Even with my current job as a systems analyst, a software developer/programmer, I felt a need to document my learning, so I have something to always look back to, especially with my advancing age. But no, I'm not that old yet...
I came across this nice and useful feature from Google, which is Google Alerts.
Anytime a certain keyword or word combination is searched, you can receive a notification, and you can set that alert in several ways: (1) as it happens, (2) daily, and (3) weekly.
You can also set the number of results, which can be (1) 20, or (2) 50.
As in all things so wonderful (I say it is!), don't get too excited.
You just might be overwhelmed.
Test the waters, and decide your comfortable level. You're good to go!
I've just set up my alerts of 7 keywords, and I'm starting to enjoy it. Hopefully, the main purpose of it being a useful tool be fulfilled in me.
I was looking up on the status of Google in China, and seems like the news is not that much. Anyway, this news article may already be a couple of weeks old, but some details may yet be unknown to some, if not many.
I would like to know what's your reaction to this world event. I say that it is a world event, as everybody is watching. Read on.
---------- A Chinese official has blasted Google for "violating its written promise", following the U.S. company's decision to move its search traffic to Hong Kong while leaving just its sales and research and development teams in China.
According to a China Daily news report filed Tuesday, the unnamed official from the Internet bureau under the country's State Council Information Office, said Google went back on its agreement to filter its search engine. His allegation was unleashed four hours after Google announced in a blog post its move to Hong Kong.
"Google has violated its written promise it made when entering the Chinese market, by stopping [the] filtering of its [search] service and blaming China in insinuation for alleged hacker attacks," the official said. "This is totally wrong. We're uncompromisingly opposed to the politicization of commercial issues, and express our discontent and indignation to Google for its unreasonable accusations and conducts."
According to one Chinese analyst, Google's stance smacks of "big power" gestures by Western countries harking back to the 19th century in attempts to prise the once-closed economy.
The unnamed commentator, who wrote in the Hong Kong-based Chinese newspaper Sing Tao Daily, noted that China's top leaders have themselves stressed the issue of opening the country up to the world. Google, however, is challenging the Chinese government's sovereignty by demanding it accepts Google's definition of "opening up", he said.
BEIJING: Google's main English-language website was inaccessible for more than two hours in China, state media reported, as Beijing continued to pressure the Internet giant to eliminate pornography.
The outage occurred Wednesday night, the China Daily newspaper said, adding that its Chinese-language website google.cn was unaffected.
A Google China spokesperson could not immediately be reached by AFP.
However, the company's China public relations firm confirmed that Google had received complaints from Internet users.
"Google did receive reports from users yesterday that google.com was not accessible for some time. But we have no further comment on that," said a spokeswoman with Ogilvy, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
The official China Daily said a Google spokesman confirmed the service cut in comments to the newspaper but would not speculate on the cause.
The paper said the outage also cut off access to Gmail, Google's email service.
Google's sites in both languages appeared to be working normally on Thursday.
Google promised last week to work harder to eliminate pornography from its Chinese Web searches after a government Internet watchdog accused the firm of continuing to allow such results.
China has vowed to crack down on Internet content that it deems unhealthy, which has included pornography and information critical of authorities, a censorship system dubbed the "Great Firewall of China".
Computer makers were notified by the government recently that all personal computers sold from July 1 must be shipped with anti-pornography software, a move that has led to widespread censorship fears both inside and outside China.
China has the world's largest online population at nearly 300 million Web users and the country's Communist Party rulers have struggled to control a proliferation of online content in recent years.
BEIJING — Google Inc. said Friday that it would step up efforts to stop pornography reaching users in China after a mainland watchdog found the search engine turned up a large number of links to obscene and vulgar sites.
"We have been continually working to deal with pornographic content, and material that is harmful to children, on the Web in China," a statement from the company said.
It added that it had renewed efforts to keep the Internet in China clean after noticing criticism posted Thursday to the Web site of the mainland watchdog, the China Internet Illegal Information Reporting Center.
The watchdog said that despite official warnings, Google was still failing to "filter pornographic contents from its search engine results according to China's relevant laws and regulations." It said tests found that the search engine provided links to a large number of lewd and vulgar pictures, videos and articles, though it gave no specific examples.
