thedailywhat:

Easter Egg of the Day: 1. Go to Google. 2. Search “let it snow.” 3. ?????? 4. Winter Wonderland.

[@alex_ogle.]

(Source: thedailywhat)

steverubel:

It was a sizzling summer for social media. As we move into fall, here’s a look at some of the major milestones.

(via mashable)

The great lunar eclipse of 2011 is happening right now, a majestic phenomenon that occurs when the moon, passing through Earth’s shadow, turns an eerie, rusty red because of sunlight bent by Earth’s distorting atmosphere.

Except that today’s eclipse not visible from North America. So the Google home page is using it as its Google Doodle, showing the eclipse almost in real time, from cameras in South Africa, Dubai and the Canary Islands.

Watch Live Video of the Eclipse Here

via ABC News

futurejournalismproject:

TechKing posted an infographic earlier this month that examined popular search terms for the top 10 countries on the Internet based on overall usage.

So, for example, in late-March Japan top trending searches were for “rolling blackouts”, “nuclear powerplant” and “earthquake”.

Head west and India was all about cricket, which makes sense since the world championships were taking place.

In the you are what you search for department, we in the United States were all about the Sheen, American Idol and the NCAA tournament along with a side of Tumblr. That “Na pohybel janas” you see? People around the globe are confused on that one. Seems to be a search bot but no one knows what it means.

Here’s my confusion: how is it that Facebook, YouTube, Yahoo and Google all crack the top five most searched items? And in a mind bender, do people search for Google while on Google?

For those counting, the search term “You” returns 15.76 billion results. Would be interested to know which “you” people are looking for.

Biggie version of the above with search habits of the top 10 countries can be found here.

(Source: futurejournalismproject)

futurejournalismproject:

FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver analyzed a month’s worth of citations to the Web’s top English language news sites. The top 30 above is a good indicator of reach and influence:

The way I’ve determined to study this is pretty simple. I’ve tracked the number of times that the publication’s name has appeared in Google News and Google Blog Search over the past month, followed by the word “reported.” For instance, to track the number of citations for The Chicago Tribune, I’d look for instances of the phrase “Chicago Tribune reported.” (In some cases, I’ve permitted multiple search terms for the same news outlet — for example, both “BBC reported” and “BBC News reported.”)

Obviously, there are other ways that a news outlet’s reporting might be referenced: “according to The Guardian” as opposed to “The Guardian reported.” So this won’t capture every time that an outlet’s reporting is cited; the idea, instead, is that it should be a representative sample.

Silver chose the sites analyzed by taking the top 100 blogs from Technorati, the top 100 circulation newspapers in the United States, the top 100 newspapers in global circulation and Memeorandum’s top 100 news sources.

His full list can be viewed here.

(Source: futurejournalismproject)

nprfreshair:

A graphic from Bloomberg News shows how Google shaves billions off its income taxes each year. The report’s author, Jesse Drucker, appears on Fresh Air today to talk about how offshore tax havens have saved companies billions of dollars in the past few years.