Google has been granted a patent to a technology that will track mouse movements to deliver relevant results. The title is “System and method for modulating search relevancy using pointer activity monitoring”. Here is how the abstract for the patent describes it:

A method and system of modulating search result relevancy use various types of user browsing activities. In particular, a client assistant residing in a client computer monitors movements of a user controlled pointer in a web browser, e.g., when the pointer moves into a predefined region and when it moves out of the predefined region. A server then determines a relevancy value between an informational item associated with the predefined region and a search query according to the pointer hover period. When preparing a new search result responsive to a search query, the server re-orders identified informational items in accordance with their respective relevancy values such that more relevant items appear before less relevant ones. The server also uses the relevancy values to determine and/or adjust the content of an one-box result associated with a search query.

It means that if a user quickly moves his mouse towards a result, Google will know that it is relevant to him.  If a user hovers over a result or an ad then it means that the user found the result or ad interesting.

Sex.com is the most expensive domain for the obvious reasons.  It was last sold for 14 million USD !!!!

Now it is up for sale again. The best people in business Sedo are brokering the sale.

From the Sedo press  report

Sedo, the leading online domain marketplace and broker of super premium domain names, today announced that it has entered into an agreement with Escom, LLC to privately broker the sale of Sex.com, widely considered to be the world’s most valuable domain name, as well as two related trademark registrations with the United States Patent and Trademark Office.

Sedo is a great place to buy, park and sell domains. You can register and sell it for a higher price later on. It is a good business.

It has been quite a while since Google have started displaying related searches for the keywords you have searched.

I just noticed that they are showing related ads (Sponsored Links) for the keywords you searched. It is a interesting feature for Adwords advertisers who can target users searching Google using related keywords

This might be old news, but I noticed this feature today.

Shown on the left is the screenshot of the search result page of  “World cup”

After both StatCounter and Net Applications placed Google’s Chrome on the podium at the third spot worldwide, StatCounter has launched results for the US market.

Here, too, Chrome has captured the third spot overtaking Apple’s Safari. Internet Explorer remains the favourite amongst American users with 52% and FireFox with 28.5%. Chrome and Safari have 8.97 and 8.88 market share, respectively.

However, worldwide the gap between Chrome and Safari is wider with them having the market share of  9.4% and 4%, respectively. Internet Explorer has 53% and Firefox has 31%.

Google Chrome’s achievement is worth applauding as it is a new comer in the browser market.

Maybe promoting it on the site with most traffic (google.com) and second highest (Facebook.com) as shown in the above pic has done the trick.

According to advertising network Chitika, when Googlers fail to find what they are searching for , they move on to yahoo, Ask.com to search for it.

The interesting part is that Googlers  prefer Ask more than much fancied Microsoft’s Bing. Yahoo grabs nearly 50% of the share while ask.com 30%. Bing manages only 16%. However, we don’t know what the trend is as Bing was launched only a year ago. We don’t know whose share is going up and whose share is going down.

We all Google. You very well know that Google collects search keywords anonymously to give search suggestions to a particular region or worldwide. More than that they use it to help advertisers using adwords to get the list of keywords they can advertise on.  Well this is acceptable.

But due you know (via Datamation) that google uses your brain to help develop its own technology.

As you probably know, Google is in the book-scanning business. The company works with libraries and publications (including the New York Times) to scan and digitize book collections. It then posts these texts on the Internet and sells advertising against it. Scanning books is like printing money.

he challenge is that computers aren’t as good as humans at recognizing words. Fortunately, optical character recognition (OCR) systems nowadays are at least smart enough to know what they don’t know — they can identify words that they can’t read, or can’t recognize with certainty.

But what should Google do with those unrecognizable mystery words?

You know those squiggly or otherwise deliberately warped or obscured words you have to type in to “prove you’re human”? They’re called CAPTCHA systems, and they make the world a better place by thwarting software robots that would hack, exploit and abuse various software services if they could.

Less than a year ago, Google bought an interesting variant of CAPTCHA called reCAPTCHA. When you “prove you’re human” at a site using reCAPTCHA, one of the words you identify for access is actually one of those mystery words Google’s OCR computers can’t read. (The other word is known by the system, and used for actually proving you’re human.)

They’re sending the same word to other users, and use the general consensus to identify the word. The results are fed back to the scanning effort, bringing word recognition very close to 100%.

Nice work! Thanks to your brain’s amazing ability to recognize words, Google is making a fortune in the book scanning racket!

Datamation have also written about how Google uses your home.

However, these is acceptable if you look what Facebook does. It uses your private data , what you ‘Like’, etc and shares it with advertisers and third party websites to target you with offers.

Free blogging platforms like Blogger and WordPress have been a boon to many people who had little or no knowledge about web designing an programming. It was just add gadgets/widgets or search Google to find minor hacks or tweaks for things these platforms didn’t provide any direct help.

