Search

Dropbox drops in to help out with Yahoo Mail

Yahoo has integrated cloud storage service Dropbox into its e-mail system, the company announced today.

The two companies have partnered to allow users to send, receive and manage Dropbox files within Yahoo Mail.

"This integration allows you to share and store files more easily, whether they are vacation photos or important documents like tax returns and research papers," according to a Yahoo blog post. "And, because files can be stored in your Dropbox account online, it's easy to find the files you want even when you are away from your desktop."

Dropbox reminded e-mail users … Read more

Google Cesar Chavez doodle on Easter ignites furor

Twitter is lighting up with tweeps questioning Google's choice of doodle for this Easter Sunday. The main search page today features no mention of the Easter Bunny, brightly colored eggs (which are on full, beautiful display on Bing), or Jesus, but instead commemorates what would have been the 86th birthday of labor leader and activist Cesar Chavez.

Just to be clear, I don't feel strongly about Google's choice. Chavez, Jesus and the Easter Bunny all seem pretty cool to me. But Glenn Beck and other prominent Christians are tweeting their disbelief.

Dana Perino of Fox News also … Read more

Are Yahoo, Mayer building an 'interest graph'?

If you haven't noticed, the Marissa Mayer-led Yahoo has been on a bit of an acquisition roll lately, buying up a number of small startups as it drives toward relevance. At least, that's the plan.

The latest? Summly, a mobile news reader startup helmed by someone young enough to not know a world that Yahoo did not inhabit. Sobering.

(The others: mobile interest tracker Stamped, news clipper Snip.it, restaurant recommendation app Alike, culture recommendation app Jybe, and video chat platform OnTheAir.)

What's the bigger strategy, exactly? Writing for Fast Company, Sarah Kessler takes a stab at it. … Read more

Google makes 'ungoogleable' unusable in Sweden

Google has put some pressure on Sweden's Language Council after it tried to add "ungoogleable" to its list of words, according to a report out of the country.

Swedish news outlet Sverigesradio is reporting today that Google's lawyers contacted the Language Council after it announced that it would make "ungoogleable" (or, in Swedish, "ogooglebar") an official word. After "a long e-mail exchange" with the lawyers, the Council decided to drop its bid to make it a word, saying that it took "too much time and resources away from other … Read more

LinkedIn unifies search to push people to content

LinkedIn today released a new unified search experience to help people dig faster, deeper, and more intelligently through its growing collection of professional content.

"We're bringing all of the goodness on LinkedIn -- people, companies, jobs, and groups -- and putting it all together in one place," Bradley Mauney, product lead for identity products at LinkedIn, told CNET.

After a year of behind-the-scenes design and engineering work, LinkedIn is now able to derive intent while you search. The site autocompletes queries to show suggestions, sorted by content type, as a person types in the new-and-improved, single search … Read more

Torrent site IsoHunt loses appeal against MPAA filters

Torrent search site IsoHunt has lost its appeal against Hollywood movie studios to have keyword filters removed from its results.

The court battle between the torrent indexing site and the Motion Picture Association of America's member studios has resulted in the former losing its appeal to remove an injunction that forces the Web site to filter its search results.

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals yesterday upheld a 2010 ruling (PDF) that stated the site does not qualify for safe harbor under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The site's founder, Gary Fung, allegedly had "red flag&… Read more

Bing tries to get its social on, again

Bing is drumming up some interest for its Snapshot feature by adding social media shortcuts into search results.

When you search for people in Bing it brings up their Wikipedia entry -- or, if they don't have an entry, their LinkedIn profile -- in a Snapshot box alongside its results. The box will also have shortcut buttons to the person's various social media accounts.

The Snapshot box is powered by Bing's Satori technology, which sounds similar to Google's Knowledge Graph.

In addition to professionals on LinkedIn and famous people, the Snapshot box will also pop up … Read more

Google launches Keep to help you store your notes

Google unveiled its rumored Keep service today, giving users a new way to create and save notes and integrate them with Google Drive.

The service is live both on the Web and in a new app for Android devices running on 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) and above.

Keep gives Google users a central place to store the information they collect from its various services. People are doing this already in Google Docs -- keeping to-do lists, recipes, and other short snippets of text on individual documents.

Here's how the company put it in a blog post:

"With … Read more

Google admits to accidentally eliminating Digg from search

Digg, which bears little to no resemblance to the site it once was, is still alive and kicking as a curated collection of top news stories from around the Web -- just not in Google's world.

If you queried Google for Digg links earlier this morning, you found that the search giant had no recollection that Digg ever existed. Seriously. As Martin MacDonald, an online marketing specialist, observed in a blog post, Digg disappeared altogether from Google's index.

Fear not. It's just a case of temporary amnesia -- well, actually a case of botched brain surgery. When … Read more