Google ads are everywhere: in your gmail, google search results, popular blogs. They’re popular because they get good results for both the advertisers and the publishers who put them on their websites or online blogs. Advertisers only pay when somebody clicks on their ad, and can set a fixed amount that they are willing to pay everyday so they won’t go over their advertising budget. But did you know that Google can publish your non-profit ads for free?

There are restrictions, of course: for example, US-based organizations must have current 501(c)(3) status, as assigned by the Internal Revenue Service or IRS. Go to this page for more information on Google Grants and to this page for organizations based in other countries.

So how was the George W. Bush “miserable failure” bomb finally removed from Google search results?

There are two reasons: first, in 2007, Google changed their algorithm so that it could no longer be abused by pranksters, and ensured that the “miserable failure” search term would not point to the Google bomb, but rather to discussions, news articles, and commentary about the Google bomb project. The first result is now an article about the “miserable failure” Google bomb itself. Google’s official statement on this change was:

Over time, we’ve seen more people assume that they are Google’s opinion, or that Google has hand-coded the results for these Googlebombed queries. That’s not true, and it seemed like it was worth trying to correct that misperception. So a few of us who work here got together and came up with an algorithm that minimizes the impact of many Googlebombs.

Also, the White House web team got smart and redirected the link that used to point to George W. Bush’s biography; it now points to the page of the current president, which means that after Bush’s successor is elected, those old links would now point to that person’s page. On second thought, I’m not sure that was a completely smart thing to do.

From 2004 to 2006, if you typed in “miserable failure” on google.com, the first result you get would be George W. Bush’s official page on the White House website. This is the most popular example of a Google bomb, which manipulates search results based on the fact that Google’s page ranking algorithm places a high premium on incoming links.

According to Google, they didn’t manually edit search results for Google bombs such as these because:

We’re reluctant to alter our results by hand in order to prevent such items from showing up. Pranks like this may be distracting to some, but they don’t affect the overall quality of our search service, whose objectivity, as always, remains the core of our mission.

Of all the companies and/or manufacturers who promise technological edges over the other, who do you think is the most popular? A research conducted by InfoPro showed that Cisco still leads the race. A veteran in the technological business with new, exciting and unique gadget releases regularly this is the reason why companies choose them over the others. InfoPro’s method of research involved doing one on one interviews with Fortune 1000 companies that lasted an hour each. More than 50 percent of the companies said that Cisco has been their number 1 choice. Though this is the case, Cisco should look over their shoulder for the 2nd most popular computer manufacturer, Juniper. Almost 20 percent of the companies prefer Juniper (nothing for Cisco to worry about, really. But, who knows?).

Photo taken from http://www.iue.edu

I am sure most of you are familiar with Bluetooth technology. Most of your devices do have this since it’s the fastest way to connect and transfer files from one device to the other. But have you ever thought of how “Bluetooth” got its name? Just a little tidbit of history, Bluetooth is the English name of Danish King Harald Blatand (King Harold Bluetooth in English). He is said to have united all the division in ancient Norway, Denmark and Sweden in the 10th century. Just like what the techie Bluetooth does, it integrates (unites or connect) a wide range of different devices for a faster, more stable connectivity. On May 22, 2008, Bluetooth (technology) will also celebrate its 100th year anniversary.

Photo taken from http://allblackberry.com

Google’s web browser, Chrome (short for Chromium) has just gotten a boost with the release of it’s ver 2.0 which is being met with enthusiasm by many users of the browser who says it is well worth the wait. Chrome also got some well needed add-ons which gave it a bit of a chance to catch up on Mozilla’s Firefox browser which had a lot of available downloadable add-ons making it better. Seems the two are in battle for Mozilla has also recently announced that it was launching JetPack which is an open-source add-on development platform. Chrome seems to be a tad faster than the first version of the browser from Google as it continues to improve on the technology as it aims to take part in the browser wars that is currently raging all over the internet.

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The software giant from Redmond has received approval for a software patent, in this case a program that has the ability to restrict the use of a particular computer loaded with any of their programs or denying access to specific hardware. The specifics of the program and it’s use are still quite muddled or unavailable which may be something we will be seeing soon in a desktop near you. The patent was approved by the US Patent Office filed May 19, 2009, for what purpose the software would serve is stirring quite a lot of conspiracy theories and is expected to be rolled out with the new operating system they may be rolling out next year.

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As the corporate world goes, the bigger a company, the bigger the chances that laws have been broken in the process of growth which places Google Inc. smack in the sights of lawmakers in the US and the world over. Google has become the biggest search engine company in the world with control of a majority of the world’s internet advertising revenue. They went under fire when talks between them and Yahoo were buzzing, eventually leading to a killing of any deals for they were under so much pressure from the law and competitors who are stating that any partnership with the number one and two in the search engine market would be counter-productive. Google has stepped on many toes during the years and they have all been trying to get their hands on the search and advertisement giant for quite sometime.

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The term “phishing” is a term used to define the illegal procurement of personal information from internet users through the use of misleading and false pretenses – much like actual fishing, where fish are baited with a worm attached to a hook, that once they bite, can never free themselves of.

Phishing is a real threat to internet users all around the world, where more and more people are accepting the normality of transacting business and exchanging personal information on the world wide web. Phishing sites and scams are really designed to bait the unsuspecting user into filling out forms and sharing sensitive information that phishers use for their own personal benefit. So in every transaction in the net, it is always best for you to pause a bit and assess whether a particular site, offer, or person is legit.

One of the most widespread malware programs, the internet worm was estimated to have infected millions of computers connected to the internet and that doesn’t count dial-up connections for they are so slow they cannot be canvassed properly. People have been hearing of such malware for many year now and they have also seen the amount of damage it can do to computer systems, from wiping whole hard disks, corrupting files and many more unspoken problems that is known only to it’s maker.

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