Lookout, a mobile security vendor, said it has identified 14 instances of the malware repackaging itself in various wallpaper apps and specifically in the popular game RoboDefense, made available in alternative application markets. The trojan works by duping an infected app into sending encrypted data containing the device’s IMEI and IMSI to a remote host. HongTouTou then receives a set of search engine target URIs and search keywords to send as queries. It then uses these keywords to emulate search processes, creating searches in the search engine yielding the top results for those keywords and clicking on specific results. To the search engine, the searches appear to be coming from a mobile user using a mobile web browser with User-Agent corresponding to the UCWeb browser."
Chrome

Google Goes After Content Farms 345

Posted by Soulskill from the cleaning-up-the-e-streets dept.
RedEaredSlider writes "Aimed at stripping search results of pages from 'low-quality' sites, a new Google Chrome extension allows users to block specified websites from appearing in search results. The names of these sites are then sent to Google, which will study the collected results and use them to determine future page ranking systems. Google principal engineer Matt Cutts wrote in a post on the Google blog that the company hopes the extension will improve the quality of search results. The company has been the target of criticism in recent months, much of which centered around the effect that content farms were having on searches."
Google

The Dirty Little Secrets of Search 154

Posted by timothy from the young-girls'-underwear dept.
Hugh Pickens writes writes "The NY Times has an interesting story (reg. may be required) about how JCPenney used link farms to become the number one google search result for such terms as 'dresses,' 'bedding,' and 'samsonite carry on luggage' and what Google did to them when they found out. 'Actually, it's the most ambitious attempt I've ever heard of,' says Doug Pierce, an expert in online search. 'This whole thing just blew me away. Especially for such a major brand. You'd think they would have people around them that would know better.'"
Google

Google's Search Copying Accusation Called 'Silly' 380

Posted by timothy from the well-that's-not-very-silly-now-is-it? dept.
itwbennett writes "Google's Bing sting, reported in Slashdot just days ago and subsequently denied by Microsoft, is now being called 'silly' and 'petty' by search industry analysts and execs. The reason: it would be impossible for Microsoft to use the copied results to reverse engineer Google's search algorithms. And in fact it is more likely that Microsoft was conducting competitive research. Charlene Li, founder of technology research and advisory firm Altimeter Group, saw Google's actions as a misguided response to a real threat from a competitor in its core search business. 'Google isn't used to having competition. You look at this incident and you wonder why they are doing this. It feels amateurish in a way, a kind of 'they're not playing fair' attitude,' she said."
Google

Microsoft Vehemently Denies Google's "Bing Sting" 596

Posted by CmdrTaco from the big-surprise-here dept.
eldavojohn writes "In a blog post titled 'Setting the Record Straight,' Microsoft's senior vice president of online services, Yusuf Mehdi, addressed Google's 'Bing Sting' operation saying, 'We do not copy results from any of our competitors. Period. Full stop. We have some of the best minds in the world at work on search quality and relevance, and for a competitor to accuse any one of these people of such activity is just insulting.' Mehdi went on to claim that Google engaged in 'click fraud' in order to rig up their alleged 'experiment.' Mehdi added, 'That's right, the same type of attack employed by spammers on the web to trick consumers and produce bogus search results. What does all this cloak and dagger click fraud prove? Nothing anyone in the industry doesn't already know.' The struggle for Bing to usurp Google as number one in search continues."
Crime

FBI Set To Turn Up Advanced Security Search Engine 56

Posted by CmdrTaco from the wonder-what-that-cost dept.
coondoggie writes "The FBI says it is set to roll out is N-DEx search engine and information sharing program to a wider swath of the federal, state and local law enforcement community. The FBI has been developing N-DEx since 2008 and says that once this latest round of development is complete, law enforcement agencies will be able to search, link, analyze, and share information such as case reports on a national basis to a degree never before possible, the agency stated."
Input Devices

Researchers Track Mouse Movements and Hesitations 116

Posted by timothy from the wait-'til-they-track-heavy-breathing dept.
lpctstr writes "Researchers from the University of Washington and Microsoft Research have found that cursor movements and cursor hovers can detect the relevance of a search result and whether a user may abandon the search. They use an efficient algorithm written in Javascript to silently record movements and clicks on Bing and find that computing relevance using movements + clicks works better than just clicks (the current state-of-the-art). They explain some of this due to cursor and gaze being closely aligned on the web, and especially so on search result pages. Is this the future of innovation in search ranking — Google and Bing tracking your every twitch and pause?"
Google

Google Would Beat Bing At Jeopardy, Says Wolfram 138

Posted by timothy from the but-thanks-for-bing-there-for-us dept.
destinyland writes "Stephen Wolfram, the physicist behind the Wolfram Alpha 'answer engine,' believes that Google would beat Bing in any contest based on questions from Jeopardy. 'Wolfram took a sample of Jeopardy clues and fed them into search engines,' explains one technology blog. 'When it came to the first page, Google got 69 percent correct, just beating Ask with 68 percent and Bing on 63 percent. ... To put that into context, the average human contestant gets 60 percent of answers correct, while champion Ken Jennings has a record of 79 percent.' Interestingly, Wikipedia came in last, scoring 23%, though they may have more to do with how Wikipedia handles searches. In two weeks, IBM's Watson computer will compete on Jeopardy against two of the show's all-time human champions."
Social Networks

Using Search To Reconnect Refugees With Their Families 22

Posted by timothy from the we-haven't-located-us-yet dept.
Lanxon writes "A lengthy and emotional feature on Wired this week goes behind the scenes of Refugees United (RU) — a US-registered non-profit, founded in 2006 by two Danish brothers, Christopher and David Mikkelsen, that aims to be a Google for refugee search: an easy, accessible platform that enables the displaced to find their families. On a grey July day in the RU office in Copenhagen — typical tech-company open-plan — Christopher and David, and Tomas Krag, chief technology officer, explain how the project came about, and the impact it has had on the world."

Slashdot Top Deals