Tag: SEARCH ENGINES

For everything we do now -- from scheduling a mover to choosing a restaurant for a first date -- we turn to the Web. Yelp, Twitter, Facebook, Citysearch and even Google immediately pull up reviews and hear what the collective voice of the Internet has to say. In fact, when scheduling a doctor, your author crosschecks what her insurance provides with what the consensus says; negative reviews are ...

A New York court has rejected a settlement in a class action lawsuit filed by the Authors Guild against Google Books. Under the settlement, reached in 2009, Google would be able to digitize and display excerpts from books that are out of print, even if they're still under copyright, or not authorized to be included in Google Books. The agreement quickly raised the ire of many organizations, ...

Google has introduced a new feature that allows users to block all search results from any site they choose. Users will now see a new 'Block all example.com results' link, next to the 'Cached' and 'Similar' options that appear under search results. The block option will only show up, however, after a user clicks on the link, and returns to Google. If you choose to block a site, you'll receive a ...

After Google inadvertently gathered personal information from its Street View cars and rendered Gmail addresses more visible with the ill-conceived launch of Google Buzz, the company soon found itself under fire from governments and consumer advocacy groups. Few critics, however, have been as vocal as Consumer Watchdog, which has now placed an enormous anti-Google ad in the middle of Times Square. ...

Search engines typically dispatch "robots," or "spiders," to systematically crawl the Web for timely, pertinent and specific information. Programmers control the actions of those crawlers with robots.txt files, which command the spider to patrol certain websites and to index specific material. Inevitably, huge nerds will also hide quirky messages right in the heart of the geeky protocol. The ...

Share One of Gmail's most polarizing features is its 'Conversations' format, which groups long e-mail exchanges under the same, single subject line. Some users prefer the format to traditional e-mail displays, and even point to it as Gmail's defining feature. Others, meanwhile, have long insisted that the message grouping only makes it easier to miss new e-mails [Ed. Note: Those people are ...

Share Whether it's a car, a professional sports logo, or Coca-Cola, every classic design, at one point or another, undergoes some sort of renovation. These cosmetic makeovers, however, are rarely as drastic as the redesign that Google has just unveiled on its trademark home page. After the search engine tested a new, minimally altered site design back in April, the company has now decided to ...

Share What does your search engine say about you? Well, if you believe a new study from a group of marketing agencies, it says a lot. A group that included Wunderman, BrandAsset Consulting, Zaaz, and Compete set out to learn about the shopping habits and brand preferences of search users. Google users tend towards Target and Amazon, while Bing users (despite apparently being "early adopters") are ...

In its never-ending quest for Web domination, Google has just introduced a real-time search function to a select few users. As detailed in the video below (after the break), the new feature responds to a search query by providing a window that displays constantly updated results. Search for "I-65 traffic," for instance, and watch as the updates of wrecks and bottlenecks pour forth. At ...

Despite Google's clean and simple design, users can still feel overwhelmed and frustrated by the freewheeling way in which search results appear on the site. To combat this problem, Marissa Meyer, Google's vice president of search product and user experience, told Mashable that the search giant will soon begin testing a new permanent sidebar on its results page, but only for a small number of ...

A surreptitious message about possible search engine upgrades appeared on the Google Blog back in August, and the rumored changes, which have officially been dubbed 'Caffeine,' seem ready to launch at any time. Google originally stated that its "next-generation architecture" would incorporate "under the hood" modifications, expanding search parameters while maximizing both indexing speed and ...

Last year, The Business Insider -- inspired by an obscenity case in Pensacola, Florida -- checked out the Google Trends data for each of the "seven dirty words." The defense attorney in the case had planned to use Google search data to show that Pensacola's morals were lax in comparison to the rest of the country. The research never saw the light of day, but that didn't stop The Business Insider ...

The Brits are great, some of our favorite people. Well-dressed, polite, fabulous musicians, but perhaps a bit too hard on the average individual. In a recent investigation on the nature of humanity, CNET.co.uk decided to see what popular searches Google offered when prompted by simple questions, and the findings were bleak. Using 'Google Suggest,' the auto-fill feature that predicts text as it's ...

Further increasing its dominance over everything Web-related, Google received a patent Tuesday for the design of its home page, according to Gawker. One might ask, "What is there to patent?" After all, the design is minimalist at best and plain at worst. Well, it means that Google owns the idea of having a home page with a search box placed in the middle (where else?), two buttons underneath that ...

Pretty much everyone, at some point, has googled their own name just to see what might pop up. To further that natural desire to know what's associated with your name on the Net, a group of MIT tech pedants, led by Aaron Zinman, has launched Personas. After entering your name, the program, which creates a personal online data portrait, "scours the Web for information and attempts to ...