Search Engine News | SEO News

Search engines and PDFs

2011-09-22T07:34:00.002+01:00

People are always excited to know how would search engines treat various factors of a website. People have their own myths whereas few people experiment and derive conclusions. There are millions of websites that use PDFs for genuine reasons. There might me companies who want to upload their magazines on their websites in the PDF versions. People have queries how would Google treat PDFs and would they be ranked in search results?

Google Webmaster Central Help Forum has been a one stop source for the resolution of such queries. Following is a useful link which provides a lot of information on how would Google treat PDF files on a website:-

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=4472512a5515686b&hl=en

One of the Google employee John Mueller has provided his valuable inputs also which helps the cause of resolving this query. We could conclude from this forum post that Google can read the PDFs if the content is available in a textual form within the PDF file and that it is in the proper character-sets (a simple test is to select some of the text and to try to copy it into a text-editor). But it is always recommended to create HTML versions of those PDFs.Web-users may prefer to be able to read the content before opting to download and view a PDF file. Many visitors don't appreciate PDFs. There isn't a concern over duplicate content if you mirror the content of PDFs on HTML pages as search engines would show only one of them in the results (most probably the HTML versions would rank above the PDF versions).

Follow Google Webmaster Central Help forum for such queries.

Russian Internet Web Search Engine Enters Turkish Market

2011-09-21T11:44:00.000+01:00

Yandex is a Russian internet web search engine and it is planning to enter the Turkish market. The plan includes a launch of Turkish version of search engine including widgets and services related to Turkish web users.

Yandex's chief executive, Arkady Volozh said that Turkey has a dynamic population and a promising market. So it was their obvious choice for being the 5th country where Yandex would start their operations.

Google is already one of the leading international search engines in Turkey and Yandex plans to have an approximate 10 to 20% of the market in Turkey in next few years.

Google Removes .co.cc domains from natural listings

2011-07-20T08:32:00.001+01:00

Few weeks back Google reported that it has deleted around 11 million .co.cc sub domains from the search listing. The issue with these sites was regarding spamming which led this giant to consider their listing against authentic and genuine domains.

Various companies offered these .co.cc domains for free or at cheaper prices compared to other domains. Because of these reasons there were many spamy websites which were ranking higher against other genuine domains. Many companies also offered .co.cc domains and are classed as 'freehost' by Google and therefore, exercised their right to block these domains. These .co.cc domains were been registered in 1000s with Korean company offering 15000 sub domains for about $1000. That accounts roughly to about 5,741,810 different accounts, with a total of 11,403,223 domains registered to date.

The Anti-Phishing Working Group also reported some 5000 phishing attacks from .co.cc domains in last six months of 2010 alone. You can check this at Google Online Security Blogpost This search engine news is all over the internet and many .co.cc domains are been affected. It has also been advised to contact the bulk sub-domain provider if Google Safe Browsing shows a warning for the website you own.

Google to remove I'm Feeling Lucky Button?

2011-06-22T14:39:00.000+01:00

Google is testing few new changes in its new interface for the search engine. Inspired by Bing, Google is now removing "I'm feeling Lucky" button from the home page. Many users these days do not use "I'm feeling lucky" button. Considering that this is no longer used by many users, Google is considering removing the button. Another change according to various search engine news is that Google is making is to making prominent its search button, however most users might not find it useful in Instant mode.

The cached and similar buttons are also not used by many users. Therefore Google is planning to put these buttons in the Instant Preview box, so they are more difficult to find. These changes are been tested on Google Finland and if Google find interesting results from this test, Google might roll it out on global scale.

Schema.org - Google, Bing & Yahoo Joins for Content Markup

2011-06-06T11:47:00.000+01:00

Schema.org is a joint effort taken by search engine giants Google, Bing and Yahoo! to improve search results. Many sites about search engine news and updates are talking about this hot topic trending in. The main reason for the rivals joining hands is to create a common set of HTML tags so that search engines can identify, crawl and index websites in same way.
Schema.org provides set of collection from different streams so that webmasters can use to mark their pages in such a way that it can be understood by these search engines. The complete hierarchy for various Schema items contains different categories in which you can add different tags of the website according to relevance (like book, movie, author, person, place etc.)
Marking up the content of the website as much as possible can help search engines to use your information and to present your page to users in most useful way. It is stated in Schema FAQs that one should markup the content which is visible to visitors of the website.

