Google is full of useful functions and search tricks that you probably don’t know. I recently spent some time with Google engineers Jake Hubert and Dan Russell, learning ways to get more out of Google search. These are tips you’ll find useful, whether you’re wondering how to convert Centigrade to Fahrenheit before you head for the beaches in the south of France, or need to look at a patent for a technology innovation.

We had hardly started our conversation, when Russell gave me his first, and over-arching, tip: If you want to know something about Google search, simply search for it. “Don’t bother to remember a URL. I don’t,” he said…..

Let’s say you want to know something about a patent. Simply type “Google patents” in a search bar, and the first hit you get will take you to Google Patent Search. Google and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office have struck an agreement, and you can now have access to more than 7 million patents, including drawings.

The Internet promises unlimited connectivity, but such connectivity requires that computers and devices find one another through a common address plan. The current plan, in place since the late 1970s, is running out of open addresses, and a new scheme called IPv6 is being put in place to power the Internet’s next stage of growth.

For small businesses that plan ahead, this shift can enhance computing security and application reliability and performance. But waiting until the last minute could leave you scrambling for costly equipment updates, missing an opportunity to turn a necessary change into a business boost…..

Malicious hackers attacked Google’s YouTube on Sunday, exploiting a cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability on the ultra-popular video sharing site, hitting primarily sections where users post comments.

“Comments were temporarily hidden by default within an hour [of discovering the problem], and we released a complete fix for the issue in about two hours. We’re continuing to study the vulnerability to help prevent similar issues in the future,” a Google spokesman said via e-mail…..

The attack potentially put at risk YouTube cookies of users who visited a compromised page, but it couldn’t be used to access their Google accounts, the spokesman said. As a precaution, YouTube users should log out of their account and log back in again.

The attackers apparently targeted singer Justin Bieber, incorporating code into YouTube pages devoted to him so that visitors saw tasteless messages pop up about the teen star, and were also redirected to external sites with adult content

An industry source familiar with the situation said that while the attack itself didn’t involve malware infections, such a risk is inherent whenever users visit any Web page, such as the ones attackers redirected users to. It’s not clear if those landing pages contained malware, but most up-to-date anti-virus software is designed to protect against those threats, this person said.

YouTube is by far the most popular video uploading and sharing site. In May, U.S. residents watched 14.6 billion video clips at Google sites, mostly at YouTube. which is about 43 percent of all clips watched online that month, according to comScore.

On a day when the U.S. marks its independence with fireworks shows, social media sites like Twitter and Facebook lit up on Sunday morning with reports from thousands of individuals who noticed the YouTube hack.

A separate stream of postings on social media sites focuses on whether Apple’s iTunes App Store may have been compromised by a rogue developer and whether purchases may have been made without victims’ permission using their credit cards on file.

People posting about the Apple issue are suggesting that App Store customers check for any unusual activity on their accounts.

Apple didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from IDG News Service.

Google has reached an agreement to buy ITA Software, a maker of air travel flight-information software whose customers include major airlines and online travel agencies. Google will pay US$700 million in cash for the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based software vendor, the companies announced on Thursday.

Google plans to use ITA’s software to improve the ways in which people can find flight information online using Google search services, Google said in a statement…..

ITA, founded in 1996, counts among its customers American Airlines, Continental Airlines, Kayak, Orbitz, Southwest Airlines, TripAdvisor, United Airlines, US Airways, Virgin Atlantic Airways and Microsoft’s Bing.

Google said it will “honor all existing agreements” ITA has in place and plans to add new partners.

The companies are holding a press conference this afternoon to discuss the deal

Google’s encrypted search engine, launched in May, has moved to a new Web address that isn’t as convenient as its original one but that gives organizations the option to block the site for their users without locking them out of other Google services.

Originally offered at google.com, the encrypted search engine has been relocated to encrypted.google.com, a move prompted primarily by the requirement of schools and universities to block encrypted search engines for their students.

Educational institutions often ban encrypted search engines because students can use them to bypass the Web content filters of their schools and universities…..

However, blocking google.com also interferes with other encrypted Google products, like the hosted Apps communication and collaboration suite, which many educational institutions offer for their staff and students.

By moving the encrypted Web search engine to its new address, it’s now possible to block access to it without affecting other Google services, Google said on Friday.

