Tag: SEARCHENGINES

According to a new comScore study, Web surfers spent about 41.1 million minutes on Facebook during the month of August, roughly equivalent to 9.9-percent of all time spent online. That total put the social network slightly ahead of Google, where, last month, users spent 39.8 million minutes (or 9.6-percent of their time). After being leapfrogged by Facebook during the month of July, Yahoo! ...

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 ...

On the Official Google Blog today, the search giant announced that Google Images is getting a makeover. The revamped look, which features larger images and less white space, might appear oddly familiar to some users. We couldn't help but notice that some of these new design features -- like thumbnails that pop-out and reveal hidden text when you hover over them -- are similar to those found on ...

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 ...

If you're an open tweeter, you know that whatever you tweet is available for general, public consumption. Facebook, by contrast, is a less intrinsically public forum, meaning that even if you update a status on a completely public profile, you can usually rest assured that it won't pop up on some random person's news feed, or in some random person's keyword search. Not anymore, though, thanks to ...

We already knew that employers and hiring managers do Web-based during the job-hiring process. There's enough anecdotal evidence out there that you probably didn't need to read Microsoft's study that found 70-percent of U.S. hiring managers rejected applicants based on their online activities. But that tidbit of information is pretty useless unless you know where they're looking (though you ...

Few websites feel like home to us as does Google. There's comfort, after all, in familiarity, and that's exactly why Google is so reliable. The search engine may have added new features over the years, but never at the expense of its classic layout. While most other sites have gone under the knife in an attempt to keep up with the times, Google has always seemed supremely comfortable in its own ...

In what might be the weirdest pairing we've seen, Nintendo and Google have partnered to create a Wii game that challenges players to accurately guess search-engine rankings. According to Joystiq, the game 'And-Kensaku' will be released in Japan at the end of April, but there's no word on a U.S. release. Essentially, the title is a collection of mini-games based on search-engine results, which ...

For some time, businesses have used digital video surveillance for security and other purposes. But there's been a problem with this system; the footage is often cumbersome to search. Now, a company has developed a search engine for archived digital video surveillance footage, making it much easier to peruse. According to Scientific American, the tool, which was developed by 3VR Security, Inc., ...

Share Google software engineer Bryan Horling told those gathered for the SMX West conference that as many as one in five Google search results are customized for the user -- based on his or her location, history and contacts. Google has customized searches based on country of origin for some time, and has also offered unique results to those who allow Google access to their browsing history. ...

Few people know the finer points of antitrust law better than those over at Microsoft. So when one of the monolith's bigwigs accuses another company of unfair business practices, you'd take it pretty seriously, right? Then again, can you ever really trust an antitruster? Speaking at a search engine conference on Tuesday, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer decried what he sees as clearly unfair ...

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 ...