Twitter encountered considerable backlash and criticism after making an announcement that it would be forming a new policy for country-by-country censorship largely aimed at blocking Tweets perceived to be in violation of local laws and governmental viewpoints. But now, it has emerged that Twitter was not the first online entity to devise a far-reaching framework for ‘conditional censorship’. Read the rest of this entry »

Would you really be worried if your mobile number or other sensitive private data on the Web was becoming accessible to any site you had just visited? And, imagine if someone from us had happened to put a sort of embarrassing photo or video online, a few months ago, which had been forgotten by now, suddenly resurfaces! Would you not want to remove all traces of it forever? Read the rest of this entry »

An interesting development at the beginning of the year bring out how emotional connect has become as important as interweaving ads, marketing strategy and content in the search and social realm. The idea seems not only to maximize revenue generating opportunities but also to make the products appear as an integral part of everyday life for people. With this in mind, Google has gradually made a shift in strategy. Read the rest of this entry »

Just a couple of days after Google announced a major change to its current privacy policy, the company is facing severe criticism. From now on, it will be sharing a greater quantum of user data across its own services something that has greatly antagonized privacy advocates and a few official data-protection agencies. Read the rest of this entry »

Google’s popularity revolves around its ability to let surfers find the right webpages. With the advent of social web, wherein users can check vast amounts of data largely off-limits to the former, its dominance has come into question. In its desperate bid to catch up to Facebook, the company is trying to amalgamate the best facets of both search and social. Read the rest of this entry »

Google’s new weapon in its tussle with Facebook for dominance of the Web has drawn circumspect reactions. It’s step to include more of users’ personal information in their search results has wider connotations, experts point out. There are valid reasons to believe so. We give you a quick grasp its background and ramifications: Read the rest of this entry »

For Google, the bet lies on ‘personal’ aspect of search. The company now claims to explore your very own world, and the roll out the customized results. It will throw up only those results from billions of Web pages that are highly relevant to a specific user based on the material you and your Web-based connections share. Read the rest of this entry »

To stay ahead of the competition, Google Chrome is taking a number of steps to improve its user-experience. For this, it has just launched a Beta release works on two core principles of speed and security so as not only the pages load quickly but also ensure Safe Browsing. Read the rest of this entry »

Once content with merely delivering most comprehensive answers to search queries from users, the 13-year-old search giant is increasingly trying to spread its dominance across an array of domains and markets, offering online music, local coupons, mobile phones etc. It is not at all surprising that Google’s recent foray into the domain of online travel has shaken the other industry players, another case of the search giant extending its huge market power into diverse aspects of socio-economic life. Read the rest of this entry »

Google has complied with roughly two-thirds of the total requests to remove ‘undesired’ content that were made by the government authorities worldwide. Most technology and communications platforms get such requests from across the world to take out content from their services and also hand over user data. The relevant data tool of Google reveals the nature and number of requests it receives from different governments in a six-month reporting period. Read the rest of this entry »