Google Inside Search - "Punctuation and symbols in search - Generally, most punctuation and special characters are ignored in Google Search. However, we’re expanding our search capabilities to support some characters that modify search terms and help Google find exactly what you’re looking for. Here are some examples from the growing list of popular symbols that are supported.." [Search Engine Showdown]

NYT: "The new version of Bing is the biggest overhaul to the search engine since Microsoft introduced it three years ago. It is the result of a continual conversation at the company about how to make Bing a more effective competitor to that other search engine — Google — and try to stem its considerable losses. In its last fiscal year, Microsoft reported operating losses from its online services division of $2.6 billion."

Google - First Amendment Protection for Search Engine Results, April 20, 2012. Eugene Volokh and Donald M. Falk [This White Paper was commissioned by Google, but the views within it should not necessarily be ascribed to Google.]

Conductor: "We recently published a study on the frequency Wikipedia appears in the search engine results pages (SERPs) that was covered by both Search Engine Watch and Search Engine Land. We broke a 2,000 keyword set into informational vs. transactional keywords, and our distribution of length of keywords was based on Hitwise’s keyword query length breakdown as suggested by Matt McGee of Search Engine Land (see our original post describing the study for more information on the methodology we used, including keyword examples). In our original post, we analyzed the frequency Wikipedia appears in Google’s search results. In his coverage of the study, McGee asked about how Google’s treatment of Wikipedia compares to Bing, so today we are publishing the Bing data alongside Google. Data was gathered in Conductor Searchlight in February 2012."

LA Times: "Google has released the full report of the Federal Communications Commission’s investigation into the data it collected and stored from millions of unknowing households across the nation while operating specially equipped cars for its Street View service. The search giant released the report, which had had heavily redacted passages, after wrangling with the FCC over which details could be publicly revealed. The report now blacks out only the names of individuals. It reveals new details and raises new questions about how Google captured personal information over a two-year period. Google has said that it was mapping wireless networks but that collecting personal data was "inadvertent."

EPIC: "The Federal Communications Commission announced that it will fine Google $25,000 for obstructing an investigation concerning Google Street View and federal wiretap law. The Commission found that Google impeded by "delaying its search for and production of responsive emails and other communications, by failing to identify employees, and by withholding verification of the completeness and accuracy of its submissions." In May 2010, EPIC wrote to the FCC and urged the agency to undertake an investigation after it became clear that Google had intercepted the private communications of millions of users of wi-fi networks in the United States. Shortly afterward, the head of the FCC Bureau of Consumer and Governmental Affairs wrote that Google's behavior "clearly infringes on consumer privacy." Many countries around the world have found Google guilty of violating national privacy laws. Surprisingly, the FCC said that Google had not violated the federal wiretap act, even though a federal court recently held otherwise. For more information, see EPIC: Investigations of Google Street View and EPIC: Ben Joffe v. Google."

News release: "comScore, Inc., a leader in measuring the digital world, today released its monthly comScore qSearch analysis of the U.S. search marketplace. Google Sites led the explicit core search market in March with 66.4 percent of search queries conducted. U.S. Explicit Core Search: Google Sites led the U.S. explicit core search market in March with 66.4 percent market share, followed by Microsoft Sites with 15.3 percent and Yahoo! Sites with 13.7 percent. Ask Network accounted for 3.0 percent of explicit core searches, followed by AOL, Inc. with 1.6 percent."

FAQ: "The Art Project is a collaboration between Google and 151 acclaimed art partners from across 40 countries. Using a combination of various Google technologies and expert information provided by our museum partners, we have created a unique online art experience. Users can explore a wide range of artworks at brushstroke level detail, take a virtual tour of a museum and even build their own collections to share. With a team of Googlers working across many product areas we are able to harness the best of Google to power the Art Project experience. Few people will ever be lucky enough to be able to visit every museum or see every work of art they’re interested in but now many more can enjoy over 30,000 works of art from sculpture to architecture and drawings and explore over 150 collections from 40 countries, all in one place. We’re also lucky at Google to have the technology to make this kind of project a reality."

House of Lords - House of Commons - Joint Committee on Privacy and Injunctions Privacy and injunctions, Session 2010–12 - Report, together with formal minutes, minutes of evidence and appendices Ordered by the House of Lords and the House of Commons to be printed 12 March 2012

Follow up to New 'HTTPS Everywhere' Version Warns Users About Web Security Holes see the following from privacy researcher Christopher Soghoian - Firefox switching to HTTPS Google search by default (and the end of referrer leakage).

Google Analytics: "Measuring the value of social media has been a challenge for marketers. And with good reason: it’s hard to understand exactly what is happening in an environment where activity occurs both on and off your website. Since social media is often an upper funnel player in a shopper’s journey, it's not always easy to determine which social channels actually drive value for your business and which tactics are most effective. But as the social industry matures, marketers and web analysts need true outcome-oriented reports. After all, although social is growing in popularity, brand websites - not social networks - remain the place where people most often purchase or convert. That’s why we’re releasing a new set of Social reports within Google Analytics. The new reports bridge the gap between social media and the business metrics you care about - allowing you to better measure the full value of the social channel for your business. We wanted to help you with 3 things:

• Identify the full value of traffic coming from social sites and measure how they lead to direct conversions or assist in future conversions
  
• Understand social activities happening both on and off of your site to help you optimize user engagement and increase social key performance indicators (KPIs)
  
• Make better, more efficient data-driven decisions in your social media marketing programs"

Danny Goodwin, March 19, 2012: "While Google is often criticized for having a Wikipedia bias, it isn’t the only search engine that has one. When you conduct searches on Bing, you’re actually more likely to see Wikipedia prominently in your search results than for the same search on Google, namely the No. 1 spot, one of the top three spots, and on the first page of search results, according to a new Search Engine Watch study. Read on for the full details and breakdown."

News release: "comScore, Inc. a leader in measuring the digital world, today released its monthly comScore qSearch analysis of the U.S. search marketplace. Google Sites led the explicit core search market in February with 66.4 percent of search queries conducted."

Search Engine Use 2012, by Kristen Purcell, Joanna Brenner, Lee Rainie, Mar 9, 2012

College Search & Statistics for Over 7,000 U.S. Colleges and Universities [h/t J. Browning]

News release: "The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) launched the 2.0 version of HTTPS Everywhere for the Firefox browser today, including an important new update that warns users about web security holes. The "Decentralized SSL Observatory" is an optional feature that detects encryption weaknesses and notifies users when they are visiting a website with a security vulnerability – flagging potential risk for sites that are vulnerable to eavesdropping or "man in the middle" attacks."

DuckDuckGo: An introduction to the anonymous search engine

How Search Engines Work, by Mike Grehan: "This year (2012) it will be ten years since I wrote the second edition of a book about search engines called Search Engine Marketing: The Essential Best Practice Guide. I decided to revisit it recently. Writing it was very difficult because there was nowhere near the amount of information available about the inner workings of search engines and information retrieval on the web back in the day. So once I finished it, I breathed a sigh of relief and have very rarely ventured back into its pages. Even now, I frequently meet people at conferences who bought it and still regard it as a useful resource. And surprisingly for me, having just re-read the most important parts of it, I also find a lot of it to be as relevant and fresh now as it was a decade ago."

EPIC: "The Google privacy compliance report, made public today, raises new questions about the company's failure to comply with an FTC Consent Order. The Order required Google to answer detailed questions about how it protects the personal information of Google users. But Google chose not to answer many of the questions. Most significantly, the company did not explain to the Commission the impact on user privacy of the proposed changes that will take place on March 1. EPIC has filed a lawsuit to force the Federal Trade Commission to require Google to comply with the Consent Order to protect the privacy interests of Google users. For more information, see EPIC v. FTC (Google Consent Order)."

"EPIC today filed a Complaint and a Motion for Temporary Restraining Order and Preliminary Injunction in Federal District Court in Washington, DC. EPIC is seeking to compel the Federal Trade Commission to act prior to March 1, when Google plans to make changes in its terms of service that will make it possible for the company to combine user data without user consent. EPIC alleges that this change in business practice is in clear violation of the consent order that Google entered into on October 13, 2011. The consent order arises from a complaint that EPIC brought to the Commission in February, 2010 concerning Google Buzz and a similar attempt by Google to combine user data without user consent. For more information, see EPIC - In re Google Buzz, FTC - FTC Charges Deceptive Privacy Practices in Google's Rollout of Its Buzz Social Network."

"EPIC has filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the Federal Trade Commission for the Privacy Report that Google was recently required to submit to the agency. The Commission had previously investigated Google after EPIC filed a complaint regarding Google's Buzz product, which transformed private user contacts into publicly available social network data. Last fall the Commission reached a settlement with Google and, as a result, the company is subject to a consent order that requires it to file regular reports with the Commission. EPIC has requested that Google's first report, filed on January 26, 2012, be released to the public. Because of Google's plan to change its business practice on March 1, 2012, EPIC has asked the FTC to expedite the disclosure of the report. For more information see EPIC: In re Google Buzz."

New Biking Directions Legend: "If you’re looking for new ways to get around for fun or to work, or might be trying to live a greener lifestyle in 2012, why not try biking? In March 2010 we introduced biking directions and since then Google Maps has been sharing biking directions with cyclists across the U.S and Canada. Since no bike path is the same, many users have requested an easier way to differentiate the different types of bike routes that are available. Starting today, a new legend feature can help you understand what the different colors on the bike maps symbolize.

• Dark green is for dedicated trails and paths
  
• Light green is for roads with dedicated lanes
  
• Dotted green is for roads that are friendly for cyclists
  
• You can view this legend by clicking on the widget in upper right corner of Google Maps and selecting the Bicycling layer. You can also access biking directions on your Android device or by going to maps.google.com on your mobile browser. Whether you want to drive, take transit, walk or even bike, Google Maps can help you get around. To see how it works on your Android phone take a tour here."

Google Lat Long blog:"[January 25, 2012] mark[ed] the launch of a new Google Crisis Response project: Google Public Alerts, a platform designed to bring you relevant emergency alerts when and where you’re searching for them. If a major weather event is headed for your area, you might go online to search for the information you need: What’s happening? Where and when will it strike? How severe will it be? What resources are available to help? The Google Crisis Response team works on providing critical emergency information during crises. Our goal is to surface emergency information through the online tools you use everyday, when that information is relevant and useful. With today’s launch of Public Alerts on Google Maps, relevant weather, public safety, and earthquake alerts from US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the National Weather Service, and the US Geological Survey (USGS) will be accessible when you search on Google Maps."

ACLU: "Yesterday evening, Google announced a new privacy policy effective March 1. The new policy is consistent across the vast majority of Google products...the new privacy policy makes clear that Google will, for the first time, combine the personal data you share with any one of its products or sites across almost all of its products and sites (everything but Google Chrome, Google Books, and Google Wallet) in order to obtain a more comprehensive picture of you. And there’s no opting out. This comes on the heels of Google’s new Search, plus Your World, a feature combining search results from the public web with private information and photos you have shared (or that have been shared with you) through Google+ or Picasa...The head of Google’s privacy for product and engineering explained on Google’s blog that integrating an individual’s profiles across Google’s sites will help Google “figure[e] out what you really mean when you type in Apple, Jaguar or Pink,” provide more relevant ads, “provide reminders that you’re going to be late for a meeting based on your location, your calendar and an understanding of what the traffic is like that day” (thanks, Mom), and “ensure that our spelling suggestions, even for your friends’ names, are accurate...this data aggregation is not just about what ads you see, but as ACLU of Massachusetts describes, it creates an even larger treasure chest of personal information ripe for government picking."

Official Google Blog: "...simply go to Hotel Finder, search for a city or a point of interest and select “Hotels by travel time”. Keep in mind that Hotel Finder and 'Hotels by travel time' are experimental and filtering by transit time is only available in cities where we have partnered with local transit agencies to integrate their data into Google Maps."

"Google’s Good to Know campaign aims to help people stay safe on the Internet and manage the information they share online. The website and ads provide easy to use tips and advice on online security, help on understanding the data users share and tools they can use to manage their data. Written in clear language and featuring practical examples to illustrate complex security and privacy issues, the website and advertising campaign aim to empower users to tackle their online security concerns and make more informed decisions about their internet use. The U.S. campaign includes adverts in newspapers, on public transport and online. Download all print ads – (PDF)."

Via LLRX - Deep Web Research 2012: Marcus P. Zillman's extensive research over the years into the "invisible" or "deep" web indicates that it covers somewhere in the vicinity of 1 trillion plus pages of information located throughout the Internet in various files and formats that current search engines either cannot locate, or have difficulty accessing. The current search engines find hundreds of billions of pages at the time of this publication. His guide provides extensive and targeted resources to facilitate both a better understanding of the history of deep web research as well to effectively and productively search for and locate these often undiscovered but critical documents.

Official Google Blog: "We’re transforming Google into a search engine that understands not only content, but also people and relationships. We began this transformation with Social Search, and today we’re taking another big step in this direction by introducing three new features:

• Personal Results, which enable you to find information just for you, such as Google+ photos and posts—both your own and those shared specifically with you, that only you will be able to see on your results page;
  
• Profiles in Search, both in autocomplete and results, which enable you to immediately find people you’re close to or might be interested in following; and,
  
• People and Pages, which help you find people profiles and Google+ pages related to a specific topic or area of interest, and enable you to follow them with just a few clicks. Because behind most every query is a community.
  
• We’re also introducing a prominent new toggle on the upper right of the results page where you can see what your search results look like without personal content. With a single click, you can see an unpersonalized view of search results."

EPIC: In a letter to the Federal Trade Commission, EPIC has called for an investigation of recent changes by Google to Google Search, the dominant search algorithm on the Internet. EPIC cited Google's decision to include personal data, such as photos, posts, and contact details, gathered from Google+ in Google Search results. “Google’s business practices raise concerns related to both competition and the implementation of the Commission’s consent order,” EPIC said, referring to a settlement that the FTC reached with Google that establishes new privacy safeguards for users of Google products and services and subjects the company to regular privacy audits. Recently, the Senate held a hearing on Google’s use of its dominance in the search market to suppress competition, and EPIC urged the Federal Trade Commission to investigate Google’s acquisition of Youtube, which allowed Google to give preferential treatment to Google's own video content. For more information, see EPIC: Google/DoubleClick and EPIC: Federal Trade."

The Gov Doc Kids Group and Free Government Information - Tom Adamich, Martha Childers, Katy Davis, John H. Faria and Antoinette W. Satterfield. The IFLA World Library and Information Congress

"The Basic search help article covers all the most common issues, but sometimes you need a little bit more power. This document will highlight the more advanced features of Google Web Search. Have in mind though that even very advanced searchers, such as the members of the search group at Google, use these features less than 5% of the time. Basic simple search is often enough."

"EPIC filed the opening brief in EPIC v. NSA, No. 11-5233, challenging the National Security Agency’s response to EPIC's Freedom of Information Act request. EPIC is seeking information about the widely publicized cybersecurity agreement between the NSA and Google that followed the January 2010 China hack. The NSA claimed it "could neither confirm nor deny" the existence of any information about its relations with Google. After the attack, Google's implemented encryption technology for Gmail by default, a privacy safeguard EPIC and technical experts had urged in 2009. For more information, see EPIC v. NSA: Google / NSA Relationship."

Competitive Intelligence - A Selective Resource Guide - Completely Updated - December 2011: Sabrina I. Pacifici's comprehensive, current awareness guide focuses on leveraging a wide but selected range of reliable, focused, predominantly free websites and resources to effectively track, monitor, analyze, background and review current and historical data, news, reports, and profiles on companies, markets, countries, people, and issues, from a global perspective. Sabrina's guide is a "best of" web resource that encompasses search engines, databases, alerts, publisher specific services and tools, along with links to content targeted sources produced by leading media organizations, governments, academia, NGOs and independent researchers.

Nielsen’s Tops of 2011: Digital - December 28, 2011 - "As 2011 comes to a close, Nielsen reviewed the top online destinations, social media sites, and smartphone devices. Google was the most-visited U.S. Web brand, while Facebook held its lead among social networks and blogs. Smartphones were popular in 2011, making up the majority of new phone purchases with Apple as the top smartphone manufacturer and Android as the leading OS."

Google.com/Elections: "From the nineteenth century’s pamphlets to the twentieth century’s TV ad revolution, our elections have always been shaped by how we communicate and consume information. There’s no question that the Internet is set to deliver more political information, opinion and news than any other medium throughout the 2012 U.S. elections. The web offers candidate and issue info to voters; networking and fundraising platforms for campaigns; and research and productivity tools for journalists. Today, just in time for the Iowa Caucuses, we’re launching google.com/elections, an election hub where citizens can study, watch, discuss, learn about, participate in and perhaps even make an impact on the digital campaign trail as it blazes forward to Tuesday, November 6, 2012."

comScore Reports November 2011 U.S. Mobile Subscriber Market Share: "For the three-month average period ending in November, 234 million Americans age 13 and older used mobile devices. Device manufacturer Samsung ranked as the top OEM with 25.6 percent of U.S. mobile subscribers (up 0.3 percentage points), followed by LG with 20.5 percent share and Motorola with 13.7 percent share. Apple strengthened its position at #4 with 11.2 percent share of total mobile subscribers (up 1.4 percentage points), while RIM rounded out the top five with 6.5 percent share...In November, 72.6 percent of U.S. mobile subscribers used text messaging on their mobile device, up 2.1 percentage points. Downloaded applications were used by 44.9 percent of subscribers (up 3.3 percentage points), while browsers were used by 44.4 percent (up 2.3 percentage points). Accessing of social networking sites or blogs increased 2.1 percentage points to 33.0 percent of mobile subscribers. Game-playing was done by 29.7 percent of the mobile audience (up 1.2 percentage points), while 21.7 percent listened to music on their phones (up 1.0 percentage points)."

EPIC: "Senator Herb Kohl (D-WI) and Mike Lee (R-UT), Chairman and Ranking member of the Judiciary Antitrust Subcommittee, have sent a letter to FTC Chairman John Liebowitz, expressing concern about Google's business practices and the company's impact on competition in Internet search and commerce. In September, EPIC wrote to the FTC and described how Google biased YouTube search rankings to give preferential treatment to its own content following the acquisition of the Internet's largest video service provider. The EPIC letter preceded a Senate hearing on The Power of Google: Serving Consumers or Threatening Competition? EPIC testified before the Senate Antitrust Subcommittee in 2009 on Google's growing dominance of essential Internet services."

Reading Digits in Natural Images with Unsupervised Feature Learning, Yuval Netzer, Tao Wang, Adam Coates, Alessandro Bissacco, Bo Wu1, Andrew Y. Ng

Technolog: "Ireland-based StatCounter — which posts Web analytics based on aggregate data it collects from a sample exceeding 15 billion pageviews per month (including 4 billion in the U.S.), collected from the StatCounter network of more than 3 million websites — released a statement about Chrome 15's ascension, humbling the initial enthusiasm of any Google devotee when it also made it clear that in the U.S., reports of IE's demise are still premature. According to StatCounter, it was still able to capture 27 percent of browser action last week, compared to 18.1 percent for Chrome 15."

Google: Searches Around the World - Visually explore the top queries from 48 different countries. "What mattered in 2011? Zeitgeist sorted billions of Google searches to capture the year's 10 fastest-rising global queries and the rest of the spirit of 2011."

Follow up to previous postings on the 2010 Japan Earthquake and Tsunami, see Japan: Before and After the Earthquake and Tsunami Pre- and post-disaster imagery in Google Street View

"Accuvant LABS has just released some new research that compares the security of three of the most widely used web browsers – Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, and Microsoft Internet Explorer. Google commissioned Accuvant to perform this comprehensive and independently designed security analysis to help advance the discussion of best practices in the security community. Our research findings are extremely thorough and complete, so we decided to create this blog to summarize the results. Malware, spyware and viruses are all too familiar to those who regularly surf the web. These malicious programs can lead to system pop-ups, slowdowns, account takeovers, credit card theft, identity theft, and the theft of personally identifiable information. While antivirus and anti-malware can help prevent an infection, the first line of defense is using a secure web browser. For a person that surfs the internet, comparing and contrasting the security of different web browsers is difficult. Marketing materials are available to the average user, but they often contain direct contradictions and the reader ends up wondering which web browser is the most secure. Our research aims to fix that problem. We compared browsers from a layered perspective, taking into account security architecture and anti-exploitation techniques. Like antivirus or anti-malware software, each provides an additional layer of defense. The nice thing is, when anti-exploitation technology prevents an attack, anti-malware and antivirus aren't needed. The idea is that it’s a lot easier to keep a fortress with a moat safe than it is to protect a beach shack."

Official Google Blog: "Six months ago we started rolling out a new look and feel for Search, News, Maps, Translate, Gmail and a bunch of other products. Our goal was to create a beautifully simple and intuitive user experience across Google. We’re now ready for the next stage of our redesign—a new Google bar that will enable you to navigate quickly between our services, as well as share the right stuff with the right people easily on Google+. To find out more about the new Google bar, take a look at this video or read our Help Center article."

Follow up to previous postings on The Digital Dead Sea Scrolls project, via NYT - "When the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, home to the Dead Sea Scrolls, reopened last year after an extensive renovation, it attracted a million visitors in the first 12 months. When the museum opened an enhanced Web site with newly digitized versions of the scrolls in September, it drew a million virtual visitors in three and a half days. The scrolls, scanned with ultrahigh-resolution imaging technology, have been viewed on the Web from 210 countries — including some, like Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq and Syria, that provide few real-world visitors to the Israel Museum...Previous Google cultural programs have also been incorporated into the center, including the Google Art Project, a digital repository of pictures from museums like the National Gallery in London, the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin and the Uffizi Gallery in Florence."

Google Scholar Blog: "A few months ago, we introduced a limited release of Google Scholar Citations, a simple way for authors to compute their citation metrics and track them over time. Today, we’re delighted to make this service available to everyone! Click here and follow the instructions to get started. Here’s how it works. You can quickly identify which articles are yours, by selecting one or more groups of articles that are computed statistically. Then, we collect citations to your articles, graph them over time, and compute your citation metrics - the widely used h-index; the i-10 index, which is simply the number of articles with at least ten citations; and, of course, the total number of citations to your articles. Each metric is computed over all citations and also over citations in articles published in the last five years."

Official Google Blog: "Behind the simplicity of Google search is a complex set of algorithms that expands and improves the query you’ve typed to find the best results. Automatic spelling correction ([vynal] to “vinyl”) and substituting synonyms (matching [pictures] to “photos”) are just two examples of the improvements we make...we’ve received a lot of requests for a more deliberate way to tell Google to search using your exact terms. We’ve been listening, and starting today you’ll be able to do just that through verbatim search. With the verbatim tool on, we’ll use the literal words you entered without making normal improvements such as

• making automatic spelling corrections
  
• personalizing your search by using information such as sites you’ve visited before
  
• including synonyms of your search terms (matching “car” when you search [automotive])
  
• finding results that match similar terms to those in your query (finding results related to “floral delivery” when you search [flower shops])
  
• searching for words with the same stem like “running” when you’ve typed [run]
  
• making some of your terms optional, like “circa” in [the scarecrow circa 1963]"

Google Transparency Report - Government Requests: "Like other technology and communications companies, Google regularly receives requests from government agencies and courts around the world to remove content from our services and hand over user data. Our Government Requests tool discloses the number of requests we receive from each government in six-month reporting periods with certain limitations. Governments ask companies to remove content for many different reasons. For example, some content removals are requested due to allegations of defamation, while others are due to allegations that the content violates local laws prohibiting hate speech or pornography. Laws surrounding these issues vary by country, and the requests reflect the legal context of a given jurisdiction. We hope this tool will be helpful in discussions about the appropriate scope and authority of government requests. These observations on content removal requests highlight some trends that we've seen in the data during each reporting period, and are by no means exhaustive."

News release: "New research from SMU's Geothermal Laboratory, funded by a grant from Google.org, documents significant geothermal resources across the United States capable of producing more than three million megawatts of green power – 10 times the installed capacity of coal power plants today. Sophisticated mapping produced from the research, viewable via Google Earth at http://www.google.org/egs/, demonstrates that vast reserves of this green, renewable source of power generated from the Earth's heat are realistically accessible using current technology. The results of the new research, from SMU Hamilton Professor of Geophysics David Blackwell and Geothermal Lab Coordinator Maria Richards, confirm and refine locations for resources capable of supporting large-scale commercial geothermal energy production under a wide range of geologic conditions, including significant areas in the eastern two-thirds of the United States. The estimated amounts and locations of heat stored in the Earth's crust included in this study are based on nearly 35,000 data sites – approximately twice the number used for Blackwell and Richards' 2004 Geothermal Map of North America, leading to improved detail and contouring at a regional level. Based on the additional data, primarily drawn from oil and gas drilling, larger local variations can be seen in temperatures at depth, highlighting more detail for potential power sites than was previously evident in the eastern portion of the U.S. For example, eastern West Virginia has been identified as part of a larger Appalachian trend of higher heat flow and temperature. Conventional U.S. geothermal production has been restricted largely to the western third of the country in geographically unique and tectonically active locations. For instance, The Geysers Field north of San Francisco is home to more than a dozen large power plants that have been tapping naturally occurring steam reservoirs to produce electricity for more than 40 years. However, newer technologies and drilling methods can now be used to develop resources in a wider range of geologic conditions, allowing reliable production of clean energy at temperatures as low as 100˚C (212˚F) – and in regions not previously considered suitable for geothermal energy production. Preliminary data released from the SMU study in October 2010 revealed the existence of a geothermal resource under the state of West Virginia equivalent to the state's existing (primarily coal-based) power supply."

Official Google Blog: "As search becomes an increasingly customized experience, we recognize the growing importance of protecting the personalized search results we deliver. As a result, we’re enhancing our default search experience for signed-in users. Over the next few weeks, many of you will find yourselves redirected to https://www.google.com (note the extra “s”) when you’re signed in to your Google Account. This change encrypts your search queries and Google’s results page. This is especially important when you’re using an unsecured Internet connection, such as a WiFi hotspot in an Internet cafe. You can also navigate to https://www.google.com directly if you’re signed out or if you don’t have a Google Account."

"What is Page Speed Online? Page Speed Online analyzes the content of a web page, then generates suggestions to make that page faster. Reducing page load times can reduce bounce rates and increase conversion rates.

Daniel Soar: "This spring, the billionaire Eric Schmidt announced that there were only four really significant technology companies: Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google, the company he had until recently been running. People believed him. What distinguished his new ‘gang of four’ from the generation it had superseded – companies like Intel, Microsoft, Dell and Cisco, which mostly exist to sell gizmos and gadgets and innumerable hours of expensive support services to corporate clients – was that the newcomers sold their products and services to ordinary people. Since there are more ordinary people in the world than there are businesses, and since there’s nothing that ordinary people don’t want or need, or can’t be persuaded they want or need when it flashes up alluringly on their screens, the money to be made from them is virtually limitless. Together, Schmidt’s four companies are worth more than half a trillion dollars. The technology sector isn’t as big as, say, oil, but it’s growing, as more and more traditional industries – advertising, travel, real estate, used cars, new cars, porn, television, film, music, publishing, news – are subsumed into the digital economy. Schmidt, who as the ex-CEO of a multibillion-dollar corporation had learned to take the long view, warned that not all four of his disruptive gang could survive. So – as they all converge from their various beginnings to compete in the same area, the place usually referred to as ‘the cloud’, a place where everything that matters is online – the question is: who will be the first to blink?"

Social Metadata for Libraries, Archives and Museums Part 1: Site Reviews - Karen Smith-Yoshimura, Program Officer OCLC Research; Cyndi Shein, Assistant Archivist Getty Research Institute

Citation by Citation, New Maps Chart Hot Research and Scholarship's Hidden Terrain, by Jennifer Howard

Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media: "Zotero is an easy-to-use yet powerful research tool that helps you gather, organize, and analyze sources (citations, full texts, web pages, images, and other objects), and lets you share the results of your research in a variety of ways. An extension to the popular open-source web browser Firefox, Zotero includes the best parts of older reference manager software (like EndNote)—the ability to store author, title, and publication fields and to export that information as formatted references—and the best parts of modern software and web applications (like iTunes and del.icio.us), such as the ability to interact, tag, and search in advanced ways. Zotero integrates tightly with online resources; it can sense when users are viewing a book, article, or other object on the web, and—on many major research and library sites—find and automatically save the full reference information for the item in the correct fields. Since it lives in the web browser, it can effortlessly transmit information to, and receive information from, other web services and applications; since it runs on one’s personal computer, it can also communicate with software running there (such as Microsoft Word). And it can be used offline as well (e.g., on a plane, in an archive without WiFi)."

Inside Higher Ed: "The ERIAL (Ethnographic Research in Illinois Academic Libraries) project -- a series of studies conducted at Illinois Wesleyan, DePaul University, and Northeastern Illinois University, and the University of Illinois’s Chicago and Springfield campuses -- was a meta-exercise for the librarians in practicing the sort of deep research they champion. Instead of relying on surveys, the libraries enlisted two anthropologists, along with their own staff members, to collect data using open-ended interviews and direct observation, among other methods. The goal was to generate data that, rather than being statistically significant yet shallow, would provide deep, subjective accounts of what students, librarians and professors think of the library and each other at those five institutions. The resulting papers are scheduled to be published by the American Library Association this fall, under the title: “Libraries and Student Culture: What We Now Know.” One thing the librarians now know is that their students' research habits are worse than they thought."

News release: "The National Music Publishers Association announced it has reached a resolution with YouTube in a copyright infringement lawsuit filed in 2007. As a result of this resolution, music publishers will have the opportunity to enter into a License Agreement with YouTube and receive royalties from YouTube for musical works in videos posted on the site. HFA's licensing and rights administration expertise was instrumental in making this opportunity possible. HFA will administer the license agreements which will be available to all music publishers regardless of affiliation."

