Fail Blog Rocks

The blog: FailBlog.org is one of the funniest blogs on the Internet with new content daily. The term "Fail" has grown during the Internet age used to describe a screwup, in the 80's a fail would have been called a blooper.

On the FailBlog people upload images and videos of screw ups from all over the world. Usually the images and videos "fails" are self evident, however the poster has the option to post a title of the fail which sometimes helps.

This is an example of a "parking fail".

In this example the image is photo shopped to show what the fail is:

By using arrows the image is able to speak for itself.

Most posts like this one are self evident:

The beauty of the site is most images like the following are not only self evident. If a person actually needed you to explain the joke then you would probably not think it was funny.

A quality of a good fail blog post has with a theatrical set design is that difficulty is appreciated. In set design it was explained that the audience is able to identify sets that are difficult, expensive or labor intensive to produce and will appreciate them more. The same quality holds with fail blog posts, images that are expensive or difficult to produce are also viewed more favorably. There is no validity checks done to ensure that the images are not staged, however if the image is two new cars stacked on each other ruining both cars it is assumed that it is more likely to be real and not staged.

Google Translate: leveraging the world's largest data store

Posted by Christopher Dawson @ 12:02 pm

How many of you use Google’s translation tools? They’re built into Google Docs, Gmail, and the Google translate website. With support for 52 languages, the tools are incredibly powerful in an increasingly flat world.

While only human translators can really capture the nuance and connotation of human speech, Google translate is the premier online tool for fast translations. Google Docs can be quickly translated, mail can be automatically translated, and now Google’s automatic YouTube transcription services can potentially translate video into other languages as well.

[Read More...]

New Google Tool Visualizes Public Data in Animated Charts

Google has just launched Google Public Data Explorer. The new Google Labs tool offers a visual way to look at and analyze large public data sets on a variety of popular search topics.
[Read More]

Google-as-the-Fonz, or: how search upstarts are--obviously!--going to kill Google in the near future

Newsweek ran an article this week that tried to point out the vulnerabilities of Google as a be-all search portal:

If Google has been able to crush its search competition, it's not because it has perfected the art and science of Web searching. Far from it. Google is what the industry calls a "second-generation" search engine. First-generation engines like AltaVista found Web pages containing words that matched the user's search words. Google's innovation was to further rank a Web page by the other pages that link to it, on the somewhat shaky assumption that if a page is much-linked-to, it must be useful. Charles Knight, an analyst who runs the AltSearchEngines Web site, notes there's a plethora of good ideas for what a third-generation engine might bring to the party, and no shortage of companies trying to prove those ideas. "Each has shown they can do some aspect of a search better than Google can," says Knight.

It goes on to describe three of the most talked-about challengers to date: vertical search engines, search refinement aids, and social search. Google, of course, has integrated each of these techniques into its own engine carefully, and has promised to do even more with vertical search to help users find reliable health information. Already, you can search for "cancer" and see prioritized medical results from Google Health, WebMD, and others.



It's worth a read, but to date, the only non-Google search experiences I've had that lead me astray live inside Apple's Safari browser and are, of all things, visual innovations. Try flipping through your personal history for a page you've recently seen in Safari 4--it blows the text-based histories seen in other browsers out of the water. Or the stolen-from-Chrome (I think) feature: screenshots of your top 8 favorite pages fill a new tab, supplanting bookmarking as the useful way to get to favorite site and more about personal information managemen.t

Apple promo 1987

Bing cashback exploit discovered, Microsoft sends in lawyers

Bing cashback exploit discovered, Microsoft sends in lawyers

By Tom Warren, 10 November 2009 - 14:09

A Bing cashback vulnerability has been discovered by Samir Meghani of the Bountii Team.

The flaw exists due to a software API oversight that allows users to fake transactions to Bing. Currently, Bing does not detect these faked transactions. The flaw affects both the customer and merchant. According to Samir, in his original posting, "merchants have a few options for reporting, but Bing suggests using a tracking pixel. Basically, the merchant adds a tracking pixel to their order confirmation page, which will report the the transaction details back to Bing." Samir detailed that the process was flawed but didn't pin point exactly how to generate fake transactions.