You can learn more about Schema by checking Schema Getting Started Guide or check the FAQs for more information.

Google Architecture

2011-06-02T13:02:00.003+01:00

Google Search Engine works upon its own algorithm to present the results for every search query. The algorithms are kept secret but there are certain rules which are followed and need to be understood keeping the website optimization in view. Following is a generalized working of Google’s search engine.

Google Architecture: Web crawling is carried out by several distributed crawlers.

Indexing is done in three fundamental steps.

1. Parsing
2. Indexing documents into Barrels
3. Sorting

Then the ranking system comes into play. Google maintains much more information than any other typical search engines like Yahoo & Bing. Every hit list contains position, font and capitalization info. Google’s ranking system is designed such that no particular factor is given too much focus. For a single word query google will look at the hit list for that keyword. The hits are considered as different types (title, anchor, URL, plain text large font, plain text small font….) where each has its own type-weight.

Google is successful in giving the most relevant results for different search queries because of such control measures and filter processes. So according to Google search engine news, keep it simple and original to rank better in their search results.

Google Buys Sparkbuy

2011-05-24T10:49:00.000+01:00

Google has recently made an acquisition recently with a shopping website Sparkbuy. Sparkbuy is a product comparison and shopping search engine. Even though there is no such official announcements from Google, Sparkbuy have updated this acquisition on their website. They have also twitted about this.

It is said that Google will use the expertise and technology to make Google shopping results more efficient and user friendly. The Sparkbuy team will be joining Google’s Kirkland, WA office.
Sparkbuy was founded by Dan Shapiro in 2010 and the company successfully raised about 1 million USD for their development and comparison software. Any search engine news has not yet disclosed the amount of this deal still now.

The service of Sparkbuy is now closed, as a result of acquisition.

Google's New Page Design - Google Test

2011-05-10T06:58:00.000+01:00

Google always try to give newer and better ways to search for users. There is a new test that is been carried out by Google. This Google test is available only to selected people. The test they are running is to improve the user interface and to improve the user experience.

The above screenshot shows the new look of the search result 'Twitter'. Each search results are separated and more distinguished. Google is also trying to refine your search results as much as possible to give you a better experience.

If you are looking for a job in certain area, you can refine your search for a particular location as well as for a function.
One more addition to this new interface will be addition of 'Remove Result'. If you like to omit a particular result from the list, you can choose 'Remove Result' so that you don’t need to see that result again in search result. This feature is already available if you are signed in, but Google is trying to make it better.

There are mixed views about this new change in the world of search engine news. One of the drawbacks of this new look is that it gives less information on the screen and this might bring in a need of more scrolling. These new changes in Google are only under test phase and hence there is no scheduled date when they'll be rolling out these changes globally.

Bing vs Google: Anticipation for 2012

2011-04-18T08:21:00.000+01:00

Bing has seen a tremendous growth rate in its market share as compared to the giant Google, at least in US. This is seen as emerging of new search engine giant in coming years. The projection done by Mashable suggests that Bing might take over Google in 2012, at least in United States.

Google is still leading the market with more than 60% of market share. Bing, has however seen a rapid growth in these few months. Bing has captured about 30% of market share. In September, Google had controlled about 72% of US market and Bing represented about 10% of market share. In March 2011, Bing’s share rose to 14.3%.

Google has seen a drop in market share of about 3% each month, while Bing has seen a rise in market share of 5% each month. If the constant trajectory is plotted, it is assumed that in January 2012, Bing will overtake Google.

If this happens, there will be all new era in search engine news and updates because users, experts and companies will be looking out for Bing as a benchmark in terms of rankings and advertisings. This can be seen happening since Bing has a real momentum in gain in market share and people will soon see a new search engine giant!

Google Introduces +1 Button

2011-04-15T11:20:00.002+01:00

Well we all know about what the like option means. This like option can be viewed from various sites like twitter, youtube videos, blogs etc. Whichever post or any kind of stuff if you like it then you can go the like option. So now all search engines news have emphasized in their blogs about his latest news of +1 button.

