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."

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?"

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."

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."

coondoggie writes "The folks at Google are taking issue over spam and the quality of Google searches, which some claim has gone down in recent months. Today on Google's official blog, Principal Engineer Matt Cutts said, 'January brought a spate of stories about Google’s search quality. Reading through some of these recent articles, you might ask whether our search quality has gotten worse. The short answer is that according to the evaluation metrics that we’ve refined over more than a decade, Google’s search quality is better than it has ever been in terms of relevance, freshness and comprehensiveness. Today, English-language spam in Google’s results is less than half what it was five years ago, and spam in most other languages is even lower than in English.' Cutts also explained that the company has made a few significant changes to their method of indexing."

jfruhlinger writes "Google surprised just about everybody at its earnings call by announcing that Eric Schmidt, who had served as company CEO for more than a decade, would be stepping down and that cofounder Larry Page would take over. Schmidt will stay on as chairman and provide 'technology thought leadership,' whatever that is. When Schmidt, an old Sun hand, joined Google in 2001, it was seen as a move to turn the scrappy upstart into a mature company; now on his Twitter feed Schmidt proclaims that his 'adult supervision' is no longer needed."

eko3 writes "SearchEngineLand.com is featuring an article that compares Google's result query relevance performance to Microsoft's Bing. Through the author's methodology and very small sampling, he argues Bing returns slightly more relevant results than Google. The article suggests that Google is riding its current market success based on its legacy namesake when internet search used to be a lot more painful than it is today."

nonprofiteer writes "Mark Jensen's home computer revealed Internet searches for botulism, poisoning, pipe bombs and mercury fulminate. A website was visited that explained how to reverse the polarity of a swimming pool — the Jensens had a pool — by switching the wires around, likening the result to the 4th of July. The State pointed out the absence of Internet searches on topics like separation, divorce, child custody or marital property. Julie Jensen died as a result of ethylene glycol in her system, an ingredient found in antifreeze. On the morning of her death, someone attempted to 'double-delete' (apparently unsuccessfully) the computer's browsing history, which included a search for 'ethylene glycol poisoning.'" What if searches for devious, undetectable methods of murder were in everyone's history?

entotre writes "A new feature has been added to the advanced Google search: reading level. From the blog post: 'The feature lets you filter or annotate the search results by reading level. The reading levels include basic, intermediate and advanced. You can either have Google label or annotate the results with those labels, only show basic results, only show intermediate results or only show advanced results.' At the time of writing, Slashdot is 1 % advanced, 64 % intermediate and 34 % basic."

An anonymous reader writes "Forget Google Instant, the search giant is working on ways to push relevant info to users before they have even asked for it... Foursquare-style location 'check-ins' are also apparently on the way next year."

An anonymous reader writes "Google is making changes in the way it presents web search results to try to exclude links that may be tied to pirated content. In a move enthusiastically praised by the RIAA, Google says it will not include terms closely associated with piracy from appearing via autocomplete. The company acknowledged that it can be hard to know what terms are being used to find infringing content, but 'we'll do our best to prevent Autocomplete from displaying the terms most frequently used for that purpose.'"

hype7 writes "Given the recent publicity about Android and Google, the Harvard Business Review are offering another interesting perspective. They argue that Google runs a serious risk of losing control of Android, as competitors such as Bing and Baidu move in. It certainly presents an interesting possibility — that Android could win but Google wouldn't see any benefit out of it."

Orome1 writes "The well-known whitehat hacker and security researcher who goes by the handle Moxie Marlinspike has recently experienced firsthand the electronic device search that travelers are sometimes submitted to by border agents when entering the country. He was returning from the Dominican Republic by plane, and when he landed at JFK airport, he was greeted by two US Customs officials and taken to a detention room where they kept him for almost five hours, took his laptop and two cell phones and asked for the passwords needed to access the encrypted material on them."

First pressing 'Enter' was to much work... now actually clicking on the links and visiting the sites is to much, too... Google is testing instant previews, where you can see a miniature rendered view of the landing page without requiring you to click through and back-arrow.