Bing Cashback is an initiative that pays people to search with Bing. Customers can also get cashback rewards, meaning you could get cashback from online purchases made when Bing is used.

In a follow up post over the weekend entitled "Surrendering to Microsoft", Samir posted a legal letter fromMicrosoft's legal team demanding he remove the original blog post to which he complied. Microsoft also terminated Samir's Bing cash back account. Some may argue that this is a heavy handed approach but clearly Microsoft doesn't take kindly to fraud.

Google Index to Go Real Time

Google is developing a system that will enable web publishers of any size to automatically submit new content to Google for indexing within seconds of that content being published. Search industry analyst Danny Sullivan told us today that this could be "the next chapter" for Google. [Read More]

Top Ten Mistakes in Web Design

Summary:
The ten most egregious offenses against users. Web design disasters and HTML horrors are legion, though many usability atrocities are less common than they used to be.

Since my first attempt in 1996, I have compiled many top-10 lists of the biggest mistakes in Web design. See links to all these lists at the bottom of this article. This article presents the highlights: the very worst mistakes of Web design. (Updated 2007.) By Jakob Nielsen.

1. Bad Search

Overly literal search engines reduce usability in that they're unable to handle typos, plurals, hyphens, and other variants of the query terms. Such search engines are particularly difficult for elderly users, but they hurt everybody.

A related problem is when search engines prioritize results purely on the basis of how many query terms they contain, rather than on each document's importance. Much better if your search engine calls out "best bets" at the top of the list -- especially for important queries, such as the names of your products.

Search is the user's lifeline when navigation fails. Even though advanced search can sometimes help,simple search usually works best, and search should be presented as a simple box, since that's what users are looking for.

[Read More...]

Why the Kindle and the iPad may change the way we search

Posted on Sunday 31 January 2010 From Pandia Search Engine News.

In spite of initial skepticism Steve Jobs has decided that the tablet has a future, and he is right. It will also change the way we search. Pandia argues that publishers should support a tool that lets tablet users surf the web and subscription based content at the same time.

[Read More...]

Today In "Thanks, Patent Office:" Google patents location-based advertising

From ReadWriteWeb, who remind us every day that the media can make us cry:

It looks like while half the Web will be holding its breath over how Facebook will wield its newly-found patent power, with its patent of the news feed, the other half just found a reason to take a big gulp of air and look around. Google was awarded last Tuesday a patent for location-based advertising, the potential bread and butter of a number of emerging mobile applications.

Bing, Google and Wolfram on the Future of Online Search

Query the Olympics!

Google execs convicted of privacy violations

Firm considered Italian trial a threat to freedom on the Internet

updated 1:36 a.m. PT, Wed., Feb. 24, 2010

MILAN, Italy - Three Google executives were convicted of privacy violations Wednesday in allowing a video of an autistic boy being abused to be posted online — a case that has been closely watched for its implications on Internet freedom.

Judge Oscar Magi absolved the three of defamation and acquitted a fourth defendant altogether. The three received a suspended six-month sentence for the conviction on violating the youth's privacy.

The trial had been closely watched since it could help define whether the Internet in Italy is an open, self-regulating platform or if content must be better monitored for abusive material.

Google has said it considered the trial a threat to freedom on the Internet because it could force providers to attempt an impossible task — prescreening thousands of hours daily of YouTube footage.

Prosecutors insist the case is not about censorship but about balancing freedom of expression with the rights of an individual.

The four executives were tried in absentia in a closed-door trial.

All denied wrongdoing. None was in any way involved with the production of the video or uploading it onto the viewing platform, but prosecutors argued that it shot to the top of a most-viewed list and should have been noticed.

Convicted of privacy violations were Google's senior vice president and chief legal officer David Drummond, former chief financial officer George Reyes and global privacy counsel Peter Fleischer. Senior product marketing manager Arvind Desikan was acquitted.

Bullies
The charges were sought by Vivi Down, an advocacy group for people with Down syndrome. The group alerted prosecutors to the 2006 video showing an autistic student in Turin being beaten and insulted by bullies at school. In the footage, the youth is being mistreated while one of the teenagers puts in a mock telephone call to Vivi Down.

