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O rly?

Those are not viable alternatives, since very few websites offer any of them as a form of payment.

What competition? Any website you go to has creditcards and paypal. There is no other competition.

O rly? And let's not ignore this looming 800 lb. gorilla, which I'm sure is ready to spring into the retail market soon.

It is my guess that this dropping of Bing by Facebook will erode Bing's search marketshare, which was only ~18%, according to a 2013 article.

Bing’s market share stayed at 17.9%, the same as it was in June. However, it is worth noting that Bing is up more than 2% from this time last year when they had 15.7% market share.

http://www.searchenginejournal...

What a load of FUD.

Google is a wonderful company, and their products are useful and seductive and beautifully interlinked. But they're free to use and you're not the customer. And every day a certain number of people have their Google account blocked, for one reason or another, and find that there's no recourse to Google to fix that. In fact, there's no customer service department at all.

Examples on the internet of this are easy to find: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/open-letter-to-google-why-have-you-taken-away-my-google-gmail-accounts/7873/ http://classicsynth.hubpages.com/hub/How-to-Get-Disabled-Google-Account-Back

If they're so easy to find, why did you post only one, from 2008, who was locked out for only 15 hours? Your second just said that Google might temporarily disable your account if they suspect it's being attacked (hint: you probably want them to disable it in that case) and that Google will offer you some account recovery options.

Now imagine that this happens to you, and your laptop has just become a paperweight. And this time, you've paid for it. Hmmm.

Not true. You can still log on to your Chromebook and use it as a web browser, including whatever you need to straighten out your account problem. You just won't be able to access your Google account stuff. If you haven't set it to disallow other users, in the worst case (somehow you simply cannot recover your Google account), you can always use it to create a new Google account. If you have set it to disallow other users, you can always reset it to factory configuration and log in with a new account.

In short: In the unlikely event you truly lose access to your Google account you will have lost access to everything in your account... but your Chromebook is still yours, is not locked to that account, and can be used just as before with a new account.

Also, since you buy a Chromebook, there are customer support centers to help you: http://support.google.com/chromeos/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1280301. I'm pretty sure Google provides customer support for all of its paid services.

Unless you live in Kansas City.

drool....

They didn't prove him wrong. They made his exaggerated claim actually correct.

The average URL for Google+ profiles is something like http://plus.google.com/u/0/101560853443212199687/ instead of plus.google.com/shortname

He made an exaggeration with his long ridiculous example, and then Google made it true. It seems to have coincided with an announcement that Google is introducing vanity URL's.

Google spends several hundred millions of dollars to force chrome as default. they also bundle it with several other software and it becomes default browser and with google as default search engine without asking the user.

http://gadgetwise.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/01/sony-defaults-to-google-chrome/

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-chrome-dell-sony/13055/

but just as someone could have downloaded Netscape using IE in Windows 98 they can change default search to bing in chrome. you either have a problem with both .. or you have a problem with none.

2. Stop supporting CSS, AACS, HDCP and other forms of DRM

That is, stop playing DVD, Blu-Rays, and drop the ability to connect to HDMI and DVI displays? If you don't like the above mentioned technologies, you can play unprotected media and connect the PS3 via SCART, VGA or component cables anyway.

It's not that Sony, like Google, is plotting to insert DRM into the open standard that governs the Web.

3. Apologise for installing rookits on people's computers without their knowledge

Done. Seven years ago. And by the way, did Apple and other phone manufacturers issue any apology for installing CarrierIQ, which had privacy implications several orders of magnitude greater, on millions of phones?

4. Apologise for taking legal action against people who circumvented their digital restrictions

Do Google apologise when they do just that?

Isn't Twitter providing all public posts to the whole world?

From all I gather of the front page of Twitter, only logged-in users can search Twitter. And from what I understand of this article, you have to pay even more for a feed of everybody's tweets.