Google has updates its Google Social Search so that you can get the most relevant answers to your search queries. You can also get even more information from the people that matter to you more, whether they’re publishing on YouTube, Flickr or their own blog or website. You will get all mixed results based on their relevance. So that is why Google introduced +1 button so you can get to know the recommendations from your friends and from other contacts related to your search.

But this +1 option can be used only if you have a Google profile. You can view all your +1's at one particular place when you use your profile, and delete some which you no longer want to recommend. To see +1’s in your Google search results you’ll need to be logged into your Google Account.

This +1 option has increased the traffic to a particular website both quality and quantity wise. But Google hasn't stopped only on this. They are working on the button so that you can recommend a particular page. We just hope that Google very soon makes search results more personal, interesting and relevant using such +1 option.

A Google A Day : Google Search Engine Puzzle

2011-04-13T15:16:00.000+01:00

Imagine coming across a question and finding it difficult to answer. If we don’t know the perfect answer, the first thought which will cross our mind is to log on to Google and try to find the possible answer. Traditional trivia games might have brought in similar situations before us, where copying was not allowed and asking Google was not on the cards either. So, now Google has itself launched a new trivia game where you will be served a question and then the most difficult part follows: the path towards the answer!!

According to various search engine news sources commence of “A Google a Day” just a few days back, is a new daily puzzle where your creativity and problem solving skills will be put to test. The question will be posted everyday on agoogleaday.com and the answers to these will be displayed the very next day in the Times and on agoogleaday.com, which will guide you through the techniques to search and features used to find it.

Kayak Introduces Hotel Booking

2011-03-15T10:21:00.000Z

Kayak launches a new and interesting feature for the customers to carry out their hotel bookings. They can now book their hotels directly on the website.

Kayak.com is a travel search site. They provide help to the customers all over the world to find the best travel choices easily by searching the information from hundreds of travel sites at once.

Kayak is now partnering with Travelocity to add a new feature of hotel booking on its website. It gives a direct option to book the hotels of your choice. It provides the customers a perfect comparison of various hotels at the destination of their choice with some basic information like check-in and out date along with rooms to be booked and number of people. This new feature saves time and provides all information at one particular site.

Earlier you had to search for particular hotels in required destination and then go through the website of that hotel for your bookings. But now Kayak search engine has made it much easier. Kayak's also adding the feature to its mobile applications for iPhone, iPad, Android, and BlackBerry and thus is getting flashed in search engine news.

Our users value that we give them choices on where to book, though some people would prefer to complete their purchases without leaving Kayak," CEO Steve Hafner said in a statement.

Google Tool to Block Websites

2011-03-11T14:19:00.000Z

Google has recently added an update in its search results. This search engine update is to target those websites which you don’t like. These can be sites which are offensive, contain pornographic materials, low quality, etc. This search engine news

was posted on Google's Blog recently.

Here it is how it works.

When you search a query, many results appear. Till now, search results used to show cached and similar options. From this update onwards, users can see 'Block all (example.com) results'. This options when turned on gets connected to your Google Account.

Here you can confirm your site that needs to be blocked. The number of blocked results appear at the bottom of the search results, which you can see when you turn on an option to 'Show blocked results' This new feature will be available for Chrome 9+, IE8+ and Firefox 3.5+ in google.com but will soon be available to all local domains.

In this update from Google, the Google blog says that the main reason for this update is to give control over the results, get more personalized searches and a good search experience.

Blekko Changes Algorithm for its Search Engine Results

2011-03-10T14:11:00.000Z

The upcoming search engine, Blekko is a better way to search the web by using slashtags. A slashtag is a tool to filter search results, rather than searching the entire web, a slashtag allows you to search just the sites you want searched.

As Google changed its algorithm for Content Farms which was emphasized in search engine news, similarly Blekko is changing its algorithm for low quality sites. Earlier they had banned about 20 websites but now they are banning 1.1 million websites from its search engines. They are blocking those particular websites which have less content and overflooded with ads.

