Wasiq Ansari’s World

Google aims to take on Facebook with new social feature called ‘Buzz’ Google, which has faltered in its attempts to break into the booming social networking business, is making another bid to counter the growing influence of Silicon Valley rival Facebook and San Francisco upstart Twitter with new products that make it easier to share [...]

Google on Thursday confirmed that it has acquired social search start-up Aardvark, a company founded by ex-Google employees. “We have signed a definitive agreement to acquire Aardvark, but we don’t have any additional details to share right now,” said a company spokesperson in an e-mail. Google has not confirmed a price, but a report on [...]

Google ‘sister’ launches in China: A new search engine and social network provider called Goojje has appeared online in China. The site contains very similar branding to Google, and the final syllable “jje” sounds similar to the Mandarin word for older sister (jiejie). Goojje’s search results appear to be filtered for sensitive content in accordance [...]

For as long as anyone can remember Microsoft Office has a cheaper ‘upgrade’ price option – but not for Office 2010. Microsoft has confirmed to Office Watch that there will be no upgrade pricing offers for existing Office users. Everyone, existing customer or not, will pay the same prices for Office 2010 with no ‘reward’ [...]

CNNIC excludes oversea registrars from .CN registrations CNNIC, the official registry for .CN, announced that all oversea registrars will no longer be allowed to register .CN domains starting with January 6, 2010, 18:00 PM (Beijing Time). The registration stop is planned to be temporarily. According to the Chinese registry, difficulties in handling the comprehensive new [...]

High-quality online video has been in high demand in China, and Chinese search provider Baidu is hoping to fulfill that need. Baidu announced on Wednesday that it is creating an independent company to offer premium online videos to Chinese Internet users. The new entity is designed to work with content providers to supply copyrighted material, [...]

Bit.ly Partners with Security Firms to Block Spams, Scams from Twitter Bit.ly, the service Twitter uses to shorten URLs to keep them under the service’s 140-character limit, announced partnerships on Monday with Verisign, Websense and Sophos that are designed to keep spam and malicious software off of the network. The partnerships should help solve a [...]

Today we’ve added another tool to our spam fighting toolbox that will give users the ability to flag bad accounts on Twitter. Folks can now help us conquer spam by calling our attention to a profile they find questionable. Click the “Report as spam” button under the Actions section of a profile’s sidebar and our [...]

Google search results sometimes include documents that were not originally formatted to be viewed in a web browser, such as PDFs. In the past, the only way to view these documents was to download them and open them in a separate viewer application. To provide an alternative, we made it possible to quickly and easily [...]

The image above is a CAPTCHA — you can read it, but computers have a harder time interpreting the letters. We tried to make it hard for computers to recognize because we wanted to give humans the scoop first, but we’re happy to announce to everybody now that Google has acquired reCAPTCHA, a company that [...]