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We all know by now how bad the strain of influenza that hit the world last year was. And if the CDC warning is to come true, we might be experiencing a second spike of flu activity anytime this year. The CDC is basing its warning of course to the similar event that happened in 1957. So, to prepare for this event or any other influnza strike, Google has released flu estimates of 121 cities in the U.S. The city level flu estimates is being carried out by Google in consultation with public health officials. With this initiative, Google is hoping to help people understand the spread of flu. Google’s flu estimates were based from the tracking of popularity of several Google search queries. Through this search queries, Google is able to estimate flu levels in a real-time fashion. The trends is updated on a daily basis and could also detect early signs of flu activity. Although not yet validated by U.S. authorities, the flu estimates are somehow reliable if not more useful than traditional flu surveillance systems which usually takes days or weeks to be collected and processed. In addition, Google’s estimates were created in the same way as the U.S. national estimates were made. So, hopefully, this tool would help cushion the impact of future flu strike. Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . Google Tracks Flu Trends in 121 US
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So, VMware has officially annonunced that it is buying email and collaboration software vendor Zimbra which was acquired by Yahoo in 2007. Although financial terms of the acquisition were not divulged, some observers say that it is actually lower the amount Yahoo paid for the company when it was still a start-up in 2007. According to the Press Release obtained by AllThingsD , VMware will utilize Zimbra to further its mission in simplifying datacenter, desktop, application development and core IT services in the enterprise setting. Although, it might seem unimportant anymore for Yahoo, Zimbra has been leading the open source email and collaboration solution, boasting of 55 million mailboxes with 85% growth during 2009. But the thing is, Zimbra is operating in an environment where one of the major rival happens to be Google with its Google Enterprise solution. Under the terms of the agreement, VMware will still support Zimbra’s existing products and open source efforts while at the same time enhancing it to fit into VMware’s own product infrastructure. The deal also gives Yahoo the rights to continue utilizing Zimbra technology on its Yahoo Mail and Yahoo Calendar services. The deal will close end of Q1 2010. Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . VMware Acquires Zimbra from
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Google has issued an official statement regarding its business operations in China, specifically its Chinese search portal – google.cn. Specifically, Google told Chinese authorities that it will stop censoring search results on the Chinese Google site. And dependeing on how things will turn out, Google might later be foreced to shut down the said site. In a long post at its official blog site, Google gave three recent discoveries/incidents that prompted its decision to stop censoring search results from its Chinese site. The first one being the fact, it was found out that recent attacks on its corporate IT infrastructure originated from China and that those attacks were not just meant for Google alone. Some other business companies were also targeted. Making things worsts is that based on Google’s investigation, it was also found out that the main objective of the attackers was to access the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. Although the attackers were not successful in achieving their target, thanks to Google’s high level of infrastructure security on its products, two Gmail accounts were jeopardized although the activity was limited only to non-essential matters and not the content of the emails. And worst of all has got to be the fact that Google also found out that even accounts of U.S., China and Europe human rights activities were accessed by third parties through malware, phising and other malicious activities. Given these conditions, Google has no recourse but to stop censoring the search results on its Chinese site. But that is of course if Google and the Chinese authorities will agree. If not, then that’s the time when Google will be force to close its Chinese site. Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . Google Will Stop Censoring Search Results in
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I reached Twitter’s 2,000 person follow limit today. Twitter Follow Limits Twitter explains their Follow limits are different for every user and after reaching 2000 follows correspond to follow / follower ratios. From Twitter: “… we have put limits on how aggressively users can follow others.” I Can't Follow People Limits Unlike the vast majority of high volume Twitter spammers… umm… users, I don’t follow people mindlessly nor do I follow people expecting them to follow me back. I don’t use autofollow bots nor do I mine Tweets and Twitter accounts to auto follow. I simply follow Twitter accounts of people who appear to approach the web and Twitter from a slightly different perspective than I do. This propensity for dissimilarity is near infinite and obviously wasn’t considered when Twitter calculated its rules and ratios for how many Twitter accounts a legitimate Twitter account can follow. If dissimilarity was considered, it was deemed spammy because Twitter has attracted more high volume spammers than legitimate high volume users.
See original here:
Twitter Follow Limits #Fail
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twitter follow limits,
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Bing is enhancing its Health search facility by focusing on