coastin writes "The folks at Google Labs have launched a new way to search with Google Nose BETA. The new condensation in search will have you "Coming to your senses" where you can go beyond type, talk, and touch for a new notation of sensation. Get acquainted with Your internet sommelier, expertly curated Knowledge Panels pair images, descriptions, and aromas. Take a whiff of the Google Aromabase — 15M+ scentibytes. Don't ask, don't smell! For when you're wary of your query — SafeSearch included. What's that smell? Google Nose BETA leverages new and existing technologies to offer the sharpest olfactory experience available with: Street Sense (vehicles have inhaled and indexed millions of atmospheric miles), Android Ambient Odor Detection (collects smells via the world's most sensible mobile operating system), and SMELLCD 1.8+ (high-resolution compatible for precise and controlled odors)"

jfruh writes "The Swedish Language Council is a semi-official, government funded body that regulates, cultivates, and tracks changes to the Swedish language. Every year it releases a list of new words that have crept into Swedish, and one of 2012's entries was 'ogooglebar' — 'ungoogleable,' meaning something that can't be found with a search engine. After Google demanded that the definition be changed and the Council add a disclaimer about Google's trademark, the Council has instead decided to remove the word from the list altogether."

Sparrowvsrevolution writes that at this year's SXSW, Defense Distributed founder Code Wilson has announced a for-profit spinoff of his gun-printing project, from which people will be able to search for and download gun-related CAD files. "Though the search engine will index all types of files, Wilson says he hopes the group's reputation for hosting politically incendiary content will mean users trust that it won't censor search results. 'When we say you should have access to these files, people believe we mean that,' says Wilson. 'No takedowns. No removals. We'd fight everything to the full extent of the law.' Along with the SXSW announcement, Wilson also released a provocative video where he lays out the plan for Defcad.com and criticizes gun control advocates and 'collusive' 3D printing companies like Makerbot."

Nerval's Lobster writes "Google senior vice president Amit Singhal, one of the executives heading up the company's search-engine operations, sat down with Guy Kawasaki, former chief evangelist for Apple and author, at one of this year's SXSW keynotes in Austin, TX. 'Our dream is for search to become the "Star Trek" computer, and that's what we're building today,' Singhal said. But he seemed reluctant to share much about his company on a more tactical level, parrying Kawasaki's queries about everything from the amount of code in Google's search platform to recent cyber-attacks on the company's systems. But the two did have an interesting back-and-forth about SEO. 'We at Google have time and time again said—and seen it happen—that if you build high-quality content that adds value, and your readers and your users seek you out, then you don't need to worry about anything else,' Singhal said. 'If people want that content, your site will automatically work you could make a bunch of SEO mistakes and it wouldn't hurt.' When Kawasaki followed up by asking, 'Is SEO bull****?' Singhal replied: 'That would be like saying marketing is bull****.' That drew a laugh from the audience—and maybe some gritted teeth from people who position themselves as SEO experts. The two talked about much more with regard to Google's future plans."

sciencehabit writes "Pharmaceuticals often have side effects that go unnoticed until they're already available to the public. Doctors and even the FDA have a hard time predicting what drug combinations will lead to serious problems. But thanks to people scouring the web for the side effects of the drugs they're taking, researchers have now shown that Google and other search engines can be mined for dangerous drug combinations. In a new study, scientists tried the approach out on predicting hypoglycemia, or low blood sugar. They found that the data-mining procedure correctly predicted whether a drug combo did or did not cause hypoglycemia about 81% of the time."

