google

Google has upgraded its Google Search Appliance, making it better and smaller. The "Google for the office" appliance is a box (previously a rack of 5) that can store and search through 10 million documents. Usually sold to large businesses and ... government in a refrigerator-sized rack, the new version offers the same punch in a smaller package. The boxes run on Dell storage hardware but use Google software for searching. New features include greater security encryption and the ability to search in 27 languages and deliver results in 40. The system can also provide notifications when documents ... (view more)

Chinese Internet use is notoriously restricted, which may explain why Google -- a North American cultural icon -- is not the major search engine used by the nation's Internet-connected public. Instead, Baidu is to the Chinese what Google is to the ... rest of the world. Within China, Google has only 26 percent of the search market share, while Baidu holds 63 percent. (Source: crn.com ) Google may be edging in through the launch of a free music search program. How? Baidu is the main gateway for Internet music piracy in China, where less than 1 percent of music downloads are legal. Google's new ... (view more)

Google's Street View mapping system has got the go-ahead from regulators in the United Kingdom, but is continuing to cause legal problems in the US. The system involves taking photographs of streets in major cities around the world. Unlike the ... better-known Google Earth system, these are not satellite images; instead photographers take shots from a standing position. This allows Google to produce maps which are more human-eye than bird's-eye. Britain's Information Commissioner had been asked to investigate the project after complaints it could be a threat to privacy because people might be ... (view more)

Now that Wikipedia is being rivalled by Knol , it seems fitting that Google is being challenged by a new search engine called Cuil. Created by Anna Patterson, a former employee of Google, the new engine, pronounced "cool", is attempting to edge ... Google out of the market by including more Web pages in its search index. The move is obviously the result of Patterson's knowledge of Google's search index, having been previously working on that particular aspect of Google. (Source: pcworld.com ) Cuil claims that it has indexed over 120 billion pages on the net and, unlike Google, can sort results ... (view more)

There are now more than a trillion web pages...and those are just the ones Google knows about. Google's index of web pages has grown from 26 million in 1998 to a billion (one thousand million) in 2000 and now to a trillion (one million million) in ... 2008. The search engine firm announced the statistic as a way of publicizing its position as the market leader (ahem, gloating). Writing in a post on the company's blog, software engineers Jesse Alpert said that the Google system reprocesses the entire index several times a day, each of which is equivalent to checking every road intersection in a ... (view more)

There's been a surprising amount of buzz about a one-word change to Google's home page: 'privacy'. The company has added a link from the front page of the site to the various privacy policies for the first time. It ends a prolonged debate about ... whether or not Google was breaching state laws. The controversy arose in May when the New York Times pointed out that a 2003 California law requires commercial websites based in the state to clearly display a link to its privacy policies from its home page. At the time, Google argued that it had taken care of this with a link to 'About Google'; however ... (view more)

The 'Security vs Privacy' debate is raging again after a court recently ordered Google to hand its entire YouTube records over to Viacom. The order, from the US District Court in Southern New York, comes as part of an ongoing billion dollar lawsuit ... that the media giant (which owns MTV and Nickelodeon among others) filed over copyrighted material on the video site. The suit claims that Viacom has lost revenue thanks to the infringement, while Google has boosted its advertising take. The heart of the case is Google's position that it doesn't -- and practically couldn't -- vet clips that users ... (view more)

The Microsoft-Yahoo saga continues and some old players have returned to the table. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that Microsoft held talks with both Time Warner Inc. and News Corp. about a possible alliance to pick apart Yahoo. Under ... the proposed deal, Microsoft would take over Yahoo's search business and the remainder of the company could be merged with other content companies such as AOL or MySpace. (Source: wsj.com ) When the news broke on July 2, Yahoo's shares climbed the highest they had in recent months, closing the afternoon at $20.88 after surging as high as $21.84 ... (view more)

Google has unveiled a system that will make it easier for online advertisers to find websites that can help reach their target audience. 'Ad Planner' is currently in testing and only available to selected customers, but the plan is to eventually ... make it available to everyone free of charge. Google's new stud should be remarkably simple to use, as advertisers simply type in details of their target demographic and some examples of websites they already know appeal to that audience. The system then returns a list of the best matches, along with details of the overall audience for each site and ... (view more)

Today's fresh software picks were provided courtesy of Bob Helmer at Shell Extension City. Please note that the below software descriptions are provided solely from the developer and are absent from any guarantee or warranty. You are encouraged to ... review the Shell Extension Software Policy for more details. Lucid Link Wi-Fi Security can be hard. There are many options, many settings, and a lot of techno-babble in many WiFi clients that make it difficult for non-technical users to understand. The LucidLink WiFi Client eliminates all of the clutter and only presents what you need to connect to ... (view more)