Search Giant Watches Search Words in Effort to Track Spread of Viruses

A collaboration between Google and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta has yielded an online tool that may help people know about flu outbreaks even more quickly than existing surveillance methods.

The new tool, called Google Flu Trends, will monitor search trends to see abnormally large numbers of searches for the flu and related terms. It will then publish a map of affected areas in its new service.

Google says its new system will be able to detect influenza outbreaks up to two weeks faster than the traditional surveillance systems in use.

Read more: abcnews.go.com 

Labels: flu, sites, Trends, Web

Seeking greater visibility for its Book Search engine, Google is making it easier for retailers, libraries and publishers to provide that service's capabilities on their own Web sites.

Via free code snippets and APIs (application programming interfaces), Google is allowing Web sites to display Book Search previews, most of which will allow potential buyers to browse up to 20 percent of a book's contents, Google announced on Monday.

Some retailers are already taking advantage of the program, including Books-A-Million, Blackwell Bookshop in the U.K., A1Books in India, Libreria Norma in Colombia, Van Stockum in the Netherlands and Livraria Cultura in Brazil.

Read more: pcworld.com 

Labels: books, search, sites, snippets, Web

Yahoo may be planning for social network domination, but that hasn't stopped the struggling search and content portal from announcing a major redesign of its homepage. It's the first redesign in over two years, during which time Yahoo has taken a financial beating, so it's safe to assume that the company has high hopes that this will rejuvenate one of its fundamental properties.

The most significant change Yahoo will offer is a much more customizable version of its homepage, powered by the "widgets" that are popular on similar content portals and social networking sites like iGoogle and Facebook.

Read more: arstechnica.com 

Labels: design, homepage, sites, Web, Yahoo

According to a report on CNet, the next version of Google's Picasa Web Albums will go live at noon PST today. The central new feature of this version will be automated face recognition and tagging. In tandem with this update, Google will also launch a new version of Picasa, its desktop photo management software, which will also get a number of new features, including a movie maker mode, a retouch brush, and online synchronization with Picasa Web Albums.
Remember Riya?

Google is not the first company to add face recognition to online photo albums. Riya, when it first launched, made face recognition its central feature, but Riya's implementation, while interesting, made too many mistakes in the face recognition to be successful. Most users quickly abandoned the site after the early hype and Riya was forced to change its business model. To be successful, Google's face recognition will have to be a lot more precise than Riya's algorithms.

Full story: readwriteweb.com 

Labels: album, picasa, pictures, Web

With 10 weeks to go before the election, the amount of news coverage surrounding John McCain and Barack Obama is set to skyrocket (as if it hadn't already). In order to help you parse through all the chatter, Google (NSDQ: GOOG) has set up a special Web site where mobile phone users can find the latest headlines.

Google appears to be throwing everything it has at the upcoming presidential election. It is using multiple avenues and products to provide coverage. Google believes that plenty of people will be interested in accessing news from their mobile phones. So it set up a "one-stop-shop" for mobile phone users to get what they need.

The site is located at m.google.com/elections.

The products that it is tailoring to election coverage are mobile Search, News, Reader, YouTube, and Maps.

Full article: informationweek.com 

Labels: election, mobile, sites, Web

A fresh look at Yahoo's search results Thursday by Hitwise Intelligence raises the question of whether Yahoo could survive just fine without its search engine.


Such a question is rather important to Yahoo investors, given the Internet search pioneer has given a cold shoulder to Microsoft, which has previously expressed interest in buying Yahoo's search assets. Yahoo, however, rebuffed the offer, noting in its investor presentation that selling its search assets, including its algorithmic search, would:

Jeopardize the Yahoo user experience and make it difficult for Yahoo to maintain search and display volume.

But Heather Hopkins, vice president of research for Hitwise, noted in her blog that Yahoo's valuable sites would not necessarily fair poorly without Yahoo's search engine.

Full story: news.cnet.com 

Labels: search, traffic, Web, Yahoo

Google is getting into the entertainment delivery business this fall with 'Family Guy' creator Seth MacFarlane in a deal to distribute via Google AdSense, Web-only episodes of series "Seth MacFarlane's Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy."

