Knol is making a transition. Google’s Urs Hölzle explains, “We launched Knol in 2007 to help improve web content by enabling experts to collaborate on in-depth articles. In order to continue this work, we’ve been working with Solvitor and Crowd Favorite to create Annotum, an open-source scholarly authoring and publishing platform based on WordPress. Knol will work as usual until April 30, 2012, and you can download your knols to a file and/or migrate them to WordPress.com. From May 1 through October 1, 2012, knols will no longer be viewable, but can be downloaded and exported. After that time, Knol content will no longer be accessible.”

Google Bookmarks Lists will end on December 19. Bookmarks within the lists will be retained and labeled.
Google Friend Connect is being retired on March 1. Google wants people to use Google+ instead. Makes sense.
Google Gears-based Calendars and Gmail will no longer be supported at the beginning of December, and then later in December, Gears will no longer be available for download.

Google Search Timeline is going away. “We’re removing this graph of historical results for a query. Users will be able to restrict any search to particular time periods using the refinement tools on the left-hand side of the search page,” says Hölzle.

Finally, Google has closed its efforts on the “Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal” project. It says other institutions are in a better position than Google to take on the research, but Google has published its results, and continues to invest in renewable energy.

Post from: A1 Leading Edge Intl.

Google continues to trim down its product line

Related posts:

1. Google to retire Blogger & Picasa brands in Google+ Push Say goodbye to the Picasa and Blogger names: Google intends...
2. Google shuts down Realtime Search as Twitter deal expires Until recently, Googling “President Obama Twitter” would give you a...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

The move isn’t without precedent; Google acquired JotSpot in 2006 and rebranded it as Google Sites in 2008. In 2007, Google acquired VOIP platform GrandCentral and relaunched it as Google Voice in 2009.
Picasa and Blogger were also Google acquisitions, although both companies have been part of the Google empire for far longer. Picasa was acquired in 2004 and Blogger (co-founded by Evan Williams of Twitter) was acquired in 2003 and is one of the top 10 most visited websites in the world. Although the rebranding could upset some existing customers, it also gives Google the ability to completely integrate both services into Google+.

The transition from Picasa and Blogger to Google Photos and Google Blogs will occur “in a month to a month and a half,” we’ve been told. The date aligns with the likely public launch of Google+. Mashable has been told to expect the public debut of Google+ on or before July 31. The date is important because it’s the day all private Google Profiles will be deleted.
We believe Google doesn’t want to have private profiles after the public Google+ launch. Instead, the company is likely to encourage users who want more privacy to use Circles to curate their friend groups.

The brand unification effort will be the largest in company history — it’s never renamed a property as large as Blogger. The popular blog creation service has been receiving a lot of extra love recently. In March, Google announced that Blogger would receive a major overhaul. We doubt many people expected that the overhaul would include a rebranding, though.

Google+ makes perfect sense for Blogger and Picasa — they are both social products that improve as more people use them. It’s important to note that Google+ already has a photos feature, a product that we believe utilizes Picasa technology. It’s also important to note that Google+’s photo feature has no Picasa branding of any kind.

Credits: Mashable – Ben Parr

Post from: A1 Leading Edge Intl.

Google to retire Blogger & Picasa brands in Google+ Push

Related posts:

1. Google shuts down Realtime Search as Twitter deal expires Until recently, Googling “President Obama Twitter” would give you a...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Google and Twitter are saying little about why the deal ended. “Twitter has been a valuable partner for nearly two years, and we remain open to exploring other collaborations in the future,” Google said in a written statement.

“We work with Google in many other ways,” Twitter said in an official statement about the deal expiration. The company noted that it continues to provide real-time stream access to Microsoft, Yahoo, NTT Docomo and “dozens of other smaller developers.”

One potential catalyst for the Google/Twitter schism: Google’s recent launch of Google+, which adds a social-networking powered real-time layer to Google’s product network.

Google also took down the standalone Google Realtime search page at http://www.google.com/realtime that it launched last year. That page now returns a 404 error. (A landing page describing the service was still accessible Tuesday afternoon.)