Google Ireland Holdings is incorporated in Ireland. Why should America get to tax its earnings, even if they're made by vastly overcharging for some trivial service?

If I were to pay a German relative $30,000 to water a plant, and he paid German taxes on that money, I wouldn't end up with a prison sentence. I'd just end up with an expensive plant. Now, two years from now I might provide the same service to my relative, and work "hard" to earn that money. Then I get to pay American taxes.

Never had a whole country despise me before.

It's easiest if you start with a relatively small country, and then claim that it doesn't actually exist.

Google sometimes 'locks down' your account for up to 24 hours, due to various criteria that aren't very well specified - e.g. http://www.google.co.uk/support/forum/p/gmail/thread?tid=7226841f0bdafc8d&hl=en - hence it's a good idea not to have all your eggs in one basket.

It has also been known for Google to disable accounts - http://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-has-disabled-my-gmail-account/7871/ - for no clear reason. Of course, if you pay for Google Apps premier edition, you do get a support phone line for this sort of thing.

Search engines

Google Bing Yahoo!

the additional issue is google is not popular with majority of chinese web surfers, year after year google has not increased market share, but lost market share to baidu.com http://www.digitaleastasia.com/2009/06/12/google-losing-market-share-to-baidu-in-china/ http://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-losing-market-share-in-china/3816/

If you think companies don't diversify, you are horribly mistaken.

Do you think that Kraft foods only makes cheese for example? Companies diversify into similar fields.

From a consumer point of view you are dead correct in that you are oblivious to the other dealings of many companies. MS makes money from things other than windows and office. Lots of other things. If that was all they did, they'd go broke. They make money off programming deals, etc. The closest thing to say about MS and google is: they both profit from software, internet, and hardware. Thus isn't not even expanding their capability, just more work in a field they already work in.

MS attempts at search have been horrible as they haven't improved anything and have been using them to hide data (look up situations involving bing on that - search anything that is negative about MS). I'm not saying google's attempts at an OS are going to be 100 % successful (as nobody can predict the future with an uneducated guess), but android is optimized for ARM, so it actually makes sense to create a separate OS. Plus, they have a ton of programmers?

Wow, when MS said they had something to announce monday, I didn't think it'd be an article full of spin.

I may be off here, but part of the reason of the reason Craigslist may be gaining popularity is because its listings are finally well indexed by search engines, where as of a year or so ago, they weren't - now when I search for an item or service, Craigslist actually shows up in the relevant hits! The more users who see Craigslist in google results, the more likely they maybe are to list with it.

Sorry - SearchEngineJournal.com link here

I may be off here, but part of the reason of the reason Craigslist may be gaining popularity is because its listings are finally well indexed by search engines, where as of a year or so ago, they weren't - now when I search for an item or service, Craigslist actually shows up in the relevant hits! The more users who see Craigslist in google results, the more likely they maybe are to list with it.

Sorry - SearchEngineJournal.com link here

I may be off here, but part of the reason of the reason Craigslist may be gaining popularity is because its listings are finally well indexed by search engines, where as of a year or so ago, they weren't - now when I search for an item or service, Craigslist actually shows up in the relevant hits! The more users who see Craigslist in google results, the more likely they maybe are to list with it.

It doesn't seem to matter to Google whether or not you mark the property as private property. This is not the first time the Google maps van has entered property they had no right to. They have previously ignored clearly posted "No Trespassing" signs and entered private property: Google Maps Trespassing Again.

Trespassing does exist; it's just a matter of whether or not the property owner decides to enforce it or not - and Google saying that they provide opt-out functionality to removed pictures from Google Maps is no excuse for blatantly ignoring the "No Trespassing" signs in the first place. This is like saying I can get away with selling door-to-door even to households with "No Hawking" signs posted (which to be honest most door-to-door salespeople do anyway).

