pages

Whether you're moving to a new place or you just want to be more familiar with your surroundings, there are a variety of sites on the Web that fill you in on everything from restaurants to businesses to apartments in your area.

BooRah If you're only looking for restaurants, BooRah is for you. The site features information on how to get to a restaurant, but really shines when you read through the informative reviews from users and consider the "similar restaurant" tab, which features a listing of local eateries that are similar to … Read more

Real estate search site Trulia released a survey Thursday showing that the "American Dream" of owning a home is still alive even as the recession continues to plague the world. According to the company, more than 75 percent of Americans still consider owning a home as part of achieving their personal dreams, but only 5 percent of respondents say they believe that President Obama's plan to increase home ownership incentives will do any good "to restore faith in the American Dream of home ownership." In fact, 53 percent of those surveyed believe that creating jobs … Read more

PALO ALTO, Calif.--Facebook on Wednesday announced major changes to the ways users could filter information, along with an overhaul to its pages feature.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg started out a morning presentation here by noting that one of the biggest trends in social networking is organizing streams of information. Sites like Twitter and MySpace were making strides in helping to organize these streams, and Facebook needs to do a better job at it, he said.

"We're at a point now of expecting this information sharing to keep moving faster and faster," he said. "Today we'… Read more

Facebook's all set to make a product development announcement of sorts on Wednesday in the form of what it calls an "Open Door" event featuring CEO Mark Zuckerberg and several other executives. The most notable portion of it--according to an e-mail from the company's press corps--is that it'll unveil "the next evolution of Facebook Pages."

Facebook Pages, as you may recall, are the free profiles that brands can set up to establish a presence on the social network, which now has over 175 million members worldwide. Members can sign onto the pages as &… Read more

As its name suggests, SitePopularity is a program that allows users to check a specific Web site's ranking using top ranking systems. It comes with two trial restrictions, but we found that it still managed to perform well during our tests.

The user interface is extremely easy to navigate. Large, self-explanatory command buttons reside at the top of the window, and URLs are listed in the main window, along with their ranking among such ranking sites as Google Pagerank, Alexa Traffic Rank, and Altavista. Novices will especially appreciate the wizard that walks you through the process of entering the … Read more

The average person likely won't even notice, but Webmasters can rejoice that Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft have banded together to support an unofficial standard for steering search engines in the right direction.

All three on Thursday announced they'd support a technique by which a little extra code in a Web page can indicate the address of its "canonical" version--essentially, the original, primary URL. The move will make it easier to tell search engines what they should pay attention to and to avoid treating duplicative Web pages as different.

Today, the search engine bots that scour the … Read more

Google has penalized the clout that its own Japanese site has in search results after a promotion that violated the company's own search policies.

Earlier this week, Google canceled a promotion in Japan that paid bloggers to write about a new feature that showed popular new search terms on Google's Japanese home page. Now Google is administering the same punishment to its Japanese site that it hands out to others who similarly violate its policies.

"Google.co.jp PageRank is now ~5 instead of ~9. I expect that to remain for a while," said Matt Cutts, … Read more

The "Singularity" is that postulated point in time when technological progress, led by machine intelligences designing their own replacements at an ever-increasing rate, becomes so rapid that we mere humans can no longer comprehend or control it.

It's a popular concept in science fiction. Some people believe that this point will eventually be reached in the real world. I think that those people are drastically underestimating the other limits to progress, such as bandwidth limits for data gathering, the difficulty of comprehension, and the inverse relationship of speed to reliability in data analysis.

They're also confusing … Read more

Larry Page and Sergey Brin have ruled Google in a triumvirate with Chief Executive Eric Schmidt for years, so what should be inferred from the fact that the company's co-founders were absent from Thursday's conference call to discuss Google's relatively strong fourth-quarter results?

Probably not too much.

Brin and Page have been a public face of the company, and sharing financial results is an important part of how a company presents itself publicly. In announcing the co-founders' absence from the call, Schmidt said, "They continue to focus on technology and product innovation which, of course, they … Read more