The series will only be available on the Internet and will be promoted by Google. However, unlike Google's traditional AdSense text and banner ads, the show Cavalcade will be promoted through relatively unknown Google service called Google Content Network. Using AdSense video clips Cavalcade promos will be embedded on thousands of Web sites frequented by Family Guy fans (read males under 30), according to a report by the New York Times.

Read more: pcworld.com 

Labels: cartoon, Family Guy, rss, Web

The new YouTube homepage answers the question "What should I watch today?" by recommending videos based on what you've previously watched, what your friends have "favorited" or rated, and more.

It's fully customizable so you can tailor it exactly to your taste. You'll have to be signed into your account to use this feature. Also this month, we added a search-suggest feature to the YouTube search box, so now you get query suggestions as you type. By offering these suggestions, we save you several keystrokes, reduce spelling errors, and improve the overall search experience on YouTube.

More: youtube.com 

Labels: video, Web, youtube

Need to get access to real scientific data but having trouble finding any relevant search results in Google? That could be because a lot of the science and technology documents on the web aren't typically indexed by major search engines. They're a part of the "deep web," the repository of web pages usually generated by database-driven sites that search engines' spiders can't access.

One resource to help open up the deep web for scientific research is WorldWideScience. This portal allows you to query more than 200 million documents not typically indexed by today's search engines.

WorldWideScience is a science portal developed and maintained by the Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI), an element of the Office of Science within the U.S. Department of Energy. The WorldWideScience Alliance, a partnership consisting of participating member countries provides the governance structure for the WorldWideScience.org portal.

Full article: readwriteweb.com 

Labels: Science, search, stuff, Web

On a modest but significant scale, Google is sharing with its customers some of the control it wields over the search market.

As countless search-engine-optimization consultants can attest, Google maintains tight control over the parameters that rank the results of Internet searches. Google's power can be terrific for those who come out on top and a torment for those who rank lower.

But expectations are different for a Google service that lets Web site operators pay to use the company's search technology on their own properties. For those customers, Google now is sharing some control over the knobs and levers that govern search results.

Google launched the service in July under the name Custom Search Business Edition and expanded internationally in November. Now it's got the more palatable name Google Site Search, said Nitin Mangtani, product manager for enterprise and small-business search at Google.

Full article: webware.com 

Labels: admin, search, sites, Web

As expected, Google has unveiled a preview of Friend Connect, a way to add social features to a Web site without programming.

David Glazer, director of engineering at Google, described Friend Connect, whose site is inaccessible Monday morning, as plumbing for the rest of the Web.

"The Web is getting better by getting more social. We've baked social features into the infrastructure of the Web, and it is not tied to any particular site," Glazer said. "Users can interact with any of their friends anywhere they go on Web, and with any app."

I asked Glazer if Friend Connect is a response to Facebook Connect and MySpace.com's Data Availability. "People will speculate a lot in that direction. We didn't create this code in the three days (since Facebook and MySpace made their announcements)."

Read more: news.com 

Labels: beta, Friend Connect, social, Web

Google Sites top property with 5.9 billion core searches

Google Sites remained the top search property among the core search engines in November, according to figures from comScore.

Some 5.9 billion core searches were conducted via Google during the month, representing 58.6 per cent share of the search market, virtually the same as in October.

Yahoo Sites ranked second with 22.4 per cent, followed by Microsoft Sites with 9.8 per cent and Ask Network with 4.6 per cent.

Read more: vnunet.com 

Labels: Ask, microsoft, search, sites, top, Web, Yahoo

Google is hoping users of its search engine will report "bad sites" to help the company fight criminals exploiting its infrastructure in order to distribute malicious software.

According to the Google security blog, the search giant already knows about hundreds of thousands of "bad" Web sites but is hoping that its users will add to the list by completing an online form to report malicious sites that are not already flagged.

The fight is important to Google because sites containing malicious software endanger the search giant's reputation by exploiting and infecting its users. This was described recently in a blog by security company Sunbelt.