"With Google Street View, you can do amazing things such as hike around Stonehenge or even ski down Whistler’s slopes—all without leaving home. Soon, you’ll be able to float down the Amazon and Rio Negro Rivers of northwest Brazil and experience some of the most remote and biodiverse areas in the world. A few members of our Brazil and U.S. Street View and Google Earth Outreach teams are currently in the Amazon rainforest using our Street View technology to capture images of the river, surrounding forests and adjacent river communities. In partnership with the Amazonas Sustainable Foundation (FAS), the local non-profit conservation organization that invited us to the area, we’re training some of FAS’s representatives on the imagery collection process and leaving some of our equipment behind for them to continue the work. By teaching locals how to operate these tools, they can continue sharing their points of view, culture and ways of life with audiences across the globe."

Official Google Blog: "When you’re searching, you often have a specific task in mind, like figuring out which exhibits are showing at a nearby museum. Despite this narrow goal, people often start with a broad query, like [metropolitan museum of art], with no mention of exhibits. For these searches, the first result may include a list of links to specific sections of the site, which are called “sitelinks.” Today, we’re launching several improvements to sitelinks, including the way they look and are organized in search results."

News release: "The Getty recently unveiled a newly expanded search function on its website that will allow scholars, researchers, and the interested public to better access the Getty's vast resources of information about the visual arts. The Getty Search Gateway, which is now available online, provides streamlined searches through the Museum's collections and the Getty Research Institute's library catalog, digital collections, and collection inventories and finding aids...In addition to streamlining the search process, the Getty Search Gateway is able to make available information about many more objects from the Museum's collection. Now information about most of the Museum's collection is available online, along with an expanded set of images."

Search and email still top the list of most popular online activities - Two activities nearly universal among adult internet users, by Kristen Purcell

Google hotel finder launched as an "experiment": Find the perfect hotel - choose location, dates, price, hotel class and user rating.

Flash Cookies and Privacy II: Now with HTML5 and ETag Respawning (July 29, 2011), Ayenson, Mika, Wambach, Dietrich James, Soltani, Ashkan, Good, Nathan and Hoofnagle, Chris Jay, Available at SSRN

“The Power of Google: Serving Consumers or Threatening Competition?” - Senate Judiciary Committee, Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy and Consumer Rights. DATE: September 21, 2011

How Google Dominates Us, James Gleick, Auguat 18, 2011

CNET: "Google's Street View cars collected the locations of millions of laptops, cell phones, and other Wi-Fi devices around the world, a practice that raises novel privacy concerns, CNET has confirmed. The cars were supposed to collect the locations of Wi-Fi access points. But Google also recorded the street addresses and unique identifiers of computers and other devices using those wireless networks and then made the data publicly available through Google.com until a few weeks ago."

News release: "The social media market is primed for a new player that allows users to connect with friends, according to the 2011 American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) E-Business Report, produced in partnership with customer experience analytics firm ForeSee Results. Despite a small improvement this year, Facebook (+3% to 66) is the lowest-scoring site, not only in the social media category, but of all measured companies in this report. The survey was conducted last month, before the widespread introduction of Facebook’s biggest competitor, Google+, but Facebook’s low score indicates that Google+ could easily pounce and gain market share if they can provide a superior customer experience."

Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips - Betsy Sparrow, Jenny Liu, Daniel M. Wegner. Science DOI: 10.1126/science.1207745, Published Online 14 July 2011. See also Google's Effects on Memory, PBS NewsHour via YouTube.

Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips. Betsy Sparrow1, Jenny Liu, Daniel M. Wegner. Science DOI: 10.1126/science.1207745

Benjamin Rossi - analyst at Basex: "For students, doing research is the bread and butter of their academic life. Conducting research doesn’t just mean searching for information effectively; it means being able to judge the reliability of sources, place information within various contexts, and synthesize different information sources while developing one’s thesis. Encompassing a wide variety of competencies, research is one of the most important skills that students learn in preparation for participation in the knowledge economy. Increasingly, however, students find that the overwhelming abundance of easily accessible but undifferentiated information on the Web hinders their ability to do the kind of deep, exploratory research that broadens their education and hones critical thinking."

News release: "Google's Chrome exceeded 20% of the worldwide internet browser market during the month of June for the first time, according to StatCounter, the free website analytics company. The firm's research arm StatCounter Global Stats reports that Chrome took 20.7% of the global market, up from 2.8% in June 2009. In the same period Microsoft's Internet Explorer has fallen from 59% to 44% globally and Firefox dropped slightly from 30% to 28%."

Official Google Blog: "Among the most basic of human needs is the need to connect with others. With a smile, a laugh, a whisper or a cheer, we connect with others every single day. Today, the connections between people increasingly happen online. Yet the subtlety and substance of real-world interactions are lost in the rigidness of our online tools. In this basic, human way, online sharing is awkward. Even broken. And we aim to fix it. We’d like to bring the nuance and richness of real-life sharing to software. We want to make Google better by including you, your relationships, and your interests. And so begins the Google+ project..."

"In the summer of 2010, Peter Mosinskis from California State University Channel Islands assembled a team of approximately fifteen volunteers from seven different CSU campuses and one from the UC system to evaluate the accessibility of Google Apps. The team also recruited student volunteers and screen reader users to assist with the testing. Automated, manual, and screen reader testing began the first week of January 2011 and was completed February 4th. The report has been completed and posted here for your review. The CSU Accessible Technology Initiative (ATI) Staff, ATI Leadership Council, and Google have reviewed the Google Apps Accessibility Evaluation report. We discovered a number of accessibility issues during our testing. These issues are outlined in the report as well as "workarounds" that can be used to improve the user experience for persons with disabilities. When campuses choose to use Google Apps, they are required to provide an equally effective service for people with disabilities and it is critical for campuses to ensure that the "workarounds" meet the educational needs of the student and/or faculty. The March 15, 2011 USA TODAY online news article Complaint: Google programs hard for blind students illustrates possible legal problems that may result from adopting the Google Apps for Education suite."

WSJ: "Federal regulators are poised to hit Google Inc. with subpoenas, launching a broad, formal investigation into whether the Internet giant has abused its dominance in Web-search advertising, people familiar with the matter said. The civil probe, which has the potential to reshape how companies compete on the Internet, is the most serious legal threat yet to the 12-year-old company, though it wouldn't necessarily lead to any federal allegations of wrongdoing against Google. While Google has faced several antitrust probes in recent years, the U.S. has limited its investigations largely to reviews of the company's mergers and acquisitions. The new inquiry, by contrast, will examine fundamental issues relating to Google's core search-advertising business, its biggest money maker, said the people familiar with the matter."

News release: "Major project to digitise up to 40 million pages from 1700-1870, from the French Revolution to the end of slavery - The British Library and Google today announced a partnership to digitise 250,000 out-of-copyright books from the Library’s collections. Opening up access to one of the greatest collections of books in the world, this demonstrates the Library’s commitment, as stated in its 2020 Vision, to increase access to anyone who wants to do research. Selected by the British Library and digitised by Google, both organisations will work in partnership over the coming years to deliver this content free through Google Books and the British Library’s website. Google will cover all digitisation costs."

Hunting For A Job? Try the Internet: Acknowledging the economy in the past several years has made the job search process even more challenging, Rhonda Keaton and Barbara Fullerton provide strategic suggestions and a guide to a wide range of sources to support and leverage a multi-pronged search effort in response to the competitive job arena.

EPIC: "The White House modified its privacy policy for WhiteHouse.gov on June 3, 2011. The new policy is more than twice as long as the old policy. The new policy states the White House web site now uses persistent Google Analytics cookies that track users for up to two years. Previously the site employed only single-session cookies, which were automatically deleted when users closed their browsers. The site does not provide a means for visitors to opt out of receiving cookies. The present policy reflects changes the administration made last year to allow for use of tracking cookies by federal websites. For more information, see EPIC: White House Adopts Weird Opt-Out Privacy Policy for Public Access to Government Web Sites."

Connaway, Lynn Silipigni, Timothy J. Dickey, and Marie L. Radford. 2011. "'If It is Too Inconvenient, I'm Not Going After It.:' Convenience as a Critical Factor in Information-seeking Behaviors." Library and Information Science Research, 33: 179-190. doi:10.1016/j.lisr.2010.12.002 Pre-print.

Official Google Blog: "...we’re announcing schema.org, a new initiative from Google, Bing and Yahoo! to create and support a common vocabulary for structured data markup on web pages. With schema.org, site owners and developers can learn about structured data and improve how their sites appear in major search engines. The site aims to be a one stop resource for webmasters looking to add markup to their pages."

Official Google Blog - Mining patterns in search data with Google Correlate: "...[Using] Google Correlate, which we’re launching today on Google Labs...you can upload your own data series and see a list of search terms whose popularity best corresponds with that real world trend. In the example below, we uploaded official flu activity data from the U.S. CDC over the last several years and found that people search for terms like [cold or flu] in a similar pattern to actual flu rates. Finding out these correlated terms is how we built Google Flu Trends.

Inside Search - The Official Google Search Blog: "Here you’ll find regular updates on our algorithms and features, as well as stories from the people who work to improve Google every day."

Via LLRX: "Link Rot" and Legal Resources on the Web: A 2011 Analysis by the Chesapeake Digital Preservation Group - Sarah Rhodes describes and documents the work of the Chesapeake Digital Preservation Group's fourth annual investigation of link rot among the original URLs for online law and policy-related materials archived though the group's efforts. Link rot" is used to describe a URL that no longer provides direct access to files matching the content originally harvested from the URL. The Chesapeake Group focuses primarily on the preservation of Web-published legal materials, which often disappear as Web site content is rearranged or deleted over time. In the four years since the program began, the Chesapeake Group has built a digital archive collection comprising more than 7,400 digital items and 3,200 titles, all of which were originally posted to the Web.

Catching AuthTokens in the Wild - The Insecurity of Google's ClientLogin Protocol by Bastian Könings, Jens Nickels, and Florian Schaub, May 13, 2011

"Local businesses are growing. We’re helping. Google's not just a search engine. We've also helped hundreds of businesses in every U.S. state to grow. Across the U.S., Google's search and advertising tools provided $64 billion of economic activity in 2010. Click the map to see Google’s economic impact in your state. The state-by-state advertiser, publisher, and non-profit totals listed in the map are rounded to the nearest thousand."

• Our Search & Advertising Tools
  
• Where We Get the Numbers
  
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Personalize Google News to reflect your taste in publishers, via Google News forum: "...we're happy to announce the addition of a few more features to Google News settings to make your experience using Google News even more customizable. As you may know, if you click on the gear icon in the top right of your screen, you'll be able to access the News Settings page. On this page, you now have the ability to opt out of having Google News refresh automatically every fifteen minutes. Additionally, you can now select to "None" for Blogs or Press Releases if you'd like to never see these content in these categories appearing in your personalized Google News page."

Google Announces First Quarter 2011 Results: "In May 2011, in connection with a potential resolution of an investigation by the United States Department of Justice into the use of Google advertising by certain advertisers, we accrued $500 million for the three month period ended March 31, 2011. Although we cannot predict the ultimate outcome of this matter, we believe it will not have a material adverse effect on our business, consolidated financial position, results of operations, or cash flows. As a result, we have updated the affected financial data in this release, as noted, as well as the accompanying financial tables."

News release: "The Federal Trade Commission today told Congress that “the Commission is committed to protecting consumers’ privacy in the mobile sphere” by bringing enforcement actions where appropriate and “by working with industry and consumer groups to develop workable solutions that protect consumers while allowing innovation in this growing marketplace.” In Commission testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee Subcommittee for Privacy, Technology and the Law, Jessica Rich, Deputy Director in the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection said the FTC has been examining mobile and wireless issues since 2000, when the agency hosted a workshop on emerging wireless Internet and data technologies and the privacy, security, and consumer protection issues they raise. The FTC also hosted a technology forum in 2006 that featured mobile issues, two Town Halls to explore the use of radio frequency identification technology and its integration into mobile devices, and a forum in 2008 examining consumer protection issues in the mobile sphere. In addition, the FTC has taken law enforcement actions against companies that fail to protect the privacy and security of consumer information. The testimony highlighted four recent cases that illustrate how the FTC’s authority applies to the mobile arena. The FTC’s case against Google alleges that the company deceived consumers by using information collected from Gmail users to generate and populate a new social network, Google Buzz, without users’ consent. As part of the proposed settlement order, Google must protect the privacy of all of its customers – including mobile users."

Via Harvey Anderson...who works at Mozilla on legal and business affairs." Homeland Security Request to Take Down MafiaaFire Add-on, May 5, 2011 - "From time to time, we receive government requests for information, usually market information and occasionally subpoenas. Recently the US Department of Homeland Security contacted Mozilla and requested that we remove the MafiaaFire add-on. The ICE Homeland Security Investigations unit alleged that the add-on circumvented a seizure order DHS had obtained against a number of domain names. Mafiaafire, like several other similar add-ons already available through AMO, redirects the user from one domain name to another similar to a mail forwarding service. In this case, Mafiaafire redirects traffic from seized domains to other domains. Here the seized domain names allegedly were used to stream content protected by copyrights of professional sports franchises and other media concerns. Our approach is to comply with valid court orders, warrants, and legal mandates, but in this case there was no such court order. Thus, to evaluate Homeland Security’s request, we asked them several questions similar to those below to understand the legal justification..."

Google Business Photos - See also the FAQ: "Do you own a business? Apply today for a Google photo shoot of your business. Millions of potential customers visit Google every day to learn about places and businesses. Through scheduled photo shoots, Google is introducing a new way for you to showcase your business to the world. Where are photo shoots available? Google photographers are currently visiting businesses in select cities in the US, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand. Any business can apply for a photo shoot, and demand will help us decide where to send our photographers next. Where will the photos appear? Pictures from the shoot will be added to your Place page."

The Deciders: Facebook, Google, and the Future of Privacy and Free Speech, Jeffrey Rosen

"Today EPIC submitted detailed comments on a landmark privacy agreement that requires Google to adopt a "Comprehensive Privacy Plan" to safeguard the privacy and personal information of Internet users. In comments to the Federal Trade Commission, EPIC recommended that the FTC require Google to adopt and implement comprehensive Fair Information Practices complaint EPIC: In re Google Buzz ..."

Cyrus Nemati, CDT: "If you've been following our Take Back Your Privacy campaign, you've seen our weekly privacy tips. Each week, we offer readers a new way to protect their privacy online through plug-ins, browser tricks, programs, and general privacy best practices. While each tip has merit in its own right, there are a few tips that give you a great amount of control over your online privacy. Without further ado, here are Take Back Your Privacy's Top Five Privacy Tips."

News release: "It's been almost a year since Mozilla, Opera, Xiph.Org, Matroska, Google and over 40 other partners launched the WebM Project with the goal of developing a world-class, open source media format for the web. The open development model has led to rapid quality improvements in WebM, and the format is now supported in HTML5-capable browsers including Firefox, Opera, Chrome and Internet Explorer. Leading silicon vendors are adding WebM support to their chipsets,and some hardware implementations are already on the market. A key measure of success for WebM is a diverse range of contributors. For example, we are already seeing a growing number of code contributions from independent developers as well as independent implementations. We are pleased to now offer another way to contribute, through a licensing initiative that allows the community to help further support the WebM Project. Google, Matroska and the Xiph.Org Foundation make the components of WebM openly available on royalty-free terms. Today we're announcing the formation of the WebM Community Cross-License (CCL) initiative with 17 founding members. Organizations that join the CCL agree to license patents they may have that are essential to WebM technologies to other members of the CCL."

Welcome to the age of data: Watch your back! by Molly Wood

Computerworld: 'Google is shedding some of the secrecy around its data center practices, with a new video that shows extensive security measures and the destruction of old hard drives to prevent leakage of customer data. Google "rigorously tracks the location and status" of each hard drive, destroying failed hard drives with a multistep process before gathering the mangled bits in boxes to send off to recycling centers. "One device that is used to destroy old hard drives is known as the crusher," the narrator of a Google video says. "A steel piston is pushed through the center of the drive and the platters are deformed, making them unreadable."

News release: "[April 19, 2011], the Dutch Data Protection Authority (College bescherming persoonsgegevens, CBP) has issued several administrative orders against Google for incremental penalty payments. Investigations by the CBP show that Google has, for a period of two years, systematically, and without the data subjects’ knowledge, collected MAC addresses of more than 3,6 million WiFi routers, in combination with the calculated location of those routers. This was done by using the so called ‘Street View cars’. MAC addresses in combination with their calculated locations, qualify, in this context, as personal data, because the collected data provide information about the WiFi router’s owners. The Dutch DPA also concludes that Google, using the same Street View cars, collected so called payload data, the contents of internet communication. This information contains personal data such as e-mail addresses, medical data and information concerning financial transactions.
Google has been ordered to, within three months, inform the data subjects – off line as well as on line – about the collection of data originating from WiFi routers by the Street View cars. Within the same period of three months, Google must also offer an on line possibility to opt-out from the database in order to enable people to object to the processing of the data concerning their WiFi routers. In case Google does not comply with the administrative order within the time period granted, the penalty amount can increase to a maximum of one million euros. Furthermore, Google is obliged to destroy the payload data it has collected in the Netherlands within four weeks. Read the Dutch press release and the relevant documents (only in Dutch)."

Google Map Maker: "Google Map Maker lets you add to and update the map, for millions of people to see in Google Maps and Google Earth. You can add your local knowledge for over 180 countries and regions. Get started mapping the places you know." See also Learn more about using Map Maker

Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox, April 11, 2011: "Users increasingly rely on individual pages listed by search engines instead of finding better ways to tackle problems. Although some analysts questioned the finding of search dominance, it's a user behavior that gets stronger every year. Today, many users are so reliant on search that it's undermining their problem-solving abilities. Ironically, the better search gets, the more dangerous it gets as people increasingly assume that whatever the search engine coughs up must be the answer...Still, the rough estimate from our available data is obvious: users change search strategy only 1% of the time; 99% of the time they plod along a single unwavering path. Whether t"e true number is 2% or 0.5%, the big-picture conclusion is the same: users have extraordinarily inadequate research skills when it comes to solving problems on the Web."

A Guide For the Perplexed Part IV: The Rejection of the Google Books Settlement - "On March 22, 2011, Judge Denny Chin rejected the proposed settlement in copyright infringement litigation over the Google Library Project. Judge Chin found that the settlement was not "fair, reasonable, and adequate" as required by the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. Judge Chin issued the decision over a year after the fairness hearing he conducted. His opinion agrees in large measure with the objections to the settlement asserted by the U.S. Department of Justice at the hearing and in its written submissions. This paper by Jonathan Band continues the series in which he discusses the opinion and where it leaves Google Books Search."

A Guide For the Perplexed Part IV: The Rejection of the Google Books Settlement, by Jonathan Band

News release: "Google Inc. has agreed to settle Federal Trade Commission charges that it used deceptive tactics and violated its own privacy promises to consumers when it launched its social network, Google Buzz, in 2010. The agency alleges the practices violate the FTC Act. The proposed settlement bars the company from future privacy misrepresentations, requires it to implement a comprehensive privacy program, and calls for regular, independent privacy audits for the next 20 years. This is the first time an FTC settlement order has required a company to implement a comprehensive privacy program to protect the privacy of consumers’ information. In addition, this is the first time the FTC has alleged violations of the substantive privacy requirements of the U.S.-EU Safe Harbor Framework, which provides a method for U.S. companies to transfer personal data lawfully from the European Union to the United States."

Yahoo Search Blog: "We have always believed that search should be simple and fun, make you smile every once in a while and be that one place you know you can depend on. We went back to the drawing boards to rethink the search experience, how we can take it to the next step, and really make search awesome...Search Direct is the first fundamental shift in search in more than a decade. For the first time, driving users to a results page filled with an overwhelming number of links is not the end game. We believe Search Direct will be the simplest and fastest way to find answers, not links.

The official Google Code blog: "Today we’re launching the most requested feature for Page Speed, Page Speed for Chrome. Now Google Chrome users can get Page Speed performance suggestions to make their sites faster, right inside the Chrome browser. We would like to thank all our users for your great feedback and support since we launched. We’re humbled that 1.4 M unique users are using the Page Speed extension and finding it useful to help with their web performance diagnosis."

Via LLRX.com - SharePoint, Training Not Required: Lorette Weldon's research has identified that librarians are using SharePoint in the corporate, government, and non-profit sectors. She expertly identifies and illustrates how to leverage the power of this application through an understanding of the site templates that Microsoft bundles in SharePoint "out-of-the-box". These templates are based on social networking abilities and not program coding. Through "plug and play" efforts librarians can find the features in SharePoint that will assist them in managing their multifaceted "collections."

[The following post is from Friedrich Lindenberg, who is a developer at the Open Knowledge Foundation working on CKAN, PublicData.eu and Open Spending.]

News release: "In testimony before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, the Federal Trade Commission discussed its efforts to protect consumer privacy through enforcement actions, consumer education, and policy initiatives like the FTC staff’s recent preliminary privacy report. The report proposes a framework to balance consumer privacy with industry innovation by: 1) building privacy protections into everyday business practices (“privacy-by-design”); 2) simplifying privacy choices for consumers; and 3)improving transparency with clearer, shorter privacy notices. The Commission told Congress that industry stakeholders have made important progress in implementing Do Not Track, a mechanism proposed in the staff's preliminary privacy report last December that would allow consumers to choose not to have their Internet browsing tracked by third parties. The testimony noted that two of the major Internet browsers – Microsoft and Mozilla – “have recently announced the development of new choice mechanisms for online behavioral advertising that seek to provide increased transparency, greater consumer control, and improved ease of use.”

Via LLRX.com, Knowledge Discovery Resources 2011 - An Internet MiniGuide Annotated Link Compilation: This new guide by Marcus P. Zillman focuses on the most current and reliable resources for knowledge discovery available on the Internet. With the constant addition of new and pertinent information to the web, it is very easy to experience information overload. A critical requirement for researchers is finding the best knowledge discovery resources and sites in both the visible and invisible World Wide Web. These carefully selected knowledge and information discovery sources will help you accomplish your research goals.

Official Google Blog: "Amidst a series of aftershocks rocking our office, a small group of us in Tokyo and several other Google offices started gathering information about the earthquake to create the Crisis Response information page. As someone who experienced the Kobe earthquake 16 years ago when I was at university, I cannot forget the immediate desire for information. There was no way to find out where people's family and friends were, if transportation would be available to get us home, and most importantly, whether we would be able to find shelter. This experience helped me remember that during a crisis, information about shelters can become increasingly muddled. Together with our Google Crisis Response team, we decided to organize existing public information from local governments about the concerned areas. Because of the very high volume of web traffic yesterday, this proved difficult to access. Collaborating with the Google Maps engineering team in Tokyo, we rapidly put together a page of information on Google Maps for our Crisis Response page."

Person Finder: 2011 Japan Earthquake - What is your situation? [Currently tracking about 70400 records...]

Official Google Blog: "Now there’s yet another way to find more of what you want on Google by blocking the sites you don’t want to see. You’ve probably had the experience where you’ve clicked a result and it wasn’t quite what you were looking for. Many times you’ll head right back to Google. Perhaps the result just wasn’t quite right, but sometimes you may dislike the site in general, whether it’s offensive...or of generally low quality. For times like these, you’ll start seeing a new option to block particular domains from your future search results. Now when you click a result and then return to Google, you’ll find a new link next to “Cached” that reads “Block all example.com results.” Once you click the link to “Block all example.com results” you’ll get a confirmation message, as well as the option to undo your choice. You’ll see the link whether or not you’re signed in, but the domains you block are connected with your Google Account, so you’ll need to sign in before you can confirm a block. Once you’ve blocked a domain, you won’t see it in your future search results."

Google Recipe Search: "After searcing for a recipe or ingredient on Google, select Recipes in the left-hand panel on the search results page. You can filter your results by ingredients, cook time, or calories."

Official Google Blog: "Our goal is simple: to give people the most relevant answers to their queries as quickly as possible. This requires constant tuning of our algorithms, as new content—both good and bad—comes online all the time. Many of the changes we make are so subtle that very few people notice them. But in the last day or so we launched a pretty big algorithmic improvement to our ranking—a change that noticeably impacts 11.8% of our queries—and we wanted to let people know what’s going on. This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful. At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites—sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on."

Measuring Bias in "Organic" Web Search, Benjamin Edelman and Benjamin Lockwood, January 19, 2011

"What is the ‘Art Project’? - A unique collaboration with some of the world’s most acclaimed art museums to enable people to discover and view more than a thousand artworks online in extraordinary detail.

• Explore museums with Street View technology: virtually move around the museum’s galleries, selecting works of art that interest you, navigate though interactive floor plans and learn more about the museum and you explore.
  
• Artwork View: discover featured artworks at high resolution and use the custom viewer to zoom into paintings. Expanding the info panel allows you to read more about an artwork, find more works by that artist and watch related YouTube videos.
  
• Create your own collection: the ‘Create an Artwork Collection’ feature allows you to save specific views of any of the 1000+ artworks and build your own personalised collection. Comments can be added to each painting and the whole collection can then be shared with friends and family."

News release: "Experian® Hitwise®, a part of Experian Marketing Services, announced today that Google accounted for 67.95 percent of all U.S. searches conducted in the four weeks ending Jan. 29, 2011. Bing-powered search comprised 27.44 percent of searches for the month, with Yahoo! Search and Bing receiving 14.62 percent and 12.81 percent, respectively. The remaining 70 search engines in the Hitwise Search Engine Analysis report accounted for 4.61 percent of U.S. searches. Bing and Yahoo! Search achieved the highest success rates in January 2011. This means that for both search engines, more than 81 percent of searches executed resulted in a visit to a Website. Google achieved a success rate of 65 percent. The share of unsuccessful searches highlights the opportunity for both the search engines and marketers to evaluate the search engine result pages to ensure that searchers are finding relevant information."

Via LLRX.com - Deep Web Research 2011: Internet research guru Marcus P. Zillman's comprehensive, extensive guide focuses on how expert search engines have written algorithms to mine the deeper portions of the web by targeting file formats such as .pdf, .doc, .xls, ppt, .ps. and others. These files are predominately used by businesses to communicate information both within their organization and to those outside enterprise systems. Searching for this information using deeper search techniques and the latest algorithms empowers researchers to obtain a vast amount of corporate information previously unavailable or inaccessible. Research has also shown that even deeper information can be obtained from these files by searching and accessing the "properties" information on these files.

"Surf the web as it was - BETA version! The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine puts the history of the World Wide Web at your fingertips. We invite you to explore this new, BETA version of the Wayback Machine and contact us with any feedback. The classic version of the Wayback Machine is still available at web.archive.org/."

"Google Transliteration allows you to type phonetically using Roman characters. Simply type a word the way it sounds in English and Google Transliteration will convert it to its local script. We currently support 24 languages: Amharic, Arabic, Bengali, Chinese, Greek, Gujarati, Hebrew, Hindi, Japanese, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Nepali, Oriya, Persian, Punjabi, Russian, Sanskrit, Serbian, Sinhalese, Tamil, Telugu, Tigrinya and Urdu."

National Journal: Google and Mozilla both announced that they will be adding "do-not-track" options to their Internet browsers, allowing users to prevent websites from gathering personal information and selling it to advertisers. Mozilla announced its plan Sunday with Google following suit Monday. According to a company statement, Google's "Keep My Op-Outs" feature will be available as an extension for download on its Chrome browser Monday. "We made available, for all major browsers, a downloadable browser plugin that enables you to permanently opt out of Google's advertising cookie, even if you deleted all your browser's cookies," according to the statement." Mozilla's Firefox version will be an HTTP header that will tell websites that a user wants to opt-out what's called "online behavioral advertising." "The advantages to the header technique are that it is less complex and simple to locate and use, it is more persistent than cookie-based solutions, and it doesn't rely on user's finding and loading lists of ad networks and advertisers to work," said Mozilla technology and privacy officer Alex Fowler wrote in a blog post Sunday. Microsoft announced a similar feature for its Internet Explorer in December."

Google search and search engine spam: "As we’ve increased both our size and freshness in recent months, we’ve naturally indexed a lot of good content and some spam as well. To respond to that challenge, we recently launched a redesigned document-level classifier that makes it harder for spammy on-page content to rank highly. The new classifier is better at detecting spam on individual web pages, e.g., repeated spammy words—the sort of phrases you tend to see in junky, automated, self-promoting blog comments. We’ve also radically improved our ability to detect hacked sites, which were a major source of spam in 2010. And we’re evaluating multiple changes that should help drive spam levels even lower, including one change that primarily affects sites that copy others’ content and sites with low levels of original content. We’ll continue to explore ways to reduce spam, including new ways for users to give more explicit feedback about spammy and low-quality sites."

News release: "Most Internet users in America say they go online to answer routine questions, and they give overwhelmingly positive marks to today’s Internet search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing. A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 66% of regular Internet users instinctively go online to answer routine questions. Just 30% say they do not. (To see survey question wording, click here). Eighty-nine percent (89%) of those who regularly go online rate today’s Internet search engines as good or excellent in terms of finding the information they need. Fewer than half a percent rates the search engines they use as poor. Seventy-eight percent (78%), in fact, say they generally use the same Internet search engine all the time. Just 19% use more than one."

News release: "S&P Equity Research sees big developments for the Internet segment in 2011, including continuing challenges for Google, changes at Yahoo, a cloud offering from Apple, and excitement from China. "The coming year should also be another year of solid growth, with double-digit gains for U.S. Internet advertising and retail spending," observed Scott Kessler, Information Technology analyst at S&P Equity Research."

