Category: The search engine industry

Google has added a new service for its Google Account holders that gives them an overview over all the Google services they have signed up for.

Google adds links to online music and plans opening an ebooks store.

The concept of network neutrality is that all internet content should be treated equally. This means that the content is treated and transmitted in the same way regardless of who uploaded it, who is downloading it, or what type of data it is. Advocates see network neutrality as the fundamental right of all users to have equal access to the internet, having control of what content they view and the tools that they use to view that content.

Internet service providers (ISPs) act as a gateway, giving users access to the internet for everything they use it for (emailing, VoIP phone calls, web browsing, file sharing). However, there are fears that ISPs are acting as gatekeepers and are filtering internet content, breaching the fundamental principle of network neutrality.

Google adds link to selected automatically translated search results in Non-English versions of the search engine.

Although the search engine news may be dominated by the big three (Google, Yahoo! and Bing), there is a lot of search engine innovation elsewhere as well. Some of these alternative search engines are looking for beta testers.

Real time indexing has become the new holy grail in the search engine business. Pandia takes a look at how Google is doing.

Google Book Search, Google’s ambitious project to scan all books in existance, has caused a lot of controversy. The most common argument is that Google could get a monopoly on accedd to a large part of our common cultural heritage. Another problem is that indexing books and making them available online — even as excerpts — could be construed as copyright enfringement.

If you are a librarian, if you are interested in intellectual propety rights or if you just have a keen interest in books, you might want to dig deeper to make up your own mind about this. Google Book Search Bibliography is a good place to start.

Burma (Myanmar) launches a search engine contest. Pandia suspects it is a ploy designed to develop censorship technology.