China, which has the world's largest population of Internet users at more than 298 million, also has one of the world's tightest controls over the Internet. The government bans online pornography and this year launched a nationwide crackdown that led to the closing of more than 1,900 Web sites.
Google, headquartered in Mountain View, California, has struggled to expand in China, where it says it has about 30 percent of the search market. China's homegrown Baidu search engine remains the most popular, with about 60 percent of the market. - AP
A new research report identifies the most dangerous Internet search words
Searches using "music lyrics" and "free" attract malicious software sites
Expert: "We've seen a dramatic increase in malware"
Dangerous topics include screen savers, free games and "work from home"
Searches for words such as "free," "music" and "download" put users at increased risk for malicious software.
HONG KONG, China (CNN) -- If you like to search for "music lyrics" or "free" things, you are engaging in risky cyber behavior. And "free music downloads" puts 20 percent of Web surfers in harm's way of malicious software, known as "malware."
A new research report by U.S.-based antivirus software company McAfee has identified the most dangerous Internet search words that place users on pages with a higher likelihood of cyber attacks.
The study examined 2,600 popular keywords on five major search engines -- Google, Yahoo, Live, AOL and Ask -- and analyzed 413,000 Web pages.
"Just in the past year, we've seen a pretty dramatic shift in what we call malware," David DeWalt, president and CEO of McAfee, told Richard Quest for CNN International's "Quest Means Business."
"It went from a hacker in a basement, to organized cybercrime to now, literally, terrorism and other forms of organized geopolitical attacks," he said.
Categories that had the highest risk of run-ins with malware: screen savers, free games, work from home, Olympics, videos, celebrities, music and news.
Riskiest terms: word unscrambler, lyrics, myspace, free music downloads, phelps, game cheats, printable fill-in puzzles, free ringtones and solitaire.
The study shows how cyber criminals are increasing in sophistication.
"We can have massive outages with a hacker in the basement. We saw that recently with the 'Twitter worm,' a 17-year-old in his basement basically perpetrated tens of millions of (computer) outages. Or, we can see an organized attack bringing down infrastructure," DeWalt said.
Antivirus software companies lag behind the latest developments by cyber criminals, he said.
"We've been way behind, that's true for the entire world, the global infrastructure of the Internet has grown dramatically -- 50 percent of the world's PCs are unprotected," DeWalt said.
Despite the increased risk, DeWalt doesn't believe there will be a "cyber Armageddon" causing widespread destruction of computers and Internet infrastructure.
"Last week, you saw President Obama in the United States talk about a major cyber-security initiative sponsored by the government, other governments are sponsoring this as well," DeWalt said. "I think we're learning this can happen, and if we get ahead of it, we can prevent it."
SAN FRANCISCO - Microsoft on Thursday unveiled a new search engine, Bing, designed to intuitively understand what people are searching for on the Internet and challenge online king Google.
The US software colossus refers to Bing as a "Decision Engine" and said it will begin deploying it online at bing.com in the coming days.
"Today, search engines do a decent job of helping people navigate the Web and find information, but they don't do a very good job of enabling people to use the information they find," said Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer.
"When we set out to build Bing, we grounded ourselves in a deep understanding of how people really want to use the Web."
Bing search employs semantic technology intended to help it recognize not just key words but what is intended by phrases typed in as online queries, according to Microsoft.
Bing is built to "go beyond today's search experience" by recognizing content and adapting to query types, according to the Redmond, Washington-based company.
Bing takes aim at Microsoft arch-rival Google, which dominates the online search market. Bing will replace MSN Live search, which has languished in a distant third place behind Google and Yahoo!.
THERE has been plenty of buzz online about Wolfram Alpha (www.wolframalpha.com), a unique online tool that tech pundits say could beat Google Search at its own game.
Unlike conventional search engines, Wolfram Alpha does not generate links to information from across the web to answer your search query. Instead, it tries to understand what you’ve asked and presents factual data from a database of curated content (currently only 10TB in size). Thanks to its algorithmic-rich backbone, Wolfram Alpha can present its results in tables, charts, diagrams and other visual means as an answer to your query. And there’s no guesswork needed to ascertain the data since it comes from valid sources.