It seems they've tried that about three years ago but I guess it didn't went well, considering that after three years they still don't have a product.
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-auctions-to-rival-ebay-and-yahoo/2322/

Something else that is also frightening is where unsubstantiated assertions like the one above can lead to. It took me less than a minute to google up Search engine Usage Comparisons for 2006 and find that Google has between 46% and 48% of the market. Second place goes to Yahoo with between 27% and 29%.

Google is the market leader, and strongly so. However this is a strongly competitive market. Google is a long way from having a monopoly and the market is such that it probably will never get any closer to that than it is now.

Concerns about the exercise of monopolistic power on the internet are baseless; people should reserve their anxiety energies for more realistic worries, like whether they'll be struck by lightning tomorrow.

So I guess Daniel Giersch isn't a member of society?

[Captcha = greedy. Hm, I'd have gone with hypocritical.]

what it can do is pressure the Western search engine businesses to stop dealing with China

Get a clue. China doesn't care. The top search engine in China is Baidu, not Google. I don't think you understand that if Google and every other Western search engine simply went away in China, there would be no riots in the streets, no calls to action, nothing at all. China would simply keep censoring its citizens. There is nothing to be gained here. Nothing.

how terrible would Yahoo look if it continued to aid the Chinese government in locking its citizenry away when Google had pulled out of the market

Here's a little experiment: Go out on the street and ask ten people at random what they know about Yahoo's participation in Chinese censorship. I guarantee you that 9.9 out of those 10 people will say that they don't know anything at all. (That last person only counts as 0.1 because they're lying just to try to look smart.) So the real answer is, Yahoo wouldn't look terrible at all. People aren't going to feel better or worse about Yahoo because of something that Google does.

Then it could raise cultural awareness in America to progress to other business sectors who would then pull out and move their factories back to America... [blah, blah, blah]

You're dreaming, right? Don't you think that Americans already know that the government in China is oppressive? I mean, we tend to hide under rocks, but please, go out and ask ten more random people whether they think the Chinese government is oppressive. I guarantee you that 10 out of 10 of them will say, "Yes, I do." And to say that other businesses will care how people feel towards Google or Yahoo to the point of shutting themselves off to the largest market in the world... I change my mind, you're not dreaming. You're clearly on drugs.

And the government does this with no help from companies, right? Google never helps the government in censoring its people, right? Google offers uncensored search engine results, right?

Now you're just being silly. Yes, the Chinese government would do this with no help from companies. Google doesn't "help" the government do anything, that implies that it's in collusion with the government. Google simply abides by the laws it has to in order to provide service. Google does exactly the same thing here in the United States, where there are also laws on what it can and can't show.

I'll say it once again since you don't seem to get it, and I'll put it in obnoxious bold letters so maybe it will start to sink in: Google does not censor the Chinese people. The Chinese government censors the Chinese people.

Can you point out the relevant quote please?

Sure, here it is: "Users will be clearly informed when the company has acceded to legally binding government requests to filter or otherwise censor content that the user is trying to access." If a government requests for Google not to disclose that they've ordered it to turn over personally identifiable information, what is Google to do? On the one hand, they have a company policy that says they must. On the other, they have a legal obligation that says they can't. If they follow their company policy (as you would have them do), they've broken international law. If they don't, they look twice as bad for not only giving up personal information and not telling the person whose information it was, but they broke their own company policy, a policy expressly created to keep that from happening, in doing so. There's no way to win with such a policy.

Of course, there's also a technical problem that's been completely overlooked here. Let's say that the Chinese government orders Google to turn over the IP addres

Actually, I've come to the conclusion that this is impossible, that the backlash from consumers against the iPhone and money lost from 3rd party developers would be too great to not allow 3rd party applications.

I simply can not believe any company would be this stupid in this day and age. It's like coming out with a game system but not allowing 3rd party developers to make games for it. What if the PSP or DS only ran games made by Sony or Nintendo? You'd have what, 5 titles each maybe? How many millions of dollars would they lose?

