Tag: SEARCH

Google's high-quality search results have been hit hard lately as spammers have been increasingly successful in gaming the system to serve you useless pages that contain only a nugget of relevancy to your query and are slathered in ads. To illustrate this growing problem, the founders of startup search engine Blekko created the Spam Clock, which claims that more than 220 million spam pages have ...

Google's just unveiled its holiday gift to the world: a brand new homepage doodle. The latest design features interactive, postcard-like images of 17 holiday scenes from around the world. All of the images are arranged across the top of the homepage, and each can be enlarged with a hover of the cursor. It took five artists a total of 250 hours to put together, working under the direction of ...

Google's latest search tool may not be its most widely celebrated, but it could end up having a far greater cultural impact than anything else the company has ever done. The new Google Books Ngram Viewer, which launched last week, collects more than 500 billion words, from over 5.2 million digital books available for free download. Users can search for a specific word or phrase, and the viewer ...

A U.S. appeals court has determined that federal investigators must obtain a search warrant before accessing a suspect's e-mail account, in a ruling that makes an obscene amount of sense. The case, U.S. v. Warshak, involves a man named Steven Warshak, who created Enzyte -- the "natural male enhancement." A few years ago, Warshak came under fire from the FTC, which claimed that his products ...

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 ...

Facebook users may have an easier time rounding out their online social circles, thanks to the site's new Find Friends Browser (Ed. note: it's still being rolled out, so you may not be seeing it yet). As All Facebook explains, the new tool essentially provides users with an expanded, more comprehensive version of Friend Recommendations. The new Friend Browser presents these recommendations in a ...

Google is now rolling out the instant previews of search results that it began testing in early October. As is the case with most Google updates, the search previews will become available to all users, and in 40 languages across the globe, within the next few days. When you gain access, you'll notice a magnifying glass icon next to each of your search results. Clicking on it will open a pop-up ...

A new (and bizarrely named) browser called 'RockMelt' was finally released yesterday, after over a year's worth of rumor and speculation. Created by Eric Vishria and Tim Howes (and backed by Netscape developer Marc Andreessen), RockMelt had been widely heralded as a "Facebook browser" -- and, in many ways, it is. To access the tool, users must first log into their Facebook accounts through the ...

According to the Official Google Blog, the company has added the option of searching by place to its results page. By clicking the Places tab that appears on the left side of Google's main page, the search results will be filtered by location, and marked on a map with red pins. Nothing new, right? But, now, each search result includes links containing more information about the place, whereas, in ...

In the age of 140-character tweets and bite-sized blog posts, Mark Armstrong found it increasingly difficult to locate lengthy articles to read during extended periods of downtime. So, he created the Longreads Twitter feed, where similarly inclined followers could submit and share meatier online pieces among themselves. Armstrong clearly wasn't the only one looking for long-form pieces, either. ...

The Google search page is getting a small but significant tweak that makes identifying and changing your location much easier. Now your current (or at least assumed current) location is displayed on the left-hand navigation bar on the results page. You can easily update your whereabouts by clicking the "change location" link. Pretty simple, really, but quite handy. ...

While technology isn't totally embraced on the baseball diamond, Major League Baseball is embracing it behind the scenes. According to The New York Times, about 50 employees now watch 2,430 regular season and up to 41 postseason baseball games as they occur, and digitally archive every play using hundreds of tags and descriptions to make searching this database as simple as a Google search. ...

The next time you save child pornography on your hard drive, you probably shouldn't save it under a name like 'KiddiePornXXX.' Doing so, it turns out, may give law enforcement officials the green light to search and seize your hard drive. That's exactly what happened to Corey Beantee Melton, from Alabama, after he took his computer to get repaired at a local Best Buy. When Best Buy's Geek Squad ...

In an attempt to set it apart from rival Google, Yahoo! has now launched a revamped search page, which the company hopes will allow users "to be entertained, to be productive and stay informed." The new search page, which went live today, certainly stands in stark contrast to Google's comparatively spartan layout. Although most search topics won't be affected immediately, Yahoo! users ...

Google recently blessed the world (or cursed it, depending on your perspective) with instant search results. Then, the company added keyboard shortcuts to the search page for faster navigation. Now, Google is testing a feature that allows users to preview a page in search results without visiting it. Those of you who have the feature enabled will see a small magnifying glass next to your search ...