smitty777 writes "You may have already noticed some of the changes in Google as part of their multi-month design slam. These design changes include information architecture focus, seamless device integration, and simplifying a number of elements. According to the official Google blog, the changes over the next few months will affect Google Search, Maps and Gmail. The black navigation bar in place right now is also part of the Google +Project."

itwbennett writes "According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is preparing to serve subpoenas to Google as a first step in a broad antitrust investigation focusing on whether Google search is unfairly driving traffic to its other sites. Representatives of Google and the FTC declined to comment on the report, although an FTC spokesperson did deny that the report came from them."

BogenDorpher writes "According to statistics from ComScore, for the first time ever, a website drew one billion visitors worldwide in just one month. Guess what website came out on top? Google of course. Microsoft and Facebook rounded out the top three. From the article: 'Though Google captured the most visitors last month, users collectively spent the most time at Facebook--250 billion minutes in May, compared with 200 billion minutes at Google and 204 billion at Microsoft."

itwbennett writes "Huawei's $30 billion credit line from the Chinese Development Bank gives it an unfair advantage over rivals, said U.S. Export-Import Bank Chairman and President Fred Hochberg in a speech Wednesday at the Center for American Progress in Washington, D.C. 'The reality is [that] opaque state-directed capital allows foreign governments to target their financing at specific sectors and companies, while aggressively grabbing market share in an attempt to dominate a market,' Hochberg said. Responding to the charges, a Huawei spokesman called the charge 'hogwash.'"

Eponymous Hero writes "In a sequel to elenasinbox.com, the publicly released emails of Supreme Court justice Elena Kagan, Sunlight Foundation has unveiled sarahsinbox.com to offer you easy access and search to Sarah Palin's recently released emails. If that doesn't flip your bits, have a gander at some of the tools Sunlight Foundation offers relating to government watchdogging, like Poligraft, or Inbox Influencer."

itwbennett writes "China is blocking searches on Google and microblogs for Zengcheng, a city in the country's Guangdong province, where protests have erupted against local authorities. The move is part of an effort to suppress information on the rioting."

kai_hiwatari writes "At the Inside Search event being held at San Francisco, Google has announced a new addition to its search features — Search by Image. The Search by Image feature is something like Google's image search application for mobile devices — Google Goggles — but for the desktop."

Frequent Slashdot contributor Bennett Haselton writes "Facebook indirectly accused Google of creating dummy accounts to log in and spider information from their site, and Google denied the charge. But if Google wants to help users discover what strangers can find out about them, then spidering Facebook with dummy accounts is exactly what they should be doing." Read on for the rest of his thoughts.

bizwriter writes "Google announced that it will support authorship HTML tags, a way to associate Web content with the individuals who create it. Suddenly, search engines know when one person was responsible for a body of work, no matter where content appears on the Web. If Google incorporates this into page relevance and ranking, as it is considering, the result could change the balance of power between those who create and those who publish."

aabelro writes "Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! have decided to propose a common markup vocabulary, Schema.org, based on the Microdata format, simplifying the job of webmasters who want to give meaning to their web pages' content." Manu Sporny, chair of the W3C group that created RDFa, added his (personal) dissenting opinion about Schema, calling it a 'false choice,' and saying, "The entire Web community should decide which features should be supported – not just Microsoft or Google or Yahoo."

itwbennett writes "Gennette Cordova knows first-hand how impossible it is to erase yourself from the Internet. The 21-year-old college student was the hapless recipient of a photo of a Congressman Anthony Weiner bulging in his boxers. Ms. Cordova then 'watched in sheer disbelief as my name, age, location, links to any social networking site I've ever used, my old phone numbers and pictures have been passed along from stranger to stranger.' She then tried to remove her personal information from the web, one social network at a time. But the fact is, 'until a site's Webmaster removes the offending content, it will remain accessible via search engines like Google,' says blogger Dan Tynan."

Hugh Pickens writes "Time Magazine reports that computational neuroscientists Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam analyzed the results of 400 million online searches for porn and uncovered some startling insights into what men and women may really want from each other. In the first place, although you can find an instance of any kind of porn you can imagine on the internet, people search for and spend money and time on 20 sexual interests, which account for 80% of all porn — the top 10 sex-related searches include variations on youth (13.5 per cent), breasts (4 per cent), cheating wives (3.4 per cent) and cheerleaders (0.1 per cent) among others. Many are surprised that "cheating wives" is such a popular search but Ogas says that it's one of the top interests all around the world because men are wired to be sexually jealous but simultaneously they're also sexually aroused so if a man sees a woman — including his partner — with another man, he becomes more aroused. Women prefer stories to visual porn by a long shot and the most popular erotica for women is the romance novel because female desire requires multiple stimuli simultaneously or in quick succession."

lordvramir writes "If you run a CD or DVD duplication company and you're based in California, you may soon be subject to warrantless searches in order to 'fight piracy.' California Senate Bill 550, introduced by Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Pacoima), has slowly begun making its way through the state legislature as a way to cut down on counterfeit discs, but critics worry that it may open the door to Fourth Amendment violations." This fits in well with other recent moves to neuter the Fourth Amendment.

Tiek00n wrote in with something that might sound familiar, saying, "Microsoft on Monday expanded its use of Facebook within its Bing search engine, adding 'likes' and recommendations from friends and strangers into search results. Going forward, if you search for something one of your Facebook friends has 'liked,' Bing will note that in its search results. Did your sister and roommate 'like' a nearby Italian restaurant? A small photo, the Facebook 'thumbs up' icon, and a note that said they approve will show up in search results, Microsoft said."

liqs8143 writes "Astronomers from the United States have begun searching for alien life on 86 possible earth-like planets. A massive radio telescope that listens for signs of alien life is being used for this project. These 86 planets are short-listed from 1235 possible planets detected by NASA's Kepler telescope. The mission is part of the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) project, launched in the mid 1980s. A giant dish pointing towards each of the 86 planets will gather 24 hours of data, starting from this week."

Last fall, Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) introduced the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA), which was dubbed the "internet blacklist" by opponents worried about its broad provisions for allowing the removal of websites based on vague criteria. COICA stalled in Congress, but now Leahy has proposed a new, similar piece of legislation called the PROTECT IP Act (PDF). "Like COICA, Protect IP expands the web of enforcement techniques by requiring advertising networks and financial transaction providers to cut ties to domains found to violate the law. But the new version now adds search engines and others to the list of providers who can be conscripted into complying with court orders. Protect IP would require 'information location tools' to 'take technically feasible and reasonable measures, as expeditiously as possible,' to remove or disable access to the site associated with a condemned domain, including blocking hypertext links to the site. ... Perhaps most worrisome of all, Protect IP adds a provision that allows copyright and trademark holders to sue the owner/operator of a domain directly. Again, the provision applies only to nondomestically-registered domains, but it allows the private party, like the government, to sue the domain name itself if the registrant does not have a US address. That's important because in all cases, once a suit is initiated, the plaintiff can ask the court to issue an injunction or restraining order effectively shutting the site down."

Orome1 writes "If you are a regular user of Google's image search, you might have noticed that poisoned search results have practically become a common occurrence. Google has, of course, noticed this and does its best to mark the offending links as such, but they still have trouble when it comes to cleaning up its image search results."

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)."

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."

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)."