Google began rolling out a new look and feel for search results on both its desktop and mobile platforms Wednesday. For the desktop, it has added navigation options to the left-hand side of the results page, listing the most relevant search tools and refinements for a user's query. For the mobile pl...

Scientists on Thursday announced the discovery of a new species of hominid, thanks to fossils whose whereabouts were located with the help of Google Earth. Dating back almost two million years, Australopithecus sediba was discovered in the Cradle of Humankind World Heritage Site in South Africa. The...

When Microsoft first launched its Bing search engine less than a year ago, the company promised to map out a strategy that involved more frequent updates and feature additions. This week, the company reiterated its commitment to that road map with the announcement of some new tweaks and technology i...

YouTube on Thursday opened its previously restricted automated captioning beta program to the public, saying it will help the hearing-impaired. Currently, the feature is only available for videos that contain speech in the English language, although YouTube plans to add other languages. In the inter...

Google is making a play for social media users with Buzz -- a new tool that enables Gmail users to view media and status updates of friends. Typically, when Google enters new territory, it is enough to send stock prices plummeting and analyst wheels spinning. Oftentimes, there is a good reason. Cons...

Google promoted its Social Search experiment to beta status on Wednesday. Social Search adds information and images from users' public pages to the results of online searches conducted by members of their social network. Users need a Google profile to get results from Social Search. Social has been ...

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer on Wednesday took the stage to deliver a keynote address at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Ballmer showcased products from several partners at the event, including a tablet device made by HP. He also announced a tie-in with HP to promote the Bing search engin...

Google is looking at quantum computing to help it sort through the millions of searches it conducts daily, and it's working with processors from Canadian company D-Wave. Quantum computing will help Google with the sophisticated artificial intelligence technologies such as machine learning and patter...

The war in the search engine market has evolved from a contest of speed and scale to one of innovation. Google, Microsoft and Yahoo have all tied in with Twitter for real-time search. Google and Bing are also focusing on visual search, although the two define that term differently. In addition, Bing...

Google on Monday announced expansions to its search service that will provide real-time content to update search results. Google also demonstrated Google Goggles, a visual search application that calls up information from Google's databases when people take a photo of objects with their Android phon...

Taking on one of Google's most popular Web applications, Microsoft introduced a beta for Bing Maps that incorporates improved imagery, 3-D photographs and street views using tools made possible by its Silverlight technology. The Streetside feature puts users on street level, letting them walk around...

A manipulated image of Michelle Obama that drew headlines and controversy when it became the first result users saw when performing a Google Image search for the First Lady was pulled down Wednesday -- but not by Google. While the picture may have disappeared, questions about Google's response to so...

In the world of search engine optimization, a perennial argument is whether Google's ranking factors look for clean code in a Web site. The W3C has developed two popular tools that check Web sites for errors: The W3C validation tool looks at HTML code, while the CSS validation tool checks the CSS St...

The board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers may vote to allow internationalized domain names at the association's ongoing meeting in Seoul. Assuming the proposal is adopted, countries can apply to test country-code top level domains beginning in mid-November. IDNs are domain...

For Google, the recent effort to mix social media with traditional search results is all about relevance -- thus its efforts such as Google Social Search, which the company rolled out in experimental form late Monday. However, can the results really be that effective if they don't include the full p...

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