by Vera H C Chan Ready to celebrate the Fourth, old school style?First, declare war on Britain ok, you can Tweet it if you prefer . Get some people to sign on, set a bonfire on the lawn, burn some King George III effigies, and stock up on rum, applejack, and salted meat. If it s a bit too late to get the applejack on short notice, a fireworks compromise will do. The recession has forced cities and sponsors to cut back on the pyrotechnics this year, but sellers actually believe sales will boom...

Should I get the new iPhone 3G S? Hmm. I don 8217;t know. One the one hand it has a lot of cool new features, but I 8217;m still not sure about the cost. I have wanted one for a long time, though. But there 8217;s a reason I haven 8217;t taken the plunge 8230; right? End the indecision! Ask your friends what they think easily and efficiently using the new My Yahoo! app Whaddyathink? How? Simply add the Whaddyathink? app to your page and then follow these simple steps: 1 Once it...

by Vera H C Chan Given the continued Search interest, amusement parks will a Fourth of July weekend destination for many. Those headed to Orland s Magic Kingdom on Independence Day might want to stop by a revamped Hall of Presidents, where an animatronic Barack Obama AKA Robobama makes his debut.Animatronics is, as HowStuffWorks puts it, a mechanized puppet. The administration apparently is so tickled by this honor, the White House blog posted a behind the scenes video of the president...

by Mike Krumboltz Nothing moves the search needle like scandals. This past week, it wasn t so much the scandals themselves, but how people reacted to them that stirred the Web. Read on for the scoop on three big transgressions. Here s hoping next week is a bit more honorable.Ruth breaks her silence While many may find comfort that Bernie Madoff will die in prison, others couldn t help but wonder what his wife thinks of his spectacular fall from grace. Until this week, Ruth Madoff had...

Windows Live Messenger provides a great deal of freedom in how you can communicate and with whom, but I m sure we all know people that like to push the boundaries of Messenger etiquette Here s a quick look the top 5 Messenger etiquette offenders: 1. The YELLERS CAPS LOCK IS APPARENTLY ALWAYS ON FOR THESE USERS AND THEY HAVE A STRONG AFFINITY FOR THE EXCLAIMATION MARK!!! REGARDLESS OF THE TOPIC, YOU CAN COUNT ON A LOUD RESPONSE!!! 2. Emoticon overload 3. Indecisive typers That...

Posted by Eyal Even Dar and Vahab Mirrokni, Google Research, NYThe 26th International Conference on Machine Learning ICML 2009 was recently held in Montreal in conjunction with the 22nd Conference On Learning Theory COLT 2009 and the 25th Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence UAI 2009 . This is one of the major forums for researchers from both industry and academia to share the recent developments in the area of machine learning and artificial intelligence. Machine learning...

Posted by Casey Ho, Software EngineerAt Google we want to make it easy for you to find the information you need. As such, we ve made searching for passages within a book part of the core experience of Google Books.Earlier this month we revamped the search experience to make searching inside a book easier. You can now view the context of a search result, sort results by relevancy or page order, and flip through results quickly while viewing the book. Today I m excited to announce one more...

A couple of months ago, we published a post on making your site a closer. But, before your website can close a sale, it has to get the visitor s attention. Presenting your visitor with a landing page that s relevant to what she s looking for is the best way to start the conversation and proceed towards the conversion or sale. Of course, you ll want to pair your landing pages with the appropriate keywords and ads. But, what else can you do to get more visitors to become customers?Google Website...

by Claudine Zap Okay, humans. This is not a drill. It s the summer movie season and the aliens are upon us: Time to pick a side. The alien invasion flick District 9 produced by Peter Jackson isn t out for another month. But a video warning of aliens on earth has hit the Web, sending humans searching for more details. You can see the safety alert video here. Stick around to try out the video game, too. The documentary style movie preview shows the aftermath of a non human invasion into...

We released the new AdWords interface early to get your feedback on it as soon as possible. And you haven t disappointed us! We receive thousands of comments every month covering likes, dislikes, and ideas for ways to further improve the AdWords interface. We read your comments carefully to prioritize the areas to work on next.And we ve made a lot of progress on the top issues our advertisers reported, so today we wanted to share these improvements with you.Less horizontal scrollingWhen working...