I’ve long said that there’s only one thing holding me back from tossing my cable box in favor of getting all my TV online: live sports.

In particular, I’d really miss ESPN, the legendary all-sports cable and satellite network that keeps me company at lunchtime, gets me all prepped for the NFL on Sunday, and serves up more live tennis that you could swing a racket at. Read the full story

Google hopes to turn the river into a canal

Before too long, expect to find anything that anyone puts on the Internet on Google within seconds: with luck, it might even be useful.

Real-time search has come to Google. The company has been hinting at this day for several months, most recently when it announced a deal to access Twitter’s “firehose” of data. But it presented its vision for real-time search before the media Monday at the Computer History Museum, claiming to have made a little history on its own.

Over the next few days, Google users will start to notice a box called “Latest results” on the main search results page for a topic that’s guaranteed to produce results. Google used “Obama” as its example, and searches for that query place a new box that automatically scrolls through recent “real-time” results associated with that topic from sources like Twitter, FriendFeed, and Google News, as well as new Web pages–such as this story–as they are created.

The concept is hot in the search world: Microsoft’s Bing also displays updates from Twitter and various blogs, although those results are not integrated with the main page. And Yahoo has also signed up with a company called OneRiot to throw its hat into the real-time search wars.

What’s less clear, however, is how useful this technology will be unless Google and others working on the problem can bring the same degree of relevance and trust to real-time results that it brings to regular search results. Google News can already confuse the casual user who wonders how and why those particular headlines were singled out, so how will relevancy work when a stream of news can knock a particularly authoritative result off your screen in seconds?

“It’s a very hard problem. Language understanding is still an unsolved problem,” said Amit Singhal, a Google Fellow and one of the key players in developing this product. “Not only do we have to understand what someone is saying, but we have to get to the deeper semantics of what is indeed true. We have to work through many issues. Truth ends up being a rather vague notion.”

In a way, this challenge is right up Google’s alley. The company is obsessed with speed when it comes to presenting results, agonizing over whether design changes that add tenths of seconds to page-loading times are worth the effort.

And now that seemingly everyone has a blog, a microblog, a social-networking profile, and commenting identity (or 29), new content on the Internet is being generated at an astounding pace. Google used to think it would be able to index all the world’s information in about 300 years, but CEO Eric Schmidt told CNET in November that one of Google’s greatest challenges in the decades ahead will be staying abreast of the explosion in content enabled by social media.

That’s why it’s a bit surprising that Google, the world’s leading search engine by a wide margin, hasn’t necessarily been a leader in this area. Marissa Mayer, vice president of search and user experience at Google, admitted Monday the company could have moved more quickly to organize the vast amount of data produced by services such as Twitter. Anyone who has tried to use Twitter Search knows that real-time search at the moment is like the regular Internet was 10 years ago: a blast of information that’s impressive in its scope but overwhelming in its usefulness.

But what Google is trying to do is leapfrog the notion of Twitter as the vanguard of the real-time content explosion. Twitter is undeniably hot at the moment, but new Web pages are generated constantly, especially as traditional media companies move online. One need only to think back to this summer when news reports of Michael Jackson’s death sent millions online looking for confirmation, staggering services such as Google and Twitter under that load.

Google said it plans to display all kinds of Internet content in its “Latest news” box. Google didn’t pay Twitter an undisclosed amount of money for access to its feed for no reason, however; the speed at which real-time content is generated can be harnessed much easier if search providers such as Google have that information pushed to them, rather than having to pull it out of the Web itself.

That raises the question of just how Google will index and rank real-time results. The company needs to develop the real-time equivalent of PageRank, which evaluates Web pages by the number of other pages that are linking to that page. That’s something Google “is beginning to experiment with,” Mayer said in a question-and-answer session following Google’s presentation.

There’s definitely some way to do that, but it certainly is not a simple problem. Someone with 15,000 Twitter followers is not necessarily as authoritative in one area as they are in another, and Google will have to figure out some way to evaluate this information to make it truly useful.

Until then, however, news junkies can entertain themselves watching the Latest results section spin with updates on Tiger Woods’ latest paramour or the glacial progress of Congress’ attempt to pass health-care reform legislation.

In a roughly 10-second period Monday afternoon on Google’s Trends page, where it is testing out the real-time service, the feed for “Pearl Harbor Day”–the second most popular trend on the Internet Monday behind the aforementioned Tiger Woods–produced a tweet about a Pearl Harbor Day poem, a news story on people who were in Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and a gentleman celebrating Ruby Diner’s 27th anniversary with a $2.70 Rubyburger. (He also happened to note in his tweet that it was Pearl Harbor Day.)

(SEE MORE AT THE ORIGINAL SOURCE BY CLICKING HERE)

Malware authors are impersonating the CDC in a new scheme to propagate a trojan horse. Fraudulent e-mails sent by a botnet claim that the recipient must register for a fake state vaccination program but really link to a malware-infested phishing website.

