Rob’s Personal Aggregator

The Yahoo! Search engineering teams are rolling out updates to crawling, indexing, and ranking algorithms.  Similar to previous updates, you may notice some ranking changes and page shuffling during the process, which we expect to complete over the next few days.

Thank you for the feedback, letting us know the community still finds these Weather Reports helpful.  To share your thoughts on this latest update, please visit the Site Explorer Suggestion Board.

Dan Rampton

Program Manager, Yahoo! Search

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Late last year we released the Social Search experiment to make search more personal with relevant web content from your friends and online contacts. We were excited by the number of people who chose to try it out, and today Social Search is available to everyone in beta on google.com.

We’ve been having a lot of fun with Social Search. It’s baby season here on our team — two of us just had little ones, and a third is on the way. We’re all getting ready to be parents for the first time and we have lots of questions. So, what do we do? We search Google, of course! With Social Search, when we search for [baby sleep patterns], [swaddling] or [best cribs], not only do we get the usual websites with expert opinions, we also find relevant pages from our friends and contacts. For example, if one of my friends has written a blog where he talks about a great baby shop he found in Mountain View, this might appear in my social results. I could probably find other reviews, but my friend’s blog is more relevant because I know and trust the author.

While we’ve been enjoying Social Search (and having babies), we’ve been hard at work on new features. For example, we’ve added social to Google Images. Now when you’re doing a search on Images, you may start seeing pictures from people in your social circle. These are pictures that your friends and other contacts have published publicly to the web on photo-sharing sites like Picasa Web Albums and Flickr. Just like the other social results, social image results appear under a special heading called “Results from your social circle.” Here’s what it looks like:
Looking at the screenshot, you may notice two new links for “My social circle” and “My social content.” These links will take you to a new interface we’ve added where you can see the connections and content behind your social results. Clicking on “My social circle” shows your extended network of online contacts and how you’re connected.

Clicking on “My social content” lists your public pages that might appear in other people’s social results. This new interface should give you a peek under the hood of how Social Search builds your social circle and connects you with web content from your friends and extended network. You can check out your social circle directly by visiting this link. (Note that it may take some time for the connections and content to update.)

We think there’s tremendous potential for social information to improve search, and we’re just beginning to scratch the surface. We’re leaving a “beta” label on social results because we know there’s a lot more we can do. If you want to get the most out of Social Search right away, get started by creating a Google profile, where you can add links to your other public online social services. Check out this short video to learn more:

The new features are rolling out now on google.com in English for all signed-in users, and you should start seeing them in the next few days. Time to socialize!

Posted by Maureen Heymans, Technical Lead for Social Search, and Terran Melconian, Technical Lead for Social Image Search

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Chrome: FreshStart is an easy to use session manager for Google Chrome that allows you to save and organize your tabs between sessions.

Once you've installed FreshStart the small green and blue icon you see in the screenshot above appears in your menu bar. At anytime you can click on the icon to save the current set of tabs—with the option to exclude tabs by unchecking them—or restoring a previous session.

Your sessions are saved locally in the FreshStart bookmarks folder and synced to the cloud via Google Chrome's bookmark sync feature—if you have the featured enabled.

FreshStart is a free extension and works wherever Google Chrome does. Have a favorite Google Chrome extension or a Firefox extension you can’t wait to see ported to Chrome? Let’s hear about it in the comments.

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Michael Geist sez,

Questions about ACTA [ed: the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a secret and punishing copyright treaty under negotiation in Gudalara right now] typically follow a familiar pattern – what is it, do you have evidence, why is this secret, followed by what would ACTA do to my country’s laws? This fourth question is the subject of this post, Part Four of the ACTA Guide. The answer is complex since the impact of ACTA will differ for each participating country: some will require limited reforms, others very significant reforms, and yet others (particularly those not even permitted to participate) complete overhauls of their domestic laws.

That is not the answer that the participating countries have been providing. Instead, most have sought to dampen fears by implausibly claiming that ACTA will not result in any domestic changes in their own country. Of course, if all of this is true, skeptics might reasonably ask why ACTA is needed at all.

The truth is that ACTA will require changes in many countries that ratify the agreement. The EU Commissioner-designate for the Internal Market, Michel Barnier, recently acknowledged precisely that during hearings in Brussels. Meanwhile, U.S. lobby groups have stated that they view ACTA as a mechanism to pressure Canada into new copyright reforms.

ACTA Guide: Part Four: What Will ACTA Mean To My Domestic Law?

(Thanks, Michael!)

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Michael Geist sez, “Part Three of my ACTA Guide [ed: ACTA, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a brutal secret copyright treaty presently under negotiation in Guadalara] focuses on the issue that has dogged the proposed agreement since it was first announced – the lack of transparency associated with the text and the talks. As yesterday’s public letter from Canadian NDP MP Charlie Angus and the UK cross-party motion highlight, elected officials around the world have latched onto the transparency issue and demanded that their governments open ACTA to public scrutiny. Reviewing the ACTA transparency issue involves several elements: the public concern with ACTA secrecy, the source of the secrecy, and the analysis of whether ACTA secrecy is common when compared to other intellectual property agreements.

Identifying the sources of ACTA secrecy are alternately easy and difficult. The confidentiality statement that forms the basis of ACTA confidentiality has been leaked and makes it clear that the U.S. set the initial terms of secrecy. A more detailed discussion can be found in several documents responding to access to information/freedom of information requests. For example, the Declaration of Stanford McCoy of the USTR on ACTA disclosure of documents provides the U.S. perspective, while European Council response on ACTA transparency and disclosure of documents provides the EU view (second EU document here).

ACTA Guide, Part Three: Transparency and ACTA Secrecy

(Thanks, Michael!)

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