"Welcome to Body Browser - To use Body Browser, you'll need a Web browser with WebGL support. Click here to get the new Google Chrome beta, or visit khronos.org for more choices."

Google Chrome Blog: "When we announced that Chrome is now used by over 120 million users and showed off some of its latest features last week, we saw a tremendous amount of excitement from both users and businesses. Many businesses asked how they can get the benefits of increased security, speed and the modern browser capabilities that Chrome offers with the configurability and customizations they need. The good news is that businesses don’t need to wait any longer to deploy Google Chrome. Today, we’re announcing that Chrome offers controls that enable IT administrators to easily configure and deploy the browser on Windows, Mac, and Linux according to their business requirements. We’ve created an MSI installer that enables businesses who use standard deployment tools to install Chrome for all their managed users. We’ve also added support for managed group policy with a list of policies and a set of templates that allow administrators to easily customize browser settings to manage security and privacy. By deploying Google Chrome, organizations can take advantage of improved security and web application performance without needing to upgrade other expensive software licenses or buy new hardware. Deploying Google Chrome also gives users access to productivity-enhancing HTML5 web applications. Since Google Chrome is the same as the browser on Chrome OS, admins considering Chrome OS for their organizations can start testing their mission-critical web applications by deploying the Google Chrome browser."

7 Useful Google Cheatsheets – Download for Free [Search Engine Journal]

Google Translate Blog: "When you come to Google Translate, we always do our best to give you the most accurate translation our system can produce. However, sometimes translation can be pretty tough. Language is full of ambiguities and our system has to do its best to make the right choices. So why choose? We’ve launched a new feature to provide you with alternate translations for each phrase in the translated text. Just click the translated phrase and you’ll see a pop-up menu of possible alternates for that phrase, as well as the original phrase highlighted in your original text. Not only can these alternative translations give you a better understanding of a confusing translation, but they also allow you to help Google choose the best alternative when we make a mistake. This new feature is powered by harnessing the vast knowledge within our statistical machine translation system. Typically, when we produce a translation, our system searches through millions of possible translations, selecting the best -- that is, the most statistically likely -- translation. With this feature, we expose more of those possible alternatives. For more information about how our system works, check out http://translate.google.com/about/."

Inside Google Books: "The Ngram Viewer lets you graph and compare phrases from these datasets over time, showing how their usage has waxed and waned over the years. One of the advantages of having data online is that it lowers the barrier to serendipity: you can stumble across something in these 500 billion words and be the first person ever to make that discovery."

Zeitgeist 2010 - How the world searched: "Based on the aggregation of billions of search queries people typed into Google this year, Zeitgeist captures the spirit of 2010."

"Sometimes you may want to limit your search results to a specific reading level. For instance, a junior high school teacher looking for content for her students or a second-language learner might want web pages written at a basic reading level. A scientist searching for the latest findings from the experts may want to limit results to those at advanced reading levels. To limit your search results to a specific reading level, follow these steps:

1. On the search results page, click Advanced Search below the search box.
   
2. Next to "Reading level" within the "Need more tools" section, select your desired reading level (basic, intermediate, or advanced) or choose to
3. Click Advanced search at the bottom of the page.
   
4. At any time, you can click the X in the right corner of the blue bar beneath the search box to go back to seeing all results."

Follow up to WikiLeaks Releases Secret US Embassy Cables, news via Computerworld of a new search engine, CableSearch.org, lets users search the disclosed cables by word, source, security classification, classification tag and date. CableSearch was the brainstorm of Henk Van Ess, chairman of VVOJ (Vereniging van Onderzoeksjournalisten), or Association of Investigative Journalists, a Dutch-Flemish reporters' group, and the co-founder of the European Center of Computer Assisted Reporting (ECCAR). In a Twitter message Thursday, Van Ess said the search engine was an "initiative of investigative reporters from eccar.org."

FT.com: Facebook’s grand plan for the future: "This is a somewhat different Mark Zuckerberg to the one the public knew just a year ago. In recent months he has transformed from an awkward wunderkind with a preternatural ability to anticipate where the web is going, into an amicable executive unafraid of laying out his grand plan. It is not just that he is a bit more confident and articulate, though he is both; what is striking is that for the first time in my two years of interviewing him, Zuckerberg seems at ease. “The fear is behind him,” said a friend of Zuckerberg’s. “Until a year ago, he thought this might be the next Google, but he wasn’t sure. Now he’s sure. The fear is gone.”

Official Google New Blog: "News publishers and readers both benefit when journalists get proper credit for their work. That can be difficult, with news spreading so quickly and many websites syndicating articles to others. That’s why we’re experimenting with two new metatags for Google News: syndication-source and original-source. Each of these metatags addresses a different scenario, but for both the aim is to allow publishers to take credit for their work and give credit to other journalists. Here’s how to use these metatags:

• syndication-source indicates the preferred URL for a syndicated article. If two versions of an article are exactly the same, or only very slightly modified, we're asking publishers to use syndication-source to point us to the one they would like Google News to use..
  
• original-source indicates the URL of the first article to report on a story. We encourage publishers to use this metatag to give credit to the source that broke the story. We recognize that this can sometimes be tough to determine. But the intent of this tag is to reward hard work and journalistic enterprise...
  
• To learn more about how these metatags work, and how you can implement them for your site, visit our Help Center article.

Hard-Coding Bias in Google "Algorithmic" Search Results, Benjamin Edelman - November 15, 2010

Drug Savings Tool

1. Search for a drug you are taking
   
2. Review your drug’s price range and efficacy and compare it to Consumer Reports Best Buy Drugs. Print out your options for discussion with your doctor.
   
3. View more information about this group of drugs, including safety and effectiveness. [Consumer Reports Health Best Buy Drugs™ information contained in the Drug Compare Tool is for general informational purposes only and should not be viewed as a substitute for consultation with your physician or other healthcare professionals.]

"The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) is the UK’s independent authority set up to uphold information rights in the public interest, promoting openness by public bodies and data privacy for individuals." Snipped from November 3, 2010 letter from ICO to Global Privacy Counsel, Google France: "My office now understands that GSV (Google Street View) cars driving in the UK before May 2010 were equipped with the same equipment as the GSV cars in countries where regulators found some instances where entire emails and URLs were captured, as well as passwords. As such, my office believes that while most of the payload data gathered from the UK is fragmentary, in some instances it is possible that entire emails and URLs were captured, as well as passwords. It is my view that the collection of this information is a serious breach of the first data protection principle..."

Official Google Blog: "With Google Instant you get results as fast as you type, but your search doesn’t stop there. Once you get results back, you choose a site to visit based on the information in each result—like the title, a snippet of text and the URL. Over time we’ve made steady improvements to our search results and snippets to help you pick a great page. Now we’re making a leap to image-based snapshots—a new kind of visual search result we call “Instant Previews” which makes it even faster to choose the right result. Instant Previews provides a graphic overview of a search result and highlights the most relevant sections, making finding the right page as quick and easy as flipping through a magazine. To use it, click once on the magnifying glass next to the title of any search result and a visual overview of the page will appear on the right. From there, hover your cursor over any other result to see a preview. For those of you who’ve recently stopped using your mouse to search, now you can navigate to a result, hit the right arrow key to see the preview, and hit the down arrow key to keep browsing."

"MyApartmentMap "is an apartment search engine that allows users to find apartment listings all over the United States...For the first time, apartment listings have been seamlessly integrated with interactive maps, virtual neighborhood tours, detailed rental data, and many other advanced tools that help apartment searchers make educated decisions about where to rent...MyApartmentMap provides detailed rental data for over 70,000 locations including states, cities, colleges, neighborhoods, military bases, and zip codes. This allows users to accurately predict how much they should be paying for rent and what regions fit within their budget. A short list of MyApartmentMap's features include:

• Interactive Maps: Users can view a map to see exactly where each apartment is located. Nearby grocery stores, restaurants, schools, and other points of interest can be seen with the click of a button.
  
• Virtual Neighborhood Tours: Interactive street images give renters the ability to get the look and feel of a neighborhood without ever leaving their computer.
  
• Rental Deals: Advanced algorithms detect which apartment listings currently offer deals and incentives. Commonly found deals include cash back rewards, free rent, or unit upgrades.
  
• Vertical Searches: College students, military families, and pet owners, all have additional requirements when searching for housing. Vertical searches help these renters by automatically identifying apartments that fit their criteria."

Google URL Shortener - All goo.gl URLs and click analytics are public and can be shared by anyone.

Google Confronts China’s “Three Warfares”, by Timothy L. Thomas. Parameters, Summer 2010, Vol. 40, No. 2, U.S. Army War College.

"Google Election Center helps you provide up-to-date election information to voters and create custom search tools for your website. You can submit the following kinds of information: Polling place locations; Registration instructions; Ballot information; State and local election office contact information. The Election Center Data Manager will guide you through the process of uploading and validating your information. After receiving your information, Google will display election information to your voters through our Maps application." See also:

Official Google Blog: "Today we’re introducing Place Search, a new kind of local search result that organizes the world’s information around places. We’ve clustered search results around specific locations so you can more easily make comparisons and decide where to go. Say you’re looking for that great barbecue restaurant with live music...The new results are marked with red pins, and each one is a unique restaurant with relevant information and links from across the web."

EPIC: "Following numerous protests around the world, Google has ended its illegal collection of wifi data transmissions. The company, which originally claimed it was not even collecting wifi data, was forced to admit that the practice has been ongoing for three years in more than thirty countries, following an independent investigation initiated by European privacy officials. Investigations are still underway to determine the extent of Google's liability. EPIC wrote to the FCC earlier this year, pointing out that the practice violated US wiretap laws."

• EPIC - Investigations of Google Street View
  
• Official Google Blog: "Creating stronger privacy controls inside Google: "In May we announced that we had mistakenly collected unencrypted WiFi payload data (information sent over networks) using our Street View cars. We work hard at Google to earn your trust, and we’re acutely aware that we failed badly here. So we’ve spent the past several months looking at how to strengthen our internal privacy and security practices, as well as talking to external regulators globally about possible improvements to our policies."

News release: "As part of the celebrations on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of its establishment, the Israel Antiquities Authority is launching a unique project – The Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library – to document the entire collection of the Dead Sea Scrolls. A major lead gift from the Leon Levy Foundation, with additional major funding from the Arcadia Foundation and the support of Yad Hanadiv Foundation, will enable the Israel Antiquities Authority to use the most advanced and innovative technologies available to image the entire collection of 900 manuscripts comprising c. 30,000 Dead Sea Scrolls fragments in hi-resolution and multi spectra and make the digitized images freely available and accessible to anyone anywhere in the world on the internet. This is the first time that the collection of Scrolls will be photographed in its entirety since the 1950’s...Click here to download high resolution pictures."

Mobile Health 2010, by Susannah Fox, October 19, 2010: "The online health-information environment is going mobile, particularly among younger adults. The Pew Internet Project’s latest survey of American adults, conducted in association with the California HealthCare Foundation, finds that 85% use a cell phone. Of those:

• 17% of cell owners have used their phone to look up health or medical information and 29% of cell owners ages 18-29 have done such searches.
  
• 9% of cell owners have software applications or “apps” on their phones that help them track or manage their health. Some 15% of those ages 18-29 have such apps.
  
• This means that health-information searches and communications have joined the growing array of non-voice data applications that are being bundled into cell phones."

"MetaLib is a service of the Catalog of U.S. Government Publications. MetaLib is a federated search engine that searches multiple U.S. Federal government databases, retrieving reports, articles, and citations while providing direct links to selected resources available online. To learn more, view additional brief or detailed search information."

Could Google's Achilles heel be showing as Facebook teams up with Microsoft? "Microsoft advanced its partnership with Facebook this week, a move that could represent the biggest threat to Google's search standing yet. Microsoft and Facebook announced that they're teaming up to make Internet searching more social. Now when someone uses Microsoft's Bing search engine to look for a new car or a book, she can see which ones her Facebook friends liked. It will now be easier for searchers to get their friends' opinions before they make purchasing decisions. Industry watchers said this was an interesting development for search in general, but it also holds big implications for Google in particular. What's notable is that Facebook turned to Microsoft for this deal and not to the search market leader, Google."

Automatic Generation of Research Trails in Web History, Elin Rønby Pedersen, Shengyin Gu, Peter Jin Hong, Karl Gyllstrom, Proc. IUI 2010.

Escaping the ‘Scrapers’: "The Internet has given rise to a dizzying array of people-search sites and data brokers that gather and compile public information and social-networking profiles. The sites gather information from public sources such as property records and telephone listings, and other information is harvested by “scraping” — or copying — websites where people post information about themselves. The fact that the information is from public records or posted on the Internet generally means that the companies have a right to use it. And many of the firms emphasize that the data will still be available in public records or elsewhere online, even if the information is removed from specific sites. As long as the source of the information remains available, it can simply be scraped again. But determined consumers willing to navigate the maze of companies have some options for requesting that their data be removed from certain sites."

"EPIC and 14 other privacy and consumer protection groups (including the American Library Association) sent a letter to Google CEO Eric Schmidt about Google's revised privacy policy. Under this new policy, twelve specific Google privacy policies will be replaced by a single policy that will enable greater data sharing within the corporation. EPIC previously raised similar concerns about Google Buzz in a complaint to the Federal Trade Commission. In the complaint, EPIC argued that Google's Gmail-specific privacy policy was more protective of users than their general privacy policy. For more information, see EPIC: In re Google Buzz."

http://goo.gl/http://goo.gl/

PC Magazine: "Google has acquired BlindType, a startup with technology that seemingly magically intuits what a user is typing, no keyboard required. "We are excited to announce that BlindType has been acquired by Google" the company said in a blog post. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. "We want to thank everyone for their overwhelming support and positive feedback. We know that typing on your mobile device can be a frustrating experience, which is why we've worked hard to make touch typing easier and faster than ever - the way it should be." As the name suggests, BlindType supposedly works without a user even seeing the keypad, intuiting what a user types from the proportional distance between the points at which his or her fingers touch the screen. The company has demonstrated the technology for Apple's iPhone and Google's Android system."

"How will the balance of power between Democrats and Republicans shake out after the elections on November 2? Many political experts and news sources track and revise predictions, but until now it’s been hard to compare perspectives. We’ve worked with some of the top names in politics — Sabato, Cook, Rothenberg, CQ-Roll Call, and RealClearPolitics — to make it easier to track the daily changes in the political landscape."

Via LLRX.com - Google Instant and Legal Search: Steve Matthews enumerates some of the issues that merit attention with respect to Google's recent implementation of this default setting search query application.

Transparency Report: "Transparency is a core value at Google. As a company we feel it is our responsibility to ensure that we maximize transparency around the flow of information related to our tools and services. We believe that more information means more choice, more freedom and ultimately more power for the individual. We’ve created an interactive map of Government Requests that shows the number of government inquiries for information about users and requests for Google to take down or censor content. We hope this step toward greater transparency will help in ongoing discussions about the appropriate scope and authority of government requests. Our interactive Traffic graphs provide information about traffic to Google services around the world. Each graph shows historic traffic patterns for a given country/region and service. By illustrating outages, this tool visualizes disruptions in the free flow of information, whether it's a government blocking information or a cable being cut. We hope this raw data will help facilitate studies about service outages and disruptions."

Official Google Blog: "But if you want to keep up just with what’s new (or even just what Google does besides search), you’ll want to know about Google New. A few of us had a 20 percent project idea: create a single destination called Google New where people could find the latest product and feature launches from Google. It’s designed to pull in just those posts from various blogs. We hope it helps you find something useful you’ve never tried before."

Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox, September 13, 2010, Children's Websites: Usability Issues in Designing for Kids: "New research with users aged 3–12 shows that older kids have gained substantial Web proficiency since our last studies, while younger kids still face many problems. Designing for children requires distinct usability approaches, including targeting content narrowly for different ages of kids. Millions of children use the Internet, and millions more are coming online each year. Many websites specifically target children with educational or entertainment content, and mainstream websites often have specific "kids' corner" sections — either as a public service or to build brand loyalty from an early age. Despite this growth in users and services, little is known about how children actually use websites or how to design sites that will be easy for them to use. Website design for kids is typically based purely on folklore about how kids supposedly behave — or, at best, on insights gleaned when designers observe their own children, who hardly represent average kids, typical Internet skills, or common knowledge about the Web. To separate design myths from usability facts, we turn to empirical user research: observations of a broad range of children as they use a wide variety of websites. This research covers users aged 3–12 years."

"Google Instant is a new search enhancement that shows results as you type. We are pushing the limits of our technology and infrastructure to help you get better search results, faster. Our key technical insight was that people type slowly, but read quickly, typically taking 300 milliseconds between keystrokes, but only 30 milliseconds (a tenth of the time!) to glance at another part of the page. This means that you can scan a results page while you type. The most obvious change is that you get to the right content much faster than before because you don’t have to finish typing your full search term, or even press “search.” Another shift is that seeing results as you type helps you formulate a better search term by providing instant feedback. You can now adapt your search on the fly until the results match exactly what you want."

Bringing the Market to You, Hakim Fobia, Agricultural Marketing Service Public Affairs Specialist on September 3, 2010

"This alternative way of slicing the data still shows Email to be, by far, the dominant sector in terms of mobile time, although this dominance shrinks by a few delta points to 38.5% from 41.6%. Search is another that nets out with a smaller share, although by less than a percentage point from 7.1% to 6.3%. The share held by Social Networking remains very similar but News & Current Events comes out much stronger using the site-level analysis at a 7.2% share of time compared to 4.4% of time using the category-level analysis. Share of time on Portals shows something more dramatic, with a change from 11.6% to 4.6% share of time, but this doesn’t mean that people are spending any less time on Portal sites. Nielsen classifies both channels and brands into categories and so a category-level analysis includes both brands (e.g. Google) as well as channels under than brand (e.g. Google News). Using the initial methodology means that all Google time would be assigned to Portals (because Google is a portal) but using the site-level method means the Google News element would be assigned to the News & Current Events sector. Thus, the Portal element is limited to more general and entry pages rather than including content-specific sectors such as news."

"The Google Public Data Explorer makes large datasets easy to explore, visualize and communicate. As the charts and maps animate over time, the changes in the world become easier to understand. You don't have to be a data expert to navigate between different views, make your own comparisons, and share your findings. Students, journalists, policy makers and everyone else can play with the tool to create visualizations of public data, link to them, or embed them in their own webpages. Embedded charts and links can update automatically so you’re always sharing the latest available data..." [examples of datasets]

Official Google Blog: When we first introduced our real-time search features last December, we focused on bringing relevance to the freshest information on the web. Our goal was to provide real-time content from a comprehensive set of sources, integrated right into your usual search results. Today we’re making our most significant enhancements to date, giving real-time information its own home and more powerful tools to help you find what you need. Now you can access Google Realtime Search at its own address, www.google.com/realtime
On the new homepage you’ll find some great tools to help you refine and understand your results. First, you can use geographic refinements to find updates and news near you, or in a region you specify...In addition, we’ve added a conversations view, making it easy to follow a discussion on the real-time web. Often a single tweet sparks a larger conversation of re-tweets and other replies, but to put it together you have to click through a bunch of links and figure it out yourself. With the new “full conversation” feature, you can browse the entire conversation in a single glance. We organize the tweets from oldest to newest and indent so you quickly see how the conversation developed."

The Agnostic Cartographer - How Google’s open-ended maps are embroiling the company in some of the world’s touchiest geopolitical disputes.

Inside Google Books: "We collect metadata from many providers (more than 150 and counting) that include libraries, WorldCat, national union catalogs and commercial providers. At the moment we have close to a billion unique raw records. We then further analyze these records to reduce the level of duplication within each provider, bringing us down to close to 600 million records. Does this mean that there are 600 million unique books in the world? Hardly. There is still a lot of duplication within a single provider (e.g. libraries holding multiple distinct copies of a book) and among providers -- for example, we have 96 records from 46 providers for “Programming Perl, 3rd Edition”. Twice every week we group all those records into “tome” clusters, taking into account nearly all attributes of each record...Is that a final number of books in the world? Not quite. We still have to exclude non-books such as microforms (8 million), audio recordings (4.5 million), videos (2 million), maps (another 2 million)...and other items for which we receive catalog entries... Counting only things that are printed and bound, we arrive at about 146 million. This is our best answer today. It will change as we get more data and become more adept at interpreting what we already have...After we exclude serials, we can finally count all the books in the world. There are 129,864,880 of them. At least until Sunday."

Street Slide: Browsing Street Level Imagery - Johannes Kopf, Billy Chen, Richard Szeliski, Michael Cohen [Microsoft Research]. Please see the accompanying video here.

Google Lat Long Blog: "It’s the middle of summer, but for those of us who long for the return of cold winter weather and warm cups of cocoa, throw on your favorite poncho and check out the weather in Google Earth 5.2. The latest version projects images of rain and snow over the areas with those weather patterns as it’s actually happening! First enable the clouds layer, then zoom in to a particular location where it might be raining or snowing. I’m willing to bet London is a likely spot, even these days, or the Lone Star state (pictured below) which is in the midst of tropical storm season. Currently, our precipitation data cover some areas in North America and Europe; you can see if it’s available in certain places by enabling the radar layer."

Trust Online: Young Adults' Evaluation of Web Content, by Eszter Hargittai, Lindsay Fullerton, Ericka Menchen-Trevino, Kristin Yates Thomas. International Journal of Communication, Vol 4 (2010)

Pew Internet: Reputation Management and Social Media - How people monitor their identity and
search for others online by Mary Madden, Aaron Smith, May 26, 2010

Via Google Blogscoped: "Perhaps bad news for the traffic of dictionary sites, which often don’t show the actual word definition in the search engine snippets: Google now has a onebox of their own immediately offering the definition(s) for certain words you’re searching for. Try enter e.g. pleasant into Google.com and the top will read: “pleas·ant/ˈplezənt/Adjective ... 1. Giving a sense of happy satisfaction or enjoyment. ... 2. (of a person or their manner) Friendly and considerate; likable.”

Exclusive - Google, CIA Invest in ‘Future’ of Web Monitoring, By Noah Shachtman, July 28, 2010: "The investment arms of the CIA and Google are both backing a company that monitors the web in real time — and says it uses that information to predict the future. The company is called Recorded Future, and it scours tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents — both present and still-to-come. In a white paper, the company says its temporal analytics engine “goes beyond search” by “looking at the ‘invisible links’ between documents that talk about the same, or related, entities and events.” The idea is to figure out for each incident who was involved, where it happened and when it might go down. Recorded Future then plots that chatter, showing online “momentum” for any given event."

Follow up to Several State Attorneys General Announce Probes of Google Wireless Data Collection, this news release: "Attorney General Richard Blumenthal today on behalf of the executive committee of a 38-state coalition asked Google whether it tested its Street View software before use -- which should have revealed that the program collected data transmitted over wireless computer networks. Google has acknowledged unauthorized collection of data -- possibly including emails, passwords, web browsing and other confidential information – but called it a mistake. In a letter to Google, Blumenthal also asks whether the company’s program was designed to collect random bits of information broadcast over wireless networks or download specific types of data and whether it has sold or otherwise used technical network information also collected."

Follow up to previous postings on climate change, UK Mail Online: "A Google Earth map that shows the potential impacts of global temperature rises of 4C was unveiled by scientists and ministers [from the Foreign Office (FCO) and the Department of Energy and Climate Change (Decc)]...The interactive map lets the public see what could happen in various parts of the world if action is not taken to curb temperature rises by cutting greenhouse gases...The map lets people find out more about the scientific research behind the possible effects of 'dangerous' climate change, from sea level rises to changes in crop yields...The interactive map shows the major impacts on a world in which temperatures have risen by 4C, a possibility which Prof Beddington described as a 'disaster'. It also includes the uncertainties scientists have over the extent and timing of temperature rises in different regions."

Official Google Blog: "Over time we’ve improved search by deepening our understanding of queries and web pages. The web isn’t merely words—it’s information about things in the real world, and understanding the relationships between real-world entities can help us deliver relevant information more quickly. Today, we’ve acquired Metaweb, a company that maintains an open database of things in the world. Working together we want to improve search and make the web richer and more meaningful for everyone. With efforts like rich snippets and the search answers feature, we’re just beginning to apply our understanding of the web to make search better. Type [barack obama birthday] in the search box and see the answer right at the top of the page. Or search for [events in San Jose] and see a list of specific events and dates. We can offer this kind of experience because we understand facts about real people and real events out in the world. But what about [colleges on the west coast with tuition under $30,000]...we’ve acquired Metaweb because we believe working together we’ll be able to provide better answers...In addition to our ideas for search, we’re also excited about the possibilities for Freebase, Metaweb’s free and open database of over 12 million things, including movies, books, TV shows, celebrities, locations, companies and more. Google and Metaweb plan to maintain Freebase as a free and open database for the world."

The Demographics of Web Search, Weber, I.; Castillo, C. SIGIR, ACM Press, Geneva, Switzerland (2010)

Official Google Blog: "Today we’re revamping the Google News homepage with several changes designed to make the news that you see more relevant to you. We’re also trying to better highlight interesting stories you didn’t know existed and to make it easier for you to share stories through social networks...The new heart of the homepage is something we call “News for you”: a stream of headlines automatically tailored to your interests. You can help us get it right by using the “Edit personalization” box to specify how much you’re interested in Business, Health, Entertainment, Sports or any subject you want to add (whether it’s the Supreme Court, the World Cup or synthetic biology). You can choose to view the stories by Section view or List view, and reveal more headlines by hovering over the headline with your mouse. We’ll remember your preferences each time you log in...we’re now allowing you to choose which news sources you’d like to see more or less often. You can do so in News Settings. These sources will rank higher or lower for you (but not for anyone else) in Google News search results and story clusters. We’ve also added keyboard shortcuts for easier navigation, like in Gmail or Google Reader. When you’re in Google News, hit the question mark key to pop up a full list of shortcuts."

MapQuest Blog: "...we are launching a new user experience on MapQuest and updating our brand to reflect our new direction. We thoughtfully redesigned MapQuest.com to be more helpful, intuitive and engaging where the entire experience is within view and contextually relevant throughout...One of the most obvious changes you will notice in the redesign is the one box search. Whether you are looking for a specific address, browsing for a local restaurant, or trying to find the little league park, you can enter as much information as you know and we will help you locate it. Another great feature is the map toolbar which allows you to easily search the map for brands, categories and places in a single click. My Maps, another new feature, allows you to quickly personalize, save and share using a simplified login that leverages existing social services. So you can login using your account information from services like Facebook®, Twitter and Google®. The idea is simple: you can create a collection of your favorite places, journal your vacation or create an itinerary and then share it with family and friends. We also now provide you with the ability to further personalize your trips with notes, anecdotes and comments about each place along the way. In a world where social and local are the new frontier, we are focused on building a place where human experiences and individuality are paramount."

Basic Legal Research on the Internet: This article explores the corner of the Internet landscape that concentrates on legal research. For the most part, these databases and search tools are free, although some might require a library card. Essentially, this is a short list of "go to" sites that most researchers will find useful. Before delving in, author Ken Strutin also examines a few time tested research concepts for the Internet age.

Employment Online Resources - This guide for researchers by Marcus P. Zillman is a comprehensive bibliography of resources and sites comprising the latest and most comprehensive, reliable content and value added information currently available on this subject via the Internet.

Follow up to Google Launches Encrypted Search in Beta, via the Official Google Enterprise Blog, the announcement that the company moved encrypted search from https://www.google.com to https://encrypted.google.com. "The site functions in the same way. However, if school network administrators decide to block encrypted searches on https://encrypted.google.com, the blocking will no longer affect Google authenticated services like Google Apps for Education."

Follow up to Several State Attorneys General Announce Probes of Google Wireless Data Collection, via EPIC: "The French National Commission on Computing and Liberty (CNIL) has released preliminary results (French) (English) of the Google Street View investigation in France. According to the CNIL, Google "saved passwords for access to mailboxes" and obtained content of electronic messages. The CNIL is pursuing the investigation to determine whether Google engaged in "unfair and unlawful collection of data" as well as "invasion of privacy and individual liberties." Investigations are now underway in at least 18 countries and five states in the US. EPIC has prepared a preliminary survey of Investigations of Google Street View."

Follow up to Several State Attorneys General Announce Probes of Google Wireless Data Collection, an update via EPIC: "Several state attorneys general have opened investigations of Google, following disclosures that the company captured and stored Wi-Fi data in addition to digital images. These states include Connecticut, Illinois, Massachusetts, Michigan, and Missouri. Maryland and New York are also reported to be pursuing investigations. Connecticut AG Richard Blumenthal described the "driveby data sweeps" of WiFi networks as "deeply disturbing, a potentially impermissible, pernicious invasion of privacy." In a subsequent statement, the Connecticut Attorney General said he will determine the legality of Google's WiFi collection practices. Earlier, EPIC sent a letter to the Federal Communications Commission urging the FCC to determine whether Google may have violated the Wiretap Act and the Communications Act. Google has since grounded its entire Street View fleet and ceased all WiFi data collection. For more information, see EPIC - Investigations of Google Street View."

Closing the Digital Frontier: "The era of the Web browser’s dominance is coming to a close. And the Internet’s founding ideology — that information wants to be free, and that attempts to constrain it are not only hopeless but immoral— suddenly seems naive and stale in the new age of apps, smart phones, and pricing plans. What will this mean for the future of the media — and of the Web itself?"

