An anonymous reader writes "Since 2006, Internet users in Argentina have been blocked from searching for information about some of the country's most notable individuals. Over 100 people have successfully secured temporary restraining orders that direct Google and Yahoo! Argentina to scrub the results of search queries. The list of censorship-seeking celebrities includes judges, public officials, models and actors, as well as the world-cup soccer star and national team head coach Diego Maradona. Try it yourself — compare the results for a Yahoo! Argentina search for Diego Maradona (0 results) to a search at Yahoo! Mexico and Google Argentina (both with millions of results)."

DeadlyBattleRobot writes "I've been using Usenet searches since about 1995 to get programming information, sample code, etc., mostly for those standard APIs that are never documented well enough in the official documentation. At first I used dejanews, and now Google Groups (Google bought dejanews). Over the last few years, I've noticed a steady decline in the quantity of search results on programming topics on Usenet from Google, increasing difficulty with their search UI and result pages, and today I find I'm completely unable to get a working Usenet search on their advanced group search page. I'm used to searching on 'microsoft.*' or 'comp.*,' sometimes supplemented with variations like '*microsoft*' or 'comp*.' As an example, try to find a post from the 1996-1998 time period on 'database' in either the comp.* or microsoft.* hierarchies, and if you can do it, please show your search expression. There should be thousands of results, but I'm getting the result 'Your search — database group:comp.* — did not match any documents.'"

ddelmonte writes "This Washington Post article examines a test conducted at UCLA. The test had two groups, young people who used the Internet, and older people who had never been online. Both groups were asked to do Internet searches and book reading tasks while their brain activity was monitored. 'We found that in reading the book task, the visual cortex — the part of the brain that controls reading and language — was activated,' Small said. 'In doing the Internet search task, there was much greater activity, but only in the Internet-savvy group.' He said it appears that people who are familiar with the Internet can engage in a much deeper level of brain activity. 'There is something about Internet searching where we can gauge it to a level that we find challenging,' Small said. In the aging brain, atrophy and reduced cell activity can take a toll on cognitive function. Activities that keep the brain engaged can preserve brain health and thinking ability. Small thinks learning to do Internet searches may be one of those activities."

mgessner writes "My kids are starting to want email accounts of their own. Even though gmail does a pretty good job of filtering spam, it's not perfect. Searching the web the other day for kid-safe email, I found a few sites that say they can do the job. What do others do for their kids' email? Pay for it? Just use a free service like gmail or yahoo? I don't pay for email accounts out of my own pocket, so I don't really see the need, but if the cost was a few bucks a month, I'd do it."

Google researchers are claiming that a newly developed approach to visual search may do for image searching what PageRank did for text search. "The research paper, 'PageRank for Product Image Search,' is focused on a subset of the images that the giant search engine has cataloged because of the tremendous computing costs required to analyze and compare digital images. To do this for all of the images indexed by the search engine would be impractical, the researchers said. Google does not disclose how many images it has cataloged, but it asserts that its Google Image Search is the 'most comprehensive image search on the Web.'"

"The other A. N. Other" writes "It seems that Microsoft has been unsuccessful with SP1 in preventing hackers from turning a pirated, non-genuine copy of Vista into genuine copies that pass activation. The article initially looked at two of the most popular hacks (OEM BIOS hack and the grace timer hack) but after a little digging ZDNet were able to transform a non-genuine install into a genuine one. 'After a few minutes of searching the darker corners of the Internet and a few seconds in the Command Prompt I was able to fool Windows into thinking that it was genuine.'"

BlueSalamander writes "Tim O'Reilly just did an interview with Devin Wenig, the CEO-designate of Reuters. With no great enthusiasm I started to read yet another interview on how the semantic web was going to make everything great for everybody. Wenig made some good points about the end of the latency wars in news and the beginning of the battle for automatically detecting linkages and connections in the news. Smart news, not just fast news. Great stuff — but just more words? Nope — a little searching revealed that Reuters just opened access to their corporate semantic technology crown jewels. For free. For anyone. Their Calais API lets you turn unstructured text into a formal RDF graph in about one second. I ran about 5,000 documents through it and played with a subset of them in RDF-Gravity. The results were impressive overall. Is this the start of the semantic web getting real? When big names and big money start to act, not just talk, it may be time to pay attention. Semantic applications anyone? The foundation appears to be here."

A new company, Delver, is offering a new take on web searching that plans to make your social network a part of the equation. "Liad Agmon, CEO of Delver, says that the site connects information about a user's social network with Web search results, "so you are searching the Web through the prism of your social graph." He explains that a person begins a search at Delver by typing in her name. Delver then crawls social-networking websites for widely available data about the user--such as a public LinkedIn profile--and builds a network of associated institutions and individuals based on that information. When the user enters a search query, results related to, produced by, or tagged by members of her social network are given priority. Lower down are results from people implicitly connected to the user, such as those relating to friends of friends, or people who attended the same college as the user. Finally, there may be some general results from the Web at the bottom."

An anonymous reader writes "I was recently laid off, and during several of the interviews looking for a new job as a mid level IT manager, I was asked "So, I can just Google your name and find some of your work?" The answer is "yes", but searching for my name doesn't really bring up many results compared to searching for my online nickname which I have been using for about a decade. I am very tempted just to put that nickname on my resume. Is the professional, albeit technical, world ready for this step? Where should I put it? At the top or somewhere in the body?" And the other problem- how hard will it be to get a job when your nickname is something ridiculous. Boy I wish I would have thought of that in 95 ;)

rokkaku writes "When the gadfly blogger Claremont Insider went searching for information about employee compensation on the city of Claremont web site, they never expected to find scans of pay stubs for all the employees. Nor did they expect the city attorney to demand that they remove copies of those pay stubs from their web site. They found it especially odd since, according to California law, the compensation of public employees is public information."