Nerval's Lobster writes "Facebook's Graph Search, its new and powerful way of searching the social network for all manner of information, has drawn a lot of attention since its January unveiling. Some have praised its innovation; others have wondered openly whether its search abilities will end up threatening Google and LinkedIn. Still more have questioned what it all means for users' privacy—always a touchy subject in conjunction with Facebook. The social network previously revealed how it's adjusting its hardware infrastructure to deal with the spike in traffic that will come from interactions with Graph Search (short answer: the Disaggregated Rack, which will break up hardware resources and scale them independently of one another). Now, in a new blog posting, it's offering a bit more with regard to the software side of things, and how the company repurposed an existing system to solve Graph Search's enormous engineering challenge. Bottom line: Facebook's engineers and executives finally decided on Unicorn, an inverted-index system they'd had in development for quite some time."

concealment writes "Many of us have had the experience of going to Amazon to buy one thing but checking out with a huge shopping cart of items that we didn't initially seek—or even know were available. Amazon's merchandising often benefits Amazon's customers, but trademark owners who lose sales to their competition due to it aren't as thrilled. Fortunately for Amazon, a California federal court recently upheld Amazon's merchandising practices in its internal search results."

First time accepted submitter punk2176 writes "Recently I started a free and open source project known as the PunkSPIDER project and presented it at ShmooCon 2013. If you haven't heard of it, it's at heart, a project with the goal of pushing for improved global website security. In order to do this we built a Hadoop distributed computing cluster along with a website vulnerability scanner that can use the cluster. Once we finished that we open sourced the code to our scanner and unleashed it on the Internet. The results of our scans are provided to the public for free in an easy-to-use search engine. The results so far aren't pretty." The Register has an informative article, too.

taz346 writes "French officials said on Monday that the EU intends to sanction Google after the Internet search giant failed to respond to concerns about its privacy policy. 'At the end of a four-month delay accorded to Google to comply with the European data protection directive and to implement effectively (our) recommendations, no answer has been given,' said France's CNIL data protection agency. Google's new policy, implemented in March 2012, allows it to track users over multiple sites. Users who sign in to Google services cannot opt out. CNIL said a working group would meet next week to begin work on 'coercive actions which should be implemented before the summer' against Google."

9to5Google cites "an extremely reliable source" in reporting that "Google is in the process of building stand-alone retail stores in the U.S. and hopes to have the first flagship Google Stores open for the holidays in major metropolitan areas. The mission of the stores is to get new Google Nexus, Chrome, and especially upcoming products into the hands of prospective customers. Google feels right now that many potential customers need to get hands-on experience with its products before they are willing to purchase. Google competitors Apple and Microsoft both have retail outlets where customers can try before they buy."

ananyo writes "When influenza hit early and hard in the United States this year, it quietly claimed an unacknowledged victim: one of the cutting-edge techniques being used to monitor the outbreak. A comparison with traditional surveillance data showed that Google Flu Trends, which estimates prevalence from flu-related Internet searches, had drastically overestimated peak flu levels. The glitch is no more than a temporary setback for a promising strategy, experts say, and Google is sure to refine its algorithms. But with flu-tracking techniques based on mining of web data and on social media taking off, Nature looks at how these potentially cheaper, faster methods measure up against traditional epidemiological surveillance networks." Crowdsourcing is often useful, but it seems to have limits.

judgecorp writes "The Russian search engine Yandex has beaten Microsoft in the search engine rankings, taking fourth place behind Google, China's Baidu and Yahoo, according to ComScore. The result won't be encouraging for Microsoft, which will also be disappointed to see Bing behind its partner Yahoo."

Nerval's Lobster writes "Software developer Jeff Cogswell is back with an extensive under-the-hood breakdown of Facebook's Graph Search, trying to see if peoples' privacy concerns about the social network's search engine are entirely justified. His conclusion? 'Some of the news articles I've read talk about how Graph Search will start small and slowly grow as it accumulates more information. This is wrong—Graph Search has been accumulating information since the day Facebook opened and the first connections were made in the internal graph structure,' he writes. 'People were nervous about Google storing their history, but it pales in comparison to the information Facebook already has on you, me, and roughly a billion other people.' There's much more at the link, including a handy breakdown of graph theory."

An anonymous reader writes "Google has recently announced changes to its image search. The search provides larger views of the images with direct links to the full-sized source image. Although this new layout is being praised by users for its intuitiveness, it has raised concerns amongst image copyright holders and webmasters. Large images can now easily be seen and downloaded directly from the Google image search results without sending visitors to the hosting website. Webmasters have expressed concerns about a decrease in traffic and an increase in bandwidth usage since this change was rolled out. Some have set up a petition requesting Google remove the direct links to the images."

