jee4all writes with this excerpt from E-week: "Researchers say personal information should 'degrade' — becoming less specific over time — to protect users' privacy. Rather than amassing personal data and holding on to it as long as legally possible, companies such as Google should allow the data to degrade over time, according to researchers. In an interview with the BBC this week, Dutch researcher Harold van Heerde discussed his work on the idea of allowing data to becomes less specific over time. Letting the specifics gradually disappear could protect consumer privacy while also meeting the needs of service providers, he said."

NIN1385 writes "Google has scrapped the now infamous background image option on its homepage. After 14 hours of a scheduled 24-hour experiment to see how people liked (or disliked) the new homepage layout, the company must have found out it was very disliked. I guess the fact that 'remove Google background' was the seventh most searched for phrase today might have had something to do with it."

PatPending writes "The Patent and Trademark Office announced it has reached a two-year 'no-cost' agreement with Google to make patent and trademark data electronically available and free to the public. From the article: 'Saying it lacks the technical capacity to offer such a service, PTO said the two-year agreement with Google is a temporary solution while the agency seeks a contractor to build a database that would allow the public to access such information in electronic machine-readable bulk form.'"

Ponca City, We love you writes "When Google started, it would only update its index every four months. Then, around 2000, it started indexing every month in a process called the 'Google dance' that took a week to 10 days and would provide different results when searching for the same term from different Google data centers. Now PC World reports that Google has introduced a new web indexing system called Caffeine, which delivers results that are closer to 'live' by analyzing the web in small portions and updating the index on a continuous basis. 'Caffeine lets us index web pages on an enormous scale,' writes Carrie Grimes on the official Google Blog. 'Caffeine takes up nearly 100 million gigabytes of storage in one database and adds new information at a rate of hundreds of thousands of gigabytes per day.' Now not only does Caffeine provide results that are 50% fresher than Google's last index, adds Grimes, but the new search index provides a robust foundation that will make it possible for Google to build a faster and more comprehensive search engine that scales with the growth of information online."

technology_dude found an unsurprising but amusing little story that BP is buying keywords on Google and Yahoo for things like "Oil Spill" to help spin some damage control. I guess if you can't plug your spill, the least you can do is try to clog the flow of information.

pjfontillas writes "Yusuf Mehdi, Senior Vice President of Microsoft's Online Audience Business Group, recently announced, 'One of the principles we have here at Bing is to constantly experiment and learn. We do this to ensure we are keeping pace with new social and technology trends, and can continue to deliver great value for our customers and advertisers. As part of this "test-and-learn" mentality, we will be retiring the Bing cashback feature, which means that the last day you can earn cashback will be July 30, 2010.' From the look of the comments, Microsoft has at least 35 saddened users. eWeek does a follow-up attempting to explain the situation in more detail."

smooth wombat writes "Various websites have tried to make readers pay for access to select parts of their sites. Now, in a bid to counter what he claims is theft of his material, Rupert Murdoch's Times and Sunday Times sites will become essentially invisible to web users. Except for their home pages, no stories will show up on Google. Starting in late June, Google and other search engines will be prevented from indexing and linking to stories. Registered users will still get free access until the cut off date."

alphadogg writes "People who want to shield their use of Google's Web search engine from network snoops now have the option of encrypting the session with SSL protection. In the case of Google search, SSL will protect the transmission of search queries entered by users and the search results returned by Google servers. Google began rolling out the encrypted version of its Web search engine on Friday. 'We think users will appreciate this new option for searching. It's a helpful addition to users' online privacy and security, and we'll continue to add encryption support for more search offerings,' wrote Evan Roseman, a Google software engineer, in an official blog post."

It was only a matter of time before ISPs began doing more than just redirecting failed DNS requests to their own pages. An anonymous reader writes "It looks like the largest ISP in Hong Kong has started bypassing search results from Firefox's location bar (which typically uses Google), forcing their own search provider (yp.com.hk) onto their users. ... Can an ISP just start re-directing search traffic at will?"

Hugh Pickens notes a USA Today story reporting that two US senators have joined Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) in telling Facebook to quit sharing more of its users' data than they signed up for. Politico.com ups USA Today's ante, saying that it was three more senators, not two more, who joined Schumer's call: Michael Bennet (D-CO), Mark Begich (D-AK), and Al Franken (D-MN). The senators are asking the FTC to look at Facebook's controversial new information-sharing policies, arguing that the massively popular social network overstepped its bounds when it began sharing user data with other websites. Sen. Schumer said he learned about the new rules from his daughter, who is in law school, but added that he's noticed no difference on his own Facebook page, which, he assured reporters, "is very boring." "I can attest to that," deadpanned Franken, who made his living as a comedian before entering the Senate, and whose Facebook followers outnumber Schumer's by ten to one.

angry tapir writes "Microsoft posted strong results for the third quarter of its 2010 fiscal year, largely thanks to sales of Windows 7. But the company continues to suffer heavy losses in its Online Services Division [warning: obnoxious interstitial] as it tries to match Google in the online search and advertising market. ... The division's quarterly loss grew by 73 percent to $713 million, compared to a loss of $411 million during the same period last year."

