Amazon released a Question & Answers site of their own called Askville. Currently in invite-only Beta, the site looks cleaner than Yahoo Answers, and as opposed to Google Answers, you don’t need to pay to ask questions. Activity on the site – like asking a question, or answering one – is rewarded with “quest coins” which can later on be spent in Questville (Questville didn’t open yet!). Amazon’s d

The web becomes more global every day, and country borders are blurred. What we really need in this day and age, even more than country flags, are flags for websites. Like... 1. Googlonia Googlonia’s flag, in classical uncluttered white, contains four stars representing the Google cornerstones search, usability, relevance, and prosperous relations with the Chinese government. 2. Amazon The flag of

Google Trends shows the volume for different search queries over time. Nadine Schmidt-Mänz at the Berlin search engines workshop last Monday categorized a bunch of these searches. Her work was based on storing & analyzing search live tickers of the course of some years, with no Google Trends available. I want to take some of her categories as well as some miscellaneous other ones and visualize the

Back in 2004, Google wrote, “For Internet users in China, Google remains the only major search engine that does not censor any web pages.” Using a dictionary of 10,000 English words I probed Google self-censorship two years later. In 2006, the following 9% of words return search results which Google agreed to censor in China*: abreast, abundant, acceptable, accusation, accuse, accused, adjacent, a