Rick Power

When Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales launched Wikia Search his aim was to create a community-led search engine, however Wikia Search has been ditched. His decision to “close the doors” on the project was announced in a blog post. Mr Wales Wikia Search “has not been enjoying the kind of success that we hoped for”. He blamed the recession for his decision to withdraw funding but promised to continue as a “cheerleader” for alternatives to Google. “I personally believe in the opportunity for free software to make serious inroads into the search space. In a different economy we would continue to fund Wikia Search indefinitely,” he said.

A nine-year-old girl, allegedly kidnapped by her grandmother,

has been located and found using a Google’s Street View and a mobile phone signal. Authorities in Athol,

Massachusetts, joined forces after they were informed that the young girl named Natalie had been taken.

Officers used

GPS in the girl’s mobile phone to find her approximate location.

They then used these co-ordinates and put

them into Google Street View, thus pinpointing a hotel where the child was subsequently found. A happy ending to a

potentially dangerous situation, all thanks to Google and smart moves by the local authorities.

Facebook, Euro 2008 and Sarah Palin all claimed spots on the list of the top

10 fastest-rising queries on Google during this year. Google has just published its end of year

Zeitgeist. This tool reveals what internet users are searching for. For UK based users, Facebook took top spot

closely followed by the BBC.

Google recently launched ‘SearchWiki‘ which

allows users logged in to their Google account to mark up Google search results. This new system allows uers to re-rank, delete and

add comments to search results. Although these changes you make will only affect you, it is a brilliant way of

sharing your insight with other searchers.

Below is Google’s lead engineer, Amay, demonstrating some ways to

use SearchWiki.

An iPhone television advert has been banned by the advertising

watchdog for exaggerating the phone’s speed. The ad actually showed internet pages loading in seconds with the

3G model of the phone.

Only 17 people complained that this advert mislead them, however it seems like the

advertising standards watchdog agreed with them.

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Apple claim they wanted to put the message across to viewers that

the latest 3G model was much faster than the previous.