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+ - 201 Former Google Exec: Facebook, Twitter Are Killing Search

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "Former Google executive Stafford Masie believes that traditional search is dying because users are choosing to query their friends and followers on services like Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr. Here's the quote from the video: 'The pie of search query volumes in the world – that business is shrinking. Why? Because people are going and doing search queries – search query volumes are moving towards social containers. They’re moving away from static pages being searched and they’re moving more towards dynamic real-time stream content. Like Twitter. Like Tumblr. Like Facebook. Those things have a better result because the penetration, the personalization associated with it, and the constant freshness of the content. So I believe that Google’s search volume – the business Google is in on the search side – that business is shrinking. And they’ve got to do something about it.'"
Google

+ - 141 Google Foes Fighting Social Search Ignore One Trut->

Submitted by
gManZboy
gManZboy writes "Google's decision about a week ago to integrate content from its Google+ social network into its search listings was met with immediate criticism from competitors like Twitter, which argued that the mixed bag of links would make its more relevant content harder to find.

Over the weekend, the fight turned nasty, as Facebook, MySpace and Twitter engineers got involved, releasing a Chrome extension bookmarklet called "Don't Be Evil."

But there's one big problem with arguing Google's favoring its own content, writes Thomas Claburn: "Search results cannot be organic. There's no natural way to determine relevance. It's all artificial.""
Link to Original Source
Cloud

+ - 146 Facebook, Twitter, Myspace To Google: Don't Be Evi

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "Over the weekend, Blake Ross, Facebook's product director and co-founder of Firefox, worked with Facebook engineers Tom Occhino and Marshall Roch to demonstrate how evil Google's newly launched Search plus Your World (SPYW) feature really is, and created a "proof of concept" showing how it should really work. His team got some help from Twitter engineers, Myspace engineers, and consulted other social networks as well to really make sure the message hits home: SPYW should surface results from all social networks, not just Google+. By leveraging Google's own algorithms, the group built a bookmarklet called "don't be evil" (a jab at Google's informal motto) and released it on a new website named Focus on the User."
Google

+ - 185 Google Updates Algorithm to Punish Websites with E-> 2

Submitted by hypnosec
hypnosec writes "Google has decided to take punitive actions against those websites that flood the top of their web pages with ads due to which the visitors have to scroll down to finally view the relevant contents on the page. According to Google, this type of layouts annoys the users and thus the web search company will be penalizing those websites through search results. The company disclosed this on its blog. According to Google over the top ads is not good for user experience and thus such websites might not get high ranking on Google web search."
Link to Original Source
Google

+ - 206 Bing Search Overtakes Yahoo->

Submitted by SharkLaser
SharkLaser writes "Microsoft's Bing search engine has overtaken Yahoo for the first time. While both Bing, Yahoo and a bunch of meta-search engines like the privacy-oriented DuckDuckGo use Bing's back-end, it clearly shows Yahoo's declining market share. comScore has also released its search data for 2011 — overally, Bing gained 3.1% of market share while Yahoo lost 1.5% and Google lost 0.7%. Yahoo's new CEO Scott Thompson has lots to work with."
Link to Original Source
Google

+ - 110 Google Fuses Google+ Into Search-> 1

Submitted by SharkLaser
SharkLaser writes "Google is today launching a remarkable update to their search engine. This update is intended to bring you personalized search results based on your Google+ friends, sharing, pictures and likes. They're calling it "Search plus Your World", and the update is going to automatically personalize all search results to a greater degree than before. These personalized matches will appear along your normal search results. For example, if you are searching for images of babies, Google will now personalize your search results and give high preferance to baby photos from your Google+ circles. Google is saying that over time they will also start adding search results from all the other Google services, including Google Docs, Gmail, Contacts, Music, Voice, wallet and so on. Today's launch also uses Google+ data for another purpose: helping you search for information about people on Google+. For example, if you are searching Google for "music", Google will now display relevant people and pages from Google+, like Britney Spears, Alicia Keys and Snoop Dogg."
Link to Original Source
Google

+ - 132 Will Google+ Break Search?->

Submitted by nonprofiteer
nonprofiteer writes "A journalist at RWW writes an angry screed about the way that Google is starting to privilege Google+ posts over content from other websites. His example is that one of his own RWW stories is outranked by two + posts about the story. He is worried that as Google tries to compete in social, it will ruin its dependable search interface. Madrigal at The Atlantic asks if "the missions of a social network and a search engine are antithetical." http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/01/atop-the-litany-of-google-plus-complaints-its-breaking-search/250863/"
Link to Original Source
Google

+ - 158 Google Testing Completely Revamped Look->

Submitted by SharkLaser
SharkLaser writes "Google's search engine has always looked pretty much the same since it was introduced in 1998. However, Google is now testing a revamped look that is the largest change the search engine has ever done to its website. The new look strips the black bar running horizontally at top and places it as an openable menu on the left side. The move is said to promote Google's other services without making the search engine too cluttered. The new side menu is also more similar to Chrome OS and allows Chromebook and Google's website to have the same look and feel. Another consequence of the move is that it now takes users two clicks to enter other services such as Images and News, which is said to improve the amount of ad clicks and visitors advertisers get. Considering that European Commission is examining claims of Google downgrading rival websites and U.S. senators are calling FTC to inspect Google for unfair practices, the move comes at a surprising time."
Link to Original Source
Google

