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."
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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
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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

Following up on a controversial demand made by DOJ to major search engine companies for extensive database records, Google this afternoon posted the following response on their official blog: "In August, Google was served with a subpoena from the U. S. Department of Justice demanding disclosure of two full months' worth of search queries that Google received from its users, as well as all the URLs in Google's index. We objected to the subpoena, which started a set of legal procedures that puts the issue before the Federal courts. Below is the introduction to our response to the Department of Justice's motion to the court to force us to comply with the subpoena. You can find the entire response here. (This is a 25-page PDF file.)"

House of Representatives Committee on International Relations, Subcommittee on Africa, Global Human Rights and International Operations, February 15, 2006 Hearing, The Internet in China: A Tool for Freedom or Suppression?

Links to statements and testimony below are in PDF:

Following-up on recent postings, Net Censorship Abroad - Free Speech Colides With E-commerce? and Hearing Focuses on Internet Censorship in China, see today's press release: "Yahoo!: Our Beliefs as a Global Internet Company - As a leading provider of Internet-based services, Yahoo! is committed to open access to information and communication on a global basis. We believe information is power. Citizens across the globe are benefiting greatly from increased access to communications, commerce and independent sources of information. The Internet has helped transform the way business is done, advanced consumer cultures, increased competition, allowed entrepreneurship to flourish, and provided citizens with more freedom in how they live, work, exchange ideas and make choices. Doing business in certain countries presents U.S. companies with challenging and complex questions. We are deeply concerned by efforts of governments to restrict and control open access to information and communication. We also firmly believe the continued presence and engagement of companies like Yahoo! is a powerful force in promoting openness and reform. Private industry alone cannot effectively influence foreign government policies on issues like the free exchange of ideas, maximum access to information, and human rights reform, and we believe continued government-to-government dialogue is vital to achieve progress on these complex political issues..."

EFF press release: "Google today announced a new "feature" of its Google Desktop software that greatly increases the risk to consumer privacy. If a consumer chooses to use it, the new "Search Across Computers" feature will store copies of the user's Word documents, PDFs, spreadsheets and other text-based documents on Google's own servers, to enable searching from any one of the user's computers. EFF urges consumers not to use this feature, because it will make their personal data more vulnerable to subpoenas from the government and possibly private litigants, while providing a convenient one-stop-shop for hackers who've obtained a user's Google password."

Related references:

Press release: "Representative Edward J. Markey (D-MA), the ranking Democrat on the Telecommunications and Internet Subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, today introduced the Eliminate Warehousing of Consumer Internet Data Act of 2006 (6 pages, PDF) – designed to strengthen consumer' Internet privacy and prevent companies from storing personal information for indefinite periods of time."

Jennifer Laycock provides a brief but useful comparison of the two satellite services, Google Earth and Windows Live Local - beta.

Follow-up to February 2, 2006 posting, Commentary on Forces Competing to Determine "Digital Destiny", this related article from the UK Times Onlines - Rumours mount over Google's internet plan, by Benjamin Cohen: "Google is working on a project to create its own global internet protocol (IP) network, a private alternative to the internet controlled by the search giant, according to sources who are in commercial negotiation with the company."

Declan McCullagh and Elinor Mills: "To find out what kind of information the four major search companies retain about their users, CNET News.com surveyed America Online, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo.
We asked the same seven questions of each company. Their answers are reproduced... with the responses sorted by the companies' names in alphabetical order."

FAQ: When Google is not your friend, by Declan McCullagh: "Google's recent legal spat with the U.S. Department of Justice highlights not only what information search engines record about us but also the shortcomings in a federal law that's supposed to protect online privacy."

Related references:

Five Ways To Keep Your Google Searches Private: "Word that the government has been seeking search data from Google has struck fear into the hearts of Internet Explorer and Firefox users. Here are five simple steps to keep outsiders from uncovering private information about your Web browsing habits."