Full story: news.com 

Labels: malicious, malware, sites, Web

The DNS admins had plenty to do at Google this week, with a lot of domain names being moved to Google's servers.

What do techicage, logiquate, and macroslash all have in common, besides a .com suffix? They are all Google domains, entered nice and neatly on their name servers, according to Resource Shelf.

Industry observers tracking Google's moves in the mobile phone space, particularly with regards to its Android software, will find so many Android domains that it looks like a Star Trek convention hacked Google's DNS boxes.

Full story: webpronews.com 

Labels: DNS, Domains, Internet, Web

ZebDisk is a free software, and you can store, and share your files on the internet with it using Google’s Picasa service.

Google’s Picasa service gives its users the ability to share their photos on the internet. ZebDisk places other files in these photos using a technic similar to steganography.

· Download : Users can connect to any Picasa address shared via ZebDisk, and they can download and save any file which was accessible publicly.

· Upload : Users can sign up a Picasa account, and can send any file to this account. They can set these files accessible publicly or restricted to themselves only.

Download: ZebDisk 0.0.1.1 

Labels: freeware, photos, picasa, share, Web, ZebDisk

Yahoo isn't giving up on search. It is, however, giving up on trying to catch Google by offering users just another set of "ten blue links," Vish Makhijani, general manager of Yahoo! Search told InternetNews.com.

To that end, Yahoo today re-launched its search, replete with special features designed to improve the experience and better enable rapid, accurate searching. Chiefly, that will be due to the new Yahoo Search Assist feature and efforts to integrate audio, video and photos into general Web search results.

Makhijani characterized Search Assist as a "step beyond" pre-filled search queries; It's a drop-down menu that allows searchers to narrow and broaden their queries by topic and concepts, delivered via an AJAX interface. There's also a new feature called Yahoo! Search Shortcuts, which integrates ratings, reviews, photos, and official websites into a box at the top of a search results page.

The new features are supposed to differentiate Yahoo from crowd of search engines that are starting to look all the same.

Full article: internetnews.com 

Labels: Ajax, feature, photo, search, Web, Yahoo

Want to be notified when the next embarrassing celebrity video hits the Web? Google's (GOOG) on the case.

The search giant's "Google Alerts" feature, which automatically notifies you when a subject appears online in news outlets, blogs or elsewhere, is now adding video to its arsenal, the company announced on its official blog. Users can choose to receive an e-mail when certain terms show up in a new video's text description.

Read more: business2.com 

Labels: Alerts, mail, video, Web

Google Web Accelerator works with your browser to help web pages show up in a snap.

Google Web Accelerator is…

· Designed for Broadband - Web pages load even more quickly on DSL and cable connections

· Easy to use - Simply install and enjoy faster web browsing in seconds

System Requirements
Operating System: Windows Vista/XP/2000 SP3+
Browser: IE 5.5+ or Firefox 1.0+

Download: Google Web Accelerator 0.2.93.116 Beta 

Labels: accelerator, Internet, Web

There's a new feature on Google Maps that enables you to easily embed an interactive map on your website or blog just by copying and pasting a snippet of HTML (much in the same way as embeddable YouTube videos work).

On Google Maps, pull up the map you want to embed-- it can be a location, a business, a set of driving directions, search results, or a map you've created. Then copy the embed code by clicking "Link to this page," and paste the code into your blog or website.

You can
create a map using the map-making tools in the My Maps tab and display it on your website using this embed feature.

Read more: Google Maps 

Labels: APIs, blogs, embed, Maps, Web

A couple of very obvious tipoffs should make it apparent to regular Google visitors that a malicious version of the search engine's home page has been substituted for the real thing.

In the Trend Micro report about malware causing redirections to a fake Google homepage, researchers included a screenshot of that page. A couple of things stand out immediately.

The malicious page tells the victim they need to let an add-on install itself to make Google run properly; helpfully, it offers a click here to download link. No add-on has ever been needed to enable Google's sparse home page to function correctly.

Full story: webpronews.com 

Labels: fake, malicious, malware, Web