“Google didn’t actually take anyone out, they just reshuffled the deck,” said Rich Skrenta, chief executive of Blekko. “Instead of demoting these sites to No. 5 or No. 7, we’re just throwing them out.”

Search engines have variety of ways to decide which sites are high-quality and which are low-quality. Google does it algorithmically whereas Blekko uses more involvement of peoples. Examples of the sites Blekko now bans: cheap-refrigerators.net, best-weddinggifts and Boston.diningguide.com.

Blekko is trying its best to debar those websites, which comprise keywords often used by the users so that the websites rank higher, in order to gain income when some user clicks on the ads present on the website.

Social Shopping for Bing Search

2011-03-07T09:00:00.000Z

After many recent updated from Bing, this is a new update from Bing for shoppers. Microsoft said that it is partnering with the Dealmap. This search engine update will offers its US users to get access to more than 200,000 offers in about 14,000 towns and cities across US.

This will help users to find the best bargain related to every possible thing ranging from meals to classes to apperals and many more. This alliance between the companies will let advertisers to reach both desktop and mobile users.

This new deal will let people to emerge into social shopping and group based shopping. This will allow customers to get benefits from offers and discounts on goods and services.

In the Bing Community Blog titled Bing Launches Deals they said that it was Dealmap made more sense than creating their own program for social shopping. Various updates and search engine news from Bing like Bing Bar, Bing Games, tie up with facebook etc are proving a threat to the giant Google. Both the search engines are trying strategically to improve the experience of users so that they can ive their best to users.

Google Recipe Search Results

2011-03-04T10:00:00.000Z

Today’s generation has the ability and interest in cooking variety of dishes. But a proper source was not available yet. But now Google has introduced a new feature for all food lovers. Google Recipe View helps you to find various recipes worldwide.

Earlier the various spices and ingredients were added according to their own judgment but it’s difficult for a new learner. But Google recipe view helps to solve this problem out. To get to Recipe View, click on the “Recipes” link on the left hand side of the page when searching for a recipe. You can constrict your search results and can find only recipes instead of other web results. Google recipe view guides you with exact quantity of ingredients, ratings and even displays with delicious recipe pictures. One can modify the search results to show recipes with your ingredients, cooking time and calorie count.

You can search of specific vegetarian recipes like Pulao, stuffing’s as well as non vegetarian recipes like Chicken Chilly or Chicken Roast and other dishes like Pizza, Pasta, soups etc.

Google Recipe View

Thus the cooking lovers are very happy with the new features. They are now able to experiment with new recipes. They can invent new dishes and can find new updates on the latest search engine news.

Bing Pops Up On The 2nd Position

2011-03-03T08:19:00.002Z

In the search engines market all over the world, Microsoft Bing has overtaken Yahoo! for the first time. According to Web Analytics company StatCounter, since the month of January Bing ranks on the 2nd position in the search engines worldwide. Microsoft Bing is striking the headlines in all search engine news.

Google's global market share in February was 89.94% -- followed by Bing at 4.37% and Yahoo at 3.93%. There is a decrease in Google’s market share but yet there is a lot difference between Google and its various competitors. Well both yahoo and Bing have to go a long way to compete with Google.

Because of many advancements and initiatives that Bing is taking to give more user friendly results, Bing has started to gain more and more market share. Bing has introduced various features in its toolbar for IE like mail, weather, news updates etc.

StatCounter tracks the Market Share of Search Engines, Browsers and Operating Systems including Mobile from over 15 billion monthly page views. StatCounter's report is based on aggregate data collected on a sample of over 15 billion page views per month. Hence some kind of contradictory results may appear. Bing is on a rise and hence Google, yahoo and other search engines must be very conscious about their positions. Microsoft Bing is hitting the headlines in all search engine news.

Google Fights Against Content Farms

2011-02-25T14:11:00.000Z

Google is making drastic changes in its algorithm for search engine results. It has decided to demote the ‘low quality’ or ‘shallow websites’ from the search engine results. After getting to know this action it is been updated in various search engine news.

Google is mainly targeting “content farms”- a company that generates large amount of textual content through various articles, which is created to generate traffic and advertising revenue. The changes, which will affect around 12% of Google search queries in US.