Press release: "A task force of global and European publishers organizations, led by the World Association of Newspapers, has agreed to work together to examine the options open to publishers to assert their rights to recognition and recompense, and to ultimately improve the relationships between content creators/producers and news aggregators and search engines."

Legal Times (reg. free) Google Search - Google Goes Beyond Web-Based Democracy

Press release: "The new beta versions of Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer are open and customizable, with new features that enable users to customize their search experience and share information with friends...The new versions of Google Toolbar now offer customizable buttons, online bookmarks, enhanced search features, new sharing capabilities, and an open API. Google Toolbar for Enterprise beta also includes administration and control for business environments."

Declan McCullagh reported that Judge James Ware, US District Court, Northern District of California, has calendered Gonzales v. Google, Inc. for February 27, 2006.

In a shift from previous responses to and commentary about DOJ's subpoena for Google's search data, this New York Times article, In Case About Google's Secrets, Yours Are Safe, recasts the probe with a focus on protecting corporate trade secrets, not preserving user privacy.

Related commentary on Google:

From askSam, a searchable version of the full text of all of the State of the Union Addresses from 1790-2005.

Beyond Algorithms: A Librarian's Guide to Finding Web Sites You Can Trust, by Karen G. Schneider, a librarian and writer, who is Director of Librarians' Internet Index (LII).

The January 15, 2006 issue of LLRX.com includes the following articles:

"Your Google personalized homepage puts the information you care about on one web page -- and now you can access that page on your mobile phone or device, in a phone-friendly format that's easy to read and navigate."

Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox, January 9, 2006: Search Engines as Leeches on the Web

Press release, January 5, 2006 – "Infotrieve, Inc. today announced that it had converted ArticleFinder, its online scientific, technical, and medical (STM) database with more than 26 million citations and eight million abstracts from over 54,000 journals, to a free access model. The move provides scientists and researchers, who work for corporations and are subject to different copyright regulations than their academic counterparts, with an end-to-end solution for conducting STM searches across literature from multiple providers. The solution seamlessly retrieves full-text scholarly journal articles that they need on a pay-per-view basis."

Following up on December 19, 2005 posting, Google Satellite Imagery Stirs Security Concerns Here and Abroad, Israel National News reports that the Goggle Earth satellite imagery will now offer users limited resolution of sensitive military installations in the country.

Google's Great Works in Progress - Academics point to content errors in the ongoing Book program, but the search giant says fixes are coming

From the Yahoo Search Blog: Open Shortcuts (beta) are custom keywords that take you directly to a site, a search, or start a task right from the search box...To use an Open Shortcut, you type !(exclamation point) followed by the name of the shortcut in the Yahoo! Search box. For example, type: !ebay lamps. This takes you directly to www.ebay.com and searches for lamps.

Google Offers a Bird's-Eye View, and Some Governments Tremble

Music Search: Use Google to get quick access to a wide range of music information. For details, see the Official Google Blog posting.

Newsweek - Google: Ten Golden Rules - Getting the most out of knowledge workers will be the key to business success for the next quarter century. Here's how we do it at Google.

Google's Empire, Privacy, and Government Access to Personal Data, by Daniel J. Solove.

From OCLC:Perceptions of Libraries and Information Resources (2005) summarizes findings of an international study on information-seeking habits and preferences. "The Perceptions report provides the findings and responses from the online survey in an effort to learn more about: Library use; Awareness and use of library electronic resources; The Internet search engine, the library and the librarian; Free vs. for-fee information; The "Library" brand."

Related links:

From The Nutritional and Dietary Supplement Law Blog: "In a complaint filed last week in federal court in California, Salu, Inc., the owner of the popular cosmeceutical site SkinStore.com has sued the owners of competitor NewSkinSpa.com for trademark and copyright infringement accusing them of copying the SkinStore.com html code and using it to create the site at NewSkinSpa.com. In so doing, SkinStore.com claims that NewSkinSpa.com has been able to obtain a higher Google ranking for search terms like 'Hylexin,' a popular cosmeceutical product for under-eye dark circles."

