A recent study reveals the Web search engine terms that return the most malware-ridden sites, including:

• “Free screensavers”
• “Bearshare”
• “Screensavers”
• “Winmx”
• “Limewire”
• “Download Yahoo messenger”
• “Lime wire”
• “Free ringtones”

The study, which tested almost 1400 of the most popular search terms, also showed that the sponsored results for these keywords are also very likely to try to install adware and spyware. Call me naive, but shouldn’t there be some kind of screening process or something for the ads?

Google had pie on its face after staffers accidentally deleted the company’s main official blog  and a user unaffiliated with Google temporarily took possession of the Web address.
This is just the latest in a recent string of embarrassing mistakes made by Google employees while handling company data.

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How far will governemnts allow Google technology to go when they claim that you can now see the front gates of Buckingham Palace? Security will become an issue not only with imagaes but also with all the amount of data Google has gathered.

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Google users in China today struggle with a service that, to be blunt, isn’t very good. Google.com appears to be down around 10% of the time. Even when users can reach it, the website is slow, and sometimes produces results that when clicked on, stall out the user’s browser. Our Google News service is never available; Google Images is accessible only half the time. At Google we work hard to create a great experience for our users, and the level of service we’ve been able to provide in China is not something we’re proud of.

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On Monday, the Washington Post reported a story that’s just getting traction in the blogs: Yahoo!’s been hit with a class action suit that alleges the firm engages in syndication fraud, showing ads through spyware, adware, and on so-called “typosquatting” pages instead of in search results or on legit publisher network partner sites.

Typosquatters park themselves on inactive domains that are typically one letter away from the web address of popular websites - switch the last two letters of “expedia,” add a “.com” and you get the Post’s example.

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Yahoo’s name has again turned up in a case in which a Chinese cyber dissident has been jailed.
Wang Xiaoning was sentenced to 10 years in prison after distributing material by email and through Yahoo! Groups he’d established anonymously in mainland China and Hong Kong.
He, “repeatedly suffered physical abuse in detention between September 2002 and February 2004,” says Human Rights in China (HRIC).

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Microsoft Corp. CEO Steve Ballmer vowed to “kill” internet search leader Google Inc. in an obscenity-laced tirade, and Google chased a prized Microsoft executive “like wolves,” according to documents filed in an increasingly bitter legal battle between the rivals.

The allegations, filed in a Washington state court, represent the latest salvos in a showdown triggered by Google’s July hiring of former Microsoft executive Kai Fu-Lee to oversee a research and development centre that Google plans to open in China. Lee started at Google the day after he resigned from Microsoft.

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Yahoo Inc. helped Chinese police identify an Internet activist who was sentenced to four years in prison for his pro-democracy postings, according to a copy of the verdict obtained by a human rights group.
Jiang Lijun, 39, was sentenced for subversive activities on Nov. 18, 2003. He was accused of being the leader of a group of political dissidents and of seeking to use violence to impose democracy, including a plan to disrupt a Communist Party Congress by phoning in a false bomb scare to police, according to the copy, obtained and translated into English by the Dui Hua Foundation, a San Francisco human rights group.

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Google aims to be able to track its users to within 100-200 feet of their location through new wireless networks in order to serve them with relevant advertising from local businesses.

The leading internet search company, which depends on advertising for 99 per cent of its revenues, was selected on Wednesday by San Francisco as its preferred bidder to provide a basic free wi-fi internet service covering the entire city.

It had partnered in its bid with the internet service provider Earthlink, which intends to charge a fee for a faster internet connection.
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No, it’s not April Fool’s Day. Google has indeed cloaked pages on its own search engine and now banned those pages from its index.

Google’s GoogleGuy forum rep provided the explanation early today in this WebmasterWorld thread: Cloaked Pages Targeted at Search Box To Be Removed. Specifically, he said:

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Two new studies reinforce what all search marketers instinctively know: You need to have top rankings to capture the attention and clicks of searchers. But that’s not all: Searchers are becoming more sophisticated, increasingly using longer queries, and tweaking failed queries with additional search terms. More findings from the two studies in today’s SearchDay article, Searcher Behavior Research Update.

Two new studies examining how people search show that internet users are becoming more discriminating, with important implications for search marketers. As part of ongoing work conducted by Jupiter Research and sponsored by iProspect, “The iProspect Search Engine User Behavior Study” found 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% in 2002, based on similar research iProspect did at the time.

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UK based online marketing firm Harvest Digital surveyed “experienced” internet users about their attitudes toward search. Unsurprisingly, a majority of people reported using Google, but notably, only 24% reported using a single search engine. A full 20% said they regularly used four or more search engines.Why use so many? UK users, despite relying heavily on search engines as a significant source of information, don’t trust the results they get. Just 22% of users reported that they were confident that search engines would always give them the information that they needed.

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Google has scarfed up an advanced text search algorithm invented by Israeli student Ori Alon, says Haaretz. “Sources believe Yahoo and Microsoft were also negotiating with the University of New South Wales in Australia, where Alon is a doctoral student in computer science,” it says.”Google, Alon and the university all refused to comment, though Google confirmed that ‘Ori Alon works at Google’s Mountain View, California offices’.”
Orion finds pages where the content is about a topic strongly related to the key word, says the Sydney Morning Herald.
“It then returns a section of the page, and lists other topics related to the key word so the user can pick the most relevant.”The results of the query are displayed immediately in the form of expanded text extracts, giving the searcher the relevant information without having to go to the website - although there is still that option.”

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The World Privacy Forum and 30 other privacy and civil liberties organizations have written a letter calling upon Google to suspend its Gmail service until the privacy issues are adequately addressed. The letter also calls upon Google to clarify its written information policies regarding data retention and data sharing among its business units.

The 31 organizations are voicing their concerns about Google’s plan to scan the text of all incoming messages for the purposes of ad placement, noting that the scanning of confidential email for inserting third party ad content violates the implicit trust of an email service provider. The scanning creates lower expectations of privacy in the email medium and may establish dangerous precedents.

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