Official Google Blog: "...we're announcing the completion of a new web indexing system called Caffeine. Caffeine provides 50 percent fresher results for web searches than our last index, and it's the largest collection of web content we've offered. Whether it's a news story, a blog or a forum post, you can now find links to relevant content much sooner after it is published than was possible ever before. Some background...when you search Google, you're not searching the live web. Instead you're searching Google's index of the web which, like the list in the back of a book, helps you pinpoint exactly the information you need. (Here's a good explanation of how it all works.) Content on the web is blossoming. It's growing not just in size and numbers but with the advent of video, images, news and real-time updates, the average webpage is richer and more complex. In addition, people's expectations for search are higher than they used to be. Searchers want to find the latest relevant content and publishers expect to be found the instant they publish."

Official Google Blog: "When we announced three weeks ago that we had mistakenly included code in our software that collected samples of payload data from WiFi networks, we said we would ask a third party to review the software at issue, how it worked, and what data it gathered. That report, by the security consulting firm Stroz Friedberg, is now complete and was sent to the interested data protection authorities today. In short, it confirms that Google did indeed collect and store payload data from unencrypted WiFi networks, but not from networks that were encrypted. You can read the report here. We are continuing to work with the relevant authorities to respond to their questions and concerns.

Google Public Policy Blog: "When we launched Google Patent Search in 2006, we wanted to make it easier for people to understand the world of inventions, whether they were browsing for curious patents or researching serious engineering. Recently, we’ve also worked on a number of public data search features, as well as experimental features like the Public Data Explorer...That’s why we’re proud to announce that the USPTO and Google are making this data available for free at http://www.google.com/googlebooks/uspto.html. This includes all granted patents and trademarks, and published applications -- with both full text and images. And in the future we will be making more data available including file histories and related data."

FT.com: "Google is phasing out the internal use of Microsoft’s ubiquitous Windows operating system because of security concerns, according to several Google employees. The directive to move to other operating systems began in earnest in January, after Google’s Chinese operations were hacked, and could effectively end the use of Windows at Google, which employs more than 10,000 workers internationally."

Article 29 Data Protection Working Party Press Release, Brussels, 26 May 2010: EU data protection group says Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! do not comply with data protection rules

News release: "Today, Chairman Henry A. Waxman, Subcommittee Chairman Ed Markey, and Ranking Member Joe Barton sent a letter to Eric Schmidt, Chairman & CEO of Google, regarding recent reports of data collection over private Wi-Fi networks in conjunction with Google's Street View product. The Committee is concerned about the accuracy and completeness of Google's public explanations and request information regarding the nature and use of the private data collected, the underlying technology of the Street View vehicle fleet, and the impact on consumer privacy."

"With Google search over SSL, you can have an end-to-end encrypted search solution between your computer and Google. This secured channel helps protect your search terms and your search results pages from being intercepted by a third party. This provides you with a more secure and private search experience. To use search over SSL, visit https://www.google.com New window icon each time you perform a search. Note that only Google web search is available over SSL, so other search products like Google Images and Google Maps are not currently available over SSL. When you're searching over SSL, these properties may not appear in the left panel."

Regulators are Watching Google Over Antitrust Concerns: "When it comes to government scrutiny, the company’s executives challenge the premise that Google is a monopoly, even as the company’s share of the search market inexorably rises, arguing that Google is still a minor player in the overall advertising market, which totals $800 billion a year...“They are not just on the radar screen. They are the at the center of it,” said Tim Wu, a professor at Columbia University and the author of a forthcoming book on technology monopolies, “The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires.” “If you are in the federal government and are interested in antitrust, you are looking at Google.”

"TV meets web. Web meets TV. Google TV is a new experience made for television that combines the TV you know and love with the freedom and power of the Internet. Watch an overview video below, sign up for updates, and learn more about how to develop for Google TV."

"Consumer Watchdog today formally launched its new Website, Inside Google, to focus attention on the company’s activities and hold Google accountable for its actions. The nonpartisan, nonprofit public interest group is launching Inside Google to educate the public and opinion leaders about Google’s dangerous dominance over the Internet, computing and consumers’ online lives. Inside Google’s blog is authored by experienced consumer advocates and journalists working to expose the “black box” at Google with an eye towards holding Google engineers accountable to social mores, ethical customs and the rule of law."

Official Google Blog: "We’ve added contextually relevant, left-hand navigation to the page. This new side panel highlights the most relevant search tools and refinements for your query. Over the past three years, we've launched Universal Search, the Search Options panel and Google Squared, and it’s those three technologies that power the left-hand panel. Universal Search helps you find the most relevant types of results for your search. The top section of the new left-hand panel builds on Universal Search by suggesting the most relevant genres of results for your query and letting you seamlessly switch to these different types of results....Our expandable Search Options panel launched last spring brought many rich slice-and-dice tools to search. The new left-hand navigation showcases these tools and enables you to get a different view of your results. Perhaps you’d like to see images from each of the results or just the newest information? These options are all on the left, and our technology will suggest the tools that are most relevant and helpful to your query. Google Squared (available on Google Labs) helps you find and compare entities. Our “Something different” feature builds on the technology in Google Squared to find other entities that are related to your query, so you can easily explore not only the results for your current query but other related topics. In addition to the left-hand side changes, we’ve updated our look and feel in terms of our color palette and our logo. These changes are slight, keeping our page minimalist and whimsical, but make our overall look more modern."

"The Chesapeake Project Legal Information Archive has completed its third annual analysis of link rot among the original URLs for law- and policy-related materials published to the Web and archived though the Chesapeake Project. The Chesapeake Project was launched in 2007 by the Georgetown University Law Library and the State Law Libraries of Maryland and Virginia as a collaborative digital archive for the preservation of important Web-published legal materials, which often disappear as Web site content is rearranged or deleted over time. More about the Chesapeake Project. In the three years since the archive was launched, the Chesapeake Project law libraries have built a collection comprising more than 5,700 digital items and 2,300 titles, all of which were originally posted to the Web. For this study, the term "link rot" is used to describe a URL that no longer provides direct access to files matching the content originally harvested from the URL and currently preserved in the Chesapeake Project’s digital archive. In some instances, a 404 or "not found" message indicates link rot at a URL; in others, the URL may direct to a site hosted by the original publishing organization or entity, but the specific resource has been removed or relocated from the original or previous URL. All of the Web resources described in this report that have disappeared from their original locations on the Web remain accessible via permanent archive URLs here at legalinfoarchive.org, thanks to the Chesapeake Project's efforts." [Sarah Rhodes, Digital Collections Librarian, Georgetown University Law Library]

The Fate of the Semantic Web, by Janna Anderson, Lee Rainie, May 4, 2010

Gutenberg 2.0 Harvard's libraries deal with disruptive change, by Jonathan Shaw, Harvard Magazine, May-June 2010

Greenleaf G., “The Global development of free access to legal information”, in European Journal of Law and Technology, Vol. 1, Issue 1, 2010.

Official Google Blog: "...it's no surprise that Google, like other technology and telecommunications companies, regularly receives demands from government agencies to remove content from our services. Of course many of these requests are entirely legitimate, such as requests for the removal of child pornography. We also regularly receive requests from law enforcement agencies to hand over private user data. Again, the vast majority of these requests are valid and the information needed is for legitimate criminal investigations. However, data about these activities historically has not been broadly available. We believe that greater transparency will lead to less censorship. We are today launching a new Government Requests tool to give people information about the requests for user data or content removal we receive from government agencies around the world. For this launch, we are using data from July-December, 2009, and we plan to update the data in 6-month increments. Read this post to learn more about our principles surrounding free expression and controversial content on the web."

Official Google Blog: "Since we first introduced real-time search last December, we’ve added content from MySpace, Facebook and Buzz, expanded to 40 languages and added a top links feature to help you find the most relevant content shared on updates services like Twitter. Today, we’re introducing a new feature to help you search and explore the public archive of tweets. With the advent of blogs and micro-blogs, there’s a constant online conversation about breaking news, people and places — some famous and some local. Tweets and other short-form updates create a history of commentary that can provide valuable insights into what’s happened and how people have reacted. We want to give you a way to search across this information and make it useful. Starting today, you can zoom to any point in time and “replay” what people were saying publicly about a topic on Twitter. To try it out, click “Show options” on the search results page, then select “Updates.” The first page will show you the familiar latest and greatest short-form updates from a comprehensive set of sources, but now there’s a new chart at the top. In that chart, you can select the year, month or day, or click any point to view the tweets from that specific time period."

Firefox now has about 30% of the browser market on average, with its strongest market in Europe, at 39% according to the Mozilla Metrics Report Q1 2010 Firefox Worldwide Market Share report.

YouTube Blog: "...we're in the midst of one of the largest redesigns in YouTube's history: we're simplifying the look and functionality of the video page. That's the page you see whenever a video plays, and this redesign is about going "back to basics," focusing attention on the reason why you came to YouTube in the first place -- the video -- and all the ways you engage with content and creators. We first unveiled the new video page two months ago and checked in four weeks later to tell you about the latest set of changes. Truth is, we've been thinking about this for a long time: what you see is the result of eight months' worth of user research, feedback and data analysis. Now, after a few more additions based on your latest feedback, we are rolling it out to 100% of YouTube users."

A transcript of a speech given by the Prime Minister on Building Britain’s Digital Future in London on 22 March 2010.

Follow up to Google Discontinues Censored Search in Mainland China and An Interview with David Drummond of Google about the company's new policies in China, additional perspective as follows:

• New York Times, Google Searches for a Foreign Policy:"When Google announced last week that it would shut its censored online search service in China, it was doing more than standing up to a repressive government: it was showing that, with the United States still struggling to develop a foreign policy for the digital age, Internet companies need to articulate their own foreign policies."
  
• Washington Post - On Leadership: Views on Google's refusal to continue censorship in China by Benjamin W. Heineman Jr., business ethics expert and senior fellow at Harvard University's schools of law and government.

News release: "Today, EPA is releasing the Health and Environmental Research Online (HERO) database, a milestone in transparency. HERO provides access to the scientific studies used in making key regulatory decisions, including EPA’s periodic review of the National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) for six major pollutants. It is part of the open government directive to conduct business with transparency, participation, and collaboration... The publically accessible HERO database provides an easy way to review the scientific literature behind EPA science assessments, which are used to support agency decision-making. The database includes more than 300,000 scientific articles including the authors, titles, dates, and abstracts. In addition, through a simple keyword search, anyone can see information from the articles that were used to develop specific risk assessments...HERO includes peer-reviewed literature used by EPA to develop its Integrated Science Assessments (ISA) that feed into the NAAQS review. It also includes references and data from the Integrated Risk Information System (IRIS), a database that supports critical agency policymaking for chemical regulation."

Follow up to Google Discontinues Censored Search in Mainland China,
via the Atlantic, An Interview with David Drummond of Google about the company's new policies in China by James Fallows: "Since the Beijing Olympics, our experience in China has gotten worse. Although we have gained market share, it has become more and more difficult for us to operate there. Particularly when it comes to censorship. We have had to censor more. More and more pressure has been put on us. It has gotten appreciably worse – and not just for us, for other internet companies too."

Official Google Blog: "On January 12, we announced on this blog that Google and more than twenty other U.S. companies had been the victims of a sophisticated cyber attack originating from China, and that during our investigation into these attacks we had uncovered evidence to suggest that the Gmail accounts of dozens of human rights activists connected with China were being routinely accessed by third parties, most likely via phishing scams or malware placed on their computers. We also made clear that these attacks and the surveillance they uncovered—combined with attempts over the last year to further limit free speech on the web in China including the persistent blocking of websites such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google Docs and Blogger—had led us to conclude that we could no longer continue censoring our results on Google.cn. So earlier today we stopped censoring our search services—Google Search, Google News, and Google Images—on Google.cn. Users visiting Google.cn are now being redirected to Google.com.hk, where we are offering uncensored search in simplified Chinese, specifically designed for users in mainland China and delivered via our servers in Hong Kong. Users in Hong Kong will continue to receive their existing uncensored, traditional Chinese service, also from Google.com.hk."

News release: "ebrary®, a leading provider of digital content products and technologies..announced that it has created a publicly available research center featuring hundreds of important government documents related to natural disasters and extreme weather - the Natural Disaster and Extreme Weather Searchable Information Center."

UK TimesOnline: "Hitwise, the internet industry tracker, announced that Facebook had dethroned Google as the world’s most popular website. For the week ending March 13, the social networking site set up by wunderkind Mark Zuckerberg got more traffic than Google in America. It was a milestone likely to be revisited as Facebook and Google limber up for what looks set to be this decade’s defining technology battle."

Grab Your Bike and Go with Google Maps - Users can now choose biking when deciding how to get to their destination: "If you’re one of the 57 million Americans who ride a bike, mapping your daily commute, exploring new trails, and planning recreational rides just became a little bit easier. Google is announcing that we have added biking directions in the U.S. to Google Maps. This has been the most requested addition to Google Maps, and we’re delighted to be unveiling this new feature at the National Bike Summit in Washington, DC. This new feature includes: step-by-step bicycling directions; bike trails outlined directly on the map; and a new “Bicycling” layer that indicates bike trails, bike lanes, and bike-friendly roads."

New York Times: "Google Translate service handles 52 languages, more than any similar system, and people use it hundreds of millions of times a week to translate Web pages and other text." [Note: Translate text, webpages and documents - users may upload documents]

Follow up to previous postings on Google Book Search: "Now that the fairness hearing on the Google Books Settlement has occurred, it is up to Judge Chin to decide whether the proposed settlement is "fair, reasonable, and adequate." The attached chart attempts to diagram some of the possible paths forward. Notwithstanding the complexity of the chart, it does not reflect all the possible permutations. For example, it does not mention stays pending appeals nor whether litigation would proceed as a class action. Moreover, the chart does not address the substantive reasons why a certain outcome may occur, e.g., the basis for Judge Chin accepting or rejecting the settlement. And it doesn't begin to address the issue of Congressional intervention through legislation. In short, the precise way forward is more difficult to predict than the NCAA tournament. And although the next step in the GBS saga may occur this March, many more NCAA tournaments will come and go before the buzzer sounds on this dispute."

Official Google Blog: "Location has become an important part of the way we search. If you're a foodie looking for restaurant details, food blogs or the closest farmer's market, location can be vital to helping you find the right information....we've added the ability to refine your searches with the "Nearby" tool in the Search Options panel. One of the really helpful things about this tool is that it works geographically — not just with keywords — so you don't have to worry about adding "Minneapolis" to your query and missing webpages that only say "St. Paul" or "Twin Cities." Check it out by doing a search, clicking on "show options" and selecting "Nearby."

EPIC: "Ponemon Institute released its annual study identifying the top twenty companies that are most trusted for privacy. American Express was ranked first, earning the Most Trusted for Privacy distinction for the fifth year in a row. Facebook suffered several privacy missteps over the last year, including a recent change in privacy settings at the end of 2009, and as a result, failed to make the 2010 list. Google, however, returned to the Top 20, ranked at 13. The survey also produced significant findings regarding consumer attitudes towards privacy, including the finding that consumers feel they are losing control over their personal information. Further, the responses revealed that consumers’ fear of identity theft is the main factor for brand trust diminishment, while a company’s implementation of privacy features contribute to brand trust. Other significant positive factors were limits on the collection of personal information and online anonymity."

New York Times: 2 Million Displaced After Chile Quake and Chilean Quake a Warning to U.S. Northwest

Bloomberg: "Google Inc. said it may spend as much as “hundreds of millions” of dollars on an experimental broadband service that offers Internet speeds 100 times faster than current networks. The cost of the test project, announced this month, isn’t known and will depend on demographics, the lay of the land and the number of households that use it, said Richard Whitt, Google’s Washington counsel on telecommunications and media issues. The company hasn’t determined the location or size of the network, which could serve 50,000 to 500,000 customers."

Google European Public Policy Blog: Yesterday's news that the European Commission has opened a preliminary inquiry into competition complaints from three companies has generated a lot of questions about how Google's ranking works. Here, Amit Singhal, a Google Fellow responsible for ranking, who has worked in search for almost 20 years, explains the principles behind our algorithm."

Brandon Badger, Product Manager, Google Books: "I'm happy to announce a few fresh features for Google Books. We've updated the home page by adding the ability to scroll through categories of books and magazines. We also integrated the My Library feature into the home page to enable you to create and then share collections of books by adding them to "bookshelves." This new version of My Library gives you control over your collections by enabling you to keep some bookshelves private--if, say, you want to organize your own personal reading lists--while sharing others."

YouTube Blog: "Diversity of content is one of the great things about YouTube. But we know that some of you want a more controlled experience. That's why we're announcing Safety Mode, an opt-in setting that helps screen out potentially objectionable content that you may prefer not to see or don't want others in your family to stumble across while enjoying YouTube. An example of this type of content might be a newsworthy video that contains graphic violence such as a political protest or war coverage. While no filter is 100% perfect, Safety Mode is another step in our ongoing desire to give you greater control over the content you see on the site. It's easy to opt in to Safety Mode: Just click on the link at the bottom of any video page. You can even lock your choice on that browser with your YouTube password..."

Official Google Blog: "Google Buzz is a new way to start conversations about the things you find interesting. It's built right into Gmail, so you don't have to peck out an entirely new set of friends from scratch — it just works. If you think about it, there's always been a big social network underlying Gmail. Buzz brings this network to the surface by automatically setting you up to follow the people you email and chat with the most. We focused on building an easy-to-use sharing experience that richly integrates photos, videos and links, and makes it easy to share publicly or privately (so you don't have to use different tools to share with different audiences). Plus, Buzz integrates tightly with your existing Gmail inbox, so you're sure to see the stuff that matters most as it happens in real time."

News release: "Now, a special Google public data search feature will show numeric results for 17 World Development Indicators (WDI) reliably sourced to the World Bank. For example, a Google search for GDP features a box at the top of the page highlighting Bank data and linking to Google's Google's public data graphing tool. Google's graphing tool lets users see and compare country-by-country statistics and offers customized graphs with a ‘link’ or web address that can be easily embedded and shared in other websites. From the Google Public Data graphing tool, users can learn more about the data on the new World Bank Data Finder, which allows them to access indicator definitions, quick facts, interactive maps, and additional World Bank related resources...From the Google Public Data graphing tool, users can learn more about the data on the new World Bank Data Finder, which allows them to access indicator definitions, quick facts, interactive maps, and additional World Bank related resources. All of these features can be easily exported and installed on other websites."

"The meta-search engine of National Case Law was created by the Network of the Presidents of the European Supreme Courts. It has been released in April 2007 and allows to simultaneously query several search engines." [Lyonette Louis-Jacques]

Follow up to previous postings on Google Book Search, this news, Justice Department Submits Views on Amended Google Book Search Settlement - Department Says Despite Substantial Progress Made, Issues Remain

Anatomy of a Large-Scale Social Search Engine, by Damon Horowitz and Sepandar D. Kamvar [via Abi Morgan]

TechCrunch - Research firm Outsell has published its third annual News Users’ report [fee only], which is based on a survey about the online and offline news preferences of 2,787 US news consumers. The Outsell report unsurprisingly predicts ongoing, steep drops in US newspapers’ print circulation as consumers continue to head online for news consumption and sharing, forecasting 3.5 percent annual declines in both daily and Sunday circulation by 2012. Interestingly enough, the research also talks of what is referred to as the “dramatic effect” aggregators like Google and Yahoo have had on print and online readership...“Though Google is driving some traffic to newspapers, it’s also taking a significant share away. A full 44 percent of visitors to Google News scan headlines without accessing newspapers’ individual sites.”

"Designed for animal lovers with very specific tastes, we've just added the following sites to the WildlifeNearYou family:

• owlsnearyou.com
  
• ottersnearyou.com
  
• monkeysnearyou.com
  
• lionsnearyou.com

Person Finder: Haiti Earthquake, embeddable application:
What is your situation? / I'm looking for someone / I have information about someone.
See also:

• Open Street Map Project's Haiti Earthquake Map
  
• Free access to Haiti Earthquake imagery through DigitalGlobe's Crisis Event Service
  
• Haiti 2010 Sahana Disaster Response Portal [all via Brady Forrest]
  
• and Haiti Earthquake Recovery / The New York Times on Facebook

Official Google Blog:

"The House of Representatives HR 3962 Affordable Health Care for America Act together with the Senate Patient Protection and Affordable Care bill as amended and passed December 24, 2009 are presented here in searchable form. This is provided as a public service. MarpX is a precision search engine uses the "Words Close Together" method of relevance ranking, which assures that the most meaningful hits appear near the top of the list search results."

Chronicle of Higher Education: "The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is closing a grant program that financed a series of high-profile university software projects, leaving some worried about a vacuum of support for open-source ventures. Mellon’s decade-old Research in Information Technology program, or RIT, helped bankroll a catalog of freely available software that includes Sakai, a course-management system used by Stanford University and the University of Michigan; Kuali, a financial-management program recently rolled out at Colorado State University; and Zotero, a program for managing research sources used by millions."

Google Scholar: A New Way to Search for Cases and Related Legal Publications - Courtney Minick and David Tsai provide an overview of the new features Google Scholar provides for the legal research market.

Follow up to previous postings on Google Book Search - Google & the Future of Books: An Exchange By Paul N. Courant, Laine Farley, Paula Kaufman, John Leslie King, Theodore Koditschek, Anthony Lewis et al.
"To the Editors: In his recent article criticizing the Google settlement [Google and the New Digital Future, NYR, December 17, 2009], Robert Darnton fails to acknowledge the significant role that libraries have had in the creation of Google Book Search as well as the concrete steps they are taking to address the sorts of concerns he raises. Libraries are using Google-digitized volumes to create the "truly public library" that he seeks, and these same libraries are taking responsibility for the preservation of Google-digitized volumes. More than thirty research libraries have made agreements with Google to digitize their collections as part of their long-standing tradition of providing the highest level of access to scholarly materials. These libraries have worked successfully with Google to ensure the integrity of their physical collections and to digitize those collections in accordance with broadly held standards for digital capture."

New York Times: "83 children, ages 7, 9 and 11...participated in a study on children and keyword searching. Sponsored by Google and developed by the University of Maryland and the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, the research was aimed at discerning the differences between how children and adults search and identify the barriers children face when trying to retrieve information...When considering children, search engines had long focused on filtering out explicit material from results. But now, because increasing numbers of children are using search as a starting point for homework, exploration or entertainment, more engineers are looking to children for guidance on how to improve their tools."

TIME - 50 Best Websites 2009: "50 offerings that are indispensable to navigating, enjoying yourself, shopping or just killing time on the Web."

Follow up to Google Scholar Now Includes Free Case Law Database and Bridging the DiGital Divide: A New Vendor in Town? Google Scholar Now Includes Case Law, this related article - Google Scholar: A New Way to Search for Cases and Related Legal Publications.

A Guide for the Perplexed Part III: The Amended Settlement Agreement - On Friday, November 13, 2009, Google, the Authors Guild, and the Association of American Publishers filed an Amended Settlement Agreement (ASA) in the copyright infringement litigation concerning the Google Library Project. The amendments proposed by the parties are designed to address objections made by the U.S. Department of Justice and copyright holders to the original proposed settlement agreement. This paper by Jonathan Band describes the ASA's major changes, with emphasis on those changes relevant to libraries.

Follow up to previous postings on the Google Book Search settlement,
this letter to DOJ Antitrust Division: "The American Library Association, the Association of College and Research Libraries, and the Association of Research Libraries (the Library Associations) write to express our views concerning how the United States should respond to the Amended Settlement Agreement filed by the parties on November 13, 2009. In brief, we believe that active supervision of the settlement by the court and the United States will protect the public interest far more than any additional restructuring of the settlement."

Deep Web Research 2010: Marcus P. Zillman is a an internet search expert whose extensive knowledge of how to leverage the "invisible" or "deep" web is exemplified in this guide. The Deep Web covers somewhere in the vicinity of 1 trillion pages of information located through the world wide web in various files and formats. Current search engines are able to locate around 200 billion pages. Marcus identifies sources to mitigate the odds on behalf of serious searchers.

Google.org blog: "...at the International Climate Change Conference (COP15) in Copenhagen we demonstrated a new technology prototype that enables online, global-scale observation and measurement of changes in the earth's forests. We hope this technology will help stop the destruction of the world's rapidly-disappearing forests. Emissions from tropical deforestation are comparable to the emissions of all of the European Union, and are greater than those of all cars, trucks, planes, ships and trains worldwide. According to the Stern Review, protecting the world's standing forests is a highly cost-effective way to cut carbon emissions and mitigate climate change. The United Nations has proposed a framework known as REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries) that would provide financial incentives to rainforest nations to protect their forests, in an effort to make forests worth "more alive than dead." Implementing a global REDD system will require that each nation have the ability to accurately monitor and report the state of their forests over time, in a manner that is independently verifiable. However, many of these tropical nations of the world lack the technological resources to do this, so we're working with scientists, governments and non-profits to change this. Here's what we've done with this prototype to help nations monitor their forests..."

"GOOG-411 is Google's new 411 service. With GOOG-411, you can find local business information completely free, directly from your phone. You can access 1-800-466-4411 from any phone, anywhere, at anytime."

New York Times: "Google on Tuesday introduced a new approach to presenting news online by topic, developed with The New York Times and The Washington Post, and said that if the experiment succeeded, it would be made available to all publishers. The announcement of the “living stories” project shows Google collaborating with newspapers at a time when some major publishers have characterized the company as a threat. Google has also taken steps recently to project an image of itself as a friend to the industry."

Google Living Stories

• "The Living Stories project is an experiment in presenting news, one designed specifically for the online environment. The project was developed by Google in collaboration with two of the country's leading newspapers, The New York Times and The Washington Post.
  
• All in one place: Complete coverage of an on-going story is gathered together and prioritized on one URL. You can now quickly navigate between news articles, opinion pieces and features without long waits for pages to load.
  
• Easy to explore: Each story has an evolving summary of current developments as a well as an interactive timeline of critical events. Stories can be explored by themes, significant participants or multimedia.
  
• Smarter reading: Updates to the story are highlighted each time you come back, and older news is summarized."

New York Times: "Google on Tuesday introduced a new approach to presenting news online by topic, developed with The New York Times and The Washington Post, and said that if the experiment succeeded, it would be made available to all publishers. The announcement of the “living stories” project shows Google collaborating with newspapers at a time when some major publishers have characterized the company as a threat. Google has also taken steps recently to project an image of itself as a friend to the industry."

• "The Living Stories project is an experiment in presenting news, one designed specifically for the online environment. The project was developed by Google in collaboration with two of the country's leading newspapers, The New York Times and The Washington Post. [Note: See Living Stories FAQ]
  
• All in one place: "Complete coverage of an on-going story is gathered together and prioritized on one URL. You can now quickly navigate between news articles, opinion pieces and features without long waits for pages to load."
  
• Easy to explore: "Each story has an evolving summary of current developments as a well as an interactive timeline of critical events. Stories can be explored by themes, significant participants or multimedia."
  
• Smarter reading: "Updates to the story are highlighted each time you come back, and older news is summarized."
Permanent Link

Official Google Blog: "Our real-time search enables you to discover breaking news the moment it's happening, even if it's not the popular news of the day, and even if you didn't know about it beforehand...Click on "Latest results" or select "Latest" from the search options menu to view a full page of live tweets, blogs, news and other web content scrolling right on Google. You can also filter your results to see only "Updates" from micro-blogs like Twitter, FriendFeed, Jaiku and others. Latest results and the new search options are also designed for iPhone and Android devices when you need them on the go...Our real-time search features are based on more than a dozen new search technologies that enable us to monitor more than a billion documents and process hundreds of millions of real-time changes each day."

Google Dictionary website - includes 40 language translation feature, and query response includes: Found in dictionary, Derivative, and Web definitions.

Official Google Blog: "Today, as part of our ongoing effort to make the web faster, we're launching our own public DNS resolver called Google Public DNS, and we invite you to try it out. Most of us aren't familiar with DNS because it's often handled automatically by our Internet Service Provider (ISP), but it provides an essential function for the web. You could think of it as the switchboard of the Internet, converting easy-to-remember domain names — e.g., www.google.com — into the unique Internet Protocol (IP) numbers — e.g., 74.125.45.100 — that computers use to communicate with one another."

• Google Public DNS: An Introduction
  
• Google Public DNS: Performance Benefits
  
• Google Public DNS: Security Benefits
  
• Google Public DNS: Setup Instructions and Support
  
• Google Public DNS: Privacy Policy
  
• Google Public DNS: Official FAQ

Official Google Blog: "The main feature of the new homepage is that it "fades in" — when the page first loads, it shows only our logo, the search box and the buttons. For the vast majority of people who come to the Google homepage, they are coming in order to search, and this clean, minimalist approach gives them just what they are looking for first and foremost. For those users who are interested in using a different application like Gmail, Google Image Search or our advertising programs, the additional links on the homepage only reveal themselves when the user moves the mouse. Since most users who are interested in clicking over to a different application generally do move the mouse when they arrive, the "fade in" is an elegant solution that provides options to those who want them, but removes distractions for the user intent on searching."

Google News Blog: "There are more than 25,000 publishers from around the world in Google News today. [With] the new Google News web crawler publishers [can]...keep their content out of Google News and still remain in Google Search...if a publisher wants to opt out of Google News, they don't even have to contact us - they can put instructions just for user-agent Googlebot-News in the same robots.txt file they have today. In addition, once this change is fully in place, it will allow publishers to do more than just allow/disallow access to Google News. They'll also be able to apply the full range of REP directives just to Google News. Want to block images from Google News, but not from Web Search? Go ahead. Want to include snippets in Google News, but not in Web Search? Feel free...All this will soon be possible with the same standard protocol that is Robots Exclusion Protocol (or REP)."