“We’ve temporarily disabled google.com/realtime. We’re exploring how to incorporate our recently launched Google+ project into this functionality going forward,” Google said. “Our vision is to have google.com/realtime include Google+ information along with other realtime data from a variety of sources.”

Meanwhile, Twitter has been working to improve its own search results. In June, the company launched a new version of Twitter search that delivers more relevant content as well as related photos and images.

Credits: Money.CNN.Com

Post from: A1 Leading Edge Intl.

Google shuts down Realtime Search as Twitter deal expires

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

For starters, LulzSec seems smarter, and more prolific, than many of its predecessors because its members appear to be experts at hiding their tracks. Eric Corley, who publishes 2600: The Hacker Quarterly, has opined that 25% of hackers today are informants (a figure largely dismissed by security experts, who said that while the FBI would like people to believe that, it’s most likely not true). If so, then LulzSec is all the more remarkable for not only having evaded arrest, but seeming to operate with impunity.

The group didn’t spring, fully formed, out of nowhere. From an ethos standpoint, the band parallels other loosely affiliated hacking groups, such as GOBBLES, and more recently Anonymous (from which LulzSec is rumored to have arisen), said Jack Koziol, director of information security training firm Infosec Institute, in an email interview. Furthermore, its members evince both skill and patience.

“I would say these guys have been in the underground for many years,” he said. “I believe them when they say they have a number of unpublished exploits. I would bet they go to cons [conferences], perhaps even present at them, and may have worked at security companies or still do work at security companies.”

How does the group evade detection? “For sure they have a very sophisticated anonymization scheme that involves Tor as well as many compromised hosts in various countries to attack their targets, tweet, and upload torrents, etc. They probably never use the same anonymization scheme and proxy channel twice,” said Koziol.

As that suggests, the group has been successful in no small part due to its members’ technological savvy. “I would say they are probably using various reverse engineering tools to discover vulnerabilities, such as IDA Pro or OllyDbg. Perhaps they have their own fuzzer or source code analyzer built from scratch,” said Koziol. “They are then weaponizing these newly discovered vulnerabilities by leveraging existing shellcode and memory-resident rootkits to pivot to internal systems.”

LulzSec’s ethos also explains, to an extent, the group’s success, because it seems to have caught a number of organizations off guard. “These are ‘old school’ hackers hacking for fun and fame, rather than a financial motive,” Koziol said. Indeed, the group focuses on embarrassing organizations it perceives to be unjust, unmasking false security experts, as well as simply finding targets that will bring them fame, he said. “They are riding the backlash against security companies, against white-hat grandstanding, and have a very strong anti-authoritarian theme running through their hacking as well as their published posts.”

Accordingly, businesses that might have previously gotten away with skimping on security are now being called to account. “All sorts of systems that are not secured–as well as perhaps an Internet banking service or credit card processing application–are now fair game,” said Koziol.

But hackers with altruistic motives or who target authority figures often lose that focus as they continue, said Rick Dakin, CEO and senior security strategist at Coalfire Systems, and also president of the Denver chapter of InfraGard. “Lulzsec is not yet associated with any damage to specific individuals,” he said in an email interview. “Can Lulzsec be corrupted with financial gain? [It's] too early to tell.”

Even if the group does move in that direction, however, businesses today need to rethink their risk management calculus, or face reputational roulette. “Companies will have to spend more to protect their reputation, with the same level of security as a bank protecting its online customers,” said Koziol.

In other words, if businesses want to not get hacked by an outfit such as LulzSec, they need to start strengthening their systems, and it’s not going to be an easy or inexpensive process. “This long-term change can only occur when business leaders understand the risk associated with processing and storing sensitive data. The CEO of Sony called it correctly by referring to a change in DNA,” said Dakin.
Credits: InformationWeek / Mathew J. Schwartz

Post from: A1 Leading Edge Intl.

LulzSec hackers outsmart security gurus

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

We couldn’t shake the feeling that something was going on, and our suspicions became much stronger in late October 2010 when we noticed a significant increase in how often Google’s top search result appeared at the top of Bing’s ranking for a variety of queries. This statistical pattern was too striking to ignore. To test our hypothesis, we needed an experiment to determine whether Microsoft was really using Google’s search results in Bing’s ranking.

