search

The European Union has formally accused Google of breaching competition rules by favoring its own sites in search rankings . It's a big step towards a potential $6.6 billion fine. The case involves specialist websites that let users compare prices ... and availability for retail products or travel deals. The EU claims that Google is effectively rigging the search results because it owns many of the sites in the list, and therefore places them higher in the search results ranking. It says that the favored sites are listed higher than they 'deserve', rather than listing the sites based ... (view more)

Google has added a new measure to protect users from visiting risky websites. It's now going to warn users about bogus downloads, even before they go to the website concerned. The changes will affect Google Search, users of the Chrome browser, and ... advertisements provided by Google to third-party websites. Safe Browsing Warnings Extended to Chrome Google's Chrome browser will now contain special warning messages built into the web browser. The warnings are part of Google's Safe Browsing Service , which is also available as a third party API (application program interface). Parts of the ... (view more)

The first consumer features of Windows 10 -- albeit very much still in test mode -- may be just a few weeks away from public unveiling. Recent leaks suggest that the virtual assistant Cortana may be extremely prominent in the new system. Cortana is ... a voice recognition feature already present in Windows Phones and works somewhat similar to Apple's Siri and Google Now. The Windows 10 Consumer Edition Preview is expected to officially roll out to public testers in late January, 2015; some analysts suggest it will likely be on January 21st, as that is the date of Microsoft's next press event. ( ... (view more)

Infopackets Reader Brenda T. writes: " Dear Dennis, I have a lot of duplicate word documents and pictures in my computer. I would like to know what is the best way to find the duplicate files and delete them? Do I need to buy a special program? And ... if so do you recommend one? " My response: That's a great question -- thanks for asking. You don't need to buy a special program to search for and delete duplicate files, as there are plenty of excellent freeware programs that will do just that. One program in particular that comes to mind is NirSoft's SearchMyFiles . This ... (view more)

A web developer has started a site which displays Google censored links, enforced by the " right to be forgotten " rules in Europe. It's another example of how such censorship rules aren't working as well as planned. The new rules came into force ... earlier this year after the European Court of Justice made a final ruling in a long-running case involving Google and a Spanish man . The man wanted Google to remove a link to a news article from the 1990s about his property being repossessed. The man said it was unfair that people who searched for his name online would see that ... (view more)

SearchMyFiles 2.48 Looking for an alternative to Windows' standard "Search for Files and Folders" feature? Then try SearchMyFiles, which gives you a number of unique tools for searching through the files and folders stored on your system. Users can ... search by wildcard, by last modified / created / last accessed time, by file attributes, by file content (text or binary search), and by the file size. http://www.nirsoft.net Fotor 2.0 This completely free online photograph editor allows you to create exciting high-definition images of your friends and family. Using this program, you ... (view more)