Google Italy, which is based in Milan, eventually took down the video, though the two sides disagree on how fast the company reacted to complaints. Thanks to the footage and Google's cooperation, the four bullies were identified and sentenced by a juvenile court to community service.

The events shortly preceded Google's 2006 acquisition of YouTube.

By: KC Morgan

Collecta: Real Time Search

Spend at least ten minutes on the Internet, and you’re bound to become familiar with the concept of search engines. In fact, the entire World Wide Web probably wouldn’t work unless users had some comprehensive way to find information on pages, and that’s what search engines are all about. But aren’t all those engines essentially the same? Collecta is different; keep reading to find out how, and how it might affect your site.

Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask. They’re all different search engines, but in many ways they’re all the same. Like most other search engines out there, these sites work in the same basic way. Search engines like these scan the Internet, archiving information about the pages they find, so this data can be quickly accessed when users like you type in search terms.

[To See How Different Collecta is, Click here]

Doing Real Time Search? Watch Your Word Order

If you’ve been reading ResearchBuzz for a while, you probably know that the way you enter your search terms in Google makes a difference. If you enter words in one order, you may very well get a different result count and a different order to the results you get back. (Try searching Google forscratching post and post scratching to get an idea of what I’m talking about.)

[Read More...]

Viewzi Search

Who said searching has to be boring?

Discover new ways to search with Viewzi

example: http://www.viewzi.com/search/4sources/windows%20phone%207%20series



what's cool about this search other than grouping similar results in the search engines, it also shows if there is a digg url associated with that posting, as you see in the screenshot

Facebook launch 'Zero' site for mobile phones

The world's biggest social network has revealed details of a stripped-down, text-only version of its mobile site called Facebook Zero.
[read more]

Why Hadoop Users Shouldn’t Fear Google’s New MapReduce Patent

By Derrick Harris

Updated: Google, nearly six years since it first applied for it, has finally received a patent for its MapReduce parallel programming model. The question now is how this will affect the various products and projects that utilize MapReduce. If Google is feeling litigious, every database vendor leveraging MapReduce capabilities – a list that includes Aster Data Systems, Greenplum and Teradata — could be in trouble, as could Apache’s MapReduce-inspired Hadoop project. Hadoop is a critical piece of Yahoo’s web infrastructure, is the basis of Cloudera’s business model, and is the foundation of products like Amazon’s Elastic MapReduce and IBM’s M2 data-processing platform.

[Read More...]

Google Buzz may force government to act on Privacy concerns

by Doug Hanchard @ February 13, 2010 @ 10:32 AM

Google’s Buzz application has unleashed editorials and flame wars around the U.S amid privacy concerns. At least it picked a name appropriate for the current backlash. Google however may wind up regretting how it launched Buzz, with significant legal and ethical concerns on the horizon. Google also faces severe criticism on how it deals with customer privacy that may tarnish that image that will require considerable repair.

The U.S. government may also have to act. As this product launch unfolded, the buzz turned ugly very quickly. Google may have few if any options but get hung out to dry and wind up being monitored with big brother oversight over how it manages and processes privacy practices.

[Read More...]

Smart Search Engines

See if you can find something odd I noticed in the results?

http://www.google.com/search?q=empire+state+height

What do you think is odd? I want to see your queries :)

Google Creating Twitter Clone for Gmail

As soon as this week, Google might be rolling out a "Twitter-killer" feature for Gmail users, according to a report from the Wall Street Journal.

Gmail users can currently broadcast status messages via the Google Talk feature. The main difference between the current offering and the new feature is that status messages aren't available in a timeline format. With the new "Twitter clone," they will be.
[read more]

Parisian Love

Data mining service crawls billions of Web pages

By Eric Lai | Computerworld

Startup 80legs launches data mining service that leverages a 50,000-computer grid to search, crunch millions of Web pages in minutes

80legs has officially launched its service, which brings supercomputer-scale data mining of the Web to companies, and even individuals.