Here’s what we found when we compared the results generated by Wolfram Alpha with other search engines.
Search: GDP of Singapore
>> Wolfram Alpha: In its results, Wolfram Alpha presented the 2007 estimate of our GDP (gross domestic product) and charted a useful graph of our country’s GDP growth overtime. It also displayed relevant information, like the country’s inflation and employment rates.
>> Google Search (www.google.com.sg): The first link on Google’s search results was a sponsored link by a bank — hardly useful. Next in line was a link to the website for the United State’s Central Intelligence Agency, which has Singapore’s 2007 GDP figures.
Search: Earthquakes in Indonesia
>> Wolfram Alpha: It displayed a graphic map littered with dots pinpointing the areas in Indonesia that are affected by earthquakes. The dots vary in sizes to illustrate the magnitude of the earthquake. With the aid of simple drop-down menus, you can filter the earthquakes by magnitude and by the period of time they occurred.
>> Yahoo (sg.search.yahoo.com): Related links to news stories from different media outlets formed the mainstay of Yahoo’s search results.
Search: Big Mac
>> Wolfram Alpha: It’s not localised yet, so Wolfram Alpha won’t recognise food items like rojak or nasi lemak. In fact, for a little surprise, see its response when you query this: “Do you speak Malay?” So, we fed McDonald’s almost universal Big Mac into Wolfram Alpha and were treated to a detailed list of the fast food’s nutritional values.
>> MicrosoftLive Search (search.live.com): Two Wikipedia entries on the Big Mac made the top of the list on the search engine’s results, with the link to the official UK website for McDonald’s appearing at number three on the result list.
Search: Singapore weather in May
>> Wolfram Alpha: Not only did Wolfram Alpha state the average temperature and range of conditions, humidity and wind speed, it also provided charts indicating cloud cover and temperature.
>> rednano.sg (www.rednano.sg): The local search engine churned out a list of largely irrelevant results. Under its web results tab, it displayed a link to news stories on Indonesia and China, followed by a blog listing “wild happenings in singapore” while under its news results page, it listed links to technology-related sites. Huh?
Wolfram Alpha won’t quite render search engines obsolete. Its strength lies in providing you ways to crunch factual data and manipulate it to your liking. Because it lacks information on pop culture or news, users who try to use it like a conventional search engine might be disappointed.
This “computational knowledge engine” can be daunting because it isn’t very flexible with processing certain phrases or queries. We sometimes had to rearrange our queries to get the right results.
However, Wolfram Alpha holds much potential and is a step in the right direction for a web tool that serves as an encyclopedia on steroids.
Microsoft might be unveiling a new search engine next week. According to the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), Microsoft plans to demonstrate the search engine, code-named Kumo, at D: All Things Digital, a conference organised by the WSJ. Said to be a revamp of Microsoft’s Live Search, Kumo aims to provide a better web search experience by shortening and grouping search results into relevant categories.
From TODAYOnline.com, Tech – Friday, 22-May-2009; see the source article here.
WASHINGTON - YouTube just keeps getting bigger. The Google-owned video-sharing site said late Wednesday in a blog post that 20 hours of video are being uploaded to YouTube every minute.
It said that in mid-2007, six hours of video were being uploaded to the site every minute. It grew to 15 hours in January of this year and now stands at 20 hours a minute, YouTube said.
"Let's see if we can get to 24 hours -- a full day's worth of video uploaded every minute," wrote Ryan Junee, a YouTube product manager.
Google bought YouTube in 2006 for 1.65 billion dollars but the Mountain View, California-based Internet search and advertising giant has not yet managed to turn a profit with the site despite its massive global popularity.
YouTube has been gradually adding professional content such as full-length televisionshows and movies to its vast trove of amateur video offerings in a bid to attract advertisers.
It recently announced partnerships with Sony Pictures and other Hollywood studios and rolled out new platforms for watching television shows and movies.
MILLIONS of web users have Google’s search engine as the homepage on their computer. It’s the first thing they see when they switch their machine on and their first port of call whenever they need to find the answer to a question.
