Oops. Google flags all sites as harmful.

Earlier today Google responded to every search with the message ‘this site may harm your computer’. Google has apologised – with the official line that the mistake was caused by human error. The company said the glitch lasted for 40 minutes – which, in my view, is quite a long time for the world’s biggest and most influential search engine to remain effectively useless. The company has apologised to the owners of sites that were incorrectly labeled as ‘harmful’. It will be interesting to monitor how the company handles the inevitable criticism.

Thanks to Henk Van Ess who alerted me to this problem through his comments on my post on Icerocket.

Research anonymity using Tor

Over the next few weeks I intend to describe some of the best ways to protect your privacy if you carrying out online investigations and need to keep a low profile. At the very least – by not revealing your IP address.

One solution is the Tor (Onion Router network) Project which ‘protects you by bouncing your communications around a distributed network of relays run by volunteers all around the world.’ It protects you by preventing sites from analysing your browsing and prevents sites from working out where you are.

It is a splendid application that allows to switch your anonymity on and off using your Firefox browser. I recently came across this basic introduction from Unwired which does a very good job. More soon.



Click to play

UPDATE: More information about Tor for Mac users here.

Easy transfer from Google Notebook to Evernote and Zoho

If, like me, you were shocked by Google’s announcement that they are to abandon development of its highly rated Notebook app – help it at hand. Two of the best notebooks have launched importers that enable Google Notebook users to easily switch to Evernote or Zoho.
Evernote’s instructions include a video tutorial while over at Zoho you’ll need a simple Firefox plugin.

If you haven’t tried a notebook app before then see my post on the 10 reasons why journalists and researchers should love Evernote.

Memory search tool – Infoaxe

I’ve been aware of Infoaxe for some time but only recently discovered that its functionality allows you to do far more than search your private web history online. Here’s what it can do:

• Once you’ve downloaded the Infoaxe toolbar it gives you quick access to the sites you visit most.
• It lets you decide which pages you visit are stored in your history.
• You can tag the pages you visit to organise your history.
• Once you’re up and running when you search Google or Yahoo you get search results from your history alongside the standard search engine results.
• The ‘pivot’ tool enables you to bundle pages together from your history that you browsed at around the same time.
• You can search your history using any computer.

Given the search functionality, Infoaxe effectively works to automatically bookmark all the pages you visit.

Reverse lookup tools added to Pipl.com

The very useful people search engine – Pipl.com – has added reverse lookups for e-mail addresses, usernames and phone numbers. All reverse lookups are a bit hit and miss but if all you have to go on is an e-mail address then this is a great addition to one of the best people finders available. The phone number feature looks like it’s limited to the US and Canada (reverse phone number lookups aren’t allowed in the UK).

I’ve tried the e-mail lookup search on a few UK-based addresses and it found references to those in places that provided other leads to follow up.

Firefox tweaks for faster browsing

Frustrated by slow Firefox performance when you’ve opened a couple of windows and a couple of dozen tabs? Here’s an easy way to boost speed. A handful of Firefox tweaks that will double your browser speed : Boy Genius Report I have a relatively slow broadband connection and found these changes made an incredible impact on page load times.
Thanks to The Boy Genious Report for that tip.

Icerocket skates in where Google fears to tread

If, like me, you’re wondering why you can’t do a ‘Twitter Search’ from the big two search engines then John Battelle has a few theories. To you and I it might make perfect sense for Yahoo! and Google to include a Twitter search but, it seems, they are both willing to sacrifice functionality because they are reluctant to endorse a potential competitor. ‘Fascinating’ if you’re an industry observer; rubbish if you want a search engine to do the obvious.
That’s where Icerocket steps in. As Phil Bradley noted this week, the very nice Icerocket search engine has recently added a Twitter search option. But perhaps even more interestingly it has added a ‘Big Buzz’ option that pulls in very recent results from blogs, Twitter, Video, News and Images. It even gives you an ‘auto refresh’ option to update those results every minute or so as you are working on a story.
As Phil Bradley notes: ‘the whole area of news and social media is one that is seemingly passing Google straight on by.’ More on Icerocket soon.

Twitter for Journalists – Webcast

The Columbia Graduate School of Journalism recently organised the webcast: Twitter for Journalists, or everything you wanted to know about Twitter but were afraid to ask.

The event set out to answer questions such as:

• How can journalists use it in their day-to-day work?
• What are best practices for journalists?
• Whose work is, in Twitter terms, worth “following”?

You can find out more about the webcast and listen again to the entire conversation via the Shool’s blog.