The Houston, Texas-based startup leverages a grid of 50,000 servers to search and crunch millions of Web pages within minutes, CEO Shion Deysarkar told Computerworld on Monday ahead of the Demo Fall 09 conference in San Diego.

[Read More...]

Twitter’s Development History Beautifully Visualized In A Video

Twitter just recently launched a new Twitter Engineering blog, and to kick things off, one team member, Ben Sandofsky, decided to share a video he made representing Twitter’s development history. The video was made using Code Swarm, a software tool used to visualize data [read more]

42 Reasons Why Netbooks Are Better Than the Apple iPad

By Cisco Cheng

Steve Jobs will probably disagree, but we think that netbooks have a few things up on the iPad.

Steve Jobs felt compelled to take jabs at the netbook market when he announced his magicalApple iPad stating at one point, "The problem is that netbooks aren't better than anything." But don't ditch that netbook just yet. Here are 42 reasons (ranked in no particular order) why I think netbooks can give the iPad a run for its money.

Please Click Here for the 42 Reasons!

Why Chrome Will be Your Next Browser

By Lance Ulanoff

Google Chrome's market share numbers are skyrocketing, blowing past Safari and Opera to become the number three most-widely-used Web browser. That's pretty impressive, and I don't think it's going to stop there. I fully expect it to overtake Firefox and challenge, if not beat, Microsoft Internet Explorer sometime in the next 5 years.

Read More...

Google struggles with social skills

Google has decided that its social-networking strategy could use a few more followers.

Perhaps no one did a better job of capturing the Internet from its inception until, say, 2007, than Google. But over the last several years, an explosion in Web content generated by social media has created a new dimension of the Web that Google doesn't control--and sometimes can't even see. Google CEO Eric Schmidt used to think that Google could index the Web by 2300, but he told CNET last year that with the advent of social media, "I'm not even sure it's possible" to capture everything.

[read more]

DotBot

This is super cool. A C/Python crawler than tries to index the web and make that index, or at least lots of aggregate information about it, public. They explain it well:

We want to make the internet as open as possible. Currently only a select few corporations have a complete and useful index of the web. Our goal is to change that fact by crawling the web and releasing as much information about its structure and content as possible. We plan on doing this in a manner that will cover our costs (selling our index) and releasing it for free for the benefit of all webmasters. Obviously, this goal has many potential legal, financial, ethical and technical problems. So while we can't promise specific results, we can promise to work hard, share our results, and help make the internet a better and more open space.

Google Takes Aim at Beijing Censorship

CEO Schmidt Hopes to 'Apply Some Pressure,'

as Business Leaders Voice Concerns

About Growing China-U.S. Tension

DAVOS, Switzerland—Google Inc. Chief Executive Eric Schmidt defended his company's recent threat to pull out of China in some of his most extensive comments on the controversial move.

"We like what China is doing in terms of growth...we just don't like censorship," Mr. Schmidt said, speaking at the World Economic Forum's annual summit here. "We hope that will change and we can apply some pressure to make things better for the Chinese people."

Mr. Schmidt's comments brought into the open a debate that bubbled up in private conversations at Davos all week—concerns about growing tensions in the relationship between the U.S. and China.

Read More...

Google wants to see client addresses in DNS queries

Late Wednesday evening, Google employees posted an "Internet-Draft" outlining proposed changes to the DNS protocol that allow authoritative DNS servers to see the addresses of clients. This way, geographically distributed content delivery networks can tailor their answers to a specific client's network location. So a client from California would talk to a server in California, while a client in the Netherlands would talk to a server in the Netherlands [read more]

Facebook : Treasures or Time-Wasters?

Free $5 Gift Card from Babies R Us, Jan 28

Today only. Babies "R" Us is offering Free $5 Gift Card to those who beccome their fan on facebook. Click on the "Become a fan" near top. Limited quantities available. eGift Card can used online and in-store at Babies "R" Us and Toys "R" Us. eGift Card expires 2/20/10.

