WebProWorld
Google is sharing some interesting statistics on malware, such as the number of entries on the Google Safe Browsing Malware List that have occurred over the last twelve months, and search results containing a URL labeled as harmful.
"We’re glad to share this sort of data because we believe that collaboration and information sharing are crucial in driving anti-malware efforts forward," says Niels Provos of Google’s Security Team.
Google is now offering downloads of public domain books in Google Books in the EPUB format, which is an open and free industry standard for electronic books. This format is supported by a wide variety of different applications, so it should be easy for many people to access literature this way.
Users can download the public domain books by simply clicking the "download" button in the Google Books Toolbar, which provides a drop-down menu to choose the file format.
Google has introduced a feature for Google Video for Business that allows viewers to adjust the playback speed. There is a speed control button/slider on the video player that can be used to speed up or slow down a clip.
If you’re unfamiliar with Google Video for Business, it’s part of Google Apps Premiere and Education editions, and lets users share rich video information, keep videos secure and private, and collaborate on videos.
Google is expanding its traffic layers in Google Maps. They’re now showing traffic conditions on arterial roads in selected cities, but is working on doing this to cover all U.S. highways and arterials when data is available.
Google is talking about how online ads can boost in-store sales at a couple of its different blogs today. The first one looks at the relationship between POS (point of sale) and O2S (online to store).
Google now has a video chat application that can be used from your iGoogle home page. This is just the latest feature Google has added to its ever-growing list of products/features that make it more like a giant social network.
Last month, an event was hosted by the Google Wave team called Google Wave Federation Day, which was described as an inaugural event for people looking to get involved by providing their own wave services.
At the event, Google discussed the protocol and system architecture behind Google Wave, and talked about how they need to get lots of developers working on it, because it is such a huge vision. That vision is for there to be many Google Wave providers, because as Google says, it won’t be complete without non-Google Google Wave providers.
Microsoft, Yahoo, and Amazon have reportedly banded together under the organization of the Internet Archive and antitrust lawyer Gary Reback, to try and put a stop to Google’s settlement with the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers over Google Book Search.
Some UK Google users have noticed that search results pages are showing more results from .com sites these days, than in the past. They are used to .co.uk sites getting better rank, and assuming that they are more relevant to their geographic location.
Certainly in some cases the .co.uk site would be more relevant to a UK searcher, but that is not always the case. Google’s Matt Cutts has posted a video in which he answers a question on this subject from a user. The question was:
A patent for "systems and methods for improving the ranking of news articles" was granted to Google yesterday. It was originally filed in 2003.