Google digitisation faces Euro legal challenge - Search giant admits its exploiting legal loop-holes in the US that don't exist in Europe

UK Times: Google turns its search power to the hunt for genetic drugs: "David Vise's book reveals how it is sifting information to help scientists advance medicine...Google's data-mining techniques appear well suited to the formidable challenges posed by analysing the genetic sequence."

As We May Search - Comparison of Major Features of the Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar Citation-based and Citation-enhanced Databases. Current Science 89(9), 2005, p. 1537-1547, by Peter Jasco.

Who's Afraid of Google? Everyone, by Kevin Kelleher. "It seems no one is safe: Google is doing Wi-Fi; Google is searching inside books; Google has a plan for ecommerce."

This profile of Sidney Verba, Harvard University Library Director, professor of government, and author of numerous books and articles, addresses key aspects related to the university's participation in the Google Book Search project.

Related references:

Press release: "Search engine use shoots up in the past year and edges towards email as the primary internet application...from September 2004 to September 2005 the average daily use of search engines jumped from 49.3 million users to 60.7 million users – an increase of 23%.
This means that the use of search engines is edging up on email as a primary internet activity on any given day. The Pew Internet Project data show that on a typical day, email use is still the top internet activity. On any given day, about 52% of American internet users are sending and receiving email."

New York Times: Googling Literature: The Debate Goes Public

Related references:

From the Official Google Blog, "When we launched Google Print, our goal was to make it easier for users to discover books. Now that we're starting to achieve that, we think a more descriptive name will help clarify what our users can do with it: namely, search the full text of books to find ones that interest them and learn where to buy or borrow them...We want to make all the world's books discoverable and searchable online, and we hope this new name will help keep everyone focused on that important goal."

From Salon, Throwing Google at the book - "Google's new search engine of books puts a world of knowledge at our fingertips. Publishers say the Internet giant is robbing them of their rightful fees. Maybe it's time to call copyright laws history," by Farhad Manjoo.

New York Times, Just Googling It Is Striking Fear Into Companies, speculates on Google's potential plans to broaden the company's e-commerce endeavors, including property listings in conjunction with mapping, searching, and satellite projects currently extant, and comparison pricing for a range of consumer goods.

Google press release: "Today, Google Inc. announced the availability of the first large collection of public domain books on Google Print. This collection, scanned as part of the company’s book digitization project with several of the world’s largest libraries, includes works such as U.S. Civil War history books, government documents, the writings of Henry James and other materials. Because they’re out of copyright, these cultural artifacts can be read in their entirety online at http://print.google.com, where anyone can search and browse every page. They are fully searchable and users can save individual page images."

Related references:

Acquiring Copyright Permission to Digitize and Provide Open Access to Books, Published by the Council on Library and Information Resources and Digital Library Federation, (72 pages, PDF)

Related references to Google's announcement that Print Program scanning will resume, along with clarifications on the programs goals:

Leggo My Ego, GooglePrint and the other culture war, by Tim Wu.

Indexing Versus Caching & How Google Print Doesn't Reprint

A recent ppt presentation, Searching Scholarly Literature: A Google Scholar Perspective, by Google Scholar principal engineer Anurag Acharya, states that the goal of the service is to "find all scholarly work...journals, conferences, reprints, reports...[from] all countries, all languages, all sources..." The presentation briefly highlights coverage by publisher, by category (with medical at 22%), and lists the countries with the most queries (US, UK, Australia, Germany, Mexico and Brazil). [SiteLines]

Google Search Tips 2005, from Google Blogoscoped, by Philipp Lenssen. Not affiliated with Google™.

"Google.org will include the work of the Google Foundation, some of Google’s own projects using Google talent, technology and other resources, as well as partnerships and contributions to for-profit and non-profit entities. While we continue to define the goals, priorities and approach for Google.org, we will focus on several areas including global poverty alleviation, energy and the environment."

