Privacy should be a major concern for everyone on the Internet these days. You would be surprised what search engines such as Google know about you – well, not really about you unless you have a real name account with them and are logged in when performing searches.
Querycat a FAQ Database
Frequently Asked Questions are a good way of reducing support inquiries at business sites or for reducing the tenth post about a similar topic in a popular forum. FAQ’s are a great way of answering questions from users before they have been asked.The developers of Querycat decided to create a database of FAQ entries from all over the Internet and make it searchable at their homepage. They claim to have more than four million FAQ entries in their ever growing database.
Search Rapidshare
Rapidshare is probably still the biggest file upload site on the internet. It is also one of the messiest and hard to work out sites that I came upon. There is no way to search for files hosted on Rapidshare.com itself. The only way that was known to me was to use a Google search exclusively for Rapidshare. (site:Rapidshare.com keywords) This is not an ideal situation, many links found by Google are already dead at Rapidshare and the overall process takes to much time.
Updates on the AOL Scandal
Aol released private search queries of 500.000 AOL users to the public. Analysts and Journalists alike are having a busy time analysing the data for various reasons. I was able to identify three different motivations: 1. How big is the privacy breach, 2. Is it possible to identify someone from the queries and 3. analysing the queries from a marketing point of view.
Anonymized Logs of 500000 AOL users on the net
AOL surely did not think about the immense backlash they would receive from the internet community when they released anonymised logs of 500,000 AOL users at the AOL research website. The file consisted of about 20.000.000 million web queries from about 500.000 AOL users in the course of three months (march to may 2006). The AOL username was replaced by a unique ID, everything else was kept unchanged in the logs.
Stalkerati Search for people on the web
Stalkerati is not your usual search engine that lets you search for long lost friends, relatives and the like. It instead tries to accumulate as much data about a person as possible and save that data in a neat profile on their website. It collects data from various sources including myspace, facebook, friendster, a web and blog search and finally a photo and image search.
Google Trends
Google Trends has been live for a few days and it´s time to play around with this new google service and find out what it´s all about. By entering one or more search terms you see a graph that shows the search volume and the news reference volume for about two years. This in itself isn´t that exciting but the feature to compare results by searching for multiple terms is. You could for instance compare linux distributions or windows, linux and macintosh.
Google and Censorship
I´ve written a short article about google suppressing search results in some countries which did not seem to bother the public opinion in those countries and elsewhere. Recent news about google china censoring search results on the other hand seem to create more public discussion. Should western companies bow to countries like china that have a different view of freedom of opinion.