Official Google Blog, Ken Harrenstien, Software Engineer: "Since the original launch of captions in our products, we’ve been happy to see growth in the number of captioned videos on our services, which now number in the hundreds of thousands. This suggests that more and more people are becoming aware of how useful captions can be. As we’ve explained in the past, captions not only help the deaf and hearing impaired, but with machine translation, they also enable people around the world to access video content in any of 51 languages. Captions can also improve search and even enable users to jump to the exact parts of the videos they're looking for...we've combined Google's automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology with the YouTube caption system to offer automatic captions, or auto-caps for short. Auto-caps use the same voice recognition algorithms in Google Voice to automatically generate captions for video...In addition to automatic captions, we’re also launching automatic caption timing, or auto-timing, to make it significantly easier to create captions manually. With auto-timing, you no longer need to have special expertise to create your own captions in YouTube. All you need to do is create a simple text file with all the words in the video and we’ll use Google’s ASR technology to figure out when the words are spoken and create captions for your video."

News release: "Now, a special Google public data search feature will show numeric results for 17 World Development Indicators (WDI) reliably sourced to the World Bank, with a link to Google's public data graphing tool. Google's feature lets users see and compare country-by-country statistics and offers customized graphs with a ‘link’ or web address that can be easily embedded and shared in other websites. From the Google Public Data graphing tool, users can learn more about the data on the new World Bank Data Finder, which allows them to access indicator definitions, quick facts, interactive maps, and additional World Bank related resources."

"This year, it's especially important to have clear information on what you can do to prepare for the flu season. With this in mind, we are happy to share a new feature for the U.S. which allows you to more easily find locations near you for getting both the seasonal and H1N1 flu vaccine. After expanding Google Flu Trends to a total of 20 countries and 38 languages, allowing more people to see near real-time estimates of flu activity, we began brainstorming with the U.S. Department for Health and Human Services (HHS), their flu.gov collaborators and the American Lung Association on the flu shot finder and other ways Google can be helpful to people this flu season. You can check out the flu shot finder at www.google.com/flushot. The same tool will also be available shortly on www.flu.gov and the American Lung Association websites. It's important to note that this project is just beginning and we have not yet received information about flu shot clinics for many locations. In addition, many locations that are shown are currently out of stock. We launched this service now in order to help disseminate information about locations where vaccines are available, and also to make more vaccine providers aware of the project so that they can contribute."

Jeffrey Peng, Software Engineer, Google Books, a software engineer on Google Books: "One of my main projects is adding magazine content and features to the site. In September we were excited to announce the availability of over 1,860 issues of the iconic LIFE magazine on Google Books. One of the feature requests that I got from friends and family was to add a way to browse all the magazines available...I'm happy to announce that last week I coded up a page on Google Books that lets you browse the available magazine titles. You can view the page here."

Official Google Blog: "In an effort to provide you with greater transparency and control over their own data, we've built the Google Dashboard. Designed to be simple and useful, the Dashboard summarizes data for each product that you use (when signed in to your account) and provides you direct links to control your personal settings. Today, the Dashboard covers more than 20 products and services, including Gmail, Calendar, Docs, Web History, Orkut, YouTube, Picasa, Talk, Reader, Alerts, Latitude and many more. The scale and level of detail of the Dashboard is unprecedented, and we're delighted to be the first Internet company to offer this — and we hope it will become the standard. [Includes a quick video] to learn more and then try it out for yourself at www.google.com/dashboard."

Follow up to October 29, 2009 posting, Google Launches New Music Search Feature, today see Google Discover Music: "Find music faster and easier using Google"

Official Google Blog: "...we're rolling out a search feature that...enabl[es] you to search and more easily discover millions of songs, all via a simple Google web search...Now, when you enter a music-related query — like the name of a song, artist or album — your search results will include links to an audio preview of those songs provided by our music search partners...We've partnered with Pandora, imeem and Rhapsody to include links to their sites where you can discover music related to your queries as well."

InformationWeek: "Social Search will be launched in a few weeks as a Google Labs experiment. As its name suggest, it integrates information created by people in a searcher's Google network -- defined by one's list of Google Contacts -- into Google search results."

Search User Interfaces by Marti A. Hearst [the author, with permission of Cambridge University Press, has placed the full text online free of charge. See the terms of service]: "This book focuses on the human users of search engines and the tool they use to interact with them: the search user interface. The truly worldwide reach of the Web has brought with it a new realization among computer scientists and laypeople of the enormous importance of usability and user interface design. In the last ten years, much has become understood about what works in search interfaces from a usability perspective, and what does not. Researchers and practitioners have developed a wide range of innovative interface ideas, but only the most broadly acceptable make their way into major web search engines. This book summarizes these developments, presenting the state of the art of search interface design, both in academic research and in deployment in commercial systems. Many books describe the algorithms behind search engines and information retrieval systems, but the unique focus of this book is specifically on the user interface."

"Can't choose default search engine? Want to compare Bing & Google results? Just put your query in the search box and press Enter. You'll see results from both engines side by side. Search provider for Internet Explorer 7/8 and Firefox is also available - search both engines from your browser: www.bing-vs-google.com. Made by Domagoj Pavlesic."

Follow up to previous postings on the Google Book Settlement, this New York Times Op-Ed today: A Library to Last Forever, by Sergey Brin/Google: "Because books are such an important part of the world’s collective knowledge and cultural heritage, Larry Page, the co-founder of Google, first proposed that we digitize all books a decade ago, when we were a fledgling startup. At the time, it was viewed as so ambitious and challenging a project that we were unable to attract anyone to work on it. But five years later, in 2004, Google Books (then called Google Print) was born, allowing users to search hundreds of thousands of books. Today, they number over 10 million and counting. The next year we were sued by the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers over the project. While we have had disagreements, we have a common goal — to unlock the wisdom held in the enormous number of out-of-print books, while fairly compensating the rights holders. As a result, we were able to work together to devise a settlement that accomplishes our shared vision. While this settlement is a win-win for authors, publishers and Google, the real winners are the readers who will now have access to a greatly expanded world of books.

Official Google Blog: "If you're like us, you're probably thinking a lot about how this year's flu season might affect you and your community. To help you out, we at Google.org are excited to announce the expansion of Google Flu Trends to 16 additional countries, including much of Europe. We've also made the site available in 37 languages. Flu is a global threat, affecting millions worldwide each year, so we're pleased to make this tool available in more regions and languages."

"Since launching Bing, Microsoft sites have seen a significant increase in search queries, but Google still controls nearly two-thirds of the U.S. search query market, according to a new report released last week. In August, Google sites, including Google, YouTube, and other Google-owned websites, handled 64.6 percent of all searches originating in the United States, according to comScore, a leading Internet trend tracking firm. Google's share was down one-tenth of one percent from July, but still represented a market share that was more than three times greater than its closest competitor, Yahoo!, which had a 19.3 percent share of U.S. searches in August."

Deloitte: Cloud computing - A collection of working papers, released September 17, 2009 and published on July 31, 2009.

Follow up to previous postings on what is becoming the saga of the Google Book Settlement, the following articles, legal documents and commentary today:

• New York Times: Google Working to Revise Digital Books Settlement
  
• Author's Guild: "Beating their midnight deadline by about 90 minutes, the Justice Department on Friday filed a brief calling for modifications to the Authors Guild's class-action settlement with Google over Google's scanning of millions of library books without permission. The Justice Department said the parties to the settlement should modify the settlement to address certain copyright, antitrust, and class-action concerns. While it opposes the settlement agreement as it now stands, the Justice Department "strongly supports" the settlement's goals of creating new markets for out-of-print works and committed itself to working constructively with the parties on a revised settlement.."
  
• Google's Book Search Deal: 5 Pros and 5 Cons, JR Raphael, PC World
  
• ars technica - DOJ: Google book settlement needs major rewrite

Follow up to previous posting on Google book search, this news release today: Justice Department Submits Views on Proposed Google Book Search Settlement: "The Department of Justice today advised the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York that while it should not accept the class action settlement in The Authors Guild Inc. et al. v. Google Inc. as proposed due to concerns of the United States regarding class action, copyright and antitrust law, the parties should be encouraged to continue their productive discussions to address those concerns. In its statement of interest filed with the court, the Department stated: "Given the parties’ express commitment to ongoing discussions to address concerns already raised and the possibility that such discussions could lead to a settlement agreement that could legally be approved by the Court, the public interest would best be served by direction from the Court encouraging the continuation of those discussions between the parties and, if the Court so chooses, by some direction as to those aspects of the Proposed Settlement that need to be improved. Because a properly structured settlement agreement in this case offers the potential for important societal benefits, the United States does not want the opportunity or momentum to be lost."

Statement of Marybeth Peters, The Register of Copyrights before the Committee on the Judiciary, United States House of Representatives 111th Congress 1st Session, September 10, 2009

The relationship between public libraries and Google: Too much information, by Vivienne Waller. First Monday, Volume 14, Number 9 - 7 September 2009

Via Google Maps Mania: "Maps Compare [created by Hussein Nasser] is a website with four different on-line map services on one page. The site places Google Maps, the Google Earth browser plugin, Yahoo Maps and Bing Maps beside each other, which can be quite useful if you want to compare the map coverage provided by each provider in different locations."

MP3 SEARCH - Search mp3 download sites

bizjounrals: "Amazon.com Inc. this week joined the groups filing objections in court against Google Inc.'s settlement with authors and publishers. Amazon said in its 41-page brief filed in federal court that Google will stifle competition if the settlement is approved."

Official Google Blog: "Today, we're excited to announce that we've added nine new languages to Google Translate: Afrikaans, Belarusian, Icelandic, Irish, Macedonian, Malay, Swahili, Welsh and Yiddish. That means that Google Translate now supports 51 languages and 2550 language pairs — including all 23 official EU languages."

Follow up to previous postings on Google Book settlement, BBB News reports - Tech giants unite against Google - "Three technology heavyweights are joining a coalition to fight Google's attempt to create what could be the world's largest virtual library. Amazon, Microsoft and Yahoo will sign up to the Open Book Alliance being spearheaded by the Internet Archive. They oppose a legal settlement that could make Google the main source for many online works."

Royal Pingdom: URL shortener speed and reliability shootout - "The services included in this test are: Bit.ly, TinyURL, Ow.ly, Is.gd, Su.pr, Snipurl, Cli.gs, Tr.im and Twurl."

American Customer Satisfaction Index - Annual E-Business Report, August 18, 2009, by Larry Freed
President and CEO, ForeSee Results

Via Slate: Seeking How the brain hard-wires us to love Google, Twitter, and texting. And why that's dangerous, by Emily Yoffe. "...Actually all our electronic communication devices—e-mail, Facebook feeds, texts, Twitter—are feeding the same drive as our searches. Since we're restless, easily bored creatures, our gadgets give us in abundance qualities the seeking/wanting system finds particularly exciting...If humans are seeking machines, we've now created the perfect machines to allow us to seek endlessly."

"In response to an EPIC Freedom of Information Act Request, the Government Services Administration released several contracts between the federal government and web 2.0 companies, including agreements with Blip.tv, Blist, Google (YouTube), Yahoo (Flickr), and MySpace. EPIC also obtained amendments to agreements with Facebook, Slideshare.net, Vimeo.com, and AddThis.com. The contracts do not address the privacy obligations of social media companies. The GSA letter to EPIC explained that “no specific Web 2.0 guidance currently exists,” but provided EPIC with Training Slides that raise privacy issues. The GSA Agreement with Google actually states that, “to the extent any rules or guidelines exist prohibiting the use of persistent cookies in connection with Provider Content applies to Google, Provider expressly waives those rules or guidelines as they may apply to Google.” Some of the agreements also permit companies to track users of government web sites for advertising purposes."

"For the last several months, a large team of Googlers has been working on a secret project: a next-generation architecture for Google's web search. It's the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions. The new infrastructure sits "under the hood" of Google's search engine, which means that most users won't notice a difference in search results. But web developers and power searchers might notice a few differences, so we're opening up a web developer preview to collect feedback. Some parts of this system aren't completely finished yet, so we'd welcome feedback on any issues you see. We invite you to visit the web developer preview of Google's new infrastructure at http://www2.sandbox.google.com/ and try searches there."

Google News Blog: "We've recently updated our index, quadrupling the number of articles included in News Archive Search. We now include articles from several new publications, including the Halifax Gazette, Sydney Morning Herald, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, and the Village Voice. Working with our partners, we've also added new international publications such as the Manila Standard, The Nation from Thailand, and many others...You can explore this historical treasure trove by searching on News Archive Search or by using the timeline feature after searching on Google News."

News release: "MBTA General Manager Daniel A. Grabauskas announced the T's partnership with Google Transit and the convenience and ease travelers will have when planning a trip on the authority's bus, subway, commuter rail, and boat service. Similar to the MBTA's Trip Planner, Google Transit, a feature of Google Maps, is a web-based application that plans a trip using public transportation options. The service calculates the route, transit time, and any necessary walking directions. This on - line feature which provides directions in various languages using the [public] transit option on Google Maps; and reaches people that the MBTA trip planner does not by surfacing public transit itineraries as an alternative when a user does a directions search within Google Maps. Including the Boston Metro area, Google provides transit information for many major cities across the United States and elsewhere around the world. Transit trip planning is also available on mobile phones including iPhone, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, S60, and other Java enabled phones."

Official Google Blog: "It's been an exciting nine months since we launched the Google Chrome browser. Already, over 30 million people use it regularly. We designed Google Chrome for people who live on the web — searching for information, checking email, catching up on the news, shopping or just staying in touch with friends. However, the operating systems that browsers run on were designed in an era where there was no web. So today, we're announcing a new project that's a natural extension of Google Chrome — the Google Chrome Operating System. It's our attempt to re-think what operating systems should be. Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010...Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS. We're designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds. The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the web. And as we did for the Google Chrome browser, we are going back to the basics and completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don't have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It should just work."

Google LatLong Blog: "The web is becoming increasingly indispensable to people looking for a new home to buy...from today, if you enter a query like <<homes for sale in san francisco>> on Google Maps, you'll see that we make it easy for you to see all your results on a map with a one-box that will take you to real estate listings...We've added lots of markers that will show not only the ten most relevant listings with pins on the map, but also show a small circle on every other listing in that area using the search results layer, so you can get a really good idea of the distribution of properties for sale. You can click on each marker and each small circle to get more detailed information about the property."

New York Times: "Google handles roughly two-thirds of all Internet searches. It owns the largest online video site, YouTube, which is more than 10 times more popular than its nearest competitor. And last year, Google sold nearly $22 billion in advertising, more than any media company in the world."

"Google's book search engine has a new interface [details and screen shots provided] that adds many missing features. The sidebar has been moved to the left, you can now embed a book by click on "Link" and selecting the embedding code, there's a new thumbnail view for pages and the table of contents can be accessed as a drop-down." [via Google Operating System blog]

Official Google Blog: "...Citizentube, a special YouTube blog devoted to chronicling the way that people are using video to change the world. If you've followed news and politics on YouTube, you might have noticed that we started Citizentube as a video channel on the site a few years back, but we soon realized that keeping track of all the phenomenal uses of YouTube by posting our own videos just wasn't fast enough — so now we're blogging, too. We generally focus on two types of posts: the compelling political and social uses of YouTube that we see the community bubble up every day, and our own programming initiatives and partnerships in the political, news, and nonprofit arenas."

New on LLRX.com: Bridging the DiGital Divide: Custom Search Engines Put You in Control - Law librarian, legal research expert and blogger John J. DiGilio's new column focuses on technology trends that leverage the web to achieve more efficient and effective results. Here John recommends using customized search engines to manage the sites you search.

"Google Squared is a search tool that helps you quickly build a collection of facts from the Web for any topic you specify.

• Facts about your topic are organized as a table of items and attributes (we call them "Squares" for fun).
  
• Customize these Squares to see just the items and attributes you're interested in.
  
• See the websites that served as sources for the information in your Square.
  
• Save and share Squares with others."

PC World - Bing vs. Google vs. Yahoo: Feature Smackdown - quick, useful guide with accompanying screenshots, includes tools and features for shopping, local, travel, music and health.

Computerworld: "After weeks of speculation and online chatter, Microsoft last week took the wraps off Bing, which is the update to its far-from-beloved Microsoft Live Search. The update, which was code-named Kumo, comes with a phalanx of related services, like Bing Travel, Bing Cashback and Bing Maps for Enterprise. Paired with the company's hefty marketing muscle, the new service is expected to help Microsoft take on search behemoth Google Inc."

URL shorteners, such as TinyURL, bit.ly and notlong.com allow users to share and post links in a quicker manner with less likelihood of misdirection. They also add an intermediary between the reader and the site of origin, and the risk of countless dead links if and when the business model of the respective services ceases to sustain a viable return.

From the World Privacy Forum: "This guide to online job sites, Job Searcher's Guide to Online Job Sites, is a list of the top job searching sites online. This list gives information about the privacy practices at each site. Because resumes contain such detailed personal and professional information, it is well worth caring about how job search sites handle privacy issues. This guide is updated monthly, and we add new information to the guide monthly."

Follow-up to previous postings on Google Book Search, Deal or No Deal: What if the Google Settlement Fails? by Andrew Richard Albanese, Publishers Weekly.

"Google Squared will be coming soon. For now, why not have fun squaring some numbers?"

Screencast demonstrates new engine's capabilities: Wolfram|Alpha Screencast

Can Collaboration Solve Copyright Status Questions? The WorldCat Copyright Evidence Registry - As Roger V. Skalbeck documents, one of the underlying obstacles to reproducing older books is a central place to look for information about what is protected by copyright and what may have passed into the public domain is lacking. Responding to this need, OCLC recently introduced a beta service, the WorldCat Copyright Evidence Registry (CER). It could be a very valuable resource for recording and sharing copyright status information."

Google News Blog: "Last Thursday we launched a new format for story pages on Google News. These are the pages you see when you click the "all [#] news articles" link of each cluster of articles which cover the same news event--or "story," as we say on the Google News team. The story page includes timely and relevant information from different sources indexed in Google News. Depending on the most recent coverage and materials available for a given story, the page features top articles, quotes from the people in the story, and posts from news blogs. You'll also find image thumbnails, videos, articles from sources based near the story, and a timeline of articles to trace media coverage of the story."

"Scoopler is a real-time search engine. We aggregate and organize content being shared on the internet as it happens, like eye-witness reports of breaking news, photos and videos from big events, and links to the hottest memes of the day. We do this by constantly indexing live updates from services including Twitter, Flickr, Digg, Delicious and more. When you search for a topic on Scoopler, we give you the most relevant results, updated in real-time."

Follow up to Authors, Publishers, and Google Reach Landmark Settlement, from the Authors Guild: "The court overseeing Authors Guild v. Google extended the time for authors and publishers to opt out of the settlement by four months, to September 4th (Judge Chin's order). The fairness hearing will be on October 7th."

Official Google Blog: "We just launched a new search feature that makes it easy to find and compare public data. So for example, when comparing Santa Clara county data to the national unemployment rate, it becomes clear not only that Santa Clara's peak during 2002-2003 was really dramatic, but also that the recent increase is a bit more drastic than the national rate...if you go to Google.com and type in [unemployment rate] or [population] followed by a U.S. state or county, you will see the most recent estimates..."

Google News Blog: "Today, we're announcing Google News Timeline--a new feature on Google Labs that organizes many different types of search results on a zoomable, graphical timeline. Google News Timeline presents search results from a wide range of sources. You can search and browse results from Google News, including headlines, quotes, photos from our Hosted News partners, and YouTube partner videos. You can also search for thousands of archival newspapers and magazines from Google News Archive Search and Google Book Search."

Follow up to previous postings on Google Book search, "The [Internet] Archive is one of many Internet content providers that have an interest in opposing the proposed [Google Book]Settlement Agreement because it effectively limits the liability for the identified uses of orphan works of one party alone, Google Inc., and provides for a Books Rights Registry, the interests of which are represented solely by identified rightsholders, to negotiate their exploitation. All other persons, including Internet content providers such as the Archive, would not be able to use orphan works broadly without being exposed to claims to infringement."

Competitive Intelligence - A Selective Resource Guide: Sabrina I. Pacifici's completely revised and updated pathfinder focuses on leveraging selected reliable, focused, free and low cost sites and sources to effectively profile and monitor companies, markets, countries, people, and issues. This guide is a "best of list" of web, database and email alert products, services and tools, as well links to content specific sources produced by governments, academia, NGOs, the media and various publishers.

YouTube Blog: "Earlier this week, we announced the launch of YouTube EDU, a hub for videos from over 100 of our leading university and college partners. Think campus tours, news about cutting-edge research, and lectures by professors and world-renowned thought leaders. There are also 200 full (and free!) courses, in a range of subjects, from some of the world's most prestigious universities, including IIT/IISc, MIT, Stanford, UC Berkeley, UCLA, and Yale. There are over 20,000 videos on YouTube EDU and growing."

"The automatic declassification provisions of Executive Order 12958, as amended, require the declassification of nonexempt historically-valuable records 25 years old or older. By 31 December 2006 all agencies were to have completed the review of all hardcopy documents determined to be historically valuable (designated as "permanent" by the agency and the National Archives) and exclusively containing their equities. As the deadline pertains to CIA, it covers the span of relevant documents originally dating from the establishment of the CIA after WWII through 1981.

CIA has deployed an electronic full-text searchable system it has named CREST (the CIA Records Search Tool), which has been operational since 2000 and is located at NARA II in College Park Maryland. On this Agency site, researchers can now use an on-line CREST Finding Aid to research the availability of CIA documents declassified and loaded onto CREST through 2008. Data for the remaining years up to the present (CREST deliveries have been ongoing) will be placed on this site at later dates.

Search the CREST web database here. Note: it does not contain actual images of the documents as the regular Electronic Reading Room search does. Rather, it contains details on the files to speed FOIA requests.

Two new improvements to Google results pages : "...we're rolling out two new improvements to Google search. The first offers an expanded list of useful related searches and the second is the addition of longer search result descriptions -- both of which help guide users more effectively to the information they need."

Google Blogoscoped: "Google Image search can now be restricted to return results of a specific color. While this isn’t available as option in the advanced settings, you can use e.g. “imgcolor=green” or “imgcolor=blue,red” as parameter right in the URL. Setting the option to “green”, for instance, shows images for your keyword which are mainly green."

News release: "Starting today, The eBook Store from Sony will provide access to more than a half-million public domain books from Google optimized for current models of the Reader. At Sony’s eBook store (ebookstore.sony.com), a button on the front page leads to the books from Google, which people can transfer to their PRS-505 or PRS-700 Reader at no cost. The process is seamless for Reader owners who have an account at the store. Those new to the store will need to set up an account and download Sony’s free eBook Library software. To start, people can access more than a half-million public domain books from Google, boosting the available titles from the eBook Store to more than 600,000."

Official Google Blog: "Google Earth... starting today we have a much more detailed bathymetric map (the ocean floor), so you can actually drop below the surface and explore the nooks and crannies of the seafloor in 3D. While you're there you can explore thousands of data points including videos and images of ocean life, details on the best surf spots, logs of real ocean expeditions, and much more."

Posted by Michael Bloomberg, Mayor of New York City: "In partnership with Google, we are launching a new website and Information Center to help make it easier for both visitors and residents to explore all the energy, excitement and diversity of New York City's five boroughs. nycgo.com is the official resource on the web for all there is to see, do and experience in the City. This dynamic site uses Google Maps to help you plan your New York experience and find hotels, restaurants and entertainment, in addition to exclusive citywide savings and promotions. With nycgo.com you can use Google Maps to get directions to attractions throughout the City, and even send the info to your phone with Google Maps for mobile."

Prado news release: "Google launches the Prado layer in Google Earth allowing you to explore highly detailed photographic images of fourteen of the Prado Museum's masterpieces in very high resolution where you can explore the finer-details of the works. With the launching of this Prado layer in Google Earth, you will be able to zoom in on famous paintings such as The Maids of Honor by Velázquez or The Three Graces by Rubens. The Prado Museum has become the first art gallery in the world to provide access to and navigation of its collection in Google Earth. Using the advanced features of Google Earth art historians, students and tourists everywhere can zoom in on and explore the finer details of the artist's brushwork that can be easily missed at first glance. The paintings have been photographed and contain as many as 14,000 million pixels (14 gigapixels). With this high level resolution you are able to see fine details such as the tiny bee on a flower in The Three Graces by Rubens, delicate tears on the faces of the figures in The Descent from the Cross by Roger van der Weyden and complex figures in The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch."

SecurityFocus: "Google posted...a handbook for Web developers that highlights the key security features and quirks of major Web browsers. The document, dubbed the Browser Security Handbook, has three parts that tackle the security features in browsers and browser-specific issues that could lead to security weaknesses."

Deep Web Research 2009: Marcus P. Zillman's guide includes links to: articles, papers, forums, audios and videos, cross database articles, search services and search tools, peer to peer, file sharing, grid/matrix search engines, presentations, resources on deep web research, semantic web research, and bot research resources and sites.

TechCrunch: "Video search on YouTube accounts for a quarter of all Google search queries in the U.S., according to the latest search engine numbers from comScore. Its monthly qSearch report, which was released on Thursday night, breaks out the number of searches conducted on YouTube. If it were a standalone site, YouTube would be the second largest search engine after Google. More searches are done through YouTube than through Yahoo, which has been the case for the past few months."

Press release: "Today, Yahoo! Inc. announced a new global data retention policy that sets an industry-leading approach to user data privacy. This new policy strengthens Yahoo!'s relationship of trust with its 500 million users world-wide and enhances its longtime leadership on privacy. Under the new policy, Yahoo! will anonymize user log data within 90 days with limited exceptions for fraud, security and legal obligations. Yahoo! will also expand the policy to apply not only to search log data but also page views, page clicks, ad views and ad clicks."

News release: "Privacy and information security research company Ponemon Institute along with TRUSTe, the most widely recognized Internet privacy trustmark, today announced the results of the Ponemon Institute’s fifth annual survey of Most Trusted Companies for Privacy. The study asked 6,486 adult-aged U.S. consumers which companies they thought were most trustworthy and which did the best job safeguarding personal information. A total of 706 companies were named by consumers; 211 made the final list of most trusted companies. American Express ranked as the Most Trusted Company for 2008 for Privacy, retaining its place from last year despite the current financial climate. eBay earned a ranking as the second most trusted company, while IBM, Amazon, and Johnson & Johnson rounded out the top five. While the financial services sector slipped amid industry-wide woes, the technology sector showed marked improvement as eBay Apple, Yahoo, Microsoft, and HP all bettered previous rankings. Also of note, Facebook moved into the top 20 for the first time, signifying an increased trust in social networking as a mainstream communications tool."

• UK Register: "Google this week admitted that its staff will pick and choose what appears in its search results. It's a historic statement - and nobody has yet grasped its significance. Not so very long ago, Google disclaimed responsibility for its search results by explaining that these were chosen by a computer algorithm."
• CNET: Does it matter if Google's search results are fixed?: "Google wants its search results to become more pragmatic, not for any political, social or even intellectual reason. The company simply thinks it's better for business. Advertising business. Most of us won't notice or care and will continue to depend on Google because it's so dominant, so fast, so very much our rolling dictionary of the world."

Official Google Search Blog: "Today, we're announcing an initiative to help bring more magazine archives and current magazines online, partnering with publishers to begin digitizing millions of articles from titles as diverse as New York Magazine, Popular Mechanics, and Ebony...You can search for magazines through Google Book Search...you'll find magazine articles alongside books results. Magazine articles are tagged with the keyword "Magazine" on the search snippet."

"Using a unique combination of new computer vision and fast computation methods, VideoSurf has taught computers to “see” inside videos to find content in a fast, efficient, and scalable way. Basing its search on visual identification, rather than text only, VideoSurf’s computer vision video search engine provides more relevant results and a better experience to let users find and discover the videos they really want to watch.

With over 10 billion (and rapidly growing) visual moments indexed from videos found across the web, VideoSurf allows consumers to visually navigate through their results to easily find the specific scenes, people or moments they most want to see."

AmLawDaily: "Google Inc. and Yahoo! Inc. called off their joint advertising agreement just three hours before the Department of Justice planned to file antitrust charges to block the pact, according to the lawyer who would have been lead counsel for the government."

Electronic Publication and the Narrowing of Science and Scholarship, James A. Evans, Published 18 July 2008, Science 321, 395 (2008) [Subscription only - Supporting Online Material available free]

Official Google Blog: "Today we're launching SearchWiki, a way for you to customize search by re-ranking, deleting, adding, and commenting on search results. With just a single click you can move the results you like to the top or add a new site. You can also write notes attached to a particular site and remove results that you don't feel belong. These modifications will be shown to you every time you do the same search in the future. SearchWiki is available to signed-in Google users. We store your changes in your Google Account. If you are wondering if you are signed in, you can always check by noting if your username appears in the upper right-hand side of the page."

Hitwise Intelligence - Heather Hopkins - US: "This week we are publishing a report on online brand protection. This issue is huge for marketers with our research showing that more than 1 in 10 US Internet searches for leading brands is led away from the brand owner's website. When you search for a brand in the phone book, you don't find that brand's competitors listed. But when you search online, that brand's fiercest competitors often appear in the sponsored listings. Online businesses need to be aware of the extent of the problem and to understand the best ways to deal with threats."

"Search millions of photographs from the LIFE photo archive, stretching from the 1750s to today. Most were never published and are now available for the first time through the joint work of LIFE and Google."

Official Google Blog: "...we have launched Google Flu Trends, where you can find up-to-date influenza-related activity estimates for each of the 50 states in the U.S...It turns out that traditional flu surveillance systems take 1-2 weeks to collect and release surveillance data, but Google search queries can be automatically counted very quickly. By making our flu estimates available each day, Google Flu Trends may provide an early-warning system for outbreaks of influenza...For epidemiologists, this is an exciting development, because early detection of a disease outbreak can reduce the number of people affected."