Google Privacy Policy Highlights, October 14, 2005:

From the October 10, 2005 Yahoo! Search Blog: "Today we've begun the integration of blogs in Yahoo! News Search. Now when you search on Yahoo! News you will see blog results as well as content from thousands of trusted news sites. [Note: search results from blogs are displayed in a box labeled Blogs Beta, that appears at the far right hand side of the search engine result screen.] The experiences and opinions published on blogs make a great addition to the mainstream news people read everyday. And major world events are further fueling the growth of blogs as platforms for anyone who wants to have a public voice. At times, even everyday bloggers beat the mainstream media to a story."

In following the continuing saga of the Google Print Program, from WSJ's Free Features today: Authors' Second Chance "Google's ambitious plan to put books online could give authors and publishers a new lease on life. But Google Print's critics say the ambitious plan runs afoul of copyright laws."

Google launched a beta version of Google Reader, a service that requires users to have a gmail account.

Google press release: "Sun Microsystems, Inc. and Google Inc. today announced an agreement to promote and distribute their software technologies to millions of users around the world. The agreement aims to make it easier for users to freely obtain Sun's Java™ Runtime Environment (JRE), the Google Toolbar and the OpenOffice.org office productivity suite, helping millions of users worldwide to participate in the next wave of Internet growth. Under the agreement, Sun will include the Google Toolbar as an option in its consumer downloads of the Java Runtime Environment on http://java.com. In addition, the companies have agreed to explore opportunities to promote and enhance Sun technologies, like the Java Runtime Environment and the OpenOffice.org productivity suite available at http://www.openoffice.org."

Related references:

Press release: Vivísimo and MSN Search to Provide Search Backbone for Redesigned FirstGov Portal: "As part of the agreement, Vivísimo teamed with Microsoft's MSN Search Web service to provide search results for the government domain. The MSN Search Web service includes extensive coverage of government documents in its index as well as a rich set of filtering-related operators. Vivísimo will leverage its Velocity software and Clusty Web search platforms to selectively crawl and metasearch federal and local government-related content and cluster the combined MSN Search and Vivísimo results for easier navigation by FirstGov users."

From AP today, this article highlights the battlelines that have been drawn, and are hardening, between publishers and Google concerning the expansive plan to digitize significant library collections from throughout the world, thus allowing users to search content on the web.

This past week Google launched a search engine specific to locating resources related to hurricane Katrina, as well as a tool, albeit one with its share of limitations due to the challeges of the task, to reunited those separated by the disaster.

Google press release: Vint Cerf, a Founding Father of the Internet, Joins Google as Chief Internet Evangelist

From Lycos, this Katrina Missing Persons Site states: "Hurricane Katrina has caused widespread destruction throughout the Gulf Coast, especially in New Orleans. As the flood waters begin to ebb, the region faces the challenges of rebuilding from this disaster and reuniting with loved ones. Numerous sites are posting information about survivors and missing persons. In an attempt to help, Lycos will search these sites for information about victims of Hurricane Katrina. You can search for people by name that you know were impacted by Katrina."

Susan Kuchinskas reported that Google Extends Book Scanning Operation to allow users in 14 countries, including the UK, Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa to conduct English language key word searches and then read selected pages from books the site has indexed.

Yet another follow-up to my previous postings on this issue here and here; see this statement, Google Print Library Position 'Backwards': Copyright holder should not have to opt-out, from the Text and Academic Author's Association past president.

Google Anything, so Long as It's Not Google, by Randall Stross.
For context see:

Will Google’s Keyword Searching Eliminate the Need for LC Cataloging and Classification?by Thomas Mann, a Reference Librarian in the Main Reading Room of the Library of Congress. This paper was written for AFSCME 2910.