They're trying to corner the top 1% of gadget geeks, those select few willing to blow $500 on a glorified cellphone. Gadget geeks will not be happy using only the few apps that are included. Apple will be forced to sweeten the pot, and doing means millions of dollars of profit in licensing fees.

I only have this to say: if Apple doesn't allow 3rd party developers on their cellphone than I'm sure either Microsoft or Google will.

You might say Microsoft's good at tedious, but you have to hand it to them: This time they're really trying something new. Where the other search engines tries to achieve quality and relevance trough variations of link cardinality, anchor text, page rank (how many and how highly valued pages links to a page), etc., Microsoft's trying neural networks and some kind of "artificial intelligence".

So far MSN Search/Windows Live Search is worst of the three big players when it comes to relevance. But they're not too bad, either, and I think there's been a lot of improvement since they launched their beta last year (the beta was incredibly bad). If this "self learning" idea works out, MSN Search very well could become the best engine of them all.

See http://www.searchenginejournal.com/?p=2273 (Search Engine Watch) and http://blogs.msdn.com/msnsearch/archive/2005/10/22 /483846.aspx (Robert Scoble's video inteview with the guys behind the search engine).

I'd also like to point out that relevance is a subjective matter, and sometimes the correct answer to a query might not come from the web index at all. Microsoft already emphasizes answers from Encarta when suitable (Google and Yahoo is doing similar things), as seen in this example: http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=what+is+chimp anzee&FORM=QBRE

I think we'll see more similar stuff from MSN Search in the future. Also, Microsoft seems to be the only one interested in experimenting with the search interface on a major service, as can bee seen on their live.com site -- see http://www.live.com/#q=what%20is%20chimpanzee&offs et=1 and the image search http://www.live.com/#q=chimpanzee&scope=images&lod =2&page=results for examples.

(Yahoo also has an interesting interface experiment going on an obscure part of an almost forgotten search engine: http://livesearch.alltheweb.com/)

My point is quite simply that what they're doing may be tedious, but this time they're also trying some fresh ideas.

Keep in mind, Google has:

* Moved the banner ad from Internet dominance to second-class status.

Here's a copy of a story on slashgeo.org earlier this morning, there's a link to see "Google GeoAds".

Remember this story about location-aware AdSense? Google is still working on various ways to geolocate ads. All Points Blog shares their patent application for Wi-Fi location ad delivery and Google Local ads. Shimon Sandler explains the link between Google Base and those GeoAds and adds: "Wanna see it? Go to Google Local and type in the search box, booksellers nyc. You should see a little coffee cup in addition to the little red ballons. Click on the coffee cup, and an ad appears for Barnes & Noble with their logo, hyperlink, street location, and phone number."

If you search Google for "why Opera" you'll find pages like this one, with a nice list of reasons for why you should consider Opera.

The best thing you can do is to simply download it and give it a fair go. If you surf around and read about Opera you'll discover lots of nice little touches that make browsing more convenient. Maybe you'll find that you love Opera. Maybe you won't. It's a slightly different approach than what Firefox is doing, but at least you won't have to rely on extensions for functionality. That can be both good and bad, I guess. (Opera seems to be a bit more efficient on the memory usage than Firefox, mind you.)

But Opera is actually also extensible in various ways, such as User JavaScript ("Greasemonkey"), and similar. There are lots of nifty things to discover, such as custom made toolbars.

Anyway, the Search Engine Journal editor asked Opera users to convince him to use Opera. He got quite a few useful replies. Maybe they will be of interest to you, too...

...start making the damn things.

I think they maybe already.

Google is already involved in television. They are involved in a cable channel called Current TV, in that they have a show on that channel called Google Current.

The basic principle, as far as I can tell, for the show is that the stories are chosen not on what some news editor thinks is news, but instead the topics are chosen based on information about which Google queries are most popular. (Kind of based on Google Zeitgeist.)