The Center for Disease Control (CDC) issued a statement this week to warn citizens about a recent wave of phishing e-mails that deceptively claim to be from the government organization. The e-mails refer to a state vaccination program and tell recipients that they have to create a personal H1N1 vaccination profile. Read the full story

by  Chloe Albanesius

News Corp. will likely pull all of its newspaper content from Google News once its switches from an ad-supported to a subscription-based model, according to Chairman Rupert Murdoch.

Murdoch on Friday sat down with Sky News, of which News Corp. is a partial owner, to discuss the impact of the Internet on news, among other things.

The Australian media tycoon has been critical of the Google News aggregation model, as well as similar offerings from Microsoft and Ask.com, which he says is tantamount to stealing. When asked why he has not pulled News Corp.-owned material from Google News, Murdoch said that it will likely happen down the road.

“I think we will,” Murdoch said. “But that’s going to be when we start charging. We do it already with the Wall Street Journal.”

Google has argued that its news aggregator simply points users to content online and actually helps drive traffic to news sites. Murdoch was not impressed by Internet traffic and said he was more interested in finding loyal readers.

“What’s the point of having someone … who likes a headline they see in Google, come to us?” he asked. “The fact is, there’s not enough advertising in the world to go around to make all the Web sites profitable. We’d rather have fewer people coming to our Web site but paying.”

At this point, users can see the first paragraph of most articles in the Wall Street Journal, but to read the rest of the story online, they must sign up for a subscription. Murdoch was not sure that that is the approach he’ll take with all his publications.

“There’s a doctrine called fair use, which we believe could be challenged in the courts and barred altogether, but you know, it’s OK,” he said. “We’re getting a lot of advertising revenue, so we’ll take that slowly.”

In addition to the Journal, News Corp. owns Dow Jones, the New York Post, six newspapers in the U.K., including The Sunday Times and The Sun, and 25 publications in Australia. The company also owns Fox News and social networking site MySpace.

Murdoch brushed off the suggestion that people will not be able to afford subscriptions.

“Everyone can afford a newspaper; they’re the cheapest things in the world,” he said. “Think what you get out of it. It’s fabulous. And it’ll be even cheaper when you get it electronically.”

He was also not concerned about competing with publications that stick with the free, ad-supported model. “We’re better and if you look at most of [the competitors'] stuff, it’s stolen from the newspapers now and we’ll be suing them for copyright,” Murdoch said. “They’ll have to spend a lot more money on a lot more reporters to cover the world when they can’t steal from newspapers.”

http://www.pcmag.com/

Google has clarified that it will not index publishers against their wishes, in response to Rupert Murdoch’s threat to block the search engine from his newspapers’ websites.

A spokesman for the search giant said: “Google News and web search are a tremendous source of promotion for news organisations, sending them about 100,000 clicks every minute.

“Publishers put their content on the web because they want it to be found, so very few choose not to include their material in Google News and web search. But if they tell us not to include it, we don’t.” Read the full story

There has been a lot of talk about a deal between Twitter and Microsoft. This morning it was reported that Microsoft would in fact announce to the world that a deal to integrate real-time status updates into bing has been reached not only with Twitter, but Facebook as well.

Qi Lu, President of Microsoft’s Online Services Group, has made official the integration of Twitter and Facebook into Bing. However, the Twitter integration has gone live first today, you can access it at Bing.com/Twitter, Facebook will follow later. Read the full story

Twitter in Google, Microsoft licensing talks-blog

* Twitter, Microsoft, Google said in advanced talks

* Licensing deal could involve “several million dollars”

* Deals could also include revenue-sharing agreements Read the full story

Justice Department opens IBM antitrust probe

By Diane Bartz

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. Justice Department is investigating allegations that International Business Machines (IBM.N) abused its dominance of the mainframe business to squeeze rivals, Computer and Communications Industry Association Chairman Ed Black said on Wednesday. Read the full story

AT&T announce HTC Tilt 2 and HTC Pure Windows phones

Microsoft founder and multi-billionaire Paul G. Allen landed Friday at Ben-Gurion Airport, the day after his 92-meter mega-yacht, Tatoosh, anchored at the Ashdod port – since no regular Israeli marina is large enough to hold the ship, the world’s 26th largest motor yacht. He took a helicopter from the airport to his yacht.

Read the full story

Limited edition Xbox 360 console announced by Microsoft

New York, September 16 — After much speculation, Microsoft and Infinity Ward announced the launch date of eagerly awaited limited edition Xbox 360 at a press conference in Los Angeles. Read the full story

What a coincidence. These businessmen not only have the same taste in suits but exactly the same black hands. Which is a bit odd, considering one of them is white.

Of course it’s not a medical marvel, just a rather clumsy editing job by Microsoft. Read the full story