Such is Google’s dominance of the search space that any attempt to launch a rival platform is often met with a mixture of bemusement and sympathy. The problem, as many companies quickly discover, is that it’s almost impossible to beat Google at its own game. Instead, what’s needed is a fresh approach to search which can supplement Google while also carving out its own niche.
That’s the strategy taken by Wolfram Alpha, a search engine that launches on Monday. It’s the brainchild of Stephen Wolfram, a British physicist and former child prodigy who, in 1988, created the Mathematica computer program used by scientists, researchers and engineers to number-crunch huge volumes of complex data.
Wolfram Alpha is designed to provide clear answers to specific questions. For instance, a Google search for, say, the nutritional values of a Big Mac returns 123,000 results, which web users then have to sift through to find the facts they want. A similar search on Wolfram Alpha will, in theory, return a single answer, detailing the calories, fat content and salt levels in the McDonald’s burger.
That’s because Wolfram Alpha doesn’t crawl the web for its answer, as Google does. Rather, it searches its own huge database of factual data to find the correct information.
“Fifty years ago, when computers were young, people assumed that they’d quickly be able to handle these kinds of things, and that one would be able to ask a computer any factual question and have it compute the answer,” says Dr Wolfram. “But it didn’t work out that way. Computers have been able to do many remarkable and unexpected things. But not that. I always thought, though, that eventually it should be possible. And a few years ago, I realised I was finally in a position to try to do it.”
Indeed, says Mr Conrad Wolfram, Stephen’s brother and the project’s strategic director, creating the database that underpins the search engine has been a “huge undertaking”.
“It has taken three to four years to generate this database,” he says. “But because we use Mathematica to help structure this information, you could say we’ve been working on it for even longer.”
The secret, says Conrad Wolfram, is in the value that’s been added to this data. “We believe in human expertise, which is very different to traditional search - that relies much more on computer science to pick out results,” he says. “The database is a structured environment in which we’ve added meaning and computational knowledge to the data. This allows it to come up with an answer to the question a user asks.”
Much of the hype and speculation surrounding the launch of Wolfram Alpha has framed the website as a potential “Google killer”. But Wolfram Alpha is designed to be “highly complementary” to other search engines rather than a direct competitor, says Conrad.
“If you use a search engine, it’s a bit like a librarian who gives you a whole set of papers that you need to look through to get the answer. If you use Wolfram Alpha, it’s more like having your own personal analyst who takes the question you’ve got and tries to come back with a specific set of answers unique to your question.”
Wolfram Alpha, he says, will grow in accuracy and scope as more people use it. He says that experts will analyse aggregated, anonymised data about searches performed and the success rate of results, to learn how people are using the search tool and find ways of improving the service.
Drawing relationships between complex data has long been a holy grail for web developers. For years, companies have been working on building a so-called “semantic web”, in which data contained within webpages is labelled with keywords, or digital “tags”, to associate meanings to information and enable it to be interpreted in a wider context.
But that’s a difficult idea to implement. “It’s hard to get people to tag their data in this way, and no consensus has been reached on what tags to use, says Wolfram. “Our approach is different - to suck the data in so that we can structure it, curate it, tag it with meaning and make it computable.”
It is here that Wolfram Alpha could really make a name for itself, becoming a “destination website” for students and researchers seeking an easy way to distil complex information into manageable chunks, which can then act as a springboard for further research and discovery.
Even Google, the old master of web search, has seen the potential of this, launching a tool called Google Squared that allows users to type in a specific query - such as London boroughs, or United States Presidents - and receive a list of information that relates to that search term. For example, the list of London boroughs aims to list all boroughs alphabetically, along with links to relevant websites and information about population and the leader of the council. The results are presented in a grid, and users can remove columns of unwanted information or add a column of data they would prefer to see.
Wolfram Alpha, it seems, is ruffling a few feathers. “We’re at the start of a very long project,” says Conrad Wolfram. “We’re not going to have everything right to start with, but I think people will find Wolfram Alpha a very powerful system, and it’s going to get a lot more powerful still. Many new things will come over the months ahead.” THE DAILY TELEGRAPH
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