search

What would you do if you found records of your personal search information haphazardly sprinkled all over the web? For three AOL subscribers, the reckless mismanagement of their personal data sparked a class-action lawsuit against the Internet giant ... this past Friday. This is the first time AOL has been sued for the intentional release of over 19 million search requests made by about 650,000 subscribers during a period of three months. The Internet service provider is being charged under the federal Electronic Communications Privacy Act and California's consumer-protection laws. (Source: ... (view more)

Just in time for the holiday shopping season, Google plans to upgrade its product search capabilities via its main search engine. A Google official publicly revealed the news early last week at the Professional eBay Sellers Alliance (PESA) Summit in ... San Francisco. (Source: pcadvisor.co.uk ) How Will the Upgrade Work? According to analysts at Bear Stearns ... (view more)

Google has introduced a new program for Google Talk users that tracks their music listening habits and posts the results online for others to view. Activating Google Music Trends To activate Google Music Trends, users must have a gmail account and ... Google Talk, the search giant's one-year-old instant messaging program. The option for Google to track your music likes is voluntary, and to participate you must check the Google Music Trends option in the Google Talk settings menu. How does it work? Google Music Trends tracks your music preferences by registering each song you listen to via Google ... (view more)

For those that have had to reinstall Windows XP or have purchased a new computer with it pre-installed, getting a good selection of software to start with is sometimes a time daunting task. Google has done something about it, however. The Google ... Staff Engineers went through dozens of software packages and built a collection of software tools, utilities, and toys that are automatically updated for you -- and it's called Google Pack. Google states that the versions on some software may lag behind a version on some software packages, but that is only because the engineering staff check out each ... (view more)

Google has just unveiled Accessible Web Search , a search engine for the visually-challenged. Here's how it works: Regular Google sorts search results primarily by how relevancy, but Accessible Search takes it a step further by also listing pages ... will that will be easy for the blind to navigate. To meet Google's Accessible Web Search criteria, a web Site has to be "visually simple." That means it should contain few images, work well even if those images are turned off, and can be navigated primarily with a keyboard. (Source: google.com ) Before Google Accessible Web Search, searching the ... (view more)

Have you ever come across an ad for a software program that looks especially interesting? For example: an ad might claim that the program has won awards and is the absolute best at doing a particular maintenance task on your computer. The truth is ... that some ads can be very compelling, but often mislead users into downloading unscrupulous software. So how do you know if the claims true? Is the software legitimate? Is the software malware? How can experienced users decide -- and what about inexperience users? Well, I am going to tell you how I go about finding the answers. It is not difficult ... (view more)

Infopackets Reader 'Sandy' writes: " Dear Dennis, I love your newsletters! Thanks so much for doing it. I've done searches for .JPG picture files using Windows Search (Start -& Search). The results appear, and then I usually click View -& ... Thumbnails to see the little pictures of each image file. I have a floppy disk that has hundreds of website templates, but in order to see what each of them look like, I have to double-click each one individually and they open up in Internet Explorer. Question: Do you know of a program that will allow me to preview all my HTML files (similar to the ... (view more)

Have you ever lost track of a file on your PC? I got sick of using Windows Search (and waiting forever for it to find anything) and started looking for an alternative. Unfortunately, most of the Search programs I came across either didn't do what I ... wanted them to, or had a lot of overhead. For example: overhead can result as some search tools index your entire hard drive (similar to a file system table). Among other reasons, indexing is performed so that searching is limited to 1 huge database file (rather than scouring through the entire hard drive, bouncing from file to file, as is the case ... (view more)

Google has unveiled its new toolbar for Internet Explorer, called Google Toolbar 4, and it is *loaded* with lots of cool and useful features. One of the best new features is called "Custom Buttons." With Custom Buttons, you can add buttons to your ... toolbar that will let you visit and search your favorite websites and keep up with interesting feeds. The Google Button Gallery has many buttons for popular sites, but you can also easily create your own. The new Enhanced Search Box of Toolbar 4 uses what appears to be the Google Suggest feature to suggest popular searches. This makes searching that ... (view more)

Below you will find some of the most common indicators of malware infection. Should you be experiencing any of these symptoms, I strongly suggest you run your anti-virus scanner, along with your anti-spyware scanners. A combination of more than 2-3 ... of any of these symptoms could mean a major clean up is in order. -The homepage of your browser is changed suddenly, and you have no clue as to how it happened. This is commonly called a browser hijack , and one of the most notorious of these infections is CoolWebSearch. -You suddenly notice an 'extra' toolbar on IE and once again you didn't ... (view more)