“We are continuing to explore longer-term options such that we could return encrypted search to https://www.google.com without introducing issues with school content filters,” wrote Google Enterprise President Dave Girouard in an official blog post.

Google introduced the option to encrypt Web search sessions with SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) technology for people who want to make sure network snoops don’t sniff the data they exchange with Google servers, such as queries entered and results received.

Pakistan has blocked 17 Web sites and is closely monitoring seven other sites and search engines for content considered offensive and blasphemous, according to a spokesman of the country’s telecommunications regulator, the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority (PTA).

The PTA issued related orders on Friday to its licensed operators after receiving a directive from the country’s Ministry of Information Technology, Khurram A. Mehran, a spokesman for the PTA said on Monday in an e-mail. The move follows an order last week by the High Court of Lahore…..

Among the seven sites being monitored are Yahoo, Google, YouTube, Amazon, MSN, Hotmail and Bing, according to media reports from Pakistan.

It is not clear how PTA intends to monitor all these sites, which have a large amount of online content.

Pakistan has recently stepped up monitoring and blocking of online content that is considered offensive to Islam.

Facebook was ordered blocked by the Lahore court in a separate case on May 19 after a lawyers’ organization filed a petition objecting to a page on the Web site called “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day!,” which invited users to draw cartoons of Prophet Mohammed. Depictions of the Prophet are prohibited in some Muslim traditions.

YouTube was also blocked a day later for content that was considered “sacrilegious.”

The block on Facebook was removed after the company agreed to prevent the offending pages from being viewed in Pakistan. The block on YouTube was also lifted, though the PTA continued to block content it considered offensive on the site. More than 450 other links on the Internet were also blocked in May as part of the order.

Ministry of Information Technology and Telecom has confirmed that it has received ban orders from Lahore High Court on Thursday to ban Google, Yahoo, Hotmail, MSN, Bing, YouTube, Amazon etc , reported BBC Urdu, citing unnamed sources in the Ministry.

It merits mentioning here that inter-ministerial committee of IT Ministry decides on how to and why to ban or not to ban a website. Committee is reportedly meeting today to discuss the implication, execution and procedures of the ban.

IT Ministry has an option of getting stay-order from Supreme Court against LHC’s decision; however, all these options will be discussed in today’s meeting.

Unlike Facebook’s ban previous month, LHC’s current ban orders for search engines were not welcomed by the masses.

Earlier this week, Lahore High Court had ordered to immediately block nine websites for publishing and promoting sacrilegious material while hearing a writ petition filed by a citizen, Muhammad Sidiq, seeking a ban on the websites for publishing blasphemous materials and twisting the facts and figure of Holy Quran.

PTA  has already sent a summary to Prime Minister of Pakistan to discuss ban options of offensive websites – summary has details on implications of banning search engines and social media.

Ban includes 9 websites, which are considered as backbone of internet, blocking them will mean a total internet blackout in the country.

Update:

Inter-Ministerial committee has decided to ban all those URLs containing blasphemous content, as directed by LHC, however, search engines won’t get blocked in accordance to decision that was earlier taken by Federal Cabinet.

In this regards, Ministry of IT and Telecom will send a list of 17 websites to PTA for a permanent ban.

Moreover, Ministry in its letter will ask PTA to keep monitoring the web for any occurrence of blasphemous content to block them immediately.

Search Engines won’t get Banned:

Committee decided not to ban search engines, as they don’t host or store any content. However, options are considered to make it impossible to search for certain keywords on search engines..

You probably don’t give much thought to what appears on the YouTube homepage every time you visit. You should, however, especially if you have a YouTube account. Let’s take a look at some of the settings you can–and possibly should–change. To get started, head to YouTube and sign into your account (if you’re not already signed in). Near the top of the page, click Add/Remove Modules. (If you don’t see that option, find your username in the upper-right corner, click it, and then choose Account. Finally, click Customize Homepage.)

As you can see, YouTube offers about dozen “modules” you can add to or remove from your homepage. Most of these are pretty self-explanatory, but there are few worth discussing. First, I strongly recommend turning off Recent Activity, which shows your friends and subscriptions just about everything you’ve done on YouTube lately. I think what I watch or “favorite” on YouTube is my business, thank you…..