An anonymous reader writes "Most of us are familiar with advertisements in online web searching, and by now we've grown accustomed to scrolling past the 'sponsored' results to get to the real responses to our query. And we know the ads are context-sensitive; for example, searching for our favorite Federation Starship will bring up ads for a similarly-named car-rental agency. But now a Harvard University professor has found a more disturbing trend in those contextual ads: racism. 'Sweeney says she has evidence that black identifying names are up to 25 per cent more likely to be served with an arrest-related ad. "There is discrimination in delivery of these ads," she concludes. Sweeney gathered this evidence by collecting over 2000 names that were suggestive of race. For example, first names such as Trevon, Lakisha and Darnell suggest the owner is black while names like Laurie, Brendan and Katie suggest the owner is white. She then entered these plus surnames into Google.com and Reuters.com and examined the ads they returned. Most names generated ads for public records. However, black-identifying names turned out to be much more likely than white-identifying names to generate ads that including the word "arrest" (60 per cent versus 48 per cent).'"

Nerval's Lobster writes "Whatever your actual feelings about football and this weekend's Super Bowl, you have to admire Wolfram Alpha's willingness to crunch any dataset and see what it can find. The self-billed 'computational knowledge engine' has analyzed the historical data for both teams involved in this Sunday's Super Bowl XLVII. Its conclusion? The San Francisco 49ers and Baltimore Ravens are 'annoyingly similar' when it comes to numbers, although some players stand out as potential game changers — if the math plays out right."

New submitter Flozzin writes with news of some resolution to the long-standing dispute that some French publishers have had with Google for republishing snippets of news reports without sharing revenue earned from the ads run alongside. Now, reports the BBC, "Google has agreed to create a 60m euro ($82m; £52m) fund to help French media organisations improve their internet operations. It follows two months of negotiations after local news sites had demanded payment for the privilege of letting the search giant display their links. The French government had threatened to tax the revenue Google made from posting ads alongside the results."

mask.of.sanity writes "Github has killed its search function to safeguard users who were caught out storing keys and passwords in public repositories. 'Users found that quite a large number of users who had added private keys to their repositories and then pushed the files up to GitHub. Searching on id_rsa, a file which contains the private key for SSH logins, returned over 600 results. Projects had live configuration files from cloud services such as Amazon Web Services and Azure with the encryption keys still included. Configuration and private key files are intended to be kept secret, since if it falls into wrong hands, that person can impersonate the user (or at least, the user's machine) and easily connect to that remote machine.' Search links popped up throughout Twitter pointing to stored keys, including what was reportedly account credentials for the Google Chrome source code repository. The keys can still be found using search engines, so check your repos."

Nerval's Lobster writes "Wolfram Alpha has upgraded its Personal Analytics for Facebook module, giving users the ability to dissect their own social-networking data in new ways. Wolfram Alpha's creators first launched its Facebook data-mining module in August 2012. Users could leverage the platform's computational abilities to analyze and visualize their weekly distribution of Facebook posts, types of posts (photos, links, status updates), weekly app activity, frequency of particular words in posts, and more. This latest update isn't radical, but it does offer some interesting new features, including added color coding for 'interesting' friend properties, including relationship status, age, sex, and so on; users can also slice their network data by metrics such as location and age." Wolfram users could also use some of that new site-specific searching power to come up with some unsavory results.

An anonymous reader writes "Australian surgeon Guy Hingston is suing Google in the U.S. for 'auto-complete' defamation. Typing in his name brings up 'Guy Hingston bankrupt' in the auto-complete. The association seems to have come about because Hingston purchased an aviation group CoastJet which went bankrupt two-and-a-half years later. Hingston himself was also bankrupted. Hingston claims this association has cost him customers and is suing Google for $75k, plus court costs. Google has often found itself the target of litigation over auto-complete searches. Are auto-complete results even useful? Should Google be policing the auto-complete suggestions?"