Google has been the topic of several articles in the New York Times this week. Yesterday the focus was on corporate expansion, and today there is news about Google Desktop 2, an IM application called Google Talk, and Gmail for everyone (all of these services are free).
See also:

From the New York Times, Relax, Bill Gates; It's Google's Turn as the Villain addresses a range of concerns about the expanding profits, plans, and profile of the company that has set its sights on dominating the information technology marketplace.

From Jim Moore's Journal: Reporting on systems evolving, the following posting yesterday provides step by step details on how researchers can easily and effectively leverage RSS: RSS-oriented search engines are appearing, including MSN search, with RSS output and one-click subscriptions to leading news aggregators.

A forthcoming report from New Media & Society, Multiple Presents: How Search Engines Re-write the Past, by Iina Hellsten, Loet Leydesdorff, and Paul Wouters (available in PDF, 28 pages).

CIO Today published a three part series, Google Has Your Data: Should You Be Afraid?, that offers perspectives on the growing tension between the expanding public and government demand for quick and easy access to a range of personal data, and concerns about how the ubiquity of such data impacts consumer privacy. Links to the respective articles are as follows: Part One, Part Two, Part Three.

From the Yahoo! Search Blog, details about new features launched last night on Yahoo! Local: "..city pages...built for every city, neighborhood, and zip across the US of A...highlight upcoming events, top user recommendations for restaurants and other favorite local spots -- all neatly plotted on a map of your city or neighborhood...other upgrades [include] comprehensive coverage of local events, a directory for browsing, recent history of searches and listings viewed, top searches in each city per week..and its RSS enabled."

Following up on my August 9, 2005 posting, Yahoo Claims Larger Search Engine Index Than Google, see this new survey challenging Yahoo's claim: A Comparison of the Size of the Yahoo! and Google Indices, by Matthew Cheney, Mike Perry, and Dr. Orville Vernon Burton, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications.

Posted late last night by Adam M. Smith, Google Print Product Manager, on the Google Blog: "As with many ambitious ideas, Google Print has sparked a healthy amount of discussion...Today I'd like to mention two new features that reflect these discussions and which we feel will considerably improve both programs. If you're in the Publisher Program...you can now give us a list of the books that, if we scan them at a library, you'd like to have added immediately to your account. This way you can have your books in Google Print, which will put them into Google.com search results, direct potential buyers to your website, provide ongoing reports about user interest in your books, and your books will also earn revenue from contextual advertising – even if they are out of print....To allow plenty of time to review these new options, we won’t scan any in-copyright books from now until this November."

"If search engines were truly intelligent, you could just pose a question the same way you would ask a person. An alternative is to get the search engine to 'fill in the blank.' So instead of asking [who invented the parachute?], you can enter the query [the parachute was invented by *]. (The blank, or wildcard, search is marked by * - an asterisk.)" [Google Blog]

Yahoo! Everything: Links to all the services and specialty sites Yahoo offers." The A to Z index includes links to a range of topic specific engines (such as finance, news, health...), as well as to shopping, entertainment and communications services.

Yahoo! and Google will no doubt continue to disagree on whose search index is the largest, but a key issue remains that researchers are interested in this issue as it pertains to reliable, comprehensive, accessible, and current content, as opposed to ad revenues.

The first excerpt from John Battelle's new book, The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture, is available on his blog.

Different Engines, Different Results - Web Searchers Not Always Finding What They're Looking For Online (30 pages, PDF), a research study by DogPile.com in collaboration with researchers from the University of Pittsburgh and the Pennsylvania State University [Press release].

"With over 50 M audio files available, Yahoo! Audio Search is the most comprehensive audio search product on the Web. Now you can find, learn about and listen to a diverse selection of audio spanning popular and hard to find music, interviews, speeches, newscasts, podcasts, and even sound effects." [FAQ]

Excerpt from John Battelle's forthcoming book, The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture.

