If you've ever used Google to search for, ahem, "adult" content, you're aware of the site's SafeSearch feature. It filters out questionable content, to the delight of parents and the dismay of porn-seekers. Now there's a new "lock" function for SafeSearch, which keeps your account's settings locked in strict filtering mode until you enter a password and change them. The obvious use here is for parents looking to keep risque material out of view of their kids, but I can also see it being handy to prevent embarrassing search results from accidentally popping up at work.

When SafeSearch is locked, you'll see four extremely conspicuous, very large colored balls in the top right corner of your search results. Google says this is so parents and teachers can tell from across the room whether the lock is still in place, and come over to reset it if it's not. It even works across Google's various languages, so clever kids can't get around it that way. Could they thwart SafeSearch in an even more obvious way, though, by simply logging out of Google? I guess that's where keeping a close eye on the giant colored balls comes in.

If you're confused about how to go about turning the lock on, the very clear video instructions in Google's official blog post will shed some light.

[via AppScout]

Over the summer, we told you how Google had enlisted users to test the next generation of its search technology. The new version of search, called Caffeine, might be ready to roll out very soon, according to some evidence dug up by Mashable. The sandbox link - for testing Caffeine - that we gave you back in August no longer works, because "the sandbox has been retired."

It's been replaced with the following announcement:

"Based on the success we've seen, we believe Caffeine is ready for a larger audience. Soon we will activate Caffeine more widely, beginning with one data center. This sandbox is no longer necessary and has been retired, but we appreciate the testing and positive input that webmasters and publishers have given. "

All signs indicate that Caffeine will apparently be arriving soon. The thing is, you might not notice at first when it does. Caffeine's improvements to Google Search are all under-the-hood, focusing on faster, more accurate results. There probably won't be an overhaul of the iconic design of Google's search pages to go along with it.

In exchange for just one search on Bing, Microsoft's new search engine, Microsoft will grant you free WiFi access on hotspots nationwide (but mostly in airports and hotels).

Apparently the offer began in September but perhaps they've been steadily unrolling it across the country as they only just announced it officially yesterday.

It's an interesting approach to marketing, and no doubt not the cheapest one either. But they're reporting good 'engagement rates' well above the usual .1 or .2% and will continue the scheme for the foreseeable future -- so enjoy your free wireless access! (As a juicy, related titbit, and in no way coincidental, Yahoo will be providing free wireless access at Times Square in New York City, for an entire year.)

Whether it's worth Microsoft's money or not may never be known. But one thing's for certain: Microsoft are famous for their brazen and fearless love of loss-leading -- they have the cash to do it, so why not?

And I tell you what... I would switch to Bing if Microsoft paid for my Internet connection. Wouldn't you? Now there's an interesting thought.

[via MediaPost]

There's been talk in journalistic circles for months about News Corp CEO Rupert Murdoch's plan to start putting the company's web sites behind a paywall. In other words, you might not be able to access news content from FOX, Sky Network, and dozens of newspapers including The Wall Street Journal, Barron's, Marketwatch, and The Sun, without paying.

The move already strikes some as a bad idea since it could essentially drive potential readers to get their news elsewhere. After all, on the web, information is always just a click away. But theoretically if News Corp can offer readers exclusive content that they won't find anywhere else, loyal readers might be willing to pay up.

OK, so that could work... but Murdoch's latest idea sounds like business suicide: He wants to remove News Corp content from Google's index. In an interview with Sky News Australia, Murdoch said that search engines are essentially stealing News Corp content without paying for it -- and that he plans to remove the corporation's web sites from Google's index.

While Murdoch claims that he doesn't see much value in searchers who often come to web sites without becoming repeat visitors, he's pretty much just plain wrong. Search engines pretty much make the web go round. If Google wasn't the dominant force in search, another company would probably rise to the challenge.

Back when there were only a few hundred web sites worth visiting, it might have been easy to find what you were looking for through old fashioned bookmarks and links. But today users rely heavily on search engines to find information, and web sites rely even more heavily on search engines for traffic and for revenue. Because who's more likely to clickon an ad? Someone who bookmarks your page and comes to it every day and has a pretty good sense of where the ads are on the page and how to ignore them, or someone who was searching for information about cheap automobiles and then came to your auto web site that also happens to have ads for good deals on new and used cars?

Still, Murdoch says he'd rather have fewer people visit his sites, but pay for it. It's possible that Murdoch is bluffing. If not, it should be very interesting to see what happens to News Corp's revenue when the paywall goes up and the sites are removed from Google. If the company winds up making more money than it does today, I'd offer to eat my own hat... you know, if I wore a hat.

