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

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

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

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

Google has said that its cookies, tiny files stored on a computer when a user visits a website, will auto delete after two years.

They will be deleted unless the user returns to a Google site within the two-year period, prompting a re-setting of the file's lifespan.

The company's cookies are used to store preference data for sites, such as default language and to track searches.

All search engines and most websites store cookies on a computer.

Currently, Google's are set to delete after 2038.

Read more: BBC News 

Labels: cookies, data, privacy, sites