For what it's worth, another notable feature of Current TV is that supposedly 1/3 of their programming is produced by viewers rather than the network. This turns the traditional TV model (where networks produce content, and viewers do nothing but consume, i.e. purely one-way communication) on its ear. It's not quite like the Internet where almost anyone can self-publish almost anything, but it is an interesting twist on things.

Yes, if you keep clicking on the links from blog to blog, you will find the actual patent links.

It would be helpful if submitters included such links directly rather than sending all the interested /. readers on a wlid goose chase.

Yes, if you keep clicking on the links from blog to blog, you will find the actual patent links.

It would be helpful if submitters included such links directly rather than sending all the interested /. readers on a wlid goose chase.

These news quickly turned into these news.

These news quickly turned into these news.

MS Plan:
1. Suffix a well-known product with the word "killer".
2. Hold a press conference of your product.
3. Release a pale version of the suffixed product above.
4. ???
5. Profit!!

Maybe if he spent a little less time blogging about KDE and a little more time working on Firefox, the security holes wouldn't be there.

You mean like Firefox 1.0.4? Anyway, the poster may have had a point if the dev was blogging about KHTML security, but he wasn't even remotely near that topic. Hence, troll. (but at least not AC troll like you).

Read about all of the username, forum, and security risks?

Since such activity could pose both a security risk to web surfers and site owners, there are some web sites which are interested in not having Web Accelerator pick up their material.

A very fast and efficacious method of denying Google Web Accelerator (GWA) funneled traffic access to your web site is blocking the IPs it is calling your pages from:

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/index.php?p=167 6

More people are using the Internet every day, http://www.axcessnews.com/national_0307051.shtml http://www.searchenginejournal.com/index.php?p=139 0 the ability it offers for the verification of material via corroborative website analysis, email correspondence and bulletin board communications is an amazing development for humanity.

Journalism like so much else has to move with the times, and currently these times are travelling at the speed of light through fibre optics of the Internet backbone!

Google got sued for copyright infringment by Perfect 10 Inc (pr0n provider) because Google Images was caching some pictures.
Article there

There are news bites coming out about Firefox everywhere you could possibly imagine.

Thanks, but we've already heard about Google News.

Hmm...I've found it very fast (on IE, Mozilla, Firefox). I also love the interface. I've posted a review here. On the negative side, spam filtering still has a way to go. I get about 50% of spams (that get past spam assassin on my primary mail server, which redirects them to gmail).

Google recently added stemming as a search of {quit smoke} will reveal. You can read about it in their help section. Stemming can be disabled on specific words. Otherwise the update came around November 15, 2003, but is probably still in flux, so there isn't too much good info about it yet.

I think website referral logs reflect this as well. Using the y2003 visitor report from one of the websites that I manage, over 50% of search engine referrals came from Google; a little over 10% came from Yahoo. Other reports that I've reviewed offer similar findings.

As for the "slurp" name, since its been a familiar crawler for years (Inktomi), Yahoo would risk alienating some websites/website managers who would have to go adjust their Robots files just for the new name. (And let's not mention those folks who don't know how to update the Webtrends crawler ini file or their browsercap.ini files...)

On a related note: at some point, those spam-artist "Submit Your Site to 300 Search Engines" folks will be put out of business. Other than the top 7 or so, what other search engines/portals would be considered "major"? Yahoo, Google, MSN, Altavista/Teoma, All The Web, Ask Jeeves, About (out-of-date half the time), Looksmart, DMOZ. (Heck, even Lycos pulled out of search the other day)

They are a Miserable Failure?

Although he still has some friends. AOL specifically filters this one result, but chose not to take out the other links to Michael Moore, Jimmy Carter, or Hillary Clinton. AOL good ol boys? See here for more info

Is this the 'Evil' Google suing? If you are true to your beliefs then this requires you to condemn Google. Doubtful that you can do this since it requires you to turn against not the 'Evil Borg' but one of open source's 'best friends'. What say you? Hypocrite or not?