Search Engines - Infoworld

EPIC sues FTC over Google's planned privacy changes

admin — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 12:52:23 +0000

The Electronic Privacy Information Center has filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, asking a court to force the agency to take action against Google over planned changes in the company's collection of personal data.

Google to pay users to track their movements online

admin — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 12:28:54 +0000

Amid widespread concern about its new privacy policies, Google is now facing criticism over an offer to give users Amazon gift certificates if they open their Web movements to the company in a program called Screenwise.

Google says the program launched "near the beginning of the year," but the company's low-key offer was disclosed Tuesday night on the blog Search Engine Land.

Yahoo ousts half its board

admin — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 00:18:31 +0000

As part of an ongoing effort to recover from a downward spiral, Yahoo said on Tuesday that four board members, including its chairman, will step down.

Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang left the board earlier this month. With the additional departures announced today -- including that of chairman Roy Bostock -- more than half of the board's membership will be fresh blood.

Google agrees to court order in India to remove content

admin — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 14:20:55 +0000

Google has agreed before a court in Delhi to remove religious and other content considered objectionable, though some other Internet firms are likely to appeal the court's decision, plaintiff Mufti Ajiaz Arshad Qasmi said on Monday.

Qasmi, a private citizen, had filed a civil suit against Google and other Internet companies including Facebook, objecting to certain content on their websites. The content is said to mock gods worshipped in India. He is now pressing the companies to put in place technology for filtering out content that is considered objectionable.

Are Google and Apple really monopolies?

admin — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 11:00:00 +0000

You hear the word "monopoly" thrown around a lot these days, especially about Google and Apple.

After Google's bid to acquire Motorola, the integration of Google+ signals in Google Search, and the announcement of Google's consolidation of privacy policies and data gathering across Google services, critics have been saying Google has a monopoly in the search market.

Google, what happened?

Eric Knorr — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 11:00:00 +0000

Google, it used to be I couldn't wait to see your cheery face in the morning. Now I'm not sure I can even get a straight answer from you.

When you first showed up out of nowhere, I was charmed like everyone else. You dressed simply. There was nothing artificial about you. You just did what you did better than anyone else. You were so low-key about it that I never would have guessed you'd become rich and famous.

Google stirs up privacy hornet's nest

admin — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 12:59:23 +0000

Google has whipped up a privacy brouhaha with a blog post announcing that the company is rewriting its privacy policy, consolidating user information across its services.

Joomla content management gets multi-database support

admin — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 15:23:53 +0000

The newly released edition of the Joomla open source content management system now comes with a new search engine, and can use Microsoft SQL Server or PostGreSQL, in addition to MySQL.

Joomla 2.5, released Tuesday, also can now alert administrators when a new version of the software is ready to be installed directly from the administrator's home page.

Google's push for Google+ risks user ire -- and worse

InfoWorld Tech Watch — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 11:00:00 +0000

Google's going to great lengths of late to promote and celebrate Google+ -- so much so that it's starting to smack of desperation. Not in recent memory, if ever, has the company engaged in such questionable tactics to promote a new service.

Google to punish sites with many ads at the top of pages

admin — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 21:32:09 +0000

Websites that load the top of their pages with ads, forcing visitors to scroll down to view content, will take a hit on their Google rankings.

Google has concluded that its users are bothered by this type of layout so it will begin penalizing them in search results, the company said in a blog post.

Microsoft results yield unexpected good news

InfoWorld Tech Watch — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 15:46:52 +0000

Microsoft's results for the quarter ending Dec. 31, 2011, were pretty much in line with what industry observers expected. But two items caught my eye, and they both fall in the category of good news for Microsoft and its shareholders.

Search engine market shares refused to budge in 2011

InfoWorld Tech Watch — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 15:55:04 +0000

The final search engine numbers for 2011 leave us right back where the year started.

Critics accuse Google of unfairly promoting Google+ in search results

admin — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 23:03:34 +0000

The long-standing and persistent accusation that Google unfairly uses its search engine to promote its other online services is once again in the spotlight, triggered by new social search functionality the company is rolling out this week that more tightly links its search engine with its Google+ social networking site.

Google social search adds 'personal' Picasa, Google+ results

admin — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 15:55:49 +0000

Google will start rolling out on Tuesday a tight integration between its search engine and two of its social media sites, Google+ and Picasa Web, in the company's latest move to deepen its social search capabilities.

With this link, Google hopes to make it easier for people to find not only information on public Web pages, but also content they and their friends have posted and made available to each other privately through the Google+ social network and the Picasa Web photo upload and sharing site.

9 hot technology startups to watch in 2012

admin — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 17:20:17 +0000

While there are sure to be a lot of new networking and IT companies that emerge in 2012, these nine stood out for their potential to deliver game-changing innovations in a wide array of fields, including cloud computing, enterprise search, and mobile application development.

Google downgrades Chrome ranking after paid-link scandal

admin — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 19:24:58 +0000

Google penalized its own browser's search rankings Tuesday over a marketing campaign that went bad, the company confirmed.

"We've investigated and are taking manual action to demote www.google.com/chrome and lower the site's PageRank for a period of at least 60 days," a Google spokesman said yesterday in an email.

Update: Yahoo taps PayPal president as CEO

admin — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 15:10:55 +0000

Yahoo's board has chosen as the company's CEO Scott Thompson, president of eBay's PayPal, ending a four-month search after Carol Bartz was fired in early September.

Tim Morse, Yahoo's interim CEO, will now go back full-time to his CFO role, the company said in a statement on Wednesday. Thompson starts on Jan. 9, at which time he will also take a seat on the company's board.

Google to pay Mozilla $300M yearly in new search deal, says report

admin — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 15:27:48 +0000

Google promised to pay Mozilla almost $300 million annually to keep its search engine as the default in Firefox, according to a report Thursday on AllThingsD, a blog operated by the publisher of the Wall Street Journal.

Google and Mozilla jointly announced Tuesday that they had struck a new deal to keep Google as Firefox's default search engine, and on the browser's home page.

LinkedIn open sources search engine

admin — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 17:29:51 +0000

Joining its fellow social-networking companies in the public release of internal code, LinkedIn has opened sourced software obtained in October with its acquisition of the IndexTank search-engine software provider.

"We are looking forward to seeing IndexTank thrive as an open-source project," wrote LinkedIn director of engineering, and former CEO of IndexTank, Diego Basch, in a blog post announcing the release.

Why Google needs Firefox now more than ever

InfoWorld Tech Watch — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 17:45:24 +0000

If you thought that Google was going to stick a lump of coal in Firefox's stocking this holiday season, you weren't alone.