When a website is in clear violation of Google’s search policies, for example they buy links to boost their presence, the search giant acts swiftly to punish those websites, apparently they are just as quick to punish their own search results when Google itself violates standard search policies.

News of that very occurrence was announced this week after hundreds of bloggers were paid to place Google Chrome sponsored links on their blogs. In most cases the sites contained irrelevant “garbage” content that the search giant typically penalizes sites for engaging in.

Google was quick to blame the ad agency they had hired to promote the browser but then acted on behalf of its own policies.

To punish their own browser the search results for the word “browser” do not contain the homepage for Chrome anywhere in the first 50 results (5 pages).

In a statement about their action to demote their own content a representative noted:

“While Google did not authorize this campaign, and we can find no remaining violations of our webmaster guidelines, we believe Google should be held to a higher standard, so we have taken stricter action than we would against a typical site.”

It’s still unclear how long Google will leave their down rank in affect, however with thousands of bloggers constantly linking to the browsers pages when new versions are available it probably won’t take long for Google Chrome to climb it’s way back up to the first few results within Google search queries.

Do you think Google did well in punishing itself for violating the company’s search guidelines?

Google Punishes Google In Search Results And They Deserved It is a post from: The Inquisitr

Mozilla on Wednesday announced a new customized version of their Firefox internet browser that defaults to the Bing search engine rather than Google.

The announcement comes nearly one year after Mozilla said they would begin including Bing and Yahoo search results in Firefox 4 through an option which can be set within the browser itself.

In a statement on their website Mozilla announced:

“Mozilla and Bing are pleased to make available Firefox with Bing, a customized version of Firefox that sets Bing as the default search engine in the search box and AwesomeBar and makes Bing.com the default home page.”

The statement continues:

“Existing Firefox users can also make these changes by installing the Bing Search for Firefox Add-on.”

Firefox is already distributed with nearly 20 versions in different geographies and through various partners including options for Twitter, yahoo, Yandez and United Internet integration.

Also on the horizon is an upcoming version of Firefox for Android which includes a native UR instead of the company’s XUL implementation. The Android change is expected to produce faster startup times.

Will you be switching to the Bing version of  Mozilla Firefox browser if it’s released en masse as a secondary option instead of the Google search?

Mozilla Has Developed A Bing Default Search Engine is a post from: The Inquisitr

Watch out Google, MC Hammer is coming after the search market. Hammer announced at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco that he was launching a new search engine, WireDoo, which will provide a new type of search.

Hammer says that Wiredoo will be a “deep search” engine. Mashable reports that search engines like Google and Bing rely on links and keywords to provide results. Wiredoo will provide results on the search topic, but also related topics.

For instance, if you search for the word “car” on Wiredoo, you’ll get results about insurance, safety ratings, and price. If you search for “MC Hammer,” you’ll find links to parachute pants, platinum albums, and bankruptcy.

Hammer said that Wiredoo is not trying to compete directly with search engine giants like Google and Yahoo. Instead, Wiredoo will provide a new service for people.

Hammer said:

“It’s not a competitive attempt to recreate search…  You can always make things better. There’s always a next version. Do we really need another search engine? Of course not. But if something can be an added value, then we’ll find a definite use for it.”

Wiredoo, which has the tagline “Search once and see what’s related,” is currently in Beta. 

Do you think MC Hammer’s Wiredoo will be a success? Are you interested in a relation search engine?

MC Hammer Launches WireDoo Search Engine is a post from: The Inquisitr

TinEye uses “sophisticated pattern recognition algorithms” to find any instance of an image anywhere on the Internet. As its creators explain it, the service creates “a compact digital signature or ‘fingerprint,’” then compares “its fingerprint to the fingerprint of every single other image in the TinEye search index.”

A complex system, but put simply: You give it an image and it’ll show you who else has it.

Here’s what happens: You sign up for a free account and wait a few minutes for a confirmation e-mail. Then, you login, upload an image or input an image URL — and within seconds, TinEye will show you every place the same image is being used. Still in beta, the service is still somewhat limited, though already fairly impressive: The database is at just over 700 million images and is growing by the day as its spiders continue to crawl the Web for images.

I first tried a search for The Inquisitr logo, seen in the banner at the top of this site. TinEye says no one else is using it. Next, I tried one certain to deliver plenty of offenders: the Miley Cyrus Vanity Fair photo. Sure enough, TinEye found a few dozen sites that’d lifted the picture and published it themselves.

Some other hot searches TinEye points out include the Uncle Sam “I Want You” poster, the Mona Lisa, the U.S. dollar bill, and the Hello Kitty character.

Canada-based Idee is behind this new startup. The company focuses on image identification software and has created a few other products utilizing similar concepts. Its founders say their technology can handle low-resolution or grainy images and still be able to recognize them.

TinEye: Tracking Your Images, Pixel-By-Pixel is a post from: The Inquisitr

Google Fellow Amit Singhal posted a detailed blog discussing some common questions about the mysterious process, such as whether Google ever manually edits results:

“Let me just answer that with our third philosophy: no manual intervention. In our view, the web is built by people. You are the ones creating pages and linking to pages. We are using all this human contribution through our algorithms. The final ordering of the results is decided by our algorithms using the contributions of the greater Internet community, not manually by us.”

Singhal doesn’t go into any explanation of the technologies or the algorithms driving the ranking. He does say, however, that those topics will come up in a future posting.

Google Opens Up About Ranking Process is a post from: The Inquisitr