Today I also received an email:

====================================================================
Facebook and Twitter:
Treasures or Time-Wasters?
Get 20/20 Insight on Where to Spend Your Hours and Dollars
Upgrade to Pro and Save
SPECIAL OFFER
http://marketingprofs.chtah.com/a/tBLYZjlAJaJZfB74i9dAvrRcLrV/upgrade
====================================================================

When it comes to social media marketing, what tactics are right
for your company? Should you be using Facebook status updates to
drive traffic to your marketing materials or "friending" your
customers? Should you tweet links to promotional Web pages? Do
these tactics work or are they simply a waste of time?

In The State of Social Media Marketing we surveyed 5,140
marketers and business professionals on practically everything
you can imagine about their social media practices—including how
they use Facebook, Twitter, and other tools and (more importantly)
what has really worked for them. Then we sliced the data by B2B
vs. B2C, company size, industry, marketing budget, and more.
http://marketingprofs.chtah.com/a/tBLYZjlAJaJZfB74i9dAvrRcLrV/sosmm

Our research team gathered the facts you'll find in this book
from the best sources available. All 110 charts are strong enough
to stand up to our expert scrutiny. We know you'll agree this is
the best resource available for finding statistics, trends, and
charts to support and enhance your marketing efforts.

In this 242-page report you'll find tactical guidance like:
http://marketingprofs.chtah.com/a/tBLYZjlAJaJZfB74i9dAvrRcLrV/inside

* Three Winning Combinations of a Marketing Goal + a Social
Media Vehicle
* Twitter Tactics That Worked: B2C vs. B2B
* The Most Used Facebook Tactic For Driving Traffic
* Commonly Used but Counterproductive Social Media Tactics

You'll learn if it is possible to successfully create an
in-person event using only Twitter invites, if you should survey
your Facebook "Fans," and if contacting people who negatively
tweet about your brand is a good idea--plus a whole lot more.
http://marketingprofs.chtah.com/a/tBLYZjlAJaJZfB74i9dAvrRcLrV/sosmm

Search Engine Watch Awards 2009

Since 1997, Search Engine Watch (SEW) has been keeping marketers and site owners informed about the world of search engine marketing through daily news and expert advice. Combined with Search Engine Strategies (SES), the leading international conference series, SEW and SES have guided search marketers of all skill levels through the fast changing and complex world of search for more than 10 years.

Results for 2009

SearchEngine Blog

You can find fascinating news here about search engines.

Best of Apophenia

Look at her, a giant in her field. See her blogs, some are them are so interesting.
Here is also some of here recent pages.

Jonathan Zittrain: The Web as random acts of kindness

We had a small discussion in class about DNS and how it works. Here is a complimentary video that describes this amazing phenomenon with great storytelling of Jonathan Zittrain.



Don't forget comments ;]

Information Retrieval Engineer Trends

Information Retrieval Engineer Job Trends

This graph displays the percentage of jobs with your search terms anywhere in the job listing. Since May 2008, the following has occurred:

• Information Retrieval Engineer jobs increased 59%

About Information Retrieval Engineer Employment Trends

With Employment Trends, you can compare the frequency of job titles, companies, skills and industries in the US employment market. This Information Retrieval Engineer trend data is derived from millions of jobs indexed by Simply Hired, a job search engine.

Apple Sees New Money in Old Media

by Yukari Iwatani Kane and Ethan Smith
Friday, January 22, 2010

provided by

Steve Jobs's tablet device looks to repackage TV, magazines, just as iPod changed music sales.

With the new tablet device that is debuting next week, Apple Inc. Chief Executive Steve Jobs is betting he can reshape businesses like textbooks, newspapers and television much the way his iPod revamped the music industry—and expand Apple's influence and revenue as a content middleman.

In developing the device, Apple focused on the role the gadget could play in homes and in classrooms, say people familiar with the situation. The company envisions that the tablet can be shared by multiple family members to read news and check email in homes, these people say.

Read More...

Could Microsoft have fixed "Google hack" prior to attacks?

