To help it handle the EU ruling that forces it to delist certain results about people, Google assembled a team of expert…
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Google fight over Mosley orgy shows censorship creep in Europe
A rich, powerful man won a series of court victories in France and Germany that arguably helped pave the way for Europe’s controversial…
Read MoreTwitter now indexes every tweet ever
Twitter has built a new search index that allows users to surface all public tweets since the service launched in 2006. At nearly half a trillion documents and a scale of 100 times Twitter's standard real-time index, it's an impressive feat of engineering.…
Read MoreGoogle has free speech right in search results, court confirms
A San Francisco court ruled last week that Google has the right to arrange its search results as it pleases, which confirms the company's long-held view, while underscoring the stark difference in how U.S. and European seek to regulate the search giant.…
Read MoreAre Google’s search results deceptive, or can consumers identify ads on their own?
Search engines are making it harder to see the difference between regular results and paid ads. Does the FTC have the power to do something? Or can consumers figure it out on their own?…
Read MoreGoogle and Microsoft should be open about their de-linking processes in Europe
If the search engines insist on playing judge and jury on so-called "right to be forgotten" requests in Europe -- something they could sidestep in many cases -- then they have to be clear about how they do so.…
Read More“Hidden from Google” shows sites censored under EU’s right-to-be-forgotten law
A controversial law lets EU citizens remove search results from Google. A web developer who feels this is censorship has made a site to keep track of some of the sites that are disappearing.…
Read MoreGoogle, the fight to forget, and the right to remember
A new right to remove results from Google poses hard choices for Europe. It offers people a chance to forget and start over, but also recalls the continent's early efforts to whitewash the past.…
Read MoreExpect Labs, SwiftKey founders describe a world of persistent search
Anticipatory search is already here, but now apps are evolving into anticipatory analysis engines as well, using data from our actions to serve up information before we ask for it.…
Read MoreRepeat after me: ‘Google is not a proxy for big data’
Another study is reporting on the inaccuracy of Google Flu Trends project, which predicts seasonal flu rates based on search data. However, Google's algorithms don't constitute the "big data" approach to this issue, they're just one piece of a smart big data approach.…
Read MoreThis woman and her machine learning tech could make Box a whole lot smarter
If collaboration favorite Box is going to grow into its ambitions, it has to do more than just raise lots of venture capital. It also must build a more intelligent product, which is something dLoop co-founder Divya Jain will now focus her energy on doing.…
Read MoreThe fall (and rise?) of Yahoo: How the web giant crumbled and built some great tech in the process
The tech world is still enthralled by Yahoo, if only to watch if the CEO du jour can remake what was a hugely important company. Here, four former Yahoo technology executives talk about why the company failed, and the great work it did while doing so.…
Read MoreIt looks like dark search is now the norm at Google
The latest traffic report from publishing analytics startup Parse.ly shows Google still dominating in terms of referring traffic to publishers' sites -- but that referral data now comes without associated search terms 87 percent of the time.…
Read MoreTorSearch offers private search of the Deep Web
Want to search without being tracked? TorSearch aims to become the leading search site for the Deep Web.…
Read MoreHow Blippex handles the data behind its time-driven search engine
Blippex calls on a few open-source tools to run its search engine on Amazon Web Services. The input is different from the usual search engine fodder, and so is the data architecture.…
Read MoreIn battle for the classroom, Microsoft to launch ad-free ‘Bing for Schools’
Microsoft's Bing plans to roll out a special version of its search product for schools that doesn't include advertising and boosts privacy protections.…
Read MoreMicrosoft’s next chapter: Putting Bing tech inside our homes and data centers
Microsoft is no joke when it comes to building web infrastructure and developing techniques such as machine learning. The company thinks its heavy investment in these areas will pay off big-time in the years to come.…
Read MoreDr. Google is as popular as ever — can real doctors adapt?
For at least a third of American adults, the internet -- and, in particular, search engines -- is a diagnostic tool. But physicians are only slowly adapting to this new reality.…
Read MoreOne decade later, 80 percent of Web users looking for health info still start with a search engine
According to a new report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project, 8 in 10 Internet users say that their last health-related search began with a search engine – a figure that has not changed since Pew last asked that question in 2000.…
Read MoreThe New York Times: Running faster and faster to stay in the same place
Like the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland, the New York Times is having to run faster and faster to try to fill the gap left by declining advertising revenue, but even a rapidly growing subscription base doesn't seem to be accomplishing that.…
Read MoreMarshall Kirkpatrick’s Little Bird wants to be your new “robot librarian”
Friday marks the official launch of former ReadWriteWeb editor Marshall Kirkpatrick's data-based discovery startup Littlebird (formerly known as Plexus Engine). The company, which aims to automate discovery and vetting of experts and influencers on any given topic, has also raised $1 million in funding.…
Read MoreGoogle lashes out at German copyright ‘threat’
The company doesn't think it's a great idea for search engines to have to pay to reproduce headlines and story summaries in their results. But that's nothing on the crazy earlier draft of this proposed law.…
Read MoreGoogle moves to combat piracy in search results
Google will tweak its search algorithm to push pirated content further down in search results -- a move welcomed by the film and music industries.…
Read MoreFor Google, keeping search relevant means baking big data into everything
Google has opened its Knowledge Graph to the English-speaking world and has made intelligent voice search possible on mobile phones. Underneath it all, of course, are ever more-complex methods of analyzing data to make search smarter and easier than it has any business being.…
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