A new article from the 8/15/05 issue of Forbes, Google Isn't Everything, serves as a useful reminder that public libraries throughout the country offer users access to a vast range of online subscription services, absolutely free. While Yahoo is beta testing a service that permits users to locate news, articles and other resources from selected subscription services (viewing the full text requires a fee), your local public library has been providing more comprehensive online access to you for free, for years. In addition, staying current with your college or grad school alumni fees may also reward you with a treasure trove of online access to subscription services that can include Factiva, LexisNexis Academic, CQ Weekly, and HeinOnline as just a few examples. Well worth some research to find out what you are missing.

Today's Wall Street Journal featured a front page article ($), Lawyers' Delight: Old Web Material Doesn't Disappear - Wayback Machine and Google Archive Billions of Pages, Including Deleted Ones, which is worth review. It focuses on how old web pages available from the Internet Archive and cached pages from Google can be of particular value in cases involving domain name disputes.

"What is Podscope? Podscope is the first search engine that actually allows you to search for spoken words within any audio or video file. We're starting with podcasts and will be adding all types of multimedia in coming months."

Another follow-up to groups voicing opposition to Google's project to digitize major library collections, this time from the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP), which is "the international trade association for not-for-profit publishers and those who work with them." The group's July 11, 2005 "response to Google Print for Libraries digitisation project" (3 pages, PDF) includes the following statements:

From the Canadian Globe and Mail, Could Googling become illegal?

"Google SMS (Short Message Service) enables you to send queries as text messages over your mobile phone or device and easily get precise answers to your questions. No links. No web pages. Just text — and the information you're looking for...local business listings...driving directions...movie showtimes and theater locations of movies currently playing near you...weather conditions and 4-day forecasts...the latest stock quotes...quick answers to straightforward questions..."[Link]

Press release: Topix.net, the Internet's largest resource for online news with over 300,000 news channels, announced today that it has expanded its product offering to include a new dedicated news channel for Canada and local news for over 4,200 Canadian cities and towns - the first in a series of initiatives to bring local news channels to international Internet users...Local Canadian news channels on Topix.net will provide users with access to news and information about where they live, work or travel from over 500 Canadian sources, and over 10,000 sources overall. Topix.net's unique technology allows the site to target news headlines down to the postal code level for over 4,200 local Canadian communities."

OCLC Data Mining Projects: "...Internet giants such as Amazon and Google provide valuable lessons on the importance of squeezing the full value from available data. Whether in the form of book recommendations, search result rankings, targeted advertising, or collection views (e.g., Google Scholar), the "Amazoogle" companies make a concerted effort to release as much value as possible from the data at hand. Libraries possess rich reservoirs of data. However, this data needs to be made to work harder in order to create value for librarians and users. To this end, the OCLC Research Data-Mining Research Area will focus on projects aimed at creating value from the bibliographic information in WorldCat and other library data sources."

Press release today: "Mamma.com Inc....today announced the beta release of its innovative Health Search... [the] technology does more than aggregate results from various content providers [WebMD, MedLine Plus, HealthAtoZ, MayClinic.com, MedicineNet.com, NHSDirect Online] for medical information; we crawl deep into the websites of certain handpicked, trusted, medical websites to extract and format results in a easy to understand, and comprehensive manner."

Following are links to several related documents worth reviewing on the Google Library Project to digitize the entire collections of participating libraries.

"Yahoo! Search Subscriptions beta is a new way to search the subscription content that's important to you. By partnering with publishers, Yahoo! is providing the convenience of a single place to access and find all relevant content, whether it's generally available web content or content from your personal subscriptions."
[FAQ]

"Google Sitemaps is an experiment in web crawling. Using Sitemaps to inform and direct our crawlers, we hope to expand our coverage of the web and improve the time to inclusion in our index. By placing a Sitemap-formatted file on your webserver, you enable our crawlers to find out what pages are present and which have recently changed, and to crawl your site accordingly." [Link]

Reuters reports, via CNN, Google's long memory stirs privacy concerns.

