World-Shaker

View high resolution

Seriously.

How to Remove Your Social Media from Google Search →

First you’ll need to copy the URL for your profile. Using my Twitter profile as an example, the link would look like this: https://twitter.com/c0z. Once you have the link you’ll need open Google’s Content Removal page — you may need to log in to Google services again when you get there. Click the Create new removal request button and paste the link. On the next page that loads, you’ll be able to remove cached content associated with the page you’re having removed. In order for Google to allow this, you’ll need to provide a piece of information that appears on the cached version but not the live version.

Outstanding reference.

How to Remove Your Google Search History Before Google's New Privacy Policy Takes Effect →

On March 1st, Google will implement its new, unified privacy policy, which will affect data Google has collected on you prior to March 1st as well as data it collects on you in the future. Until now, your Google Web History (your Google searches and sites visited) was cordoned off from Google’s other products. This protection was especially important because search data can reveal particularly sensitive information about you, including facts about your location, interests, age, sexual orientation, religion, health concerns, and more. If you want to keep Google from combining your Web History with the data they have gathered about you in their other products, such as YouTube or Google Plus, you may want to remove all items from your Web History and stop your Web History from being recorded in the future.

Here’s how you can do that.

Click through for the instructions :o)

"Apple’s release of iOS 5 for both new devices and iPhones dating back to 2009 has had a significant impact on its integration partners, with Twitter noting a 25 percent increase in new accounts and Wolfram Alpha stating that Siri boosted its query volume 20 fold, disrupting the status quo in search and web services."

— Apple’s iOS 5 boosts Twitter signups 25%, Wolfram Alpha searches by 20x

"

High school and college students may be ‘digital natives,’ but they’re wretched at searching… In 1955, we wondered why Johnny can’t read. Today the question is, why can’t Johnny search?

Who’s to blame? Not the students. If they’re naive at Googling, it’s because the ability to judge information is almost never taught in school. Under 2001’s No Child Left Behind Act, elementary and high schools focus on prepping their pupils for reading and math exams. And by the time kids get to college, professors assume they already have this skill. The buck stops nowhere. This situation is surpassingly ironic, because not only is intelligent search a key to everyday problem-solving, it also offers a golden opportunity to train kids in critical thinking.

"

— Clive Thompson on why kids can’t search and the importance of educating against the filter bubble (via curiositycounts)

View high resolution

And this perfectly illustrates why I only ever use Google.

(Source: reddit.com)

Google: 2/3rds of our mobile search comes from Apple’s iOS →

emergentfutures:

Paul Higgins: Certainly now having an iPad means that I use search on my Android phone  much less. I use the HTC phone I have as a wifi hotspot and search on the iPad because it is easier to do so.

.bijan:

whoa, this is surprising. 

Crazy statistic.

"Google is where we go for answers. People used to go elsewhere or, more likely, stagger along not knowing. Nowadays you can’t have a long dinner-table argument about who won the Oscar for that Neil Simon movie where she plays an actress who doesn’t win an Oscar; at any moment someone will pull out a pocket device and Google it."

— How Google Dominates Us

View high resolution

futurejournalismproject:

Worldwide, we conduct 88,000,000,000 searches per month on Google.

That’s billion, with a ‘b’.

Google has begun testing an integration of voice search with the Google.com search engine.

Helpful tipster Matt Schlicht first spotted the feature earlier Monday afternoon. Voice search detects your computer’s microphone settings and can open up a “Speak now” widget to detect your words and transcribe them into a search query.

From an accessibility standpoint, this is great.

(via Voice Search Being Tested on Google.com [SCREENSHOTS])

Microsoft Bing Nips at Google with 13.6% Search Share →

Microsoft’s Bing search engine grabbed 13.6 percent search share through February, up from 13.1 percent from January as the company continues to peck away at Google’s search kingdom.

According to Google Analytics, and I can screencap this if you want, the total number of people who have visited my Tumblog since I started tracking (out of thousands of people) who have found me via Bing, is one.

Google Search Becomes More Social, Integrates Flickr, Twitter & Quora →

The first major change is that Google Social Search results will no longer appear only at the bottom of the page, but will instead be “blended” throughout the page. This is done through an annotation system that lets you know when a friend has shared a specific link or search result. If your friend writes a blog about how to create honey, that result will have an annotation that your friend has “shared this,” either via Google or through one of Google’s three major social integrations.

That leads into the second update to social search: a vast increase in its appearance in search. Any content shared by your friends on Quora, Flickr and Twitter can appear as a social annotation in search results. If a friend has tweeted a link to a Mashable article and your Google account is connected to Twitter, you’re likely to see an annotation saying that your friend “shared this on Twitter.”

Google: Bing Is Cheating, Copying Our Search Results →

Google has run a sting operation that it says proves Bing has been watching what people search for on Google, the sites they select from Google’s results, then uses that information to improve Bing’s own search listings. Bing doesn’t deny this.

As a result of the apparent monitoring, Bing’s relevancy is potentially improving (or getting worse) on the back of Google’s own work. Google likens it to the digital equivalent of Bing leaning over during an exam and copying off of Google’s test.

“I’ve spent my career in pursuit of a good search engine,” says Amit Singhal, a Google Fellow who oversees the search engine’s ranking algorithm. “I’ve got no problem with a competitor developing an innovative algorithm. But copying is not innovation, in my book.”

Bing doesn’t deny Google’s claim. Indeed, the statement that Stefan Weitz, director of Microsoft’s Bing search engine, emailed me yesterday as I worked on this article seems to confirm the allegation:

As you might imagine, we use multiple signals and approaches when we think about ranking, but like the rest of the players in this industry, we’re not going to go deep and detailed in how we do it. Clearly, the overarching goal is to do a better job determining the intent of the search, so we can guess at the best and most relevant answer to a given query.

Opt-in programs like the [Bing] toolbar help us with clickstream data, one of many input signals we and other search engines use to help rank sites. This “Google experiment” seems like a hack to confuse and manipulate some of these signals.

View high resolution

Ever wonder what a map of the U.S. would look like if all of the states’ names were altered to match the suggestions offered by Google’s autocomplete search algorithm? Wonder no longer.

The United States of America According to Google Autocomplete

Why We Desperately Need a New (and Better) Google →

This semester, my students at the School of Information at UC-Berkeley researched the VC system from the perspective of company founders. We prepared a detailed survey; randomly selected 500 companies from a venture database; and set out to contact the founders. Thanks to Reid Hoffman, we were able to get premium access to LinkedIn—which was very helpful and provided a wealth of information.  But some of the founders didn’t have LinkedIn accounts, and others didn’t respond to our LinkedIn “inmails”. So I instructed my students to use Google searches to research each founder’s work history, by year, and to track him or her down in that way.

But it turns out that you can’t easily do such searches in Google any more. Google has become a jungle: a tropical paradise for spammers and marketers. Almost every search takes you to websites that want you to click on links that make them money, or to sponsored sites that make Google money. There’s no way to do a meaningful chronological search.

We ended up using instead a web-search tool called Blekko. It’s a new technology and is far from perfect; but it is innovative and fills the vacuum of competition with Google (and Bing).