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Google is ‘white bread for the mind’
As the morning news today claimed that most students in the UK are guilty of plagiarism and copy and paste huge chunks of material found on the internet, a UK professor has criticised the effect that Google is having on students, calling the search engine ‘white bread for the mind’ Tara Brabazon of the University of Brighton believes that the easy access to information that Google offers students is taking away their critical abilities….
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Survey reveals role of search engines in travel purchases
The internet is a major source for information on travel in the UK, and consumers are using search engines ‘in more sophisticated ways’, according a new Google/comScore study. In the first three months of last year, around 20m people in the UK used search engines to look for travel related information, and many are taking their time to find out what they need to know before booking their holidays. The…
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Open-source search engine launches
Wikia Search, the new open-source search engine from Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, launched yesterday in alpha. According to Wales though, users shouldn’t be expecting too much from the site just yet, and the actual search results ‘suck’ at the moment. He predicts that it may take a year or two before it can hope to compete with Google. Like Jason Calacanis’ Mahalo, Wikia Search aims to use human editors to…
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Click fraud rate reaches 16.2% in Q3 – ClickForensics
According to click fraud monitoring firm ClickForensics, the overall industry rate hit 16.2 in the third quarter of the year. This is an increase on 13.8% for the same period in 2006, and is also up on the previous quarter’s average of 15.8%. Meanwhile, the click fraud problem has worsened for ads on search engine content networks including Google AdSense and the Yahoo Publisher Network, increasing by roughly 3% to…
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Google removes malware sites from search results
Google has carried out a purge of its search engine rankings, removing thousands of malware sites that were appearing in search results for hundreds of keyword searches. Google, along with Microsoft Live Search and Yahoo had been subjected to a coordinated campaign to spread malware through results on these three and other search engines. US web security firm Sunbelt Software Distribution had broken the news on Monday this week, informing…
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Google experiments with Digg-style voting on search results
Google is currently testing Digg style voting on its search results pages – giving users the chance to re-order the search engine’s rankings. This is currently to be seen on the Google Labs site, where proposed new developments to the search engine are available for people to try out – other experiments include left hand search navigation and plotting search results on timelines and maps. With the voting system, users…
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True Knowledge unveils its natural language search engine
UK based True Knowledge is developing a ‘radical new approach to search engine technology’ and launched its new natural language search engine this week. Search engines normally do a pretty good job of returning accurate results to keyword based searches. But because they understand natural language, you can't ask Google or Yahoo straightforward yes or no question, just search through results until you find the information you need. True Knowledge…
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Search engines vital for brand building and driving offline sales
A major study into the role of search engines in generating web traffic for consumer packaged goods has found that a presence on search engines is vital for building brand awareness and driving offline sales. The US focused survey looked at Consumer packaged goods (CPG) which includes baby care products, homecare, personal care and packaged food. The study was conducted by SEMPO in partnership with comScore, Yahoo and Procter &…
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Yahoo launches new search features in the UK
Yahoo today launched Search Assist in the UK, a handy piece of technology which helps users complete their search queries by understanding the intentions behind web users’ searches. The company cites recent research conducted for the search engine by Harris Interactive, which shows that, while 99% of web users use search engines to find information online, just 15% find what they are looking for on their first search, and most…
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