However, this is going to change. The search engine giant Google has announced that Website’s Page Speed will be a factor in its search ranking. It is currently applicable for English searches from Google.com only and that it only carries little weight in comparison with relevancy. Knowing Google, it wouldn’t be long before they make page speed a significant part of the algorithm for ranking websites.

This means that every serious blogger will have to learn basics for web designing and programming in order to make his site outrank others. There are many tools for help. They have been mentioned on the google blog post like Firefox addon Page Speed, Yahoo’s ySlow, etc.

These tools will only help you find out issues with your site and give suggestions. You will have to make the suitable changes yourself and for that you will need learn the basics at least .

Some suggestions for improving site speed is that serve images from your own server to minimise DNS look ups, remove unused codes and use ads from networks that load quickly.

Many professional web developers are going to gain from this as many people would want their services.

More people visited Facebook  than Google, gaining the No 1 spot in the US the previous week, according to hitwise. Google does not minds that as long as these people are using Chrome to visit the site.

Google whose revenues comes from advertising dollars by means of cpc and cpm ads from its search results and publisher sites cannot match the viral nature of facebook.

Google has been trying hard to push its web browser Google Chrome. Though initially it did well in getting users its growth has been stagnant. It is still far, far behind the much hated and obsolete IE6.

With facebook advertising, it might get lot of people recommending chrome to others by means of share and like buttons. And hopefully more users.

Earlier today, several sealed legal documents of Viacom’s copyright infringement lawsuit against Youtube where opened; Youtube chief legal counsel Zahavah Levine wrote a blog post which was a summary of the legal evidences provided by Youtube.

The blog mentions that every video that is uploaded to its site by amateur  individuals or by big movie studios is copyrighted to its uploader/creator. That means your cute cat video that you have shot and uploaded to youtube is copyrighted to you as much as Harry Potter trailers uploaded by Warner Brothers is copyrighted to them.

It also mentions how Viacom is trying to sue Youtube by framing them. Here is the excerpt.

For years, Viacom continuously and secretly uploaded its content to YouTube, even while publicly complaining about its presence there. It hired no fewer than 18 different marketing agencies to upload its content to the site. It deliberately “roughed up” the videos to make them look stolen or leaked. It opened YouTube accounts using phony email addresses. It even sent employees to Kinko’s to upload clips from computers that couldn’t be traced to Viacom. And in an effort to promote its own shows, as a matter of company policy Viacom routinely left up clips from shows that had been uploaded to YouTube by ordinary users. Executives as high up as the president of Comedy Central and the head of MTV Networks felt “very strongly” that clips from shows like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report should remain on YouTube.

Viacom’s efforts to disguise its promotional use of YouTube worked so well that even its own employees could not keep track of everything it was posting or leaving up on the site. As a result, on countless occasions Viacom demanded the removal of clips that it had uploaded to YouTube, only to return later to sheepishly ask for their reinstatement. In fact, some of the very clips that Viacom is suing us over were actually uploaded by Viacom itself.

Techcrunch perfectly summarized this revelation

In other words, while Viacom’s lawyers were issuing takedown notices, its marketers were putting clips up on YouTube to promote Viacom movies and TV shows. You’ve got to wonder what the judge will make of that evidence.

UPDATE:

I read this interesting comment on reddit by a user. Its credibility, unfortunately, cannot be verified but it sounds genuine.

I worked on a show for MTV (which is owned by Viacom), and was asked by the network to leak footage of our show to Youtube, to get some kind of free viral publicity. The footage was already digital, but I had to run it through an analogue recorder to give it a time-code burn-in, thus appearing more like a leak. After one of the clips was posted to “Pink Is the New Blog”, we got a huge congratulations e-mail from the network executive in charge of our show.

UPDATE:

Excerpt from Viacom’s reply to Youtube

Google and YouTube had the technology to stop infringement at any time but deliberately chose not to use it. They would only offer to protect Viacom’s content if Viacom agreed to license those works, effectively holding copyright protection as ransom for a license.

These facts are undisputed. The statements by Google regarding Viacom activities are merely red herrings and have no relevance on the legal facts of this case.

A link  to a phished page of Twitter is being sent as a direct message to followers. Most probably the tweeter, who is automatically direct messaging his followers, might have typed in his username and password in the phished page himself. Using that details the attacker can send DM’s to all the followers with the hope of getting more victims.

If you look at the url, it is linked to bzpharma.

http://commonwealthcommunications.com/?rid=http://twitter.verify.bzpharma.net/login

http://cbsi.net/?rid=http://twitter.secure.bzpharma.net/login

These are actual links that I have received. Firefox 3.6 and Chrome 4.0 will warn you about this site as Reported Web Forgery. If you visit the site you will be taken to a login page and when you enter your details you will be taken to this page http://bzpharma.net/login/err.html which has a pic of Fail Whale with the message Twitter is overcapacity. After that you will be redirected to the actual twitter homepage.

Please take care about the links you click on and where you put in your login details. Use latest browsers like FireFox 3.6 and Chrome 4.0.