Tag: SEARCH ENGINE

Every year Google blesses us with Zeitgeist, a roundup of what the world was searching for during the last 12 months. This year's big searches included the World Cup, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and the earthquake in Haiti. The iPad and Chatroulette, though were the most popular queries. Check out the year in review video after the break, and explore the Zeitgeist data here using Google's ...

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 ...

You know how in movies, a character plays a trick on another by subtly changing something to which they're accustomed? Like the size of their favorite slippers, or the location of a trusted hat rack, causing the victim to toss their cap onto the floor? It's that grand old prank of quietly rearranging things to mess with somebody's head. That's how we felt this morning when we went to do our ...

In a move to compete with Google, lesser search providers Yahoo! and Microsoft yesterday inked a 10-year agreement to combine their search powers. Microsoft's Bing, the Redmond-based company's latest foray into the search market, will be powering Yahoo!'s search engine, and, in turn, Yahoo! will sell ads. The combined companies' research-and-development teams might actually make a legitimate ...

After Feds decided to step up their monitoring practices of Web ad companies that use behavioral advertising (which narrows ad content based on search terms, age ranges, and interests), a group of Web and media advertisers decided to launch new guidelines on privacy. USA Today reports that more than 5,000 companies, along with the Better Business Bureau and the American Association of National ...