Google now detects malware in Search

If found in their data center’s servers, Google will now notify you if you have malware running on your computer when making a Google Search. Google announced the new feature today, and hopes to use their vast wealth of information to make this effective. Google explains:

Recently, we found some unusual search traffic while performing routine maintenance on one of our data centers. After collaborating with security engineers at several companies that were sending this modified traffic, we determined that the computers exhibiting this behavior were infected with a particular strain of malicious software, or “malware

Obliviously this won’t pick up every single piece of malware out there, but it’s a nice little addition to an already great search platform.

Google tests infinite scrolling on search page

Can Google’s search UI get any better?  Yes!

Google Operating System is reporting Google is testing an infinite scrolling feature on their search page. As you can see in the video above — the navigation bar, the search box, and the search options sidebar stays fixed at the top as the user continues to scroll down. Google is also testing a new page preview UI, requiring you to hover over the magnifying glass to see the preview.

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Reminder: Re-visit What Do You Love (video)

Remember WDYL, the Google-owned site affectionately named What Do You Love? It rolled out quietly last month to no fanfare as a glorified Google.com frontend to present search results across numerous Google products with pretty layouts. It has gotten some press time before most folks forgot about it so Google made this little video to remind us of the project and showcase the power of HTML5 and Google search.

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Baidu-Bing! Microsoft will provide English search results for Baidu

BloombergThe New York Times and Dow Jones today report that Microsoft and China’s Baidu have entered a cooperation pact for former to provide English language results for the the latter’s queries.

“This is not good news for Google,” said Jake Li, who rates Baidu shares “accumulate” at Guotai Junan Securities in Shenzhen. Most Chinese Internet users currently prefer Google’s English-language search results over Baidu, whose service will be improved by the partnership with Microsoft, he said.

The terms of the deal weren’t made public but the deal will likely work similarly to the Bing-Yahoo deal last year where both companies share the revenues from advertisements.  Baidu is the dominant search provider in China, one of the few places that Google doesn’t reign supreme.  It had previously signed a mobile only deal with Microsoft but rumors of this deal first surfaced a month ago.

The Baidu-Bing service will go live later this year.

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Google to incorporate real-time social updates into Google+

Google said in a tweet four hours ago that they have temporarily disabled  a dynamic stream of real-time content in people’s search results until they figure out how to bake this functionality into their latest social service dubbed Google+:

We’ve temporarily disabled google.com/realtime. We’re exploring how to incorporate Google+ into this functionality, so stay tuned.

Trying to access the google.com/realtime web page produces a 404 page not found error. Google real-time was conceived two years ago as a way to enhance people’s search results with the latest news headlines, blog posts and updates from Flickr, Twitter, FriendFeed and other social sites. With the Google+ service the company has upped the ante in the social department so it makes sense to use Google+ to have one place to connect with your friends, share photos, links and other content as well as track updates from other social services across the web.

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Amazon terminates Affiliate advertising in California, but hints at ads

Amazon Affiliate members in California got a rude awakening this morning when they received and email from Amazon telling them that all Affiliate programs would be terminated by September 30th.  This is in reaction to a proposed CA law that would tax Amazon purchases because Affiliate Account holders (workers) live and work in the State.

The whole thing is up for debate but we found the last sentence in the letter (whole thing pasted below the fold):

We are also working on alternative ways to help California residents monetize their websites and we will be sure to contact you when these become available.

We noted yesterday that Amazon was getting their own ad network, which would go head to head with Google and others. Read more