US Federal Trade Commission to investigate Google
Following on from our recent post discussing Google’s popularity, concerns have recently been raised about just how Google maintains such a high number of users, and the legitimacy of their methods. At the end of last month, the US Federal Trade Commission notified Google that they would be conducting a “wide-range investigation”. (more…)
1 Billion People Use Google in 1 Month
Recent reports have stated that in the month of May, Google sites, including its search engine, Gmail and Youtube (which it acquired back in 2006), had 1 billion unique visitors in total. Having previously discussed the competition each search engine site faces to be the most popular and most-used, the figures distributed by ComScore, a company that compiles web data, show just how popular Google is. (more…)
Google to introduce new Instant Pages feature
We regularly use the term “to google”, using it as a verb to replace “to search for online” and the vast majority of people understand what it means. However, it doesn’t necessarily mean that we will use the search engine Google, we may use another – Bing or Yahoo for example. In fact, according to a BBC article, “Bing’s US searches rose to 14 percent in May from 12 percent at the end of 2010”. However, despite the competition, as reported in an article published in 2007, a study found that on average 90 million unique visitors use Google each day. (more…)
Google discontinues its Translation API
Google recently took the decision to retire its widely adopted API, stating “substantial economic burden caused by extensive abuse” as the reason.
The API has been “officially deprecated” since the 26th of May, and will cease to exist completely this December the 1st.
International websites need at least 16 languages to be competitive online
A recent report by the Common Sense Advisory states that global companies need to have multilingual websites in order to compete on an international scale.
According to the report, an English-only site can be read by 23.2% of the global online population. Making it readable in simplified Chinese adds 22.3% and Spanish 9.0%. (more…)
Google to machine translate patents
Google has confirmed that it will machine translate patents into more than 29 languages, using the Google Translate interface.
On 30th November, an agreement was reached between Google and the European Patent Office (EPO), in order to facilitate the understanding of patents throughout the world.
Google Morocco hijacked
Google.co.ma, the Moroccon domain occupied by search engine giants Google, was temporarily whipped from within their control by a group of hackers on Saturday May 9th. It appears their only motive was to show it could be done, and bask in hacker glory at having had the skills to do it.
Pakistan hackers from pakbugs.com left their forum aliases on the google.co.ma homepage, along with a message congratulating themselves. The cyber coup lasted long enough for screenshots to be taken, but the site was relatively quickly re-assumed by Google, who are unsure how it happened.
It is alleged that hackers found a way into NIC.ma, which controls the DNS for the country, and specifically went after the Google domain which was, once taken over, pointed to a different server and left showing the hackers’ calling card. Moroccon users who tried to access their local Google were re-directed to Google.com until the embarrassing issue was resolved.
Rumour has it that this isn’t the first time Google has found itself victim of internet crime, with Google Algeria and Google Puerto Rico also falling under the command of some ‘net miscreants recently.
It seems nothing is safe, even the internet’s most dominant force.