Mindset: "A Yahoo! Research Labs demo that applies a new twist on search that uses machine learning technology to give you a choice: View Yahoo! Search results sorted according to whether they are more commercial or more informational (i.e., from academic, non-commercial, or research-oriented sources)."

The Google Print program now has its own homepage, Discover and browse printed material online. [Google Blogoscoped]

One of today's WSJ free features: Sky-High Search Wars - Microsoft, Google Vie to Offer Best Aerial Views of Earth

From BusinessWeek.com, A Google Project Pains Publishers - The major presses are raising thorny legal issues with the search giant's initiative to digitize the books of the world's great libraries.

On May 19, there was a Google Factory Tour, for which there are accompanying screen shots and a webcast.
Details of the information presented include this posting about Google Machine Translation Systems,
A Guided Tour of Google's Personalized Home Page, and 'Google Earth' Ready to Travel the World.

Today Google Labs released Google's New Personalized Homepage. It currently allows you to choose from among a discrete range of sources (gmail; news from Google, New York Times, BBC, Wired, Slashdot; weather; driving instructions; maps) for display on your homepage. Features will be expanded to include feeds from more sites. (Note: you need a Google account to use this feature. More info in this SFgate.com article.)

"Google Desktop Search for Enterprise helps you easily manage the ever-growing mountain of information located on your computers and includes key standards-based administrator features that provide enhanced security, centralized configuration and easy company-wide deployment. Perhaps best of all—it's free."

Missing Pieces: A Study of First Page Web Search Engine Results Overlap

Yahoo! Video Search 1.0 was released today, after being in beta. See also the Advanced Video Search Preferences.

"Google Web Accelerator (beta) is an application that uses the power of Google's global computer network to make web pages load faster. Google Web Accelerator is easy to use; all you have to do is download and install it, and from then on many web pages will automatically load faster than before. Please note that Google Web Accelerator is currently in beta test mode." [Google Web Accelerator FAQ]

Related references:

The Infinite Library, by Wade Roush, May 2005 issue of TechnologyReview.com.

Google Personal-Search Tracker Raises Privacy Concerns

Various sources have reported on Google's trademark infringement lawsuit against Froogles.com, and a copy of the complaint (68 pages, PDF), filed April 8, in District Court for the Eastern District of New York, is available courtesy of Search Engine Watch Blog.

The current Yahoo! News site has been transformed with this beta that sports a more sophisticated and user-friendly design, layout, and navigation features, using well placed content tabs, as well as more prominent display and organization of sources and time stamp for respective topical news stories. RSS feeds and custom user queries are supported.

"This page features links to World Wide Web sites, PowerPoint slideshows, and other electronic resources used in support of presentations at Computers in Libraries 2005. Links are provided at the discretion of presenters. Additional links will be provided as they become available."

Become.com Goes Live with Web's Largest Search Engine for U.S. Shopping Information [Link]

Press release, Wikimedia Foundation Announces Corporate Support of Wikipedia from Yahoo! Search: "...Yahoo! Search will dedicate hardware and resources to support Wikipedia, a community based encyclopedia written and edited by people from around the world...In addition, Wikipedia content will become available to hundreds of millions of users worldwide through Yahoo! Search via shortcuts that are automatically displayed above the relevant search results."

Google continues to roll out new features, and today's addition is Q&A, still under development, that allows users to enter a plain language fact query whose answer will appear at the top of the search results page, along with the site reference source. For example, population arkansas.

For those on the go, take a look at Yahoo's Farechase Beta which lets you search for competitive pricing and reservations for hotel rooms, cars and airline flights. See the FAQ for more details.

From AP, Google Feature Incorporates Satellite Maps.

The UK Inquirer reports on a site called Yagoohoogle that provides side by side search results using two window panes for Google and Yahoo respectively, allowing users an interesting, albeit compressed perspective on the "big two" search engine.