"This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites – sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful," said Amit Singhal, a Google fellow, and Matt Cutts, head of the company's spam-fighting team in the blog post titled - Finding more high-quality sites. This implementation will definitely benefit the high quality sites which have original content and information on various related topics to improve their rankings.

After all this Google is in poor health because of black hat SEO practices and content farms complaints from users. As and when Google implements this new change, the high quality website owners will be very much satisfied and google will also be able to gain more faith from its users all over world.

Bing Bar for Internet Browsers

2011-02-21T09:22:00.000Z

Recently Bing has introduced its new Bing bar for Internet Explorer 7 and higher versions. Bing bar runs on Windows XP SP3 and higher versions. Because of various options and user friendly interface it offers, Bing Bar is hot topic in search engine news and social media updates. Here are some of the features of this new Bing Bar.

Bing News: Bing news to keep you updated with all the latest happening across the globe. This includes news from entertainment, business, politics, international and other streams.

Bing Maps: Helps you to get road maps from your location. YOu can also set a default start location for the map.

Bing Weather: Bing weather is a compact weather forecaster for your location. You can get weather map for your nearby locations, hourly weahter forecast for your location and if you want, you can also add multiple locations for Bing weather map.

Bing Mail: You can access multiple mails through this single tab. You can access gmail, hotmail and yahoo mail all through single bar.

Bing Search: A search bar helps to search whatever you want. it also keeps a track of your searches to optimise your search.

You can also stay updated with Facbook account. You can post comments, make 'likes', comment and do other various activities right from the Bing Bar.

With all these features, users may find this Bing toolbar very friendly. You can also download Bing bar for free. Bing's navigation through arrow keys, reduced number of clicks, user friendly interface are some of the features users may find useful.

Google Social Search Update

2011-02-18T13:59:00.001Z

Recently Google announced an update for Google social search. This new update needs the user to get logged on to Google before he/she searches a term. Google has started making and is supposed to appear in the coming week.

When you search a term in Google, search results will also show content that are shared by your friends. For example, if you search the term 'climbing Kilimanjaro' and your friend has a blog about the same, then the search results will show the blogpost results from that friend.

This also includes updated from sites like Twitter and other social sites. Google will include all those updates that are public and are easy to crawl. However, this update excludes the sites like Facebook because status updates and other posts are not public.

This search engine news have however created some concern about publicising some content on these social sites. Many people would not like everybody to know what they have posted publicly. Google has however enabled an option for user. This will help user to control their Google profile and allow them to connect or disconnect the accounts that they want.

Bing more Accurate than Google

2011-02-14T11:03:00.000Z

A recent study was done by Hitwise showed that Bing and Yahoo! Search have higher success rates as compared to their rival search engine, Google. This study was done in US for 4 weeks in the month of January. About 10 million users were surveyed for this data.

The results show that there is a significant rise of about 21% in MOM (month-over-month) percentage change for Bing users. The share of Bing increased from 10.6% to 12.81%

Also the success rate for Bing and Yahoo! Search are highest for the month of January. The success rate, according to Hitwise is measure of visit to a website after the search query is done. For both the search engines,

Bing and Yahoo!Search, more than 81% of the searches executed resulted in visit to a website, whereas, Google achieved a sucess rate of 65%.

Also there is a shift in the trend of the search keywords used. The long term keywords were up 5% from December 2010 to January 2011. The short keyword phrases, i.e. one, two or three words keywords shows decreasing percentage of searhces, as compared to long term keywords like five, six, seven or eight keywords term.

After the data was released, Matt Cutts, from Google seemed skeptical about the survey. On Google Buzz, he stated that 'successful search' was less accurate term to use as compared to 'left the site after searching'.

Recently Bing being accused by Google, new releases of Games on Bing, and Hitwise statistics, it seems that Bing is all on the search engine news this year. But for a giant competitor like Google, Bing still has a tough task to compete Google in terms of searches and market share.

Search Engines to use History for Better Search Results

2011-02-09T13:17:00.001Z

According to two new papers that were presented at WSDM (Web Search and Data Mining) Conference 2011, it is said that search results can get personalized. These papers were presented by researchers from Microsoft. This means that by if you are interested in Orange, a brand of France Telecom, and not in fruit, and then you will see results accordingly. This will ensure that you give more clicks on search results as these results are more oriented to your needs.

