Jochem Prins

Interesting post over at Google blogoscoped, people have found a blacklist and a whitelist which is probably used for Google’s ‘safe browsing’ functionality. All that time I was thinking that Google had this ‘smart discovery’ for phishing sites, now it turns out that it is just a good old blacklist!

Oh, but wait, the fact that they also need a whitelist must mean that they do use some auto-discovery. Apparently it works a bit too well occasionaly, so they included a whitelist for sites that are known to be safe. Still interesting though.

Update: more about the lists can be read at the mozilla wiki, might be handy if you plan to use the lists in your own application.

According to australian research, sex and pornography are no longer the most popular search topics on the web. Professor Amanda Spinks from Queensland University of Technology’s says that business and commerce-related topics, including buying and selling on the net, are currently more popular than sex.

The research was performed in collaboration with Pennsylvania State University, together they analysed up to 30 million search sessions from search engines including Alta Vista, AlltheWeb.com, Ask.com, Excite and Dogpile. Apparently they didn’t make use of AOL’s logfiles that were are available online.

A few explanations that Prof. Spinks has:
– “More women are searching the web. Back in the 90s, it was probably young male geeks, but now the demographics are changing with mums and dads, kids, grandmas and business people all searching the web.”

– “The general population is searching now compared to the male set in the 90s.”

– “Back in the 90s, there wasn’t as much business information on the web.”

To be honest, I’m not really convinced. I would love to read a more detailed paper about how the research was performed. Looking at the statistics of one of the major Dutch search engines (where I happen to work at), I can only draw the conclusion that sex does still dominate the search topics.