'Search Engine for Fun' Delivers Mixed Results

Info boxes will pop up next to your search

(NEWSER) - Google is rolling out a major new change to its search engine today—the Knowledge Graph . When a user searches for a famous person, place, or thing, a box will pop up on the side of the screen offering a concise list of relevant facts, reports ABC News . Google's database for the new tool includes 500 million people, places, and things combined with 3.5 billion items of information and connections. More»

Google tracks major milestone—150 sites for everyone on the planet

(NEWSER) - The internet now hosts a staggering 1 trillion unique web sites, according to Google researchers. The million million sites—over 150 for everybody on the planet—are growing by billions of pages a day, PC World reports. Google doesn't index all those pages, but plots them on a complex graph. A theoretical human researcher trying to check a different internet site each second would finish up around the year 3696. More»

Google, Yahoo get software to better read, index Flash files

(NEWSER) - For years, web developers have faced a tough choice: Make their pages pretty with Flash animations, or optimize for search engines? Now, Flash maker Adobe has tried to make that choice easier, by giving Google and Yahoo the software to read and index Flash files. “For end users, they're going to see a lot more results, and a lot better results,” says Flash’s project manager. More»

Two experts will create one for you (if you're 'Wiki worthy')

(NEWSER) - If you're important enough to warrant your own Wikipedia page, it should, in theory, just kind of appear on its own. But sometimes, giving it a $300 nudge doesn't hurt. Two Brooklyn entrepreneurs charge that much to craft an in-depth entry for you or your business on the free online encyclopedia and stuff it with citations, which are essential for meeting the site's standards, reports the New York Daily News . Alas, "a lot of people aren’t Wiki worthy," says one of the co-founders of mywikipro.com . "There are not a lot of articles on them to cite. We turn down a lot of people.” More»

Natalie Portman steals top spot from Johnny Depp this year

(NEWSER) - When you want to ogle an actor, the Internet Movie Database is a reasonable destination. So which 10 celebs racked up the most IMDb profile page views in 2011? The top spot now belongs to Natalie Portman , who snagged the crown from Johnny Depp (now No. 3, he's been No. 1 for six out of the last seven years). IMDb's managing editor certainly isn't shocked at the new queen bee: Natalie "won a Best Actress Oscar for Black Swan, was in the news welcoming a son into the world in June, and appeared in three films." Mashable reports on the rest of the top 10:

2. Mila Kunis : another Black Swan star