geekosystem

Google is adding "pirate hunter" to its very long list of jobs this week, announcing that starting next week they plan to change the Google search algorithm to downrank sites flagged for repeated copyright infringement. In other words, file sharing sites like The Pirate Bay, Demonoid, et al. The questionable sites aren't being removed from Google search, just penalized for bad behavior. Kind of like hockey, only with an invisible search-based box.

No, I'm actually not talking about Bing. Million Short is a search engine that provides you with less-than-revelant results on purpose as a kind of experiment in web trawling. If you want to find something old, obscure, or weird on the Internet, search engines like Google -- or even Yahoo! -- aren't going to cut it. They'll get you to what most people want, but maybe that's not what you want. If so, Million Short has got your back; they slice out the top one million most indexed sites and let you dive right into the weird stuff.

Upstart search engine Blekko has its work cut out for it going up against the big boys, but it's worked hard to distinguish itself as offering a different kind of search, adding a human touch to algorithms: First, with its unique slashtag system, and then by fighting against the "content farms" responsible for the alleged decline in search quality. Search watchers complain that the likes of eHow and ChaCha game Google search and clutter up the first-page results with low-quality, ever-present results, which make it harder to find what one is looking for, but turn a tidy profit for the content farms, which likely spent far less producing the content than a 'legitimate' source might have. So Blekko has gone ahead and cut the Gordian knot: According to TechCrunch, rather than trying to find algorithmic ways to punish these sources, Blekko is simply banning content from what it says are the biggest offenders.

The most searched term in search engines in 2010 was "facebook," with "facebook login" in second, and "facebook.com" and "www.facebook.com" further down the list. Gee, you'd think the most popular social network on the planet had a blockbuster movie made about it or something.

Blekko, a new search engine that has recently gone into beta, has taken a slightly different approach to Internet searching by basing searches around "slashtags," simple keywords that attempt to cut down on superfluous results. The neat thing about Blekko, however, is that once signed up, any user can create custom slashtags, potentially making Internet searches a lot more precise.

At an event earlier today, Facebook teamed up with Microsoft and announced that Microsoft's search engine, Bing, will now be able to display social search results, which are search results that relate themselves to Facebook user data. When a user searches with Bing, it will attempt to connect to said user's Facebook account, gather various bits of data, then attempt to relate the data to the search results via a Facebook module that will travel up and down the search page based on Bing's ranking algorithms.

Zany one-off Google parody sites are a dime a dozen (even Google's got one for H4x0rs), but we couldn't resist posting about this one: Dinoogle, which is basically just a custom Google search with CGI dinosaurs tacked on.