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Google’s Knowledge Graph will display summaries of topics when your query is related to one of the 500 million items in Google’s new database of things. Google has long sought to index the world’s information — and it’s now taking things a step farther with an effort to create “a database of everything in the world.” And it’s bringing this effort to your search results pages. The new Knowledge Graph project, rolling out to English-language Google Search users over the next few days, provides more data snippets alongside its query results than the search engine currently provides. The results are based on Google’s new database of 500 million people, places, and things, says Jack Manzel, Product Management Director of Search at Google. Manzel says there are 3.5 billion attributes and connections between these things in the database. ...

GFI Labs Blog: We’ve noted this before, but Microsoft needs to get a handle on ad placements on Bing. Ok, so Bing isn’t the most widely used search engine, but remember that Yahoo plays a part here as well. In this case, we’re talking Sirefef (ZeroAccess aka Max++), probably the nastiest piece of malware circulating on the ‘net right now. Sirefef kills any attempt to remove it, and is nearly impossible to clean (short of booting onto a rescue disk and performing cleanup actions, or reformatting). ...

Today we’ve added a new notification to our search results that helps people know when a site may have been hacked. We’ve provided notices for malware for years, which also involve a separate warning page. Now we’re expanding the search results notifications to help people avoid sites that may have been compromised and altered by a third party, typically for spam. When a user visits a site, we want her to be confident the information on that site comes from the original publisher. Here’s what the notification looks like: ...

Mashable: Bing is getting an early start on the “best of 2010” lists, releasing its compilation of the year’s most popular search terms a little more than a month before the New Year. Reality TV star Kim Kardashian tops the list, which is dominated by celebrities; in fact, seven of the top 10 terms are people, as you can see in the list: Kim Kardashian Sandra Bullock Tiger Woods Lady Gaga Barack Obama Hairstyles Kate Gosselin Walmart Justin Bieber free Kardashian’s online dominance extends beyond searches, however. You may recall that a recent study pegged her as the celeb that gets the most traffic to their website via Twitter (despite not having the largest audience). ...

This is amazing news indeed. Its has been feature talk with many of clients and colleagues all long for many years. Currently almost any text a user can see as they interact with a SWF file on your site can be indexed by Googlebot and used to generate a snippet or match query terms in Google searches. Additionally, Googlebot can also discover URLs in SWF files and follow those links, so if your SWF content contains links to pages inside your website, Google may be able to crawl and index those pages as well. ...

If you want to improve Google’s results and report spammy web pages, there’s a Chrome extension for you.Google Webspam Report adds a link next to each Google search result and automatically fills the spam report form with information like the URL of the page and your query. You can also use the button from Chrome’s toolbar to report pages. The most interesting feature is the integration with Chrome’s browsing history that lets you select recently visited pages and recent Google searches. ...

Microsoft and Facebook Wednesday unveiled some new search tools for Bing which integrate data from a user’s circle of friends into Bing’s search results. In the Bing blog on Wednesday, Microsoft Senior Vice President of online services Satya Nadella said 50% of users consider their friends’ opinions when making a decision online. Bing is trying to capitalize on this by incorporating the “likes” of a user’s friend list into search results. ...

Yesterday, Yahoo! Inc. announced it would be acquiring Associated Content Inc., and the transaction would cost the search company an estimated $100 million. Associated Content calls itself the “People’s Media Company,” and is a media outlet consisting of more than 380,000 freelancers publishing news, photos, video, and other content on subjects chosen by the site. “Combining our world-class editorial team with Associated Content’s makes this a game-changer,” said Carol Bartz, CEO, Yahoo! Inc. “Together, we’ll create more content around what we know our users care about, and open up new and creative avenues for advertisers to engage with consumers across our network. These are important aspects of building engaging consumer experiences on Yahoo!, and one of the reasons why we’re one of the most visited destinations online.” ...

You might avoid looking for photos of Miss USA Rima Fakih for a while. There is a controversy about a certain pole-dancing incident in her past that is stirring up the talk show circuits and the adolescent inside every male on the planet. It also has stirred up a massive number of SEO poisoned links to photos. In 2007, Fakih won a “Stripper 101” contest sponsored by a Detroit radio show “Mojo in the Morning.” And, of course, she was no sooner crowned Miss USA than somebody resurrected the “Stripper 101” video. And, of course, everybody is searching for “Rima Fakih pole dancing.” ...

Of course I’m talking about football. When I say football I mean the game that is played with one ball thas is kicked with the foot, not the other game that is known as football in the US even though it’s played using the hands. Anyway I don’t like football at all, it’s too boring fo me. But, at least in Europe, everyone loves football. And one of the best national championships is the Spanish one, with the 2 biggest teams being Real Madrid and F.C. Barcelona. Every time they play against each other, millions of people watch that game, and news about it are going around all the time. Last Saturday they played in Madrid, and being this such a popular match, cybercriminals couldn’t miss this opportunity. ...