Follow up to October 28, 2008 posting, Authors, Publishers, and Google Reach Landmark Settlement, from the Harvard Crimson: "Harvard University Library will not take part in Google’s book scanning project for in-copyright works after finding the terms of its landmark $125 million settlement regarding copyrighted materials unsatisfactory, University officials said yesterday."

News release: "The Authors Guild, the Association of American Publishers (AAP), and Google today announced a groundbreaking settlement agreement on behalf of a broad class of authors and publishers worldwide that would expand online access to millions of in-copyright books and other written materials in the U.S. from the collections of a number of major U.S. libraries participating in Google Book Search...Under the agreement, Google will make payments totaling $125 million. The money will be used to establish the Book Rights Registry, to resolve existing claims by authors and publishers and to cover legal fees. The settlement agreement resolves Authors Guild v. Google, a class-action suit filed on September 20, 2005 by the Authors Guild and certain authors, and a suit filed on October 19, 2005 by five major publisher-members of the Association of American Publishers: The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.; Pearson Education, Inc. and Penguin Group (USA) Inc., both part of Pearson; John Wiley & Sons, Inc.; and Simon & Schuster, Inc. part of CBS Corporation. These lawsuits challenged Google’s plan to digitize, search and show snippets of in-copyright books and to share digital copies with libraries without the explicit permission of the copyright owner."

Official Google Blog: "Today we are pleased to announce the launch of a 5-year quotes index. This expanded coverage lets you explore what Governor Palin said before she was a VP nominee, or Senator Obama before he was a presidential candidate. The InQuotes lab page is also much improved and now provides comparisons over time on issues like the economy or the war in Iraq."

Official Google Blog: "We've created a handy energy saving calculator to help you see how simple steps can help you save money for treats -- and ward off scary carbon emissions. We've also put together a webpage full of tricks to help you save energy -- and money."

Official Google Blog: "Today, we're pleased to launch a new homepage for Google Blog Search so that you too can browse and discover the most interesting stories in the blogosphere. Adapting some of the technology pioneered by Google News, we're now showing categories on the left side of the website and organizing the blog posts within those categories into clusters, which are groupings of posts about the same story or event. Grouping them in clusters lets you see the best posts on a story or get a variety of perspectives. When you look within a cluster, you'll find a collection of the most interesting and recent posts on the topic, along with a timeline graph that shows you how the story is gaining momentum in the blogosphere."

From Google Labs, "the In Quotes feature allows you to find quotes from stories linked to from Google News. These quotations are a valuable resource for understanding where people in the news stand on various issues. Much of the published reporting about people is based on the interpretation of a journalist. Direct quotes, on the other hand, are concrete units of information that describe how newsmakers represent themselves. Google News compiles these quotations from online news stories and sorts them into browsable groups based on who is being quoted." [Note - also currently includes comparisons of topical quotes from PM candidates in Canada, UK and India. Thanks TM]

Find your voting location, registration information and more. Just enter your home address...

Chris Harrelson, Tech Lead & Creator of Google Transit: "We've just added comprehensive transit info for the entire New York metro region, encompassing subway, commuter rail, bus and ferry services from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, New Jersey Transit and the City of New York. That means this information is now at the fingertips of the more than 20 million people who live in and around New York (not to mention the millions of people who visit the region every year). The MTA is the largest transportation agency in the U.S., serving one in every three users of mass transit in the country."

• Step by step Google Transit instructions via this YouTube video
  
• New York Times: Google Transit Expands to New York
  
• "Google Maps for mobile makes it easy to get public transit directions while you're out and about in more than 50 cities worldwide. Quickly access information for subway, bus, and train routes."

Researching Medical Literature on the Internet - 2008: Medical journals, dictionaries, textbooks, indexes, rankings, images – all can be found on the Net, and much of it is available free. Sources include publishers, government agencies, professional organizations, health libraries and commercial entities. Gloria Miccioli's completely updated and revised topical guide expertly focuses on what she identifies as the best, content-rich databases and services for researchers.

"Google Audio Indexing is a new technology from Google that allows users to better search and watch videos from various YouTube channels. It uses speech technology to find spoken words inside videos and lets the user jump to the right portion of the video where these words are spoken...The aim of Google Audio Indexing on Google Labs is broader and the US election is just a first step. We see it as an experiment platform where we can learn what features make the best user experience for people looking for spoken content on the Web."

Official Google Blog: "we're announcing a new logs retention policy: we'll anonymize IP addresses on our server logs after 9 months. We're significantly shortening our previous 18-month retention policy to address regulatory concerns and to take another step to improve privacy for our users."

Official Google Blog: "Today, we're launching an initiative to make more old newspapers accessible and searchable online by partnering with newspaper publishers to digitize millions of pages of news archives...Not only will you be able to search these newspapers, you'll also be able to browse through them exactly as they were printed -- photographs, headlines, articles, advertisements and all...You’ll be able to explore this historical treasure trove by searching the Google News Archive or by using the timeline feature after searching Google News. Not every search will trigger this new content.."

Fortune - Google turns 10: A look back - "As the search giant celebrates its birthday, we highlight some of its biggest moments."

Follow up to September 1, 2008 posting, Google Launches New Beta Browser for Windows, Google Redefines Web Browser - Chrome Offers New Way To Surf Net, as Microsoft Beefs Up Internet Explorer, by Walter S. Mossberg, WSJ: "Chrome is a smart, innovative browser that, in many common scenarios, will make using the Web faster, easier and less frustrating. But this first version -- which is just a beta, or test, release -- is rough around the edges and lacks some common browser features Google plans to add later. These omissions include a way to manage bookmarks, a command for emailing links and pages directly from the browser, and even a progress bar to show how much of a Web page has loaded."

The Official Google Blog: "As you may have read in the blogosphere, we hit "send" a bit early on a comic book introducing our new open source browser, Google Chrome. As we believe in access to information for everyone, we've now made the comic publicly available -- you can find it here. We will be launching the beta version of Google Chrome [September 2, 2008] in more than 100 countries."

"Features include significant security, privacy and developer tools updates."

• Windows Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 Fact Sheet
  
• Windows Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 Images

News release: "Customer satisfaction continues on a bumpy path without momentum or trend in the second quarter, according to the American
Customer Satisfaction Index. After a small uptick last quarter, ACSI slips 0.1% to 75.1 on a 100-point scale. The ACSI second quarter report, released today from the University of Michigan’s National Quality Research Center, forecasts consumer spending will remain weak with growth of no more than 2.3% in the third quarter...Customer satisfaction with the e-business category of websites surges 6% to an all-time high of 79.3, largely on the remarkable improvement of Google. After slipping behind Yahoo! for the first time last year, Google surged an unparalleled 10% to leave all rivals in its wake. Google’s score of 86 sets a new standard for e-businesses and creates a formidable nine-point gap between its nearest competitor, Yahoo!, which fell 3% to 77."

News release: "The percentage of internet users who use search engines on a typical day has been steadily rising from about one-third of all users in 2002, to a new high of just under one-half (49%). With this increase, the number of those using a search engine on a typical day is pulling ever closer to the 60% of internet users who use email, arguably the internet's all-time killer app, on a typical day."

Google Still Not Indexing Hidden Web URLs, by Kat Hagedorn
Metadata Harvesting Librarian, Digital Library Production Service, University of Michigan Libraries, Ann Arbor, MI and Joshua Santelli
Applications Programmer, Digital Library Production Service, University of Michigan Libraries, Ann Arbor, MI. D-Lib Magazine, July/August 2008, Volume 14 Number 7/8.

A Review of Zotero, the free, Firefox extension to assist in collecting, managing and citing research sources - Stacy Bruss focuses on specific and practical examples of using this flexible application to organize and manage current collections of resources as well as citations to documents, web sites, and blogs. — Published July 24, 2008

Official Google Blog: "A few months ago we announced that we were testing a new product called Knol. Knols are authoritative articles about specific topics, written by people who know about those subjects. Today, we're making Knol available to everyone.

The web contains vast amounts of information, but not everything worth knowing is on the web. An enormous amount of information resides in people's heads: millions of people know useful things and billions more could benefit from that knowledge. Knol will encourage these people to contribute their knowledge online and make it accessible to everyone.

The key principle behind Knol is authorship. Every knol will have an author (or group of authors) who put their name behind their content. It's their knol, their voice, their opinion. We expect that there will be multiple knols on the same subject, and we think that is good."

Official Google Blog: "Today, the Google speech team (part of Google Research) is launching the Google Elections Video Search gadget, our modest contribution to the electoral process. With the help of our speech recognition technologies, videos from YouTube's Politicians channels are automatically transcribed from speech to text and indexed. Using the gadget you can search not only the titles and descriptions of the videos, but also their spoken content. Additionally, since speech recognition tells us exactly when words are spoken in the video, you can jump right to the most relevant parts of the videos you find."

"HealthMap brings together disparate data sources to achieve a unified and comprehensive view of the current global state of infectious diseases and their effect on human and animal health. This freely available Web site integrates outbreak data of varying reliability, ranging from news sources (such as Google News) to curated personal accounts (such as ProMED) to validated official alerts (such as World Health Organization). Through an automated text processing system, the data is aggregated by disease and displayed by location for user-friendly access to the original alert. HealthMap provides a jumping-off point for real-time information on emerging infectious diseases and has particular interest for public health officials and international travelers."

2008 US Election Trends: "See what Americans are searching for on politics. Use the Search Queries Map to view search trends from the 2008 election by location. Track the most searched elections-related terms below, and find out which candidates are hot in different cities. Find out how other Americans stay politically engaged online...Use the Candidate Search Queries map to see which cities are searching more for Obama or McCain, and the News by Candidate tool on the trends page to see the latest headlines on each of the presidential contenders."

"This is the companion website for the following book. Christopher D. Manning, Prabhakar Raghavan and Hinrich Schütze, Introduction to Information Retrieval, Cambridge University Press. 2008. This "is the first textbook with a coherent treatment of classical and web information retrieval, including web search and the related areas of text classification and text clustering. Written from a computer science perspective, it gives an up-to-date treatment of all aspects of the design and implementation of systems for gathering, indexing, and searching documents and of methods for evaluating systems, along with an introduction to the use of machine learning methods on text collections. Designed as the primary text for a graduate or advanced undergraduate course in information retrieval, the book will also interest researchers and professionals. A complete set of lecture slides and exercises that accompany the book are available on the web."

Google Book Search Bibliography, Charles W. Bailey, Jr. Version 2: 5/27/2008

"This bibliography presents selected English-language articles and other works that are useful in understanding Google Book Search. It primarily focuses on the evolution of Google Book Search and the legal, library, and social issues associated with it. Where possible, links are provided to works that are freely available on the Internet, including e-prints in disciplinary archives and institutional repositories. Note that e-prints and published articles may not be identical.

Official Google Blog: "We're very excited to tell you that real-time quotes on NASDAQ securities are now available on Google Finance. This is an important (and way overdue) development for everyone who consumes financial information. Historically, real-time stock data was not freely and widely accessible. Either buried behind subscription walls or brokerage sites, consumers typically had to live with 15 or 20 minute price delays. In the world of finance, time is indeed money, and it's critical to have timely and accurate data."

"When you search with Google News, you'll now see a list of related searches at the bottom of the results page. For example, a search for [global warming] will show more news results for topics such as carbon dioxide, Al Gore, carbon emissions, greenhouse gas and the Kyoto protocol." [at the bottom of the page]

"...get access to and manage all of your personal health information online...This would help you keep your doctors and family members up-to-date on important medical conditions and current medications. Well, after a successful pilot with the Cleveland Clinic, we've opened up Google Health to everyone in the U.S. It's easy to sign up, and free to use. All you need is a Google username and password. You can import your medical records and prescription history from our partners — well-known brands such as Walgreens, Longs Drugs and Quest Diagnostics."

Via Google Blogoscoped, "Google [has a] malware diagnosis service; just append any domain – your domain or another site you want to check on – to the end of the URL google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=, or paste a domain in the box below, and you will find an overview page listing potential problems like trojans or exploits (or the result may be telling you the site is OK)."

Microsoft Live Search Blog: "Today we informed our partners that we are ending the Live Search Books and Live Search Academic projects and that both sites will be taken down next week. Books and scholarly publications will continue to be integrated into our Search results, but not through separate indexes. This also means that we are winding down our digitization initiatives, including our library scanning and our in-copyright book programs. We recognize that this decision comes as disappointing news to our partners, the publishing and academic communities, and Live Search users."

Yahoo Search Blog: "Today, we're announcing the beta release of SearchScan, a new feature from Yahoo! Search that helps protect users from viruses, spyware and spam. We've heard from users that security and privacy continue to be major concerns when they are online. We've also learned that solutions that require downloads and constant updating are less than ideal. To tackle the problem, we partnered with McAfee to build a feature that provides a safer and hassle-free search experience to all users...How does it work? SearchScan leverages McAfee's SiteAdvisor technology to alert users if risky websites appear in Yahoo! Search results. Starting today, SearchScan will be turned on by default for all users in the U.S., Canada, UK, France, Italy, Germany, Australia, New Zealand, and Spain..."

"Did you ever want to get a help file for Gmail, Google Docs or for Google Desktop so you can print it or save it on your computer? All Google services have help centers that include information about features, tutorials, troubleshooting guides, but you need to find the information in a complicated hierarchy of topics or use the search box. Fortunately, there's a way to save all the information related to a Google service: append ?fulldump=1 to the address of a Google help center. This doesn't work for all Google services, but here's a list of addresses that dump all the information from a help center (note that the pages are very large and are frequently updated.)"

Google News Blog: "As part of Google's mission to organize the world's information, we've been hard at work making quotations in news articles easy to search and browse. You can now more easily keep track of what your favorite politician, actor or sports star is saying. You can even search within their quotes for specific topics. To access these new features, first search for a person's name on Google News. If we have a recent quote, we'll show it above the search results."

Google Earth 4.3 - "With this version, we have completely rethought how you might interact with the 3D world. We've redesigned the navigation to make it much easier to fly from the heavens down to the streets of your town. And with all of the great user-created buildings in the 3D Warehouse, we wanted to make it easy for you to get right up close to see the rich detail." [Google Lat Long Blog

News release: "Representatives of the UN refugee agency and Google on Tuesday unveiled a powerful new online mapping programme that provides an up-close and multifaceted view of some of the world's major displacement crises and the humanitarian efforts aimed at helping the victims. The Google Earth Outreach programme gives UNHCR and other humanitarian agencies the ability to use Google Earth and Maps to highlight their work on behalf of millions of refugees and other populations of concern in some of the world's most remote and difficult areas."

Official Google Blog: "As the 2008 election progresses, more and more voters are tuning into YouTube to stay on top of the action. Our You Choose '08 platform now features content from candidates, news organizations, and voters, and we've made it easier than ever to see where the candidates stand on each of the major issues in this election. The next big stop on the campaign trail is Pennsylvania, so we're partnering with C-SPAN to collect videos from voters across the country who will answer the question, "What is the most important issue to you in this election?"

EPIC: "European privacy officials have established "a clear set of responsibilities" on search engine companies regarding their handling of user data. The opinion, issued by the Article 29 Working Group, states that the European Union Data Protection Directive requires search engines to "delete or irreversibly anonymise personal data once they no longer serve the specified and legitimate purpose" for which they were collected. This requirement has particular significance for search engines, because European privacy rules classify Internet Protocol (IP) addresses as "personal data." The opinion further holds that European privacy laws generally apply to search engines "even when their headquarters are outside [Europe]," and requires that search engines must delete personal data within six months of collection. Earlier this year, EPIC urged the European Parliament to protect the privacy of search histories. For more information, see EPIC's Search Engine Privacy page."

Google Advanced Search: "We recently updated our advanced search page to make it easier than ever to refine and expand your query with our dynamic query builder. You can use all the same features as before, but we'll now show you a real-time view of what it looks like if you create a complex query using specific search parameters." [Google Blog]

News release: "...the Wikimedia Foundation reached a significant new milestone: on Thursday, March 27, at 00:07 UTC the official article count for all Wikipedias combined reached 10 million. The ten millionth article, a short biography of 16th century English goldsmith and painter Nicholas Hilliard, was created in the Hungarian Wikipedia by user Pataki Márta. Wikipedia now boasts articles in more than 250 languages, with the English Wikipedia having the largest number, followed in descending order by the German, French, Polish, Japanese, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, and Swedish Wikipedias. The project is also experiencing rapid growth in many young Wikipedias, including Marathi, Tagalog, and Cantonese."

News release: "...we're releasing YouTube Insight, a free tool that enables anyone with a YouTube account to view detailed statistics about the videos that they upload to the site. (You can see this...announcement on the Google blog and on the YouTube blog...) This tool will help anyone who uploads videos to YouTube better understand and serve their audiences. For example, users might use Insight to tailor upload strategies to increase their videos' view counts and improve their popularity on the site. And partners who increase their videos' popularity also increase the number of monetizable views their videos get, and as a result, generate more revenue."

This Wikipedia-World map mashup is terrific. It displays content from tools.wikimedia.de and is not affiliated with google. Use the taxonomy on the left hand nav bar, and choose to view locations throughout the world, inclusive of vivid color photos, designation on the map, and read text about the subject/location from Wikipedia. [Via Joe Gregorio's links]

Official Google Blog: "Today, we're excited to launch Google For Non-Profits, a one-stop shop for tools to help advance your organization's mission in a smart, cost-efficient way. This site features ideas and tutorials for how you can use Google tools to promote your work, raise money and operate more efficiently. And to get inspired, you'll also find examples of innovative ways other non-profits are using our products to further their causes."

Google Lat Long Blog: Google "announces the launch of the web version of Google Sky, which turns your browser into a virtual telescope that can zoom and pan across the entire cosmos. You now have several ways to easily explore the universe:

• Powerful search that lets you browse tens of thousands of named objects.
  
• Three optical sky surveys that show you what your naked eye would see if it had a really good zoom lens. Try switching to infrared, microwave, ultraviolet, or x-ray to see the sky in a completely different light. Or blend between these views to create unique visualizations on the fly.
  
• Galleries highlighting the best images from Hubble and many other telescopes.
  
• Current planet positions and constellations.
  
• Overlays of custom KML content. (Simply paste a Sky KML URL into the search box, just like on Google Maps.)
  
• Last but not least, the Earth & Sky podcasts gallery is not to be missed, particularly for those who run a classroom."
  Permanent Link

Follow up to previous postings on the Google-DoubleClick merger, this announcement today from Eric Schmidt, Google Chairman and CEO: "I'm pleased to share the news that we completed our acquisition of DoubleClick today. Although it's been nearly a year since we announced our intention to acquire DoubleClick last April, we are no less excited today about the benefits that the combination of our two companies will bring to the online advertising market."

News release: "A new Defense Department policy prohibits the commercial gathering of detailed street-view imagery on U.S. military bases and installations. U.S. Northern Command issued the policy message Feb. 28 after detailed images of Fort Sam Houston, in San Antonio, appeared on the Google Map Web site, said Navy Lt. Cmdr. Gary Ross, a NORTHCOM spokesman. Google Corp. representatives had entered the post with permission and taken the images with roof-mounted recording equipment, according to the policy message."

Your Guide to Online Privacy, by Mark Glaser

Creative Commons and Public.Resource.Org announced [February 11, 2008] that the first revision of a substantial corpus of U.S. federal case law is available for download by developers. The files are all clearly marked with the new Creative Commons CCØ label, indicating that the contents are Works of the United States Government and are thus free of copyright or other restrictions for their dissemination and reuse. Developers may access this information here. [This] release covers all U.S. Supreme Court decisions and all Courts of Appeals
decisions from 1950 on. The release is equivalent to 1,858 volumes of case law in book form, a stack of books 348 feet tall. The files have all been converted to the XHTML standard and make extensive use of
CSS style sheets to allow developers to build new search engines and user interfaces."

Follow up to February 2, 2008 posting Microsoft Proposes Acquisition of Yahoo! for $31 per Share, this news:

Google Book Search: The Good, the Bad, & the Ugly, 1/1/2008, By Dian Schaffhauser, Campus Technology.

Preservation in the Age of Large-Scale Digitization, A White Paper by Oya Y. Rieger, February, 2008. 52 pp. Published by the Council on Library and Information Resources.

"The University of Michigan's University Library has just put the millionth book from its collection on-line. That's one million out of the 7.5 million volumes in the library's current holdings. Digitized materials are made available publicly via the Mirlyn library catalog and MBooks. MBooks provides full text of works that are in the public domain, creating new ways for users to search and access U-M Library content. Materials that are currently in copyright are available for searching on-line, allowing users to assess the contents of a book before deciding whether to purchase it or borrow it from the library."

Press release, February 1, 2008: "Microsoft Corp. today announced that it has made a proposal to the Yahoo! Inc. Board of Directors to acquire all the outstanding shares of Yahoo! common stock for per share consideration of $31 representing a total equity value of approximately $44.6 billion. Microsoft’s proposal would allow the Yahoo! shareholders to elect to receive cash or a fixed number of shares of Microsoft common stock, with the total consideration payable to Yahoo! shareholders consisting of one-half cash and one-half Microsoft common stock. The offer represents a 62 percent premium above the closing price of Yahoo! common stock on Jan. 31, 2008."

Top 60 Little-Known Technology Web Sites, By Charles Babcock, Thomas Claburn, John Foley, W. David Gardner, Antone Gonsalves, Nicholas J. Hoover, K.C. Jones, Elena Malykhina, Richard Martin, Paul McDougall, Marianne McGee, Chris Murphy, Cora Nucci, Art Wittman, and Serdar Yegulalp, InformationWeek, January 26, 2008

Advancing Advanced Search, by Stephen Turbek: "Websites have come to depend on their search engines as the volume of content has increased. Yet advanced search functionality has not significantly developed in years. Poor matches and overwhelming search results remain a problem for users. Perhaps the standard search pattern deserves a new look. A progressive disclosure approach can enable users to use precision advanced search techniques to refine their searches and pinpoint the desired results."

Grants and Investments: "As of January 2008, Google.org has committed $75.4 million in grants and investments to further our five initiatives."

Press release: "A new report, commissioned by the UKL JISC [Joint Information Systems Committee] and the British Library, counters the common assumption that the ‘Google Generation’ – young people born or brought up in the Internet age – is the most adept at using the web. The report by the CIBER research team at University College London claims that, although young people demonstrate an ease and familiarity with computers, they rely on the most basic search tools and do not possess the critical and analytical skills to asses the information that they find on the web. The report Information Behaviour of the Researcher of the Future [11 January 2008] also shows that research-behaviour traits that are commonly associated with younger users – impatience in search and navigation, and zero tolerance for any delay in satisfying their information needs – are now the norm for all age-groups, from younger pupils and undergraduates through to professors. 'These findings add to our growing understanding of subjects that should concern all who work in further and higher education – the changing needs of our students and researchers and how libraries can meet their needs.'

The study calls for libraries to respond urgently to the changing needs of researchers and other users and to understand the new means of searching and navigating information. Learning what researchers want and need is crucial if libraries are not to become obsolete, the report warns."

Press release: "The University of California announced this week that its widely used eScholarship Repository has surpassed the 5 million mark for full-text downloads of its open access scholarly content. This major milestone reflects the impressive adoption and usage rate the repository has enjoyed since its inception in 2002, with University of California academic units and departments from its 10 campuses publishing or depositing more than 20,000 papers and works."

"Google U.K. and comScore, Inc...announced the results of a study into online consumer behaviour in the travel sector, finding that consumers are using search engines in more sophisticated ways to research and purchase travel in the UK. The Internet is rapidly becoming the number one resource for the travel consumer. The study revealed that 20 million people in the U.K. utilized search engines for travel information in the first quarter of 2007."

Google Maps: enter the "start address" and the "end address." [Google Blogoscoped]

"The European Library launched a new version of its website on the 4th of December; the changes involve significant lay-out improvements and reflect a constant care for understanding user needs. It also introduces the latest partners’ collections and the first The European Library web-exhibition."

Courthouse News: "The Federal Circuit renewed patent infringement claims over Google's AutoLink and AdSense programs by tossing out part of a summary judgment ruling for Hyperphrase Technologies LLC. The circuit decision is a setback for the Internet search engine and a victory for Hyperphrase, which challenged the judgment that neither program infringes any of 15 patent claims."

Press release: "The Federal Trade Commission today announced that it will not seek to block Google Inc.’s proposed $3.1 billion acquisition of Internet advertising server DoubleClick Inc. In a 4-1 vote to close its eight-month investigation of the transaction, the Commission wrote in its majority statement that "after carefully reviewing the evidence, we have concluded that Google’s proposed acquisition of DoubleClick is unlikely to substantially lessen competition."

• Proposed Acquisition of Hellman & Friedman Capital Partners V, LP, (Click Holding Company) By Google Inc., File No. 071 0170


• Statement of the Commission


• Dissenting Statement of Commissioner Harbour


• Concurring Statement of Commissioner Leibowitz


• Closing Letter to Counsel for Google Inc.


• Closing Letter to Counsel for Hellman & Friedman Capital Partners V, LP


• Online Behavioral Advertising: Moving the Discussion Forward to Possible Self-Regulatory Principles: Statement of the Bureau of Consumer Protection Proposing Governing Principles For Online Behavioral Advertising and Requesting Comment - Text of Staff Statement


• EPIC and CDD have raised far-reaching objections to the merger. EPIC Statement.


• European Consumers' Organisation: Google/DoubleClick: Consumers' privacy is at stake >>Press release >>Letter to Commissioner Kroes
  Permanent Link

Official Google Blog: "For the latest information on a flight's status, simply search for an airline and flight number, and the first result will tell you whether your flight is on time or delayed as well as the estimated departure and arrival times."

New York Times: Google Gets Ready to Rumble With Microsoft - "The growing confrontation between Google and Microsoft promises to be an epic business battle. It is likely to shape the prosperity and progress of both companies, and also inform how consumers and corporations work, shop, communicate and go about their digital lives. Google sees all of this happening on remote servers in faraway data centers, accessible over the Web by an array of wired and wireless devices — a setup known as cloud computing. Microsoft sees a Web future as well, but one whose center of gravity remains firmly tethered to its desktop PC software. Therein lies the conflict."

Follow up to December 13, 2007 posting Senator George J. Mitchell Releases Report on Major League Baseball Investigation, this news: "A free, searchable database of The Mitchell Report has been released by askSam Systems. The askSam database contains a full-text searchable archive of George J. Mitchell's report to the commissioner of baseball on the investigation into steroid and other performance enhancing substance use by players in Major League Baseball."

Press release: "This statement responds to the “Complaint Requesting Recusal of the Federal Trade Commission Chairman From the Pending Review of the Proposed Google-Doubleclick Merger” (“Petition”), which was filed with the Federal Trade Commission (“FTC”) by Messrs. Rotenberg and Chester on December 12, 2007. After reviewing the relevant facts and consulting with the FTC’s Designated Agency Ethics Official, Deputy General Counsel Christian S. White, the General Counsel, my fellow Commissioners, and members of my staff, I have determined not to recuse myself from this matter because the relevant laws and rules, as detailed below, neither require nor support recusal."

Press release: "Vital government information appears “invisible” to millions of Americans who are combing the Internet and looking for answers via the most popular search engines, according to a report released today by the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) and OMB Watch. The report, Hiding in Plain Sight: Why Important Government Information Cannot Be Found through Commercial Search Engines, highlights the shortcomings some federal agencies exhibit when trying to comply with the mandates of the E-Government Act of 2002, a landmark law that promotes access to government information and services."

Via Dan Froomkin, news that the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform has begun to post preliminary transcripts of selected hearings on its website. However, links to these transcripts is currently circuitously provided by conducting a search on Google, documented here by Dan.

Press release: "Governor Crist...announced two new open government initiatives that will improve Floridians’ ability to access public documents and meetings. The first initiative involves a Bill of Rights for all Floridians trying to access public records. The list of rights was compiled by the Commission on Open Government, established by the Governor on June 19, 2007, by Executive Order 07-107. The second initiative involves improving Internet access to state agency contact information...Governor Crist established the Office of Open Government and charged it with providing the Governor’s Office and all state agencies the tools necessary to serve the people of Florida in a professional and efficient manner. The executive order also instituted the Plain Language Initiative to ensure all announcements, publications and other documents sent by the Governor’s Office or state agencies contained clear and concise instructions and information. For a list of all state agency open government websites, please visit http://www.flgov.com/og_agency_ogpages."

Press release: "The new, non-proprietary, open standard, ACAP (Automated Content Access Protocol), is set to put an end to publisher-search engine legal clashes was unveiled and showcased in New York today, 29 November 2007 at a conference opened by World Association of Newspapers President, Gavin O’Reilly and addressed by keynote speaker AP CEO Tom Curley. ACAP has been developed at the initiative of the World Association of Newspapers, the International Publishers Association and the European Publishers Council in close collaboration with search engines to protect the intellectual property of anyone wishing to make content available on the worldwide web. ACAP is the result of an intense 12-month pilot project which has resulted in a unique communications tool that will open the door to more and more high level content, giving all content owners the confidence to make their content available on the worldwide web. From today, publishers globally will be encouraged to implement ACAP version 1 which will allow publishers, broadcasters and indeed any other publisher of content on the network to express their individual access and use policies in a language that search engine robots and similar automated tools can read and understand. ACAP is set to become a universal standard. Click here for instructions on how to implement ACAP."

