Category «Search Engines»

Mapping the Expansion of Google’s Serving Infrastructure

Mapping the Expansion of Google’s Serving Infrastructure – Matt Calder, University of Southern California; Xun Fan, USC/ISI; Zi Hu, USC/ISI; Ethan Katz-Bassett, University of Southern California; John Heidemann, USC/ISI; Ramesh Govindan; University of Southern California “Modern content-distribution networks both provide bulk content and act as “serving infrastructure” for web services in order to reduce user-perceived latency. Serving infrastructures such as Google’s are now critical to the online economy, …

Subjects: Internet, Knowledge Management, Search Engines

WaPo – NSA challenged by data overcollection from e-mail address books, buddy lists

Barton Gellman, Ashkan Soltani, Julie Tate: “The National Security Agency is harvesting hundreds of millions of contact lists from personal e-mail and instant messaging accounts around the world, many of them belonging to Americans, according to senior intelligence officials and top-secret documents provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. The collection program, which has not …

Subjects: Civil Liberties, E-Government, E-Mail, E-Records, Free Speech, Internet, Privacy, Search Engines

New university consortium service allows users to create citation links that will never break

“Perma.cc is a service [Built and Run by Libraries], currently in beta, that allows users to create citation links that will never break. When a user creates a Perma.cc link, Perma.cc archives a copy of the referenced content, and generates a link to an unalterable hosted instance of the site. Regardless of what may happen …

Subjects: Internet, Knowledge Management, Legal Research, Libraries, Search Engines

EPIC – Google Announces Plan to Post Names and Photos of Users for Advertising Without Consent

“Google announced changes to its Terms of Service that will allow “your Profile name, Profile photo, and actions you take on Google or on third-party applications” to be used in advertisements. The changes will not require Google to seek the affirmative consent of users before putting their personal information to commercial use. Minors, however, will not be …

Subjects: E-Commerce, Internet, Privacy, Search Engines

Disconnect Search Lets Users Search Privately on Google, Bing, and Yahoo

News release: “Disconnect, a leading developer of popular consumer privacy and security software, today launched its newest service: Disconnect Search (https://www.disconnect.me/search). Developed by an ex-NSA engineer and three ex-Google engineers over the last year, Disconnect Search allows users to easily keep searches private without having to change their behavior. Unlike other private search solutions, Disconnect …

Subjects: Privacy, Search Engines

NYT – Selling Secrets of Phone Users to Advertisers

Selling Secrets of Phone Users to Advertisers – by Claire Cain Miller and Somini Sengupta, October 5, 2013 “Now, smartphones know everything — where people go, what they search for, what they buy, what they do for fun and when they go to bed. That is why advertisers, and tech companies like Google and Facebook, …

Subjects: Civil Liberties, E-Government, E-Mail, Government Documents, Internet, Marketing, Patriot Act, PC Security, Privacy, Search Engines, Wireless Web

Are Some Tweets More Interesting Than Others?

Are Some Tweets More Interesting Than Others? #HardQuestion – Omar Alonso, Catherine C. Marshall, and Marc Najork. October 2013 “Twitter has evolved into a significant communication nexus, coupling personal and highly contextual utterances with local news, memes, celebrity gossip, headlines, and other microblogging subgenres. If we take Twitter as a large and varied dynamic collection, how can …

Subjects: Blogs, Internet, Knowledge Management, Search Engines

EBSCO Information Services Releases a Free Version of ERIC During Government Shutdown

“EBSCO Information Services (EBSCO) is making the government database ERIC available during the government shutdown. ERIC, the Education Resource Information Center, is typically available through the government website (http://eric.ed.gov/) as well as via EBSCO’s EBSCOhost® research platform. Because of the shutdown, access to the full text of articles and other materials will not be available but …

Subjects: Education, Government Documents, Internet, Search Engines

DOJ opposes tech company requests to publish surveillance statistics

“The U.S. Department of Justice has opposed requests by Facebook, Google, Microsoft and other companies to publish the number of surveillance requests they receive from the National Security Agency and other agencies. Requests from five Internet companies, also including Yahoo and LinkedIn, would hurt the NSA’s ability to conduct surveillance on “particular” Internet communications, the …

Subjects: Civil Liberties, Courts, Free Speech, Freedom of Information, Government Documents, Internet, Legal Research, Patriot Act, Privacy, Search Engines

Internet Archives Maintaining copies of offline e-gov sites

Via Jeff J. Berns: “Per http://blog.archive.org/2013/10/02/governmentblackout/, the Internet Archive grabbed copies of a number of federal agency websites just before they were taken offline due to the lapse in appropriations. You can access the archives through the links on the blog entry. The databases, search engines, etc. may not work, but the static pages should …

Subjects: E-Government, Government Documents, Internet, Knowledge Management, Libraries, Search Engines

Bing.com redesigned

A New Interface: a Modern Bing.com: “With this release we’ve created a modern Bing.com experience – one that is faster, cleaner and more visually appealing. We believe that search can be beautiful as well as functional and efficient. With that as our goal, we evaluated fonts, spacing, color, visual scan patterns, the search box and …

Subjects: Search Engines

Google Alters Search to Handle More Complex Queries

New York Times – By Claire Cain Miller “Amit Singhal, senior vice president of search at Google, introduced the Hummingbird search algorithm at the garage in Menlo Park, Calif., where the company was founded 15 years ago. Google on Thursday announced one of the biggest changes to its search engine, a rewriting of its algorithm to handle …

Subjects: Internet, Knowledge Management, Search Engines

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