Second, if you upload a lot of videos and want to know how they’re trending, enable Insight Map and Insight Chart. When you return to your homepage, you’ll see various statistics and data on how (and where) your videos are being viewed.

Third, after clicking Save Changes and returning to your homepage, click the Edit link atop any module that has one and you’ll be able to make changes to how many videos are displayed and in what layout.

Finally, if you want to change the order in which modules appear on your homepage, just click their corresponding up/down arrows. For example, if you want the aforementioned Insight Map to reside at the very top, click its up arrow repeatedly until it lands there.

YouTube offers a lot more homepage customization than most people think. Experiment a bit and you’ll be able to configure your own page exactly how you like it.

Responding to yet another user uproar, Facebook recently made efforts to simplify its privacy controls and introduce some other welcome changes. They’re good steps to take–but considering that Facebook had to be forced to respect users’ basic wishes regarding their own information, it suggests a serious disconnect in how the company and its users view privacy.

In January, CEO Mark Zuckerberg had said that his company was updating its systems to “reflect what the current social norms are.” So when Facebook announced in April that it would automatically enroll users into new features such as Instant Personalization–which handed users’ publicly available Facebook info to selected Websites that users visited–the implication was that users’ wishes, not the company’s bottom line, prompted the move from a largely private system shared only with approved friends to a largely public system that freely gave data to search engines, marketing companies, and anyone else who wanted it……

The shift suggests that, according to Facebook, the current social norm is to share everything with everyone. But many users clearly disagree, judging from the spike in the number of people searching in Google for “delete Facebook account.”

In May, reacting to complaints, Facebook drastically simplified its labyrinthine privacy controls. Instead of having to sift through as many as 50 settings and 170 options (according to a count by the New York Times), users see a chart outlining which info is shared with everyone, with friends of friends, or with friends only. Just as important, Zuckerberg says that the company will no longer arbitrarily change those settings when new controls or features are added.

Good moves. But it’s beyond me as to why any business would have to be forced to acknowledge that reversing a user’s privacy control changes to make previously personal information public is a bad idea.

If you’re willing to stick with Facebook to see if the clue-bat whacking takes hold this time, try a tool that can hedge your bets. Originally made to assist with the previous sorry maze of privacy controls, a bookmarklet from ReclaimPrivacy.org can scan your settings and report whether you might be sharing more than you’d like. Its creator, Web developer Matt Pizzimenti, says his organization will be keeping the tool updated to scan the newly simplified settings as well as any future controls, in part because he believes that the current defaults are still too open for comfort.

Wondering what the fuss is about? Data-mining firms are vacuuming up this now-public information for marketing and advertising databases. One company, Marketo.com, offers to “monitor what prospects say on social sites” for use with sales leads.

Hewlett-Packard plans to use Yahoo’s advertising network in a pilot program that will deliver targeted advertisements for content printed with its latest line of Web-connected printers. HP launched a line of Web-connected printers last week that allow users to print content directly from the Web or send content from their mobile phone to a remote printer using an e-mail address specific to that printer.

HP also launched a program called “scheduled delivery,” where a user can regularly schedule printing, for example, portions of a daily newspaper every day at 7 a.m. The company also sees a potential for localized, targeted advertising to go along with the content. While testing its ePrint Web-connected printers, HP ran two trials where consumers received content from a U.S. national music magazine and major U.S. newspaper along with advertisements, said Stephen Nigro, senior vice president in HP’s Imaging and Printing Group…..

“What we discovered is that people were not bothered by it [an advertisement],” Nigro said. “Part of it I think our belief is you’re used to it. You’re used to seeing things with ads.”

HP’s ePrint printers, some of which will become available next month, are connected to the user’s home router, which means they will have an IP address. IP addresses can be used to identify an approximate area where the Web-connected device is located, opening the potential for targeted advertisements based on location.

“Through IP (Internet Protocol) sniffing, you have an idea about where those printers are so naturally it allows you to kind of already target your offers,” Nigro said.

Ads can also be targeted based on a user’s behavior as well as the content, said Vyomesh Joshi, head of the HP’s Imaging and Printing Group. The pilot with Yahoo is in its early stages, however, and Joshi said the program has to be done with privacy in mind.

“That’s where we need to be very clear business rules in terms of privacy,” Joshi said.