CSC-SY

Founded by husband-and-wife team Tom Costello and Anna Patterson, a search-engine researcher from Stanford University and a Google technical lead, respectively, Cuil aims to rank the relevance of search results by content analysis rather than by popularity. It's an obvious swipe at Google, which treats Web links as popular votes in weighing Web page relevance for a given query.

"Our team approaches search differently," said Patterson, president and COO of Cuil, in a statement. "By leveraging our expertise in search architecture and relevance methods, we've built a more efficient yet richer search engine from the ground up. The Internet has grown and we think it's time search did, too."

Google's Blogger service is responsible for 2% of the world's malware hosted on the web, according to a new report from security firm Sophos.
The security firm claims hackers are setting up pages on the free blogging service to host malicious code, or simply posting links to infected websites in other bloggers' comments.

"Blogger accounts for around 2% of malware," according to Sophos's senior technology consultant, Graham Cluley. "It's head and shoulders above the rest [of the blogging services]."

Cluley says Blogger is worse than other blogging services because of its close ties with the search behemoth. "The attraction for the bad guys in targeting Blogger is that things pretty much get spidered instantly into Google, because it [Blogger] is part of Google," he says.

Google has been very vocal on its stance for net neutrality. Now, Richard Whitt--Senior Policy Director for Google--announces that Google will take an even more active role in the debate by arming consumers with the tools to determine first-hand if their broadband connections are being monkeyed with by their ISPs:

"We're trying to develop tools, software tools...that allow people to detect what's happening with their broadband connections, so they can let [ISPs] know that they're not happy with what they're getting -- that they think certain services are being tampered with," Google senior policy director Richard Whitt said this morning during a panel discussion at Santa Clara University, an hour south of San Francisco.

Last night, Google unveiled something called “Gmail Labs.” It can be found under your Settings tab in Gmail. Of course, typically, this will roll out gradually to users, so you may not see it, though it went live at 6 PM PDT Thursday night, so most should have it by now.

They give users an escape hatch just in case something’s broken; always a nice thing to have.

There are currently 13 “features” in the Lab list.

Quick Links

Adds a box to the left column that gives you 1-click access to any bookmarkable URL in Gmail. You can use it for saving frequent searches, important individual messages, and more.

Google's bosses are meeting in Britain on Monday evening to discuss a response to Microsoft's new talks with Yahoo.

Google's chief executive Eric Schmidt and the founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin are at the company's European "Zeitgeist" meeting in Hertfordshire.

They told journalists they had only just heard of Microsoft's latest move and needed to consider their reaction.

Microsoft said on Sunday that it was considering a deal with Yahoo that would not involve a full buyout.

The Reuters news agency is reporting that the potential deal would involve buying Yahoo's search engine business and a minority stake in the rest of the company.