An anonymous reader sends us a Reuters story on a statement yesterday by Franco Frattini, the EU Justice and Security commissioner, who believes that Internet searches for bomb-making instructions should be blocked across the European Union. The commissioner "intend[s] to carry out a clear exploring exercise with the private sector... on how it is possible to use technology to prevent people from using or searching dangerous words like bomb, kill, genocide or terrorism..."

ttsiod writes "An internet connection is not always at hand. I wanted to install Wikipedia on my laptop to be able to carry it along with me on business trips. After trying and rejecting the normal (MySQL-based) procedure, I quickly hacked a much better one over the weekend, using open source tools. Highlights: (1) Very fast searching. (2) Keyword (actually, title words) based searching. (3) Search produces multiple possible articles, sorted by probability (you choose amongst them). (4) LaTeX based rendering for mathematical equations. (5) Hard disk usage is minimal: space for the original .bz2 file plus the index built through Xapian. (6) Orders of magnitude faster to install (a matter of hours) compared to loading the 'dump' into MySQL — which, if you want to enable keyword searching, takes days."

Joe Kauzlarich writes "The 'pattern' book has become a familiar genre for frequent readers of technical manuals. The idea is to sift through mountains of architectural or design schemes and then to categorize and catalogue the most frequent ideas and present their strengths and weaknesses. This type of book has been a success in software engineering, but can it translate to website design, where designers have everyday and frequent access to other designs? At worst, these books provide a common industry vocabulary (assuming it was read by everyone in the industry). How many people knew what a factory method referred to before Erich Gamma's Design Patterns was released? At best, as in the case of that 'original' software design patterns book, mountains of complex ideas are archived into a single reference and will sit within arm's reach for the rest of your life. So, is the web design discipline full of patterns that evade common sense?" Read below for the rest of Joe's review.

athloi writes to tell us usability expert Jakob Nielsen is stressing the importance of well-thought-out articles as opposed to off-the-cuff blog postings. "Blog postings will always be commodity content: there's a limit to the value you can provide with a short comment on somebody else's comments. Such postings are good for generating controversy and short-term traffic, and they're definitely easy to write. But they don't build sustainable value. Think of how disappointing it feels when you're searching for something and get directed to short postings in the middle of a debate that occurred years before, and is thus irrelevant."

time961 asks: "I use the Web extensively to research a wide variety of topics (weird, huh?). However, much of the time I end up printing out web pages and filing them on paper, because that's the easiest way I know to say 'OK, that was interesting, I'll hold on to it until I actually do something about this topic'. Often, I'll run across something that seems relevant to a long-term project or interest and just want to grab it without even reading the details. Paper is OK for reading, browsing, and scribbling, but it's hard to search, it's heavy, and it's wasteful (and I yearn for a day when browsers can reliably print what's on the screen, instead of cutting it off at the margin because some designer doesn't understand layout!). How do others deal with organizing the results of browsing?"

netbuzz writes "A problem with Google's Personalized Home Page feature has apparently cost a lot of users their carefully crafted doors to the Internet. And Google, which says it is frantically searching for a fix, also acknowledges that it is not sure if it will be able to recover the lost settings. 'The problem is the latest in what seems a regular stream of technical glitches and availability problems affecting Google's online services. In the past six months, Google services like Blogger, Gmail and Google Apps have all experienced significant technical issues that have left users fuming. The problems highlight one of the risks of relying on hosted applications providers, which offer to house software and its data for individuals and organizations. Google is one of the biggest cheerleaders for this software provisioning model, which many see as a viable option to the traditional approach of having users install applications on their own PCs and servers.'"

eldavojohn writes "I've heard a lot of talk about software being used to detect pirated media anywhere on the web, but haven't seen a lot of details. PhysOrg has a good article on one of the tools out there. Automatic Copyright Infringement Detection (ACID) boasts a patented technology dubbed 'meaning-based computing' that is reportedly capable of finding relationships among 1,000 different types of files. The important thing is that this is not tagging-based searching. 'Autonomy's search technology uses automatic hyperlinking and link clustering that the company claims isn't built into keyword search engines. According to the company, this technology allows computers to perform searches with greater context, so it finds a wider range of related documents or research citations than is possible from keyword searches.' For more details on how this magic works, check out Autonomy's patent and the many patents by its subdivision, Virage."

eldavojohn writes "Random House & HarperCollins have agreed to allow book browsing and searching on all their books. According to the article, 'Book publishers are to trying to update their businesses as more young readers consume media via the Web, a trend that already has affected the music, movie and newspaper industries.' I am definitely looking forward to more publishers following suit. It's not that far of a stretch to imagine a person searching for a book, finding something else and then buying both books."

John Suda writes "It's been over five years in the making and its nearly perfect. No, Im not referring to Microsoft's vast new operating system named Windows Vista, but to the reference book Windows Vista: the Missing Manual, by author David Pogue. The book is the latest, and perhaps best, in the Missing Manual series published by Pogue Press / O'Reilly Media, Inc. The Missing Manual series is the benchmark of quality for computer manuals. Unless youre a system administrator, programmer, or uber-geek, this is probably the only reference source you'll need to learn Microsofts Vista." Read below for the rest of John's review.

Trent Lucier writes "Google depends on new content constantly being added to the web. No Google initiative has done a better job at encouraging new content than the AdSense/AdWords programs. Google Advertising Tools by Harold Davis is a book that teaches you to use these tools effectively." Read the rest of Trent's review.