dyatmika

Following the wave of concern expressed by several media companies that Google was favoring its own services and websites in search results, like the new Knol service, Timo Paloheimo, a Finnish digital planner for an advertising agency, had an interesting idea – to give people the option to use Google search without getting results from Google’s own websites. He went on and created a service that does just that, and named it Google minus Google.

A while back, Google launched a service called Knol, which aims at becoming an encyclopedia written by experts (as opposed to Wikipedia, which can be edited by anyone). Not long after it was launched, people started to notice that, when searching various names like products or services on Google, results from Knol pages appeared higher than the original pages related to those names.

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Popularity: 2% [?]

Google on Tuesday plans to unveil an online 3D social arena called Lively, the Internet giant’s take on Second Life. But Google wants it to be part of your first life.

Second Life requires users to download and install a separate “client” software package that taps into the online world. Lively also requires a download and installation–Windows only for now–but then people can use Internet Explorer or Firefox to enter the virtual world.

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Popularity: 30% [?]

Google has always been in the habit of lending a helping hand to programmers in distress. This time around, the Code Search Team has introduced six new features to come in handy to the developers who work with such large bases of code that searching through them becomes an ordeal.

The first feature that Dmitry Barashev from the Google Code
Search Team describes on the official blog is Code Outline, which displays, when hit, the structure of code written Java, C, C++, C#, Python, JavaScript and Pascal. When selecting a program, the application offers a further look into all its lines, in a partitioned window.

A second feature allows users to be directed to the files included in the same package in Java, C, C++ and Python code. When programmers click on the Include and Import statements, they are directly sent to the included file. “In the case where the included file comes from a third-party library or, say, from Linux headers, a search is performed for the included file in the indexed code base,” explains Barashev.

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Popularity: 22% [?]

The word “privacy” now appears on Google’s home page, with a link to the company’s privacy policy.

With that one word, the Web search giant heads off the growing controversy over whether its previous practice ran afoul of a California law, the California Online Privacy Protection Act of 2003, which requires the operator of a commercial Web site that collects personal information to link to its privacy policy from its home page.

When The New York Times wrote in May that Google appeared to be violating the law, Google said that it did not believe that it was required to put a link on its home page. The company said that its privacy policy was easy enough to find, either on the page called “About Google” or by searching for “Google privacy policy” on its search engine.

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Popularity: 25% [?]

It would seem that Google Calendar is plagued by all sorts of problems, the most recent of them being phishing attacks. Google representatives ask users to ignore suspicious messages and click the “Report Phishing” button instead of reading the message, opening links included in the message or downloading any attachments.

Phillip Lessen was one of the first to receive such a message. It was entitled “[Invitation] VERIFY YOUR ACCOUNT” and seemed to be sent by Google’s customer care. (more…)

Popularity: 22% [?]

Google has fixed security vulnerabilities related to its Grand Central telecom service and its Google.com Web site, the company said Monday.

Google fixed a cross-site scripting vulnerability on the log-in page for Grand Central, a service that allows people to have numerous phone numbers ring on one phone and have a unified voice mail.

A cross-site script is a vulnerability found increasingly in Web applications in which malicious code can be injected into Web pages that could be used to attack or compromise visitors to the site.
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Popularity: 38% [?]