YouTube just pass the 100 million US viewers a month
According to comScore, YouTube hit a new monthly high in January, topping 100 million as it dominated the online video arena.
The overall number of videos watched online in the US in January climbed 4 percent from the previous month to 14.8 billion, with YouTube viewing accounting for 91 percent of that growth, comScore reported Wednesday.
Google-owned websites, predominantly YouTube, ranked at the top of the US online video heap with 6.4 billion snippets watched during the month, according to comScore.
Mahalo vouches for criminal hacker in its midst
March 7, 2009 by NetCrunch
Filed under Cyber Crimes, Internet Security, Top Stories
The founder of young Internet search engine Mahalo explained on Thursday how a convicted hacker wound up a cherished member of their team.
Mahalo hired John Schiefer without being aware of his cyber crimes, and regretted seeing him sentenced on Wednesday to four years in prison, founder Jason Calacanis said in a message posted online.
Schiefer used “botnets,” armies of computers hijacked by using malicious software, to steal people’s identities and snoop on electronic communications, according to Los Angeles US attorney’s office spokesman Thom Mrozek.
Trending Tools Analyzing Search Terms, Keywords
Ever Wonder what most people are searching on the web? or what are the most visited websites for the day?, Most Search Engines are developing tools to analyze these data and are freely available to anyone. Here’s some online tools to analyze Search terms, and websites.
Search Trends
Google Trends
- Google Trends is a web-based tool under development by Google Labs. The tool measures the search volume for terms in Google’s search engine over a specified period of time. Google Trends will display graphical results for a specific term’s popularity and allow you to compare search volumes with other search terms. Google Trends also compiles and displays a list of the most popular terms for which people have recently searched. Learn More.
Yahoo Buzz!
- Yahoo! Buzz is a service much like Digg offered by search engine Yahoo!. It allows users to submit links and vote for submitted links; Yahoo! Buzz then ranks the submitted links in order of votes received and search engine trends and places the highest ranked links on the front page of their site.
Live Search xRank
- xRank keeps track of notable people and puts them in order for you. We count Live Search web searches for movie stars, musicians, and other famous people. Then, we compile our findings into an insightful ranking formula that tells you who the world is searching for most. The result is a cultural snapshot of who’s hot and who’s not!
MSN A-List
- MSN A-list tracks popular searches on MSN network, topics ranges from News headlines, Health, sports to top Books and more..
AOL Hot Searches
- Find out what are the hottest topics and most searched news and keywords on AOL Network
Ask.com IQ Reporting
- Ask.com IQ (Interesting Queries) – See the most popular search terms each week based on millions of Ask.com searches.
Search.com top Searches
- Lists of popular search terms on Search.com a part of CNET Networks, Inc.
Lycos 50
- The Lycos 50 lists the people, places and things which are most on the public mind as reflected by Lycos user searches over the past week.
Website Trends
Alexa.com
- Alexa.com is both a search engine and website tracker. You may search for information on Alexa.com, as you would when using a search engine like Google, or you may enter a url into the search bar to receive traffic statistics and other information about that site.
Larry Page
Larry Page, (born March 26, 1973 in Lansing, Michigan, USA) is an American computer scientist and co-founder of Google, Inc., the world’s largest internet company, based on its search engine and online advertising technology. He is ranked 33rd on the 2008 Forbes list of the world’s billionaires and is the 6th richest person in America. In 2007 he and co-founder Sergey Brin were both ranked #1 of the “50 Most Important People on the Web” by PC World Magazine.
Larry Page is the son of the late Dr. Carl Victor Page, a professor of computer science and artificial intelligence at Michigan State University and one of the University of Michigan’s first computer science Ph.D. graduates, and Gloria Page, a computer programming teacher at Michigan State University. Although his mother was Jewish, Page was raised similarly to his father, and did not practice any religion. He is also the brother of Carl Victor Page, Jr.. a co-founder of eGroups, which was later sold to Yahoo!.
Googleplex
The Googleplex is the corporate headquarters complex of Google, Inc., located at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway in Mountain View, Santa Clara County, California, near San Jose. The name Googleplex is a play on words, being a portmanteau of Google and complex, and a reference to googolplex, the name given to the large number 10.
The four core buildings, totaling 506,317 ft² (47,038 m²), were built for and originally occupied by Silicon Graphics (SGI). The office space and corporate campus is located within a larger 26-acre (110,000 m2) site that contains Charleston Park, a 5-acre (20,000 m2) public park; improved access to Permanente Creek; and public trails that connect the corporate site to Shoreline Park and the Bay Trail. The project, launched in 1994 to reclaim a former industrial brownfield, was a creative collaboration between SGI, STUDIOS Architecture in San Francisco, SWA Group of San Francisco and Sausalito, and the Planning and Community Development Agency of the City of Mountain View. The objective was to develop in complementary fashion the privately-owned corporate headquarters and adjoining public greenspace. Key design decisions placed parking for nearly 2000 cars underground, enabling SWA to integrate the two open spaces with water features, shallow pools, fountains, pathways, and plazas. The project was completed in 1997. The ASLA noted in 1999 that the SGI project was a significant departure from typical corporate campuses, challenging conventional thinking about private and public space.