When Microsoft released the highly-publicized patch for Internet Explorer yesterday, the software giant admitted that it was aware of the flaw for quite some time. "As part of that investigation, we also determined that the vulnerability was the same as a vulnerability responsibly reported to us and confirmed in early September," Redmond disclosed on the Microsoft Security Response Center. Does this mean that Microsoft could have prevented the Chinese attacks on the 33 companies by releasing patches for Internet Explorer sooner, or at the very least, that the browser would not have been one of the vectors used? Not exactly, we learned after contacting three different security experts [read more]

Reporters put Twitter, Facebook to 'Big Brother' test

Five journalists plan to lock themselves away in a French farmhouse with access only to Facebook and Twitter to test the quality of news from the social networking and micro-blogging sites. Twitter and Facebook's use as news-breaking tools has been highlighted over the past year, particularly during opposition protests in Iran that many media described as a "twitterised revolution."[read more]

Bing Continues to Grow

According to Compete.com, Bing was able to amass 53,536,766 million unique visitors in December 2009 as Microsoft’s official search engine. Note that this data is for U.S. visitors, since Compete does not track international visits.

Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard

Apple + Microsoft?

"Once bitter rivals in the PC landscape, Apple and Microsoft could now partner to make Bing the default search engine of the iPhone, in an effort to counter the market dominance of search giant Google."

Click here for main article.

- Nery Chapeton ^_^"

Your server this evening? Bing!

Head to bing.com and search for "margarita recipes." Mixed into regular search results, you'll see results for margaritas from a database of recipes. "Bing pulls from a number of popular recipe websites (delish.com, MyRecipes.com, epicurious.com, etc.)"

Google v. Baidu: It’s Not Just about China

By Zhuomin Wu

Most publications, including us, noted yesterday that if Google has to lose its $600 million in revenues from China by pulling out of the country, then at the very least it’s won a lot in brand and integrity points by the public, English-language and scorched-earth way they did it. Google’s halo is so bright that even now Valley thought leaders are aghast at the idea that a publicly-traded, for-profit company could have had more than just an ethical motive at play [read more]

Microsoft to delete Bing users' IP addresses after 6 months

Microsoft will eliminate all data collected on Bing users after six months. The software giant said it sent a letter to the Article 29 Data Protection Working Party, a collection of the EU's top minds on data protection and privacy issues, today notifying it that the company would reduce the amount of time it stores IP addresses from searchers from 18 months to six months before deleting them.

Currently, Bing takes search data and separates the user's account information (such as e-mail or phone number) from the non-personal information (such as what the query was) and only after 18 months does Microsoft take the additional step of deleting the IP address and any other cross session IDs associated with the query. The only difference with the new policy is that the IP address will be removed completely at six months to provide greater user privacy protection; the rest of the process will remain the same, since Microsoft says it needs the data to make search better for consumers [read more]

Microsoft: Better Off Split Up?

Nearly 10 years ago, on April 3, 2000, U.S. District Court Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson ordered that Microsoft be broken up into two companies -- one to develop and sell operating systems, and the other to develop and sell other types of software.

Ten years on, Microsoft is struggling to maintain its dominance in a world in which Google thrives, Apple is resurgent, and the Internet has arguably become more important than operating systems. Where would Microsoft be today if it had been split in two a decade ago? There's no way to know, of course, but I think there's a reasonable chance that the two resulting companies would have thrived and been better able to fend off Google, Apple and other competitors.

Why would two Microsofts be better off today than one? The primary reason is that a split might have altered the corporate culture and led to different business and investment decisions. In 2000, Microsoft had no serious competition, either in operating systems or productivity suites. Both Windows and Microsoft Office were virtual monopolies. The company was a money machine with no serious challengers in sight [read more]

Chinese Attack on Google Among the Most Sophisticated Attack

A Chinese cyber-assault on Google and more than 30 other U.S. companies was the most sophisticated online attack ever seen outside of the defense industry, according to experts from anti-virus firm McAfee interviewed by Wired. Google announced on Tuesday that it would no longer censor information on its search portal per Chinese government rules, and may stop doing business in China entirely [read more]

Important News of the Week

By Norik Davtian, Jan 14
China has said that foreign internet firms are welcome to do business there "according to the law".


By Sara Javanmardi, Jan 13
American Dialect Society picks 'tweet,' 'Google' as top words for 2009, decade