We created about 100 “synthetic queries”—queries that you would never expect a user to type, such as [hiybbprqag]. As a one-time experiment, for each synthetic query we inserted as Google’s top result a unique (real) webpage which had nothing to do with the query.

….Google we strongly believe in innovation and are proud of our search quality. We’ve invested thousands of person-years into developing our search algorithms because we want our users to get the right answer every time they search, and that’s not easy. We look forward to competing with genuinely new search algorithms out there—algorithms built on core innovation, and not on recycled search results from a competitor. So to all the users out there looking for the most authentic, relevant search results, we encourage you to come directly to Google. And to those who have asked what we want out of all this, the answer is simple: we’d like for this practice to stop.

Read the complete article inclusive some graphics explaining at the official Google Blog here….

Post from: A1 Leading Edge Intl.

Microsoft’s Bing uses Google search results

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Search Basics
Several factors have traditionally produced consistent SEO results. Content is still king, in many ways. Compelling content with proper keyword density and keywords highlighted in titles and meta tags remains very valuable to improving search engine rankings. Link building — inbound and outbound — adds strength to your site in the eyes of search engines, giving your site credibility and respect. Site structure is also important — if it’s easy for search engines to index your content, rankings are not only more easily achieved but longevity can result, too.

Social and SEO
As it stands today, no shift in search is more important or prevalent than social media. Every day, millions of people communicate with social media tools like Facebook and Twitter. Reaching these people can be a critical component of any successful online marketing campaign. However, every social media strategy needs to be more sophisticated than simply starting a Twitter page and posting your company’s latest specials.
Social media and SEO marketing programs can strengthen each other. A high-quality social media campaign that is interactive and engages audiences can improve search engine rankings on two fronts — both in organic listings and as a source of inbound links. At the same time, applying smart SEO practices to social media content — such as keyword-rich updates — will increase the reach and visibility of your social media campaign. It is important to use your social profiles as a way to attract attention by making sure that the right keywords are highlighted within them. This way, when a user searches for your brand, business or industry, your profile will appear in results. A nice side effect is that the more results containing your brand, the less room for your competition. It’s also important to be active on your chosen social media sites. Along with making your own posts, build friends and followers by being involved in communities with similar interests. Social bookmarking tools like Digg and Delicious will help promote your own activities along with helping you share useful information with your followers.

Video and Feeds
Feeds have also become a valuable tool in the new SEO landscape. This includes RSS feeds with the latest company news, press releases, blog posts or social media updates. It can also include product feeds — another reason why it’s important that your products and shopping carts can be easily indexed by search engines.
A relatively new concept is video SEO. Since acquiring YouTube, Google presents many video results in regular searches, often on the first page. Applying SEO concepts to videos can not only increase their placement in various searches but also improve the overall ranking of an entire website.

Getting Personal, and Local
Search engines are constantly looking for ways to differentiate themselves from the competition. One way has been attempting to deliver individual users with as much personalized content as possible. Localized search results have become increasingly expected by users in recent years, as they seek information relevant to their specific geographic area. Even as a small business, it might make sense to have offices (or even phone numbers) in different parts of the country or world to help improve search results in localized searches.
Beyond localized searches, search engines are continually looking for ways to drill down searches with results as individualized as possible. The new Google Personalized Search is just one example of this. Not only are search engines taking factors such as location into account when delivering results, they are also considering previous search history and other sites users have visited in the past. The reality is that, in many cases, no two searches will produce exactly the same results.
Because of concepts like personalized searches, it’s important to feature customized content. Microsites that are targeted to specific areas of interest, demographics or geographic regions are one way to do this. You might build a microsite for teens, or city and state pages for different parts of the country. These sites also give places to post fresh content on a weekly or even daily basis — something that search engines like to see. The bottom line is that basic SEO concepts are still critical, just not by themselves. In order for SEO campaigns to be truly effective they need to be paired with smart marketing campaigns that involve every aspect of a company’s online brand. As with any marketing campaign, it’s very important to think about your target audience when designing an SEO campaign and how and where you can most effectively reach them.

Post from: A1 Leading Edge Intl.

SEO Alone is not Enough

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Post from: A1 Leading Edge Intl.

Analyzing SEO Successes

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.