You can check out the Sky News interview with Murdoch after the break.

[via The Inquisitr]

Google sure knows how to time its innovations. Just in time for the holiday rush, Google have a new search tool -- but not for shoppers like you or I, at least not directly. No, this one's for businesses themselves; it's an enterprise product that straps onto existing online shops! (Sorry, I like anything that sounds vaguely Star Trekkie.)

Citing the ol' chestnut that most visitors spend on average just eight seconds before deciding if it's the right site for them or not, Google's Commerce Search replaces any kind of built-in search engine that an e-commerce shop might already have installed. Rather than hosted locally, it's hosted up in the big Google cloud, so as business gradually increases in the weeks up until Christmas, the Commerce Search will remain quick and snappy, not buckling under the increased load!

And as you all know, Google prides itself on the accuracy of its results -- so being able to search a shop quickly and reliably for the gift you want can only be a good thing for us this Christmas.

There's a lot more info over on the Google Blog itself, so go take a look.

... but, in true Google fashion, it's less annoying and invasive! Hooray!

Google keeps rolling out the big guns to their search service -- which is good, as people might've been beginning to think that Google has their attention on other things. But no, Google has their attention on everything. Fingers in every pie.

Today, if you're in a subset of Google's users, you can now choose even more ways to display your search results. You've probably noticed that 'More Options' button in the top left corner -- well now, at the bottom of that list, there are now the following options:

• More text -- you can get a good 50-100 words from each page now, without having to click through!
• Images from the page -- this option shows you a couple of images from each search result. I'm sure there's a good use for this, I just haven't worked it out yet.
• Page previews -- the big one! Now you get a little thumbnail showing you what the target page looks like.

And that's about it. Some of you will have none of the above options -- and if you're like me, I have all of the options on my laptop, but only two of them on my desktop. I have no idea why -- I guess they are all being gradually unfurled.

Even before Twitter purchased Summize and turned it into Twitter Search, users started to realize that a deleted tweet was never truly deleted. If you knew what it said, you could easily find it by searching for some of the words, and even if you didn't, you could see someone's deleted tweets in the results for "from:username." M.G. Siegler over at TechCrunch noticed that after Twitter made high-profile search deals with Google and Microsoft, they also decided to clean up the problem and stop indexing deleted tweets.

This is a big win for personal privacy, because although Twitter Search is relatively low-volume and you'd have to know where to look to find a deleted tweet, the sheer number of Google searches that happen every day would inevitably result in people seeing tweets they weren't meant to. I think it's great that Twitter has closed this privacy loophole, but it's also important to think before you post anything, because with retweets, third-party aggregators and the like, your tweets aren't always going to be isolated to your Twitter page. Treating them as public, Google-indexable info is probably the best policy.

When Microsoft partnered with Twitter to allow its Bing search engine to index tweets in real time, it looked like they had finally gotten the jump on Google at something. Just hours later, Google VP Marissa Mayer announced that the big G had made a Twitter deal, too. Although Bing's Twitter product is out today, Google's won't be too far behind.

It looks like Google intends to use tweets to augment search results for up-to-the-minute data. In the official Google blog post on the subject, Mayer gives the example of weather conditions at a ski resort. Getting access to tweets is good for Google, but Bing still has the advantage of being the first to snag the Facebook deal. How long until Google gets one of those, as well?

With so much hype about real-time as the future of search, it makes sense that the major players in search would make moves to partner up with real-time networks like Facebook and Twitter. What's surprising is that the first big move is coming from Microsoft Bing, and not from Google. At today's Web 2.0 summit, Bing announced deals with Twitter and Facebook, which will allow Bing to start searching those sites' status updates. The Twitter search was demonstrated at the conference, and you should be able to play with it later today at bing.com/twitter. The Facebook product isn't due out until later, but it will give Bing access to all Facebook's public status updates.

Bing showed off some impressive features of its Twitter search product at the conference, including filtering of duplicate tweets and adult content. It also expands bit.ly URLs, so you know where those shortlinks lead. Unlike Twitter's own search, Bing's product attempts to deliver not just the most recent tweets, but the most relevant.

Apparently, both Twitter and Facebook have been talking to Google as well, but Bing is first to make a deal. The two deals are separate and non-exclusive, meaning that Twitter and Facebook aren't getting into bed together (yet) and that there's still room for Google to make a play like the one Microsoft just pulled off.

[via CNET]

Wolfram Alpha was hyped as better than Google for finding certain info, especially in the areas of math and science computation, but the hype died down a bit when people realized that it was finicky and a bit tricky to use. Wolfram Alpha hasn't gone away, though. In fact, they've just announced an API for developers and a new iPhone app. It's quite possible that third-party applications harnessing the power of Wolfram Alpha might prove more popular than the engine itself.