Geoffrey.landis writes "Terry Southgate discovered that his wife Wendy appears on the Google Street View of his neighborhood not once or twice but a whopping 43 times. From the article: 'It seems as if the Street View car simply followed the same route as Wendy and Trixie. However, Wendy was a little suspicious that the car was doing something on the "tricksie" side. Several of the Street View shots show Wendy looking with some concern towards the car that was, well, to put it politely, crawling along the curb. "I didn't know what it was doing. It was just driving round very, very slowly," Wendy told the Sun.' The next best thing to being a movie star — a Street View star!"

An anonymous reader sends along this excerpt from MIT's Technology Review: "Personalization is a key part of Internet search, providing more relevant results and gaining loyal customers in the process. But new research highlights the privacy risks that this kind of personalization can bring. A team of European researchers, working with a researcher from the University of California, Irvine, found that they were able to hijack Google's personalized search suggestions to reconstruct users' Web search histories (PDF). Google has plugged most of the holes identified in the research, but the researchers say that other personalized services are likely to have similar vulnerabilities."

An anonymous reader writes "In an unfortunate data breach, social media site Blippy has left credit card numbers in clear text, searchable via a simple Google query. The results show the amount spent on a transaction, the location, and the full card number. As of this submission, the issue still hasn't been resolved." The company's co-founder, Philip Kaplan, told the NY Times, "... when people link their credit cards to Blippy, merchants pass along their raw transaction data – including some credit card numbers – and the site scrubs that information to present just the merchant and the dollar amount spent. But several months ago, when Blippy was being publicly tested, that raw transaction data was present in the site's HTML code, where it was retrieved by Google. Mr. Kaplan said that early on, Blippy started disguising the raw transaction data behind the scenes, but it did not know about the breach until today."

lee1 writes "Google is now taking into account how fast a page loads in calculating its PageRank. In their own words: '[W]e're including a new signal in our search ranking algorithms: site speed. Site speed reflects how quickly a website responds to web requests. ... our users place a lot of value in speed — that's why we've decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings. ... While site speed is a new signal, it doesn't carry as much weight as the relevance of a page. Currently, fewer than 1% of search queries are affected by the site speed signal in our implementation and the signal for site speed only applies for visitors searching in English on Google.com at this point.' Considering the increasing dilution of high-ranking results by endless series of plagiarizing 'blogs,' brainless forums, and outright scam sites, anything that further reduces the influence of the quality of the content is something I would rather not have. Not that Google asked me."

kai_hiwatari writes "Sometime back Canonical decided to change the default search in Firefox that comes Ubuntu 10.04 to Yahoo! from Google. In a surprising turn-around, Canonical have decided to a ditch Yahoo! for Google. Rick Spencer from Canonical announced that Google will now be the default Firefox search in Ubuntu 10.04, not Yahoo! as was previously decided."

Hugh Pickens writes "eWeek reports that the data Apple collects about users from its iPhone is so valuable that the company may build its own iPhone-centric search engine just to keep Google from gleaning insight from that data. 'The data generated on the iPhone OS platform must become an increasing priority for Apple and we believe the company has the resources to develop its own products in both maps and search in the next five years,' writes analyst Gene Munster. Google is currently the default search engine on the iPhone, but Google has increasingly encroached on Apple's mobile turf, offering the Android operating system and several mobile applications. As the search provider for the iPhone, Google sees what iPhone users are searching for, which can help it tailor software and services for its own mobile smartphones — a competitive advantage that has not gone unnoticed by Apple. Apple lacks the experience and engineering wherewithal to build a large, scalable search engine, but Munster says Apple could buy a search startup with a Web index, such as Cuil or Taptu, and use its index as the seed for its own search engine. 'Apple is in an inside position to tap into the current pent-up demand for better mobile search, and add a new competitive differentiation from other search providers and device makers,' adds IDC analyst Hadley Reynolds."

techmuse was one of several readers to note Google's official response to recent news that a town in Kansas would rename itself Google. The search engine company has announced a name change of its own, although I'm not sure saying "Let me Topeka that" has quite the same ring to it.

Art3x writes "When developing search engine technology, Microsoft focused on returning good results for popular queries but ignored the minor ones. 'It turned out the long tail was much more important,' said Bing's Yusuf Mehdi. 'One-third of queries that show up on Bing, it's the first time we've ever seen that query.' Yet the long tail is what makes most of Google's money. Microsoft is so far behind now that they won't crush Google, but they hope to live side by side, with Bing specializing in transactions like plane tickets, said Bing Director Stefan Weitz."

ericb tips an article at the Guardian which begins: "Hopes that Google's forthright stand on censorship in China would inspire other companies to follow suit appeared unfounded today, with the move instead threatening to widen the rift between some of the world's most powerful internet companies. Microsoft, which has considerable interests in the country, including its Bing search engine, responded directly to criticism by Google's co-founder Sergey Brin, who this week accused the company of speaking against human rights and free speech. Brin, who pressed for the closing down of Google's self-censored Chinese search engine, said yesterday: 'I'm very disappointed for them in particular. I would hope that larger companies would not put profit ahead of all else. Generally, companies should pay attention to how and where their products are used.' Microsoft rejected Brin's critique, saying it would continue to obey local laws on censorship in China."