Press release: "Google today announced a new strategic initiative to develop electricity from renewable energy sources that will be cheaper than electricity produced from coal. The newly created initiative, known as RE/C [Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal], will focus initially on advanced solar thermal power, wind power technologies, enhanced geothermal systems and other potential breakthrough technologies. RE/C is hiring engineers and energy experts to lead its research and development work, which will begin with a significant effort on solar thermal technology, and will also investigate enhanced geothermal systems and other areas. In 2008, Google expects to spend tens of millions on research and development and related investments in renewable energy. As part of its capital planning process, the company also anticipates investing hundreds of millions of dollars in breakthrough renewable energy projects which generate positive returns."

Press release: "comScore, Inc...released its monthly comScore qSearch analysis of the search marketplace. Among core search engines in October 2007, Google Sites remained the top search property with more than 6.1 billion core searches conducted, representing a 58.5 percent share of the search market. October was a strong month for overall search activity, as each of the five core search engines achieved at least 5 percent growth in the number of searches conducted."

EPA News release: EPA has developed two tools that let computer users "see" air quality information on a virtual globe. Both tools are available to the public starting today...The first tool is part of the new "Air Emission Sources" Web site, which is designed to make emissions data for six common pollutants easy to find and understand. Based on the latest National Emissions Inventory, the site uses charts and Google Earth files to answer a user’s questions. Users can look at overall emissions, emissions by type of industry, or emissions by largest polluter. Want to know what industry emits the most sulfur dioxide in your state? Select your state from a map, pick a pollutant, and the site creates a chart showing you emissions by industry. Want to "see" which refineries in your state emit the most sulfur dioxide? Use the "tilt" feature in Google Earth to quickly find the largest emitter. Then click on the balloon to get more details about emissions from that facility. EPA also is providing Air Quality Index (AQI) information in the Google Earth format. Use the AQI tool to quickly see air quality across the country, then click on a specific location to see that city’s AQI forecast and current levels of ozone or particle pollution. The AQI is EPA’s color-coded tool to inform the public about daily air pollution levels in their communities. EPA, in collaboration with state and local governments, provides AQI forecasts and conditions for more than 300 cities across the United States."

• Air Emissions Sources Web site


• View information in Google Earth format about which facilities emit any of six common pollutants


• See AQI forecasts and current conditions


• View air quality information in Google Earth format


• EPA is also using the Google Earth platform to display Acid Rain Program data

"Welcome to the British Museum collection database. When complete, it will contain a record of every object in the Museum collection. This is the first release and contains records for the collection of two-dimensional works (almost entirely drawings, prints and paintings) from all over the world. New records and images are being added every week as work on the database continues...The entire database contains records for more than 1,698,000 objects. It is still in its early stages, and work is continuing to improve the information recorded in it. In many cases it does not represent the best available knowledge about the objects. This is being added as fast as possible, but will take many years."

"We’ve mashed up Google Maps with World Bank data to give you a visual entry point to browse our projects, news, statistics and public information center by country."

National Archives: "Geospatial One-Stop (GOS) is a geographic information system portal that serves as a public gateway for improving access to geospatial information and data. This portal makes it easier, faster, and less expensive for all levels of government and the public to access geospatial information. GOS provides web access to maps, data and other geospatial services from all levels of government...The National Archives has joined Geospatial One Stop’s (GOS) web portal. Select National Archives holdings are now searchable from the GOS Historical Collections Channel, which the National Archives and the Library of Congress jointly manage."

Google Public Policy Blog: "Google has been working to make publicly available government information more accessible to the public. We're doing so by helping government agencies implement the Sitemap Protocol, a technical standard that makes it easier for search engines to crawl and index pages on a website...The Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee...[reported out of committee] S. 2321, which extends and updates the E-Government Act of 2002. Part of the bill directs the Office of Management and Budget to create guidance and best practices for federal agencies to make their websites more accessible to search engine crawlers, and thus to citizens who rely on search engines to access information provided by their government. It also requires federal agencies to ensure their compliance with that guidance and directs OMB to report annually to Congress on agencies’ progress."

The New Yorker: Digitization and its discontents, by Anthony Grafton, November 5, 2007

"The United Nations, Google and Cisco today unveiled a pioneering online site that tracks progress towards decreasing global poverty by 2015, a global campaign known as the Millennium Development Goals, or MDGs. Visit the website at www.mdgmonitor.org"

Greg R. Notess updated his guide, Finding Old Web Pages: "The Web changes constantly, and sometimes that page that had just the information you needed yesterday (or last month or two years ago) is not available today. At other times you may want to see how a page's content or design has changed. There are several sources for finding Web pages as they used to exist. While Google's cache is probably the best known, the others are important alternatives that may have pages not available at Google or the Wayback Machine plus they may have an archived page from a different date. The table below notes the name of the service, the way to find the archived page, and some notes that should give some idea as to how old a page the archive may contain."

Guardian UK: "Palestinian militants are using Google Earth to help plan their attacks on the Israeli military and other targets, the Guardian has learned. Members of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, a group aligned with the Fatah political party, say they use the popular internet mapping tool to help determine their targets for rocket strikes."

Why Yahoo, not Google, should drive your search, by Steve Johnson, Chicago Tribune Internet critic, October 12, 2007: "The Yahoo [search] effort...is so impressive I'm going to make it my default searcher. Best is "Search Assist," an expandable box right below where you type your query that offers a bevy of clickable terms to help you refine it. A good reference librarian will write a specific, targeted search. Yahoo's search assist gets you close to librarian status, without the bother of getting an MLS degree."

"comScore, Inc....released its monthly comScore qSearch analysis of the search marketplace. Among core search engines in August 2007, Google Sites remained the top search property with more than 5.5 billion core searches conducted, representing a 56.5 percent share of the search market...In August, Google Sites maintained its position atop the core search rankings with 56.5 percent of U.S. searches, gaining 1.3 share points versus the previous month. Yahoo! Sites ranked second with 23.3 percent, followed by Microsoft Sites (11.3 percent), Time Warner Networks (4.5 percent) and Ask Network (4.5 percent)."

Press release: "Joined by nationally recognized medical providers, health-management device manufacturers and patient advocacy organizations, Microsoft Corp. today launched Microsoft® HealthVault, a software and services platform aimed at helping people better manage their health information. The company outlined its vision for ways that HealthVault can bring the health and technology industries together to create new applications, services and connected devices that help people manage and monitor their personal health information...The HealthVault platform is available to people for free at http://www.healthvault.com."

Google's Law, Working Paper (2007), by Greg Lastowka, Rutgers University, Assistant Professor of Law: "Google has become, for the majority of Americans, the index of choice for online information. Through dynamically generated results pages keyed to a near-infinite variety of search terms, Google steers our thoughts and our learning online. It tells us what words mean, what things look like, where to buy things, and who and what is most important to us. Google’s control over “results” constitutes an awesome ability to set the course of human knowledge. As this paper will explain, fortunes are won and lost based on Google’s results pages, including the fortunes of Google itself. Because Google’s results are so significant to e-commerce activities today, they have already been the subject of substantial litigation. Today’s courtroom disputes over Google’s results are based primarily, though not exclusively, in claims about the requirements of trademark law. This paper will argue that the most powerful trademark doctrines shaping these cases, “initial interest confusion” and “trademark use,” are not up to the task they have been given, but that trademark law must continue to stay engaged with Google’s results."

Press release: "Yahoo! Search today announced Search Assist, the most advanced assistance technology available on the Web, and the integration of audio, video and photos directly into the search results to help make Web search effortless for consumers. The new Yahoo! Search was designed to better understand user intent and get consumers to the results they are looking for in one search." See also this Yahoo! Search blog posting: "To Do" to "Done" in One Search.

Official Google Blog: "Video Alerts enables you to specify any topics or queries of interest so we can deliver interesting and relevant videos on a daily, weekly, or as-it-happens basis (your choice) to you via email. To start receiving Video Alerts, you can visit the Google Alerts homepage directly or set up the alert during your normal video searches. Videos may come from Google Video, YouTube, or many other video sources on the web."

Jane Horvath, Senior Privacy Counsel at Google, has posted links to two YouTube videos providing users with details about privacy practices and personalizing your search.

Press release: "Healia announced today the launch of two new search engine tools - Healia PubMed/Medline Search and Clinical Trials Search - to help consumers find relevant biomedical literature and clinical trials information...Healia PubMed/Medline Search is specifically designed to help consumers retrieve abstracts (summaries) of scientific articles published in biomedical journals in a user-friendly way. It searches the National Library of Medicine's (NLM) PubMed/Medline dataset, which includes more than 17 million abstracts and citations from approximately 5,000 biomedical journals published in the United States and worldwide since the 1950s."

EPIC: "The United States Senate Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing entitled An Examination of the Google-Doubleclick Merger and the Online Advertising Industry: What Are the Risks for Competition and Privacy on Thursday, September 27. Dave Drummond of Google, Brad Smith of Microsoft, Scott Cleland of Precursor, Tom Lenard of the Progress & Freedom Foundation, and Marc Rotenberg of EPIC are expected to testify. See EPIC's page on the proposed Google-Doubleclick merger."

Windows Live Translator Beta: "If you click on a “Translate this page” link in the Live Search results or enter a web address in the web page translation box on translator.live.com, translations will be presented to you in the Bilingual Viewer, providing easy access to the original web page and its translation. In the Bilingual Viewer you are able to: Browse the original web page text and translation in parallel, supported by synchronized highlights, scrolling, and navigation. Enter a new web page URL. Select a translation language.
Choose between 4 bilingual layouts. Exit the bilingual translation mode to see the original web page content." [ResearchBuzz]

Heise Online: "The world's number one search engine Google is calling for international standards for data protection. "Three quarters of the countries in the world have no privacy regimes at all", Peter Fleischer, Google's Privacy Chief, explained at a conference organized by UNESCO, the UN's Education, Science, and Culture Organization, on the topic of "Internet Ethics". What's worse, Fleischer pointed out that even the countries in Europe and the OECD (Organization for Economic Collaboration and Development) that do have such laws wrote them up back when the Internet did not have the impact it currently does."

Reading Books in the Digital Age subsequent to Amazon, Google and the long tail by Terje Hillesund, Associate Professor at the University of Stavanger, Norway. First Monday, volume 12, number 9 (September 2007),

Tim Stanley: US Federal District Court Opinions with Full Text Search: "We have put online the Federal District Court case opinions and orders that are available using the opinion report in the Federal Courts' ECF. These are updated daily. We have categorized the opinions by state, court, type of lawsuit and judge and combinations of judge and type of lawsuit. You can also subscribe to each of categories through RSS feeds to track a judge or court's decisions on different issues. And we also give the cause of action for each case.

We are using Google's hosted Business Custom Search Engine for the full text search. Google is now OCRing PDF image files, so even PDF files that have images of scanned documents will be in most cases full text indexable and searchable. Like the OCR of Google's Book Search. You will need to look at the cached copy to see the highlighted searched text though, and then find in the original PDF to be 100% that what you are reading is correct. Google should be doing a pretty good job of indexing and ocring these court decisions, although it may take a few days for a new document to show up in the index.

We have also noted on the federal district court case filing database when we have a judge's opinion (you will see a little gavel. The case filings are at here."

"LibWorm Beta is intended to be a search engine, a professional development tool, and a current awareness tool for people who work in libraries or care about libraries. LibWorm collects updates from about 1400 RSS feeds (and growing). The contents of these feeds are then available for searching, and search results can themselves be output as an RSS feed that the user can subscribe to either in his/her favourite aggregator or in LibWorm's built-in aggregator...Each feed searched by LibWorm has been assigned a category, so when you browse by Feed Category, you're seeing all the content from the feeds that have been assigned to that category. Subjects are pre-built searches, usually of greater complexity than the user interface currently supports, for common subjects of interest to libraryfolk." This site is free.

"MedWorm is a medical RSS feed provider as well as a search engine built on data collected from RSS feeds...MedWorm collects updates from over 4000 authoritative data sources (growing each day) via RSS feeds. From the data collected, MedWorm provides new outgoing RSS feeds on various medical categories that you can subscribe to, via the free MedWorm online service, or another RSS reader of your choice, such as Bloglines, Newsgator, Google Reader or FeedDemon." Users may construct free text key word searches, or search for an exact phrase, and may further specify inclusion of content from the following areas: news, consumer, journals, organizations, info and blogs. This service is free.

Press release: "NASA and Internet Archive of San Francisco are partnering to scan, archive and manage the agency's vast collection of photographs, historic film and video. The imagery will be available through the Internet and free to the public, historians, scholars, students, and researchers. Currently, NASA has more than 20 major imagery collections online. With this partnership, those collections will be made available through a single, searchable "one-stop-shop" archive of NASA imagery."

Press release: "Google today announced the launch of Sky, a new feature that enables users of Google Earth to view the sky as seen from planet Earth. With Sky, users can now float through the skies via Google Earth. This easy-to-use tool enables all Earth users to view and navigate through 100 million individual stars and 200 million galaxies. High resolution imagery and informative overlays create a unique playground for visualizing and learning about space.
To access Sky, users need only click "Switch to Sky" from the "view" drop-down menu in Google Earth, or click the Sky button on the Google Earth toolbar. The interface and navigation are similar to that of standard Google Earth steering, including dragging, zooming, search, "My Places," and layer selection…To access Sky in Google Earth, users need to download the newest version of Google Earth, available at: http://earth.google.com. The feature will be available on all Google Earth domains, in 13 languages."

Google Lat Long Blog: "...the Google Book Search and Google Earth teams are excited to announce the next step: a new layer in Earth that allows you to explore locations through the lens of the world's books. Now when you turn on the "Google Book Search" layer in Google Earth (found in the "Featured Content" folder in the "Layers" menu), you'll see small book icons scattered around the globe. When you click on one of the book icons, a pop-up balloon will display a snippet of text from one of Book Search's public domain books that references that location. You'll also find links to the Google Book Search page for that snippet so that you can learn more about what it has to say about the city or town."

Technology Review - Searching for Humans - Various websites are trying to make it easier to find friends and colleagues online: "Jaideep Singh, cofounder of the new people-search engine Spock, says he wants to build a profile for every person in the world. To do this, he plans to combine the power of search algorithms with online social networks."

"About the Ad Traffic Quality Resource Center - The relationship between Google and AdWords advertisers is built on trust. Advertisers rely on the relevance of our ad placement, our reporting statistics, and the quality of the clicks their ads receive. We take this trust seriously, and we know that AdWords couldn't exist without it."

American Customer Satisfaction Index, Scores By Industry, Internet Portals/Search Engines, 2007, Commentary by Professor Claes Fornell, The Donald C. Cook Professor of Business Administration, Director, National Quality Research Center, Stephen M. Ross School of Business, University of Michigan: "Yahoo! has also improved. It has always had more users than Google and now it leads in customer satisfaction as well. Yahoo! has been there before. As its customer satisfaction rose to a high of 80 in 2005, Yahoo! did well financially. With falling customer satisfaction in 2006, Yahoo! also saw stock price and profits falling sharply. The company has also suffered from recent well-publicized management and business strategy issues. But this year's improvement in ACSI restores almost all of the 2006 loss in customer satisfaction..."

Press release: "In a trend that could substantially benefit Internet users, the largest Internet search companies are beginning to aggressively compete with one another to offer stronger privacy protections, according to a report published today by the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT). Until recently, most of the major Internet search engines kept detailed -- and potentially personally identifiable -- records of their customers' searches for as long as they deemed them useful, which generally meant indefinitely. In a string of recent announcements, the companies announced steps they were taking to delete old user data, strip the personally identifiable information out of stored search records, and, in one case, give users the option to have all of their search records deleted. CDT's Search Privacy Practices report details and compares the revamped privacy policies of the five largest search providers and offers recommendations for both the industry and lawmakers for how to strengthen privacy protections even further."

Press release: "Cornell University Library is partnering with Google Inc. to digitize materials from its superb collections and make them available online...Google will digitize up to 500,000 works from Cornell University Library and make them available online using Google Book Search. As a result, materials from the library’s exceptional collections will be easily accessible to students, scholars and people worldwide, supporting the library’s long-standing commitment to make its collections broadly available."

"Google is always experimenting with new features aimed at improving the search experience." Currently available tools as follows:

Via SEO by the Sea: "A paper from Google researchers on Question Answering, Statistical Machine Translation for Query Expansion in Answer Retrieval (pdf), looks at automated strategies for understanding and answering questions that people might type into a search box."

Press release: "Ask.com(R), a leading search engine and wholly-owned business of IAC, today announced it will soon be implementing a new product called AskEraser that will offer its searchers unmatched control over their privacy when searching for information on the Web. With AskEraser, people can ensure that their search history will not be retained by Ask.com. Searchers will have easy access to AskEraser and can change their privacy preference at any time. Once selected, searchers' privacy settings will be clearly indicated on search results pages so they always know the privacy status of their searches."

Press release: "Today Google officially released a new feature of Google Maps that enables users to layer valuable third-party information directly on Google Maps with a single click and to save these customized maps to their personal library. These mini-applications, called Mapplets, make it possible for users to view and layer maps containing information such as real estate listings, jogging trails, events and photos...These tools are built using the Google Mapplets platform, which enables any developer to create mini map applications that overlay their content on Google Maps and showcase their services to millions of Google users. Developers can find more information on authoring Mapplets here.

Follow up to the Google DoubleClick Merger In the News, from EPIC: The European Commission Directorate on Competition will review Google's $3.1 billion merger with internet advertising company DoubleClick. The news comes a few days after European consumer group BEUC sent a letter (pdf) urging Commission to investigate the merger. The Article 29 Data Protection Working Party recently expanded (pdf) an investigation of Google's data retention policies to include the policies of all search engines. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission also is reviewing the merger."

From Zorgloob Logiciels, a very large, visual representation of the extensive range and variety of Google products [via Google Blogoscoped]. If you prefer all this information in a list format, along with associated icons, descriptions of the services (in French) and links directly to them, one can find that information here.

Follow up to June 20, 2007 posting, Microsoft Complies With Vista Browser Choice Option, see Microsoft's Memorandum in Opposition to Google's Motion for Leave to Participate as Amicus Curiae - July 3, 2007

Brand Awareness and the Evaluation of Search Results, by Bernard J. Jansen (Pennsylvania State University), Mimi Zhang (Pennsylvania State University), Ying Zhang (Pennsylvania State University)

"ScienceHack is a unique video search engine for science videos...Every video is screened and approved based on accuracy and quality by our scientists...So far we indexed: Physics, Chemistry, and Space.Coming soon: Geology, Psychology, Robotics and Computer." [via Slashdot]

Press release: Justice Department Files Joint Status Report on Microsoft’s Compliance with the Final Judgments: "The Department of Justice told the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia [June 19, 2007] that it has reached an agreement with Microsoft Corporation to resolve a complaint by Google regarding Microsoft’s desktop search function in Windows Vista. In a joint filing with the court, the Department, 17 state Attorneys General, and the District of Columbia said that the agreement, which aims to promote user choice, will resolve any issues the complaint may raise under the final judgments."

June 14, 2007 press release: "The Sunlight Foundation today launched a new search engine called LOUIS – the Library Of Unified Information Sources – to improve public access to federal documents through an all-inclusive, catalogued and cross-referenced collection of official documents from the executive and legislative branches of government...LOUIS makes it easy to search from a collection of over 300,000 documents from seven sets of federal documents dating back to 2001: the Congressional Record, congressional bills and resolutions, congressional reports, congressional hearings, GAO reports, presidential documents and the Federal Register. LOUIS, which updates its document depository daily, even allows users to set up a "standing query" as an RSS feed, to get alerts every time Congress or the executive branch takes action that references the subject of the initial query."

The AltSearchEngines announced the June Top 100 (attached spreadsheet), inclusive of name, URL and type of search (business, people, podcast, health, meta, games, google mash-up, charity and many other categories). Well worth a look, as you may be familiar with a few of these search tools, but others offer unique and expert features to facilitate focused research on topical and issue-related content.

Computerworld: What Google bought in the past 12 months - A rundown of the year's acquisitions. Note - the news that Google has acquired FeedBurner was not included in this article. Feedburner announced the purchase on June 1, 2007. It was for a reported $100 million.

"The number of libraries participating in the Google Book Search Library Project just got a whole lot bigger with today's addition of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC). The CIC is a national consortium of 12 research universities, including University of Chicago, University of Illinois, Indiana University, University of Iowa, University of Michigan, Michigan State University, University of Minnesota, Northwestern University, Ohio State University, Pennsylvania State University, Purdue University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Google will work with the CIC to digitize select collections across all its libraries, up to 10 million volumes."
Project Related Documents:

Press release: "Ask.com®...today unveiled Ask3D, a completely re-engineered and redesigned version of Ask.com. Ask3D includes powerful new search technology, an innovative three-panel design, and unique new features that give people what they need, faster. With the new version of Ask.com, people get the most relevant and customized information they need from the best range of content available, including videos and music clips, and makes it all immediately accessible on one page."

The State of Search Engine Safety, June 4, 2007 - Ben Edelman, Advisor to McAfee SiteAdvisor and Hannah Rosenbaum - Research Analyst, McAfee SiteAdvisor

Press release: "...new innovations for Google Maps...offer a whole new perspective on search: Street View and Mapplets. Available on Google Maps at maps.google.com, Street View and Mapplets further Google's commitment to provide users with the most innovative maps available online and developers with new tools for creating and sharing geographic content. Street View is a new feature of Google Maps that enables users to view and navigate within 360 degree street level imagery of various cities in the US. Street View provides users with a rich, immersive browsing experience directly in Google Maps, enabling greater understanding of a specific location or area. Street View imagery will initially be available for maps of the San Francisco Bay Area, New York, Las Vegas, Denver and Miami, and will soon expand to other metropolitan areas. By clicking on the "Street View" button in Google Maps, users can navigate street level, panoramic imagery. With Street View users can virtually walk the streets of a city, check out a restaurant before arriving, and even zoom in on bus stops and street signs to make travel plans."

WSJ free feature, At Some Schools, Facebook Evolves From Time Waster to Academic Study: "After years of worrying about how much time freshmen spend on Facebook, schools are incorporating the study of social networking, online communities and user-contributed content into new curricula on social computing. The moves, like other academic expansions into fields like videogame design, are part of an effort to keep technology studies relevant to students' lives – and to tap subjects with entrepreneurial momentum. Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft Corp. are among the tech companies that have invested in schools' social computing programs."

Follow up to April 20, 2007 posting, Google DoubleClick Merger In the News, additional documents and news.

Google Lat Long Blog: "Do you prefer to avoid driving on major highways? Do you ride a scooter that can't travel at highway speeds? Or do you simply prefer to take the road less traveled? If so, Google Maps driving directions now has an "Avoid Highways" option for you. When you click the the "Avoid Highways" checkbox, the route instantly updates to one that tries very hard to stay off of interstates, motorways, and other major roadways. This may give you a much longer path, but one that you may find more suitable."

Technorati Blog: "We've streamlined a blogsearch-only homepage at search.technorati.com (an easy shortcut is s.technorati.com ...With this launch, we also provide you with more context around more stuff like videos, music, and blogs. Over time, these pages will become richer and more comprehensive as we add more information about the thing itself, like where it was published, who links to it, what other things are similarly tagged, and more...We currently track over 250 million videos, blogs, photos, podcasts, events, and other social media objects in addition to more than 80 million blogs..."

Press release, May 23, 2007: "We are happy to announce the arrival of a new cross-language search feature that allows users across the world to find and view search results on foreign language web pages in their own native language. Now, more content on the web is accessible to more users, regardless of what languages they speak. This means, for example, that if an Arabic speaker is searching for restaurants in New York, he/she can now conduct a search in Arabic, and Google will translate the results (most of which are from English language websites) and provide the most relevant search results in their native language. This new feature is available in the following languages: English, Arabic, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Japanese, Korean, Chinese (Traditional), and Chinese (Simplified)...Google uses machine translation, or automated language translation, to enable users to search and view foreign language web content. A user simply needs to visit http://translate.google.com/translate_s, enter a query in their language, select the language they want to find results in, and issue a search. Behind the scenes, Google translates the query, performs a search, and translates the results so that users can click on the results of interest to view. And while machine translation is not perfect, it can be a very useful tool for users who want to access and obtain a gist of content written in a language that they do not know or know well."

Experimental Search: "See results on a timeline or map. With the timeline and map views, Google’s technology extracts key dates and locations from select search results so you can view the information in a different dimension. Timeline and map views work best for searches related to people, companies, events and places."

A new world unfolding - Posted by John Hanke, Director, Google Earth & Maps

Earthtimes reports that a recent "internal survey conducted by search engine giant Google has revealed that one in every 10 pages scanned by the company is infected with malicious software that can harm the users' PC."

Useful Void: The Art of Forgetting in the Age of Ubiquitous Computing, by Viktor Mayer-Schoenberger, Working Paper Number: RWP07-022, Submitted: 04/24/2007 [via Harvard Crimson, Working paper calls for search engines to delete Internet activity records]

I created and launched LLRX.com in 1996 and have always strived to maintain a site dedicated to sharing best practices on a range of research and technology related issues relevant to legal professionals. Keeping these goals in mind, launching the newly designed LLRX.com, which premiered with the April 2007 issue, was an endeavor over one year in the making, involving alot of discussion, review, design, redesign, testing, and tweaking...some of which is still underway. To my friends who indulged repeated refrains of, "but does this look better than this," thank you. And a very special thanks to Darlene Fichter, whose genius has been an inspiration which helped me bring my site to where it is today.

The other part of this journey is thanks to the terrific team at Justia - Tim and Stacy, Danilo, Nick, et al. - who provided the programming expertise to compliment my research, publishing and usability experience. Converting a decade of content coded by 'yours truly' was a challenge in and of itself, but we also crafted a new site design, navigation structure and search features.

We preserved the best of the old site, such as the Court Rules Forms and Dockets database, while grounding the new site in an open source content management system, Drupal, providing enhanced layout, navigation and usability, and offering more options to access the depth of source materials that are hallmarks of the site. This is accomplished via drop down menus that appear on the top navigation bar, topical navigation choices that consistently appear on the far right hand side of each page, and by employing the new Google Custom Search so that readers may query for content on LLRX, LLRX and beSpacific [my blog on law and technology news, updated daily], or for results from the legal web. Also, a "printer friendly" option has been added to make it easier to read articles once you have printed them.

Authors may submit an article directly to me any time, so I will take the opportunity now to invite authors, new and returning, to contribute their expertise, via presentations, guides, articles, and columns, to the LLRX global community numbering over 120,000 readers each month. Thank you for participating in this community, and I look forward to hearing from you. Best --- Sabrina.

From the Official Google Blog, May 7, 2007: "There's barely enough time to join an earnings call if you are combing through all the latest news and quarterly statements. Today, we're adding content on these events content so you never have to miss an earnings call again. You can view earnings calls, analyst meetings, and any other material event on your company and portfolio pages. Further, you can download these events directly to your Google Calendar. And in response to many of your requests, we've also added a few smaller features to Google Finance, including:

Book Searching Update, Computers in Libraries 2007 presentation by Greg R. Notess.

Press release: "Wikipedia has become a popular Web destination for a wide range of information. Now users of Exalead's Web search engine can search, browse and navigate the Wikipedia database with greater ease and satisfaction than ever before by making use of the company's new vertical search capability that has been added to the exalead one:search technology platform. The Wikipedia search application, the first in a series of vertical search functions from Exalead, can be launched by clicking a Wikipedia tab on theExalead search engine's home page."

From Greg R. Notess, State Libraries: Custom Search Options Compared -
"For the six search builders listed on the Customize Your Own Search Engine page, here are the search engines built using the state library sites from all 50 U.S. states, or at least as many as they can manage."

Text of Wired's Interview with Google CEO Eric Schmidt, April 9, 2007.

Press release: "The Holocaust took place across the entire European continent, and for all of Europe's Jews, as well as other victims of Nazism, geography played a major role in determining their fate. The Museum is using Google Earth to map key Holocaust sites with historic content from its collections, powerfully illustrating the enormous scope and impact of the Holocaust. Use Google Earth to access content from the Museum's online Holocaust Encyclopedia. Find out more about Auschwitz, Dachau, Bergen-Belsen, Treblinka, Warsaw, Lodz, and many more. Each place name links to a featured article with related historical photographs, testimony clips, maps, artifacts, and film footage. Over time, this layer will be updated with additional content from the Encyclopedia."

Press release: "The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has joined with Google in an unprecedented online mapping initiative. Crisis in Darfur enables more than 200 million Google Earth users worldwide to visualize and better understand the genocide currently unfolding in Darfur, Sudan. The Museum has assembled content—photographs, data, and eyewitness testimony—from a number of sources that are brought together for the first time in Google Earth. Crisis in Darfur is the first project of the Museum’s Genocide Prevention Mapping Initiative that will over time include information on potential genocides allowing citizens, governments, and institutions to access information on atrocities in their nascent stages and respond."

Google Voice Local Search FAQ: "With Google Voice Local Search, you get fully-automated, fast access to same local-business information you would find on Google.com. But you can access it from any phone, anywhere, at anytime...Google doesn't charge you for the information or for connecting you to the business. Keep in mind, though, that your telephone company may apply regular charges for making a phone call or receiving an SMS."

Agence France-Presse CEO Pierre Louette commenting in a press release today: "The agreement will allow uses of AFP's content in ways that go beyond its typical use of content in Google's services, which features just headlines and snippets of text to provide just a taste of what an article offers..."

Official Google Blog: "Searching on Google for Seattle real estate or homes for sale in San Diego prompts you to enter a location and choose whether you want to buy or rent.* After clicking "Go," you can see the individual homes that Google has indexed, provided by our partners and culled from the web. When you want more information on a particular home, you can click straight through to the source of the listing—no detail pages or sign-up forms get in the way. And when Google gets the same listing from multiple sources, we show links to all the data providers and websites, ranked according to many factors including, but not limited to, the quality and comprehensiveness of the data."