Some personalized data is already been in use by search engines like the device a user is using, geographical location of the user etc. One of the researchers, Jaime Teevan at Microsoft, says that this can be started by using personalization of searches so that users can be directed to those websites which they have already visited. Search engines could also follow with braver personalization that would suggest related keywords and search results.

One of the findings conclude that instead of using Bookmarks for websites, visitors like to find sites through search queries, even if they have visited these sites earlier.

According to search engine news from internet, Bing is experimenting with the search results so that they can collect data through user’s Facebook account to improve this personalized search. To test this system, researchers used volunteers who were part of this experiment for two months. There was increase in click through by 2.7 times in this period.

However, personalising a result will have its own drawback. For example, personalised searches can narrow down search results too much - only giving pages relevant to the search. And many people will be unreceptive to search engines for these narrow searches. Moreover, user does not want to share all their information with search engines.

This all will need more time and research so that personalised search can be more promising without any flaws.

NICTA Join Hands with Microsoft Research Asia to Develop Online Video Search

2011-02-08T08:03:00.001Z

NICTA (National Information and Communications
Technology Australia) is collaborating with Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA) to enhance technology to improve the performance of online video search engines. This is the first such project between Microsoft Research Asia and NICTA which is being highlighted in all search engine news.

Dr Jian Zhang, project leader at NICTA said “We want to find the best way for computers to sort and recognise actions in videos”. This project of Online Video Search is basically launched with the objective that search engines can convey more perfect and faster results.

Most of the search engines support keyword search for video based content, this results into many irrelevant and unwanted videos, but the one's which are related videos are dumped below and doesn’t exist in the main frame.

The major idea of this project is to algorithmically target 'action words' from titles instead of keyword based searches.

Shipeng Li, MSRA Group Manager of Media Computing at Microsoft Asia, said: "I believe this research collaboration will result in real progress in the area of large-scale database search based on human action recognition.

Bing Introduces Games in Search Results

2011-02-07T07:31:00.000Z

Recently Bing has announced that ‘games search’ is available in Bing UK Search Engines. According to news Bing introduced nearly 46 games that are available to play. People are taking this search engine news on both positive and negative notes.

If you try to search a result in Bing Search for games like Klondike Solitaire, Carniball, Slingo, Solitaire, Bubble Town, Zuma's Revenge etc, an option of 'Play Now' is available along with other search results, so that you can play these games directly on Bing itself.

You can also sign in with your Windows Live or Facebook account to put up your scores and share it with others. You can thus start sharing your high score with other players or see your friends' game feeds. There are nearly 50 games that you can play online for now. However while playing a game, after a level or two; there are advertisement pop-ups, just like the ones that you can see on many online-streaming video sites.

Bing is expecting to wrest some market share from Google with this new option. Bing spokesperson, Tamsin Todd commented on this new feature saying that since Bing's inception, games had been their popular search term with users. Even though some people might not be very happy with this new gaming concept of Bing, finding it as a distraction for user, many young and old users will certainly find a reason to move toward Bing.

Google Accuses Bing for Cheap Imitations

2011-02-03T09:28:00.000Z

Google after its sting operation claims that Bing is cheating and copying its search results. Bing keeps an eye on what people search for on Google, and then they select the sites from Google’s results, and then use that information to improve Bing’s own search listings.

Apparently, Google’s engineers set up random results for certain terms like‘hiybprqag’‘mbzrxpgjys’ ‘indoswiftjobinproduction’. Among them was ‘hiybprqag’, a gibberish word pointing to a Los Angeles theater seating plan. Google then observed that their results started appearing in Bing within few weeks.

Approximately at the end of May, Google observed that Bing was performing quite good returning the identical sites that Google would list, when someone would enter unusual misspellings. Google observed it in some cases like ‘torsoraphy’.

As Google claims all this charges on Bing, Bing doesn't deny this.

The Bing engineering team has been working hard over the past few years to give the best search results which are relevant as well as of good quality for the users. They even add that this is their chief objective which they look in on daily basis.