+ - 131 US Senators Want the FTC To Look At Google->

Submitted by SharkLaser
SharkLaser writes "US Senators have written to the US Federal Trade Commissions about their concerns on Google's internet monopoly. Google executives did themselves no favours when the Senators looked at Google's business practices in September. When asked if Google has monopoly in online search, Google chairman Eric Schmidt is quoted as saying "I would agree, Senator, that we are in that area". Another worrying quote is from Marissa Meyer, Google's VP of location services, who said that it was "only fair" that Google put its own sites on higher placements than competitors. The Senators are also warning that Google is only facing one real competitor, Microsoft's Bing. Almost all other metasearch engines use either Google or Bing technology to deliver search results, including DuckDuckGo which uses Bing. In Europe Google is currently under investigation of monopoly abuse and the EU has also delayed Google's purchase of Motorola Mobility."
Link to Original Source
Google

+ - 95 Google Considering Adult Search Engine->

Submitted by SharkLaser
SharkLaser writes "Google's search engine currently lets users filter out adult search results. However, many have wanted to do exactly the opposite and get only adult related results. While YouTube.xxx will never see the light, Google didn't rule out that possibility for Google.xxx. .xxx TLD went live last week following "sunrise" phase, and all domains registered under the Sunrise B defensive scheme will never work or resolve. This block contains, along other trademarks, youtube.xxx, facebook.xxx and bing.xxx. Interestingly, Google has registered google.xxx as a normal working and resolvable domain. If Google is indeed considering launching adult only search engine, this could mean bad news for Bing, who has now completely ruled out the possibility to ever use bing.xxx domain."
Link to Original Source
Open Source

+ - 195 Common Crawl - now everyone can be Google ->

Submitted by
mikejuk
mikejuk writes "If you have ever thought that you could do a better job than Google but were intimidated by the hardware needed to build a web index, then the Common Crawl Foundation has a solution for you. It has indexed 5 billion web pages, placed the results on Amazon EC2/S3 and invites you to make use of it for free. All you have to do is setup your own Amazon EC2 Hadoop cluster and pay for the time you use it — accessing the data is free. This idea is to open up the whole area of web search to experiment and innovation. So if you want to challenge Google now you can't use the excuse that you can't afford it."
Link to Original Source

+ - 125 CA Governor Vetoes Bill Protecting Arrestees' Cell->

Submitted by Wrath0fb0b
Wrath0fb0b writes "The U.S. Supreme Court let stand Diaz v. California, a Fourth Amendment case from California's Supreme Court which held that a cell phone can be searched incident to a lawful arrest. Meanwhile, over the summer, California state legislators passed SB 914, a bill limiting searches incident to arrest in California. Just today, however, California Governor Jerry Brown vetoed the bill stating that the courts are better suited to resolve complex and case specific issues relating to constitutional search-and-seizures protections.

Noted Fourth Amendment scholar Orin Kerr opines that Governor Brown has it exactly backwards and lays out the advantages of the legislature in rapidly-evolving fields such as new technology and their ability to better assess facts, amend the law to reflect the latest technology and disregard precedents that they feel no longer ought to apply. He argues that legislatures are much better equipped than courts to strike the balance between security and privacy when technology is in flux."
Link to Original Source
Australia

+ - 204 Australian Court rules Google's search ads OK->

Submitted by daria42
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 serices with which they are not associated — making it much hard for competitors to artifically take valued positions in Google's rankings."
Link to Original Source
Advertising

+ - 144 Microsoft Has Lost $5.5 Billion On Bing Since 2009

Submitted by MightyMartian
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"."
Microsoft

+ - 111 Microsoft's 5 biggest weaknesses->

Submitted by alphadogg
alphadogg writes "For all its success as the world's biggest maker of PC operating systems and office programs, Microsoft's position as the dominant provider of software to consumers is at risk. While Windows still powers the vast majority of desktops and laptops, the emergence of mobile devices and increasing reliance on the Internet have shown consumers and businesses alike that much of what we call personal computing can be done without touching a single Microsoft product. In this article, Network World examines Microsoft's five biggest weaknesses, a list compiled in conjunction with the analyst firm Directions on Microsoft."
Link to Original Source
Google

+ - 247 Google Explores +1 Button To Influence Search->

Submitted by
tekgoblin
tekgoblin writes "Google has proposed using data from its +1 button to help re-order search results and fight web spam. This move would take the entire search engine into the social arena.

        “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.”"
Link to Original Source
Education

+ - 214 Most People Have Never Heard of CTRL+F 1

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes 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 how 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.""
Books

+ - 106 Pandora For Books->

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "BookLamp is launching a new kind of book recommendation engine today that scans the texts of its partner publishers to establish what it calls “Book DNA.”"
Link to Original Source
Google

+ - 143 Computer scientist calls for Web search shake-up->

Submitted by alphadogg
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.""
Link to Original Source

Dishonor will not trouble me, once I am dead. -- Euripides