Pickens writes "Previous specialized search engines including Cuil, Hakia, Powerset, Clusty, and RedZ — each had a special trick, but they've all faded from memory, some after crashing in flames, some after making their founders rich. Now Rafe Needleman reports at Cnet that along comes Blekko, whose claim to fame is that you can tilt your search results in the direction you like by using a category of bias, like 'liberal' or 'conservative.' Categorization lists are applied by appending a 'slashtag.' The query, 'climate change /conservative' will give you politically slanted results, for example. 'Climate change /science' will restrict your results to hits from scientific Web sites. Blekko won't have a real, Web-wide impact unless its concept — that bias is good and more aggressive search filtering is needed — gets some traction, writes Needleman. But 'Blekko is a solid alternative to Google and Bing for anyone, and more importantly it's got great potential for researchers, librarians, journalists, or anyone who's willing to put some work into how their search engine functions in order to get better results.'"

Trailrunner7 writes "A Google malware researcher gave a rare peek inside the company's massive anti-malware and anti-phishing efforts at the SecTor conference here, and the data the company has gathered shows that the attackers who make it their business to infect sites and exploit users are adapting their tactics very quickly and creatively to combat the efforts of Google and others. While Google is still a relative newcomer to the public security scene, the company has deployed a number of services and technologies recently that are designed to identify phishing sites, as well as sites serving malware, and prevent users from finding them. The tools include the Google SafeBrowsing API and a handful of services that are available to help site owners and network administrators find and eliminate malware and the attendant bugs from their sites. Fabrice Jaubert, of Google's anti-malware team, said the company has had good luck identifying and weeding out malicious sites of late. Still, as much as 1.5 percent of all search result pages on Google include links to at least one malware-distribution site, he said."

snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Peter Wayner looks beyond Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari, and IE to uncover 10 alternative browsers that offer specialized advantages for 3-D searching, social networking, easy scriptability, powerful page manipulation, and the like. Each provides a targeted browsing environment, enabling users to browse Web tables into spreadsheets, browse leaner, browser in text, browse socially, browse musically, or browse smarter on the Mac. 'A purist might object that these hybrids are not much different from a standard browser with extra plug-ins. There's some truth to this, but not always — some of the unique capabilities can only be done deep inside the software. In any case, the job of parsing the terms and creating an exact definition of the Web browser isn't as much fun as embracing the idea that there are dozens of alternatives.'"

Pickens writes "In a move that could be the biggest threat to Google's search standing yet, Microsoft and Facebook announced that they're teaming up for social search. When someone uses Bing's search engine to look for a new car or a book, she can see which ones her friends liked. While industry watchers say this is an interesting move for search, what's most notable is that Facebook turned to Microsoft for this deal and not to the market leader, Google. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg says there is a specific reason he wants to go with Bing: 'They really are the underdog here. They're incentivized to go out and innovate. They have all these smart people and are trying to do all these new things.' The real importance of this week's announcement is that it highlights the growing strategic conflict between Facebook and Google, says analyst Ray Valdes. 'There is a battle for the future of the Web, and it is not about search engines, but about the social Web.'"

1 a bee writes "CNN is reporting that China is attempting to block all communication regarding Peace prize winner Liu Xiaobo. Even texting is affected: 'Text-messaging on mobile phones is not immune from censors, either. A Shanghai-based netizen, @littley, tweeted his unfortunate experience: "My SIM card just got de-activated, turning my iPhone to an iPod touch after I texted my dad about Liu Xiaobo winning the Nobel Peace Prize."' Might as well add Slashdot to the censored list." Further coverage is available from NBC.

An anonymous reader writes "GoogleSharing, the popular Google anonymizing service created by well known privacy advocate and security researcher Moxie Marlinspike, has released a major new version today. The biggest change is leveraging Google's SSL search option to provide an anonymizing service which doesn't require you to trust either Google or GoogleSharing. This means that anyone who wishes to opt out of Google's data collection practices can now do so without having to trust the operator of the anonymizing service."