Bing uses over 1,000 different signals and features in the ranking algorithm. A small piece of that is click stream data which they collect from some of their customers, who keep on sharing mysterious data as they follow the web in order to help us show improvements in our search results.

Although Google and Bing have been in cold war for so many years, by making claims in its blog Google is now in a war front with Bing. Due to this war Google and Bing are the highlights of search engine news.

Foodly: A Search Engine and Social Network for Food Lovers

2011-02-03T07:57:00.000Z

Foodly is a search engine and a social network for recipes lovers. Foodly stands for Food I Love You and was launched by two Yahoo! alums - Andrea Cutright and Hillary Mickell. Foodly shortly after its launched, were in discussions all over the search engine news and stories. According to LA Times, Foodly has also picked $5 million of investments from Index venture.

Foodly boasts to be the most advanced recipe search engine in the world. The unique feature of searching a recipe without particular ingredients makes it stand aprat from other websites like Allrecipes.com or Yelp. Moreover, it is added with heavy social network aspect like Facebook. Users can like recipes of Foodly and check out with their friends and their dishes. Also a user can plan a menu and invite their friends for their recipe. You can do this by creating an event on the Facebook page.

The interface of Foodly is beautiful. When you search a recipe, it gives options to save and like that recipe. You can also see various other details like cooking time, ingredients and the source of the recipe. You also have an option to rate a recipe you like.

Andrea Cutright and Hillary Mickell are happy and are looking forward for this site. Andrea says in Foodly Blog - We are extremely proud to bring this social aspect of cooking to our online lives. Because food — like life — is even better when shared.

Google Launches "Google Art Project"

2011-02-02T07:46:00.002Z

Google has launched a unique Google Art Project which gives a detailed view of paintings. It also gives a link directly to art project from Google’s homepage.

Google announced in their official Google blog that they have bought their street view technology into the art museums sections. You can have an experience of virtually being present at the museums. Google has invented a new vehicle called "Trolley" which helps to move around the museums, streets, interior parts etc. Its gives a maximum zoom feature with 360 degree views.

You can find a stunning collection at one particular place given by about 400 artists. The superb collection includes high resolution images of famous 17 museums like The Metropolitan Museum of Art and MoMA in New York, The State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Tate Britain & The National Gallery in London, Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid, the Uffizi Gallery in Florence and Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam and more than 1000 other images.

Google has also included another feature named "Create an Artwork Collection" feature in Art Project. It allows users to save specific views of artwork they like and can create a personal collection of artwork images which can be shared with family, friends and users. They can also add comments to each artwork.

Google yet wants to increase this project on a wider level by adding more and more museums and paintings to this art project as soon as possible which would thus create a greater interest of people into it. This would definitely reduce the trouble of going into crowd of people and help you watch the paintings at your leisure.

You can catch with the latest upcoming updates on search engine news.

Google Starts To Censor Torrent-Related Search Queries

2011-01-31T11:13:00.001Z

Google has taken few new steps to remove all variations related to torrents from its Auto complete and Instant services. In December Google had announced that it would start filtering the terms closely related with piracy from its ‘Auto complete’ and ‘Instant services’ and today they are successfully running this feature. Google has started filtering the torrent files which provide illegal downloading of movies, music, games, software’s etc. Google has just filtered these sites from instant searches but yet their websites are displayed in the search results. Google has already filtered a list of keywords related to sex from its Auto complete feature and Instant services.

Arbitrarily List

The most shocking thing about this new filter is that the keywords are picked randomly. But these new filtered keywords do not affect the search results in anyways. They are just prevented to be displayed in the auto complete and instant services, when user enters a search query.

Banned: Bit Torrent clients such as uTorrent and Xunlei, cyber lockers such as RapidShare and Megaupload, versions of the word ‘torrent’.

Not Banned: BitTorrent clients such as BitComet and Vuze, prominent sites such as 4shared, HotFile and MediaFire, The Pirate Bay.

It may be seen that many sites like uTorrent, RapidShare and Megaupload, etc aren’t happy with this new filtration method. They feel Google is going down the wrong path. Even though Google has banned torrent related keywords from the instant searches yet the users can access the websites from the search results.