Press release: "Today, Google is launching My Maps, a new feature of Google Maps that enables users to quickly and easily create custom maps for personal use or sharing through search. With this release, creating maps mashups is now as simple as pointing and clicking. From chronicling trips, to sharing tips and documenting academic endeavors, My Maps empowers users to create content-rich maps that are relevant to their interests, expertise, or personal needs."

Press release: "Rep. Brad Miller, Chairman of the Investigations and Oversight Subcommittee of the House Science & Technology Committee...asked Google Chairman Eric Schmidt to explain why Google had changed its satellite maps of the New Orleans region to pre-Hurricane Katrina images."

Taking steps to further improve our privacy practices: Posted by Peter Fleischer, Privacy Counsel-Europe, and Nicole Wong, Deputy General Counsel: "When you search on Google, we collect information about your search, such as the query itself, IP addresses and cookie details. Previously, we kept this data for as long as it was useful. Today we're pleased to report a change in our privacy policy: Unless we're legally required to retain log data for longer, we will anonymize our server logs after a limited period of time. When we implement this policy change in the coming months, we will continue to keep server log data (so that we can improve Google's services and protect them from security and other abuses)—but will make this data much more anonymous, so that it can no longer be identified with individual users, after 18-24 months...Just as we continuously work to improve our products, we also work toward having the best privacy practices for our users. This includes designing privacy protections into our products (like Google Talk's “off the record” feature or Google Desktop’s “pause” and “lock search” controls). This also means providing clear, easy to understand privacy policies that help you make informed decisions about using our services. After talking with leading privacy stakeholders in Europe and the U.S., we're pleased to be taking this important step toward protecting your privacy. By anonymizing our server logs after 18-24 months, we think we’re striking the right balance between two goals: continuing to improve Google’s services for you, while providing more transparency and certainty about our retention practices. In the future, it's possible that data retention laws will obligate us to retain logs for longer periods. Of course, you can always choose to have us retain this data for more personalized services like Search History. But that's up to you. Our engineers are already busy working out the technical details, and we hope to implement this new data policy over the coming months (and within a year's time). We’ll communicate more as we work out these details, but for now, we wanted you to know that we’re working on this additional step to strengthen your privacy. If you want to know more, read the log retention FAQ (PDF)."

FindLaw: Viacom Files Copyright Infringement Lawsuit Against YouTube and Google Over Unauthorized Use Of The Company's Shows: Viacom International, Inc. v. YouTube, Inc., YouTube, LLC, and Google, Inc., March 13, 2007.

Beet.TV: "A major defense department contractor, BBN of Cambridge, Massachusetts, has applied a national security technology application, developed to fight terrorism, to "crawl" the audio tracks of public Internet videos through its Podzinger subsidiary. Podzinger has analyzed, transcribed and organized some 1.5 million YouTube clips since December and is crawling many thousand every day, according to Alex Laats, who heads the unit."

Business Search vs. Consumer Search: Five Differences Your Company Can't Afford to Ignore

Posted by Mendel Chuang, Product Marketing Manager: "For the past several months, we've been working on ways to let you better get information on your desktop through gadgets and sidebar. We've also thought about improving how you search your computer. Today, we are happy to be releasing the Google Desktop 5 beta application. The most prominent changes you'll notice are to our gadgets and sidebar. Some of the gadgets have been redesigned to provide you with the same useful information but in a more easy to read and visually appealing format. The sidebar has also been changed to blend in even more with your desktop."

Google Librarian Center posting: "Today we announced our 13th Library Project partner, the Bavarian State Library. With the announcement of a fourth library partner located outside the U.S., we're making headway towards our goal of helping people find books from libraries all over the world through Google Book Search. We're making a good deal of headway elsewhere, too. Let's take a look at some of our numbers as they stand right now:
Publisher partners: Over 10,000 from around the world
Library partners: 13 today
Books in the index: Over a million
Book Search interfaces: 9 (English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, and Simplified and Traditional Chinese)".

GovExec.com: Google moves ahead with plan to open up federal Web sites: "Three federal organizations recently agreed to structure their sites to make them accessible for nearly all Internet searches, [Google] officials said."

FindSounds - Search the Web for Sounds - "...free site for finding sound effects and musical instrument samples on the Web."

PTO Direct was created by intellectual property professionals for intellectual property professionals and their clients. Its purpose is to provide an efficient way to search, gather and share relevant intellectual property record information from the United States Patent and Trademark Office and the United States Copyright Office. PTO Direct provides free patent searches." [Ted McClure]

Failure Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population, Eduardo Pinheiro, Wolf-Dietrich Weber, Luiz André Barroso, 5th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST 2007), 2007

Follow up to previous postings on a legal dispute between a group of Belgian newspaper sites and Google over removal of copyrighted materials from the search engine index, news today that the court reaffirmed its decision against Google.

Google's Moon Shot, by JEFFREY TOOBIN - The quest for the universal library. New Yorker, Posted 2007-01-29

Press release: "Today, Princeton University becomes the latest partner to join Google's Library Project. The combined collections of the Princeton University libraries total more than six million printed works, five million manuscripts and two million nonprint items. Working together, Google and Princeton will digitize approximately one million public domain books from these collections, so that readers around the world will be able to view, browse, read, and even download public domain materials - all simply by searching online."

"The Cornell Law Library is pleased to announce its new Legal Research Engine This specialized search engine helps users easily find authoritative online legal research guides on every subject. It searches approximately 20 different web sites that either prolifically publish guides, or index and link to guides." [Julie M. Jones]

Press release: "Starting today, YouTube video results will appear in the Google Video search index: when users click on YouTube thumbnails, they will be taken to YouTube.com to experience the videos. Over time, Google Video will become even more comprehensive as it evolves into a service where users can search for the world's online video content, irrespective of where it may be hosted."

Press release: "Known as the fifth largest academic library in the United States, the University of Texas Libraries house some of the nation's leading collections, including the world-renowned Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection. Soon, researchers and history lovers all over the world will be able to search more than one million books and materials from the University of Texas, including selections from these unique works from early Latin American history."

On January 13, 2007 Michael Fagan updated his Fagan Finder Image Search Engines page, according to his http://faganm.com/blog/">blog. He states, the page has "gone from 42 search tools and 42 external links to 65 search tools and 42 external links."

Official Google Blog announced: "... the NYSE has moved the issue a great step forward with a proposal to the SEC which if approved, would allow you to see real-time, last-sale prices across all Google properties including Google Finance, Personalized Google, Mobile, and of course, Google.com. It won't matter if you're on Wall Street or Main Street -- you'll have free, easy and fast access to real-time prices from NYSE on Google."

Google Web Search Help Center

"Search Wikia serves as a platform for the development of a new open source search engine with user-editable search results. This wiki accompanies the development therefore, and is used as a sounding board for ideas, organization and technical stuff. It is a place for the search community to discuss the project and search related issues."

Hitwise reports that Google Blog Search "the market share of visits to Google Blog Search surpassed visits to Technorati for the week ending 12/23/06."

Press release: "The Internet Archive Receives Grant from Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to Digitize and Provide Open Online Access to Historical Collections from Five Major Libraries...The Sloan Foundation is proud to support the digitization of these high-value collections from five of the nation's leading cultural institutions and to ensure that these materials will always be available through public channels for future use...These collections include:

About Google Patent Search: "As part of Google’s mission to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful, we’re constantly working to expand the diversity of content we make available to our users. With Google Patent Search, you can now search the full text of the U.S. patent corpus and find patents that interest you. You can view images of original patents online, or save and print them for offline use."

Washington Post: Seeking Iran Intelligence, U.S. Tries Google - Internet Search Yields Names Cited in U.N. Draft Resolution

Live Search's WebLog: "The U.S. beta launch of Live Search Books is a big step forward in advancing the way people discover information through the integration of content that has been "off-limits" to the traditional Search experience, until now. This release makes tens of thousands of out-of-copyright books available from our library scanning initiative, including books from the University of California, the University of Toronto, and the British Library. In addition, we are announcing new partnerships with the New York Public Library and the American Museum of Veterinary Medicine...The team is also taking this opportunity to announce an update to the beta of Live Search Academic. We're adding millions of new articles—primarily bio-medical content. Live Search Academic now indexes thousands of academic journals in the computer science, engineering, physics, and bio-medical fields. We’re also now indexing theses, dissertations, and books within these disciplines."

Google for Educators: "Google recognizes the central role that teachers play in breaking down the barriers between people and information, and we support educators who work each day to empower their students and expand the frontiers of human knowledge. This website is one of the ways we're working to bolster that support and explore how Google and educators can work together."

The nonprofit Educational Testing Service's (ETS) new Information and Communications Technology (ICT) literacy exam "measures students' abilities to research, organize, and communicate information using technology....Feedback from librarians and faculty members has shown that while most college-age students can use technology, they don't necessarily know what to do with the content the technology provides....To achieve information and communication technology literacy, a person must be able to research a topic well, identify credible data, and then prepare a cohesive, compelling argument based on the findings." [See page 16, Fall 2006, Innovations, for more details.]

Follow up to September 18, 2006 - posting Belgian Court Rules Against Google in Copyright Dispute:

From Wired Magazine: "TV advertising is broken, putting $67 billion up for grabs. Which explains why google spent a billion and change on an online video startup."

Inside Google Books Search blog: "...we've just launched a bunch of new features and a whole new interface to make your online book experience better. First, we made it easier to find books you may be interested in by improving the "About this book" page. If you're a bookworm looking for your next book to devour, you can easily find new books via the related books feature....If you're trying to beef up your research by uncovering relevant work, then you may want to check the references from books and scholarly works....Once you find a book you might be interested in, you can now see its chapter titles, key terms, and selected pages all on the same page, helping you get a feel for it. Next, we designed a new browsing interface. You can simply scroll through the pages, or, for full view books, view them in two-page mode and flip through just like a book. You can zoom in, switch to full screen, and jump directly to the chapters that interest you. If the book is part of the public domain, you can comfortably read it on screen or download it if you prefer. For an in-copyright book, just follow the links to buy it or to find it in a library."

Press release: "November 13, 2006 - Google Inc. announced today that it has closed its acquisition of YouTube, the consumer media company for people to watch and share original videos. In connection with the acquisition Google issued an aggregate of 3,217,560 shares, and restricted stock units, options and a warrant exercisable for or convertible into an aggregate of 442,210 shares, of Google's Class A common stock. The number of shares of Class A common stock issued and issuable by Google was calculated by dividing $1.65 billion less certain amounts (approximately $15 million) funded to YouTube by Google between signing and closing by the average closing price for the 30 trading days ending on November 9, 2006. 12.5% of the equity issued and issuable in the transaction will be subject to escrow for one year to secure certain indemnification obligations." [emphasis added] See also this AP article discussing the $200 million set-aside for potential future lawsuits.

Via CyberJournalist.net, news that Washingtonpost.com's advanced news search engine has been expanded, and now offers free article archive access within the last 60 days. The archive search page, from 1877 - present, is here.

Follow-up to previous postings related to the DOJ's subpoena early this year, to obtain Google search data, news via Seth Finkelstein, posted copies of the following reports (PDF) released today:

From the Official Google Blog, November 3, 2006: "The world's libraries are a tremendous source of knowledge, much of which has never been available online. One of our goals for Google Print is to change that, and today we've taken an exciting step toward meeting it: making available a number of public domain books that were never subject to copyright or whose copyright has expired. We can show every page because these books are in the public domain. (For books not in the public domain we only show small snippets of the work unless the publisher or copyright holder has given us permission to show more.)"

From kaiserEDU.org: "SmartLinks provides 'pre-queried' searches on health policy topics (Complementary and Alternative Medicine; Electronic Medical Records; Children's Health Coverage; Massachusetts Health Care Reform Plan; Direct-to-Consumer Advertising; Public Health Preparedness; Drug Safety and Regulation; Stem Cell Policy; Drug Reimportation; VA Health System) in several different internet search engines. You'll get results from: PubMed, Kaisernetwork Daily Headlines, Google Uncle Sam, Google Scholar, and NY Academy of Medicine Grey Literature Report."

Via Official Google Blog: "...the new Blog Alert, which notifies you about new blog search results. We've also added a Comprehensive Alert, which can show results from multiple sources (including Google News, the web, and blogs) so you get fuller information whenever your favorite topics appear online."

New Search (BETA): "For the first time you can search the largest sections of the Library's site from one search box." Search individually or collectively, the following content: U.S. historical and cultural collections (American Memory); Library of Congress Online Catalog; Prints & Photographs Online Catalog; Library of Congress Web site.

Follow-up to September 18, 2006 posting Belgian Court Rules Against Google in Copyright Dispute, reports that Begian news rights representative Copiepresse is continuing its breach of copyright action against Microsoft and will target Yahoo in future.

Google press release: "Google Custom Search Engines empower users to choose which pages they want to include in their index, how the content should be prioritized, whether others can contribute to their index, and what the search results page will look like...organizations or individuals simply go to www.google.com/coop/cse and select the websites or pages they'd like to include in their search index. Users can choose to restrict their search results to include only those pages and sites, or they can give those pages and sites higher priority and ranking within the larger Google index for their site. Users can then customize the look, feel and functionality of their search engine."

Press release: "Convera Corporation...announced it has been selected by prime contractor Vivisimo to support the image search at FirstGov.gov, the official web portal of the United States Government. Convera search technology will be supplementing the image index for FirstGov.gov search, enabling FirstGov.gov to better deliver images in response to the millions of queries made by citizens visiting the portal every year...The added technology will provide site users access to the over one billion images contained and categorized within the Convera Web index."

Press release: "Together, the UW-Madison and Google will expand access to hundreds of thousands of public and historical materials from the UW-Madison libraries and the Wisconsin Historical Society Library. Some wonderful examples from their collection can be found here. The combined 7.2 million holdings of these libraries comprise one of the largest collections of historical documents and books to be found in the United States."

"Google Docs & Spreadsheets is a web-based word processing and spreadsheet program that keeps documents current and lets the people you choose update files from their own computers."

"...Google Code Search...gives programmers a single place to search publicly accessible source code."

The Heart of Google's Wild Success Is a Home Page of Calculated Simplicity

Press release: "Working together, Google and the University Complutense of Madrid will digitise the university's hundreds of thousands of public domain works, so that anyone, at anytime will be able to view, browse, read, and even download the full texts from the library's historic and special collections. The library of the Complutense University of Madrid is the largest university library in Spain."

Related news and postings:

Google Transit Trip Planner allows "commuters to find the fastest and most effective way to get around the city using public transportation....we've added five more cities to our coverage: Eugene, Oregon; Honolulu, Hawaii; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Seattle, Washington and Tampa, Florida."

Follow-up to September 18, 2006 posting Belgian Court Rules Against Google in Copyright Dispute, this press release from the World Association of Publishers, September 22, 2006:

As reported by Mike Shields: "Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive has launched made-for-mobile versions of the Web sites for three of its largest properties, including WashingtonPost.com, Newsweek.com and Slate.com as part of a new mobile services initiative at the company. The sites are available free of charge for any users that have a Web-enabled handset by logging onto the addresses mobile.washingtonpost.com, mobile.slate.com and mobile.newsweek.com."

"The Electronic Frontier Foundation has developed the following search privacy tips. They range from straightforward steps that offer a little protection to more complicated measures that offer near-complete safety. While we strongly urge users to follow all six tips, a lesser level of protection might be sufficient depending on your particular situation and willingness to accept risks to your privacy."

Windows Live Search Blog: "...the new Live Search... no longer in beta, and powering searches on both Live.com and MSN.

Google News Archive Search: "News archive search provides an easy way to search and explore historical archives. Users can search for events, people or ideas and see how they have been described over time. In addition to searching for the most relevant articles for their query, users can get a historical overview of the results by browsing an automatically created timeline. We provide two ways of searching: search articles, which presents articles in order of relevance to the query; and show timeline, which presents a timeline of events and articles associated with the query. The timeline is dynamically generated in response to each query." [News Archive Search Help]

Google press release: "Starting today, readers can find new, and free, downloadable versions of some of the world's greatest books on Google Book Search. Working with our library partners, we're expanding access to books that are out of copyright and have become public domain material. Users can search and read these books on Google Book Search like always, but now they can also download and print them to enjoy at their own pace."

Related sources and information:

Google Webmaster Central: "Welcome to your one-stop shop for comprehensive info about how Google crawls and indexes websites. You can learn here how to ensure that your site is easily crawled and indexed and access tools that will enable you to diagnose crawling issues, study statistics on how your site is doing in our index, and tell us how you'd like your site to be crawled and indexed."

See also:

The Chronicle of Higher Education obtained a copy of the 13 page agreement between Google, Inc. and the Regents of the University of California that details the scope of the digitization project, as well as copyright and ownership issues.

FindLaw: "A federal judge scolds the FBI in a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit for failing to "just Google" the names of people about whom plaintiffs sought audio recordings and other information in their litigation. According to Judge Garland, "Surely, in the Internet age, a "reasonable alternative" for finding out whether a prominent person is dead is to use Google (or any other search engine) to find a report of that person’s death." John Davis v. U.S. Dept. of Justice, August 22, 2006.

From the Official Google Blog: "For every Google Scholar search result, we try to automatically determine which articles in our repository are most closely related to it. You can see a list of these articles by clicking the "Related Articles" link that appears next to each result."

Can Our Culture Be Saved? The Future of Digital Archiving, by Diane Leeheer Zimmerman, New York University - School of Law, July 25, 2006

Technology Review: Surprising Search Patterns - A new study questions the common assumption that search engines control the hierarchy of the Internet.

Press release: The University of California libraries today (August 9, 2006) announced their partnership with Google to digitize books from the libraries' collections. UC becomes the latest partner in the Google Books Library Project, which was launched in December 2004 to digitize books drawn from the libraries of the University of Michigan, Harvard University, Stanford University, Oxford University, and the New York Public Library. The digitized books will be searchable through Google Book Search."

StopBadware.org Blog: "We're entering a new phase here at StopBadware.org. Google—which is one of our partners—will present people with a warning before they visit websites that have been reported to StopBadware.org as sites that distribute badware. These warnings currently link to a general page on StopBadware.org, but as we finish researching sites, we'll replace the general page with one of our individual website reports (see an example here). Hopefully this next step will bring us that much closer to fulfilling our mission of providing people with reliable, objective information about downloadable applications in order to help them make better choices."

Joining more than a dozen product blogs, Yahoo launched a corporate blog on August 1: "We want to share insights into our company, our people, our culture, and the things that occupy our cluttered minds. We’ll cover emerging trends, provide some behind-the-scenes commentary, profile interesting Yahoos, spotlight our beloved users..."

About Google Trends: "With Google Trends, you can compare the world's interest in your favorite topics. Enter up to five topics and see how often they've been searched for on Google over time. Google Trends also displays how frequently your topics have appeared in Google News stories, and which geographic regions have searched for them most often."

Press release: "...FirstGov.gov, the official portal of the U.S. Government, has won the Pioneer Award from Federal Computer Week and the Government Solutions Center (GSC) for its "innovative use of technology in a government program."

Press release: "Amnesty International (AI) today released a new report, "Undermining Freedom of Expression in China," (32 pages, PDF) exposing how Yahoo!, Microsoft and Google have violated their stated corporate values and policies in pursuit of the potentially lucrative Chinese market. In sync with the report release, the organization unveiled irrepressible.info, a new campaign for free speech online that continues Amnesty International's work combating Internet censorship."

Fom Google Labs, Accessible Web Search for the Visually Challenged: "In addition to finding the most relevant results as measured by Google's search algorithms, it further sorts results based on the simplicity of their page layouts."

From Tara Calishain: "This page allows you to search Google’s government search engine and narrow your results by a state. Try adding a city or county name to your query as well." See also Peggy Garvin's review of U.S. Government Search on LLRX.com.

New York Times: A Search Engine That's Becoming an Inventor

Press release: "Google Inc. today announced the launch of Google Checkout, a checkout process that makes online shopping faster, more convenient and more secure for Google users. Google Checkout offers an easy and trusted checkout option that enables shoppers to purchase from participating stores with a single Google login." More information on this Official Google Blog posting.

In an 11-11 vote today, the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, & Transportation defeated the Communications, Consumers' Choice, and Broadband Deployment Act of 2006 (otherwise known as Net Neutrality).

The un-Google, June 15, 2006, from The Economist print edition (free online, if you view an advert first): "Google dominates the lucrative market for web-search, but its rivals [Microsoft, Ask, Yahoo] are setting out to change that."

Getting The New York Times More Search Engine Friendly, by Danny Sullivan and Chris Sherman, June 15, 2006.

Press release, June 14, 2006: Google Launches Shakespeare Website. See Google Search Beta's complete plays of Shakespeare

Related news:

Press release: "Google today announced Google U.S. Government Search, a new search product that will make it easier to find U.S. government information and keep up to date on government news. With Google U.S. Government Search, millions of U.S. government employees, various contractor organizations, as well as the general public can easily search across content on official federal, state and local government sites from a single search box. They can also keep current on government-related news with constantly updated content from government and commercial news sources, including the White House, Department of Defense, The Washington Post, and Google News." [Note: Google Uncle Sam now resolves to U.S. Government Search].

Available today, Google Earth (Release 4 - BETA)

June 8, 2006: "The Internet Caucus Advisory Committee (ICAC) hosted a discussion focusing on the legislative proposals percolating in Congress on so-called Network Neutrality. No fewer than six House and Senate bills are circulating in Congress that in some way address this amorphous policy question." [Link]

AP reports Google plans to release a beta spreadsheet program on June 6, via the Google Labs site. "Google Spreadsheets allows you to create, store and share spreadsheets on the web. For those of you who already struggle to organize multiple versions of spreadsheets and other data and lists, Google Spreadsheets is a great solution..."

Web 2.0: A New Wave of Innovation for Teaching and Learning? EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 41, no. 2 (March/April 2006): 32–44.

Refereed technical papers from 11 research areas are available from the WWW2006 Conference, May 23-26, 2006. Topic areas include: business success, next wave, education and science, security and health.

Google Accounts for Half of all U.S. Searches in April according to Nielsen//NetRatings

BusinessWeek.com: Life On The Web's Factory Floor - Who do you think turns all those words into an easy click?

From the Google Librarian Center: "Looking for tools to help teach your patrons how to use Google more effectively? By popular demand, we’re now offering free downloadable teaching tools. While we've started small, we're planning on making more materials available soon, including additional posters, cheat sheets, tent cards – even trainings. Feel free to download and distribute these materials as widely as you'd like."

"SmartLinks provides 'pre-queried' searches on health policy topics (Complementary and Alternative Medicine, Electronic Medical Records, Children's Health Coverage, Public Health Preparedness, Drug Safety and Regulation, Stem Cell Policy, Drug Reimportation, VA Health System) in several different internet search engines. You'll get results from: PubMed, Kaisernetwork Daily Headlines, HighBeam Research, Google Uncle Sam, Google Scholar, and NY Academy of Medicine Grey Literature Report."

The Safety of Internet Search Engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL, Ask), May 12, 2006, by Ben Edelman and Hannah Rosenbaum.

"With Google Trends, you can compare the world's interest in your favorite topics. Enter up to five topics and see how often they've been searched on Google over time. Google Trends also shows how frequently your topics have appeared in Google News stories, and in which geographic regions people have searched for them most...Google Trends analyzes a portion of Google web searches to compute how many searches have been done for the terms you enter, relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time. We then show you a graph with the results -- our search-volume graph -- plotted on a linear scale."

Press release: "Today, Google Inc. announced new technologies to enhance and improve the search experience. Three new products – Google Co-op, Google Desktop 4, and Google Notebook – advance the state of the art in search by helping users worldwide find and share more relevant information. The products all incorporate new capabilities that leverage user communities, enabling users to either share more information with others or benefit from other users' expertise to improve the accuracy of search results. The company also introduced Google Trends, a new tool that enables users to examine billions of searches conducted on Google to gain insight into broad search patterns over time."

Yahoo! Tech: reviews, help and how-to advice for buying and using personal electronics

Yahoo!Babel Fish allows users to translate English text into 12 other languages. See also this Official Google Reearch Blog posting on their hybrid machine and human translation engine, currently available only for Arabic-English and English-Arabic.

Search Engines: Where We Were, Are Now, and Will Ever Be - "Phil Bradley takes a look at the development of search engines over the lifetime of Ariadne and points to what we might anticipate in the years to come."

From the Official Google Blog: "Today we're launching a feature of Google Scholar which will make it easier for researchers to keep up with recent research...It's not just a plain sort by date, but rather we try to rank recent papers the way researchers do, by looking at the prominence of the author's and journal's previous papers, how many citations it already has, when it was written, and so on. Look for the new link on the upper right for "Recent articles" -- or switch to "All articles" for the full list."

From Microsoft Research, Photo2Search: Explore the Real World via Camera Phone

Press release: "The iProspect Search Engine User Behavior Study reveals that 62% of search engine users click on a search result within the first page of results, and a full 90% of users click on a result within the first three pages of search results. These figures were just 48% and 81%, respectively, in 2002."

"Windows Live Academic is now in beta. We currently index content related to computer science, physics, electrical engineering, and related subject areas. Academic search enables you to search for peer reviewed journal articles contained in journal publisher portals and on the web in locations like citeseer. Academic search works with libraries and institutions to search and provide access to subscription content for their members. Access restricted resources include subscription services or premium peer-reviewed journals. You may be able to access restricted content through your library or institution."

As previously noted in a series of postings this year, DOJ has sought, and obtained, voluminous data search records from companies including Yahoo, MSN and Verizon. Today, InformationWeek reported that their FOIA request yielded 54 documents [made available in a Zip archive], that include subpoenas, replies, and related legal documents involving 34 ISPs, search companies and security software firms.

Newsweek: Why Privacy Won't Matter Google, Yahoo and Microsoft desperately want to know every last thing about what you do, say and buy. Here's how they'll do it—and why we'll let them.

New York Times Op-Ed, March 26, 2006: Searching for Dummies, by Edward Tenner.

According to the Official Google Blog, Google's newly released Finance service is in beta, with additional content and features to be added in future. Currently, users are offered data in the following categories: Market Summary, Today's Headlines, Company Facts and Financials, Related company data, a Company Summary, Management info, blog posts and links to topical discussions.

Google launches its challenge to financial news websites in US: "Google Finance is trumpeting features that will allow users to monitor their portfolio and get access to chief executives' pay details without wading through annual reports."

Wikipedia has published an extensive comparison of over two dozen web browsers. Included is information on each respective browser's general history, features, operating system support, web technology support, languages in which the brower is available, and technical vulnerabilities. Readers note that all data is subject to verification, as this is a collaborative, open source publication.

ComputerWorld reports on enterprisewide search applications implemented by large corporations for a range of tasks, including competitive intelligence, e-discovery, and generating intranet content. Solutions such as FAST, Autonomy and Endeca index formats including text, audio and video.

From the Official Google Blog: Judge tells DoJ "No" on search queries, Posted by Nicole Wong, Associate General Counsel: "Google will not have to hand over any user's search queries to the government. That's what a federal judge ruled today when he decided to drastically limit a subpoena issued to Google by the Department of Justice. [Today's ruling, 21 pages (PDF) and the government's original subpoena.)

WSJ free feature - Google Wins Copyright Battle; Archiving Issue Is Still Unclear: "A federal judge dismissed a lawsuit accusing Google Inc. of wrongful conduct, including copyright infringement and defamation, providing the latest court opinion to weigh in on the contentious area of search engines and copyright."

"Welcome to CenSEARCHip! This is a tool developed by Mark Meiss and Filippo Menczer at the Indiana University School of Informatics in March of 2006 to allow you to explore the differences in the results returned by different countries' versions of the major search engines. We currently work with the Web search and image search functions of four national versions of Google and Yahoo!: the United States, China, France, and Germany."

Feds suggest 21-day deadline for Google subpoena
The U.S. Justice Department has set a suggested deadline for Google to hand over information about its users' search habits: 21 days."

March 1, 2006, It's Time To Update Site Search Functionality, by Iris Cremers with Jaap Favier, Kerry Bodine

Notes from CEO Eric Schmidt's March 2 Google Analyst Day remarks, not intended for public release, mention a company plan to allow for the storage of "100% of user data" on a virtual drive.

Press release: according to Nielsen//NetRatings reports - "Online Search Hits All-Time High of 5.7 Billion Searches...the highest number to date." Top three search engines remain: Google search, Yahoo search and MSN search.

Computers in Libraries 2006, Post Conference Workshops – Saturday, March 25 - Workshop 17 — 1:30 p.m. – 4:30 p.m., presented by Sabrina I. Pacifici (LLRX.com and beSpacific)

How to Digitize a Million Books - Needed: scanning software for 430 languages and a system to organize the next big leap in the information age.

Follow-up to postings on Google's ongoing legal battle with DOJ on the release of database search records, CDT provides a PDF copy of the latest round of briefs, Gonzales v. Google, February 24, 2006, 26 pages.

New York times: Ruling May Undercut Google in Fight Over Its Book Scans

See also this related commentary:

NARA press release: "Archivist of the United States Allen Weinstein and Google Co-Founder and President of Technology Sergey Brin today announced the launch of a pilot program to make holdings of the National Archives available for free online. This non-exclusive agreement will enable researchers and the general public to access a diverse collection of historic movies, documentaries and other films from the National Archives via Google Video as well as the National Archives website."

Inside Look: Internet Explorer 7, Beta 2, by Wei-Meng Lee