Sergey Brin
Sergey Brin (born August 21, 1973, in Moscow, Soviet Union) is co-founder of Google, Inc., the world’s largest internet company, based on its search engine and online advertising technology. He is ranked by Forbes as the 32nd richest person in the world. In 2007 he and co-founder Larry Page were together ranked #1 of the “50 Most Important People on the Web” by PC World Magazine.
Brin emigrated to the United States at the age of six due to his family’s educational barriers in the Soviet Union. Earning his undergraduate degree at the University of Maryland, he followed in his father’s and grandfather’s footsteps by studying mathematics, double-majoring in computer science. After graduation, he moved to Stanford to acquire a Ph.D in computer science. There he met Larry Page, who quickly became his intellectual soul-mate and close friend. They crammed their dormitory room with inexpensive computers and applied Brin’s data mining system to build a superior search engine. The program became popular at Stanford and they suspended their Ph.D studies to start up Google in a rented garage.
Google Inc.
Google Inc. is an American public corporation, earning revenue from advertising related to its Internet search, e-mail, online mapping, office productivity, social networking, and video sharing services as well as selling advertising-free versions of the same technologies. The Google headquarters, the Googleplex, is located in Mountain View, California. As of December 31, 2008, the company has 20,222 full-time employees.
Google was co-founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were students at Stanford University and the company was first incorporated as a privately held company on September 4, 1998. The initial public offering took place on August 19, 2004, raising US$1.67 billion, making it worth US$23 billion. Google has continued its growth through a series of new product developments, acquisitions, and partnerships. Environmentalism, philanthropy and positive employee relations have been important tenets during the growth of Google, the latter resulting in being identified multiple times as Fortune Magazine’s #1 Best Place to Work. The unofficial company slogan is “Don’t be evil”, although criticism of Google includes concerns regarding the privacy of personal information, copyright, censorship and discontinuation of services. According to Millward Brown, it is the most powerful brand in the world.
eBay Auction Tool Web Site Infected With Malware
February 23, 2009 by NetCrunch
Filed under Internet Security, Top Stories
A Trojan horse lurking on servers belonging to Auctiva.com, a Web site offering eBay auction tools, infected people’s PCs last week.
The problem became very public when Google’s malware warning system kicked in as people tried to browse the site, saying Auctiva was infected with malware. Google will display an interstitial page warning people of certain Web sites known to contain malware.
“It appears the reason these virus alert warnings started showing up on our site is because some of our machines were injected with malware originating in China,” according to a post on Auctiva’s community forum. “The malware we believe to be at fault has also hit a number of other high-profile Websites over the past six months.”
Google Sinks Atlantis Discovery Buzz
February 23, 2009 by NetCrunch
Filed under Top Stories
Last week, a British man announced he’d found the lost city of Atlantis using Google Ocean — the latest add-on to Google Earth that features 3D bathymetry, which lets you explore the ocean floor. The supposed ‘Atlantis’ image is about 620 miles off the northwestern coast of Africa and south of Portugal. It shows a rectangular grid with what looks like roadways leading away from it at the coordinates 31 15’15.53N 24 15’30.53W. According to The Telegraph, the newspaper that first reported the “discovery,” the pattern is roughly the size of Wales (around 8,000 sq. mi.).
Friday’s find sparked intense interest online despite the farfetched claim. Many scratched their heads wondering, what if? After all, this underwater discovery seemed to match the location Plato had described in his writings. Plato said Atlantis was a massive island that was “larger than Libya and Asia together,” and located at a “distant point in the Atlantic Ocean…in front of the mouth of the pillars of Hercules” (the Straits of Gibraltar).
Google Earth reveals secret history of US base in Pakistan
February 20, 2009 by NetCrunch
Filed under Top Stories
The US was secretly flying unmanned drones from the Shamsi airbase in Pakistan’s southwestern province of Baluchistan as early as 2006, according to an image of the base from Google Earth.
The image — that is no longer on the site but which was obtained by The News, Pakistan’s English language daily newspaper — shows what appear to be three Predator drones outside a hangar at the end of the runway. The Times also obtained a copy of the image, whose co-ordinates confirm that it is the Shamsi airfield, also known as Bandari, about 200 miles southwest of the Pakistani city of Quetta.
