9731230
submission
sopssa writes:
2K Games announced today that they will be releasing Civilization V in the fall. For the first time in the series the square tiles will be changed to hexes, which 2K Games says provides "deeper strategy" and "more realistic gameplay". Civilization V will also include new graphics engine, new combat system including ranged bombardment, multiplayer and good support for the modding community. 'Each new version of Civilization presents exciting challenges for our team. Thankfully, ideas on how to bring new and fun experiences to Civ players never seem to stop flowing. From fully animated leaders and realistic landscapes, new combat tactics, expanded diplomacy and shared mods, we're excited for players to see the new vision our team at Firaxis has brought to the series.', Sid Meier said. In addition to Civilization V, the Facebook-based Civilization Network will also be released during 2010.
8670506
submission
sopssa writes:
According to latest comScore qSearch numbers Bing is currently gaining market share faster than ever before. "In December, Microsoft’s search engine gained another 0.4 percent to capture 10.7 percent of U.S. search queries. That makes five straight months of steady share gains for Bing since it launched — Bing’s share is up 2.7 percent in total since May, 2009. Google gained only 0.2 percent to end the month with 65.7 percent market share. What is even more interesting is if you look at year-over-year query growth rates for each search engine. Bing’s growth is actually accelerating. Its growth rate in query volume was 49.4 percent in December. "
8033608
submission
sopssa writes:
Several sites including TechCrunch and The Register are reporting about an email Google's vp Jonathan Rosenberg sent to employees on Monday about the meaning of open. "At Google we believe that open systems win. They lead to more innovation, value, and freedom of choice for consumers, and a vibrant, profitable, and competitive ecosystem for businesses. ... Our goal is to keep the Internet open, which promotes choice and competition and keeps users and developers from getting locked in." But are we likely to see Google open their search engine, advertising or the famous backend system? In their words, that would mean Google and other companies would need to work harder and innovate more to keep their users, for everyones benefit.
7246000
submission
sopssa writes:
TechCrunch is reporting that "several federal and regional government officials in Germany are trying to put a ban on Google Analytics, the search giant’s free software product that allows website owners and publishers to get detailed statistics about the number, whereabouts and search behavior of their visitors (and much more). — One German lawyer that gets cited in the article says the penalties could amount up to €50,000 (about $75,000) per website that uses Google Analytics to keep track of its visitors’ usage patterns." The amount of data Google collects from everywhere of the internet is indeed huge and website owners should be using local open source alternatives to keep the visitor data private.
4865423
submission
sopssa writes:
Bing has set up another domain just for porn images and videos. "general manager of Microsoft Bing said in a blog post that potentially explicit images and video content now will be coming from one separate domain — explicit.bing.net. 'This is invisible to the end customer, but allows for filtering of that content by domain which makes it much easier for customers at all levels to block this content regardless of what the SafeSearch settings might be'. When Bing was first launched, there was some online chatter about explicit images popping up when videos were "previewed" in the search results." This means the thumbnails and videos are served from that domain, allowing easy filter of them in corporate and school networks. Users still normally use www.bing.com. Instead of heavily filtering the results, this is quite good move.