The iPhone app, due to be released soon, is sort of a demonstration of what developers can do with the API. It should be a big improvement on the iPhone-optimized version of the Wolfram Alpha site. It will be interesting to see what uses developers find for Wolfram Alpha, because the problem with the site is that it requires more specific, more complex search queries than most users are going to bother with. Third-party apps could narrow those queries down, and direct users toward some of the things Wolfram Alpha does really well.

[via Mashable]

SearchTabs is a Firefox add-on from the makers of cross-browser bookmarking syncing utility Xmarks. Xmarks has a database of over a billion bookmarks, and SearchTabs puts that to work to get you better search results. When you Google something with SearchTabs installed, you'll see tabs with related terms. Clicking on one gives you a list of the most-bookmarked sites for that term, which usually looks quite a bit different from the Google results.

SearchTabs also adds additional info to the Google results themselves, displaying badges next to various results to indicate how they rank on Xmarks for a given search term. For example, if you Google "Download Squad," you'll see a badge indicating that we're #3 on Foxmarks for "tech software internet blogs." Some suggested terms are more helpful than others, though: Google "software blogs" and you'll see tabs for blogging software and CMS. Close, but not quite.

PDF files have never been Google's strong suit. Anyone who's run across them in search results is familiar with the "view as HTML" option, which is convenient, but isn't always available, and ruins the formatting of the PDF. Google's fixing all that now, though, by adding Quick View for PDFs to its search results. Now you'll be able to view properly-formatted PDF files in your browser, without downloading and opening in Acrobat or a similar program.

Right now, the new PDF viewing option is only available for 50% of the PDFs in Google's index. More are being added all the time, but for now, you'll still the "View as HTML" link some of the time. If you've already installed a plugin for browser-based PDF viewing, this isn't that exciting to you. The average person running a Google search probably hasn't done that, though, so this is definitely a big step forward.

[via Mashable]

Yesterday, people were tripping over themselves writing about big news from Google. TechCrunch almost got it right, snidely calling it "the mother of all updates." Unfortunately, that's where the humor ended.

The rest of the post -- like nearly everything else that was written up about the change -- was a pretty dry look at the mind-numbingly dull addition of a few extra pixels in width to Google's search box.

A few pixels means bigger? Come on. That's wussy stuff. On the Real Man's scale of bigness, the search box would have been embiggened to look like the mother of an input area in the image above. You want search front and center? Don't muck about with a measly 100 extra pixels, go all the way.

I use Google, and I enjoy reading news about changes to their products and services -- when it's actually news.

Obvious omission: Mick Dundee weighs on in big vs. BIG after the break (video).

If you're curious about iPhone apps, but you either hate iTunes or just hate the hassle of downloading and installing it, you're in luck. uQuery is an app store search engine with no iTunes required. Even if you do have Apple's proprietary music software installed, sometimes its built-in app store search can be frustrating to use. uQuery gives you more control over your search results.

Granted, not too many iPhone owners are going to be without iTunes (although maybe you don't have it on every computer you own), so the better search results are uQuery's biggest draw. You can quickly filter apps by price, category, and when they were added to the store. Unfortunately, you still iTunes to buy the apps, but at least uQuery helps you find them.

[via AppScout]

If you needed just one more scrap of proof that the U.S. patent system is completely and utterly broken, then you might want to click the "I'm feeling lucky" button. I have a sneaking suspicion that the reviewing agents at the USPTO couldn't tell the difference between a "Graphical user interface for a display screen of a communications terminal" and a hole in the ground.

Patent number D533561 was granted to Google on Tuesday, after a 5 and a half year battle. The examiner is also responsible for such deep and philosophical patent examinations as "Foot and toe washer", "Combined ice scraper and brush" and, "H style harness doggie vest."

Depending on the angle at which you hold this patent up to the light, Google may own the ticket for having a search box smack-dab in the middle of a page, or the concept of having two buttons under the search bar. Really, given the state of U.S. patent litigation, what you have here is a license to annoy, molest, harass and waste the legal fund of any company who dare tick off a Google lawyer. If asked for comment, I imagine even the guy who "invented" the combined ice scrapper and brush would think this one is a little over the top. Whatever happened to, "Don't be evil"?

Now, if you'll excuse me; I'm very busy working on my own design for a search box with *three* buttons below. Soon, I will build a third search button powerful enough to enslave you all! Muahahahahaaahahah, cough, ahem.