search

Some slight search changes are coming to Chrome, as Google updates the developer's version of the browser today to make getting to your search results more quickly.

Initially released to a small subset of people using Chrome dev for Windows (download) and the developer's version of Chrome OS (read CNET review) that also have Google set as their default search provider, the changes affect both the new tab page and any searches you type into your location bar.

Google software engineer David Holloway wrote in his blog post announcing the search improvements that they're a response to … Read more

Windows XP users can now take advantage of Microsoft's Bing Desktop app to run searches without leaving their desktop.

Released yesterday, Bing Desktop version 1.1 supports all versions of Windows starting with XP. The latest flavor also lets you set your desktop wallpaper to match the image displayed by the Bing home page. You can cycle through the past nine days worth of images, according to Microsoft. And as the Bing home page image changes each day, so will your desktop wallpaper.

The Bing Desktop sports a search bar at the top so that you can enter a … Read more

Search for porn using Google Image Search today and you might not find much.

The company rolled out a change to its image search algorithm overnight that makes it tougher to stumble across adult pictures, whether or not you're searching for them.

Here's how a Google representative explains the change:

"We are not censoring any adult content, and want to show users exactly what they are looking for -- but we aim not to show sexually-explicit results unless a user is specifically searching for them. We use algorithms to select the most relevant results for a given … Read more

The death of Whitney Houston in February led to Google's top search for 2012.

Looking at the world's most popular searches for the year, Google's Zeitgeist 2012 uncovered a variety of people, events, and even a couple of tech products.

In second place behind Houston was music video phenom Gangnam Style. Hurricane Sandy took third place, followed by the iPad 3, Diablo 3, Kate Middleton, the 2012 Olympics, Amanda Todd, Michael Clarke Duncan, and BBB12.

The list also drilled down to the top searches among specific categories, including people, movies, TV shows, and consumer electronics.

The iPad … Read more

SkillPages, a startup that helps people find skilled workers like carpenters or painters, has been quietly gathering millions of users over the last two years. Now, at 10 million users -- with 1.5 million of those users coming online in just the last month -- it's launching mobile app to localize searches even more.

The site's services are a mixture of social-networking sites like LinkedIn and job marketplaces like TaskRabbit or Zaarly. People with specific talents start a skill page, a profile that lists their skills and what type of work they are looking for. On the … Read more

It looks like Chrome users, not just Android users, will get access to Google Now, the search giant's technology for bringing weather reports, trip departure reminders, birthday alerts, nearby restaurant reviews, and more to the attention of Android users.

Google's Chrome team added a "skeleton for Google Now for Chrome" to the Google browser yesterday, an early step in a larger project to show Google Now notifications in Chrome.

Google Now integration into Chrome gives Google a new way to connect people closely to online services that Google judges to be relevant depending on time and … Read more

In the past, classic search routines in the Mac OS scoured the directory tree of the file system to locate files, but with ever-increasing numbers of files on computers, these searches became slower and slower. To tackle this in OS X, Apple introduced an indexing solution called Spotlight as a replacement for the classic search, which actively indexes files as they are created or edited. When you perform a search, the system accesses this index to almost instantaneously bring up search results not only for file names, but also for relevancy since the indexing includes the content of the files … Read more

Quite some time ago, Twitter discontinued the ability to see tweets when you did a search through Google. The tweets were actually useful, because you could see who was talking about whatever you searched for, as well as gather additional information.

If you want to add the Twitter results back to Google search, you can do so with a simple extension. Just install a copy of HashPlug for your Chrome Web browser.

This extension will add the Twitter results into a small column to the right of your search results. The column updates with live tweets, but if you … Read more

PARIS -- Some in France and Germany want laws requiring Google to pay for the content it hosts on Google News, usually snippets of text with a link to the site where it was published. But Google, unsurprisingly, thinks that's a rotten idea.

"It's bad for publishers in the long run," said Ben Gomes, the Google vice president in charge of search, speaking here at the LeWeb conference. "The concern is with laws like this, is it clamps down on what you can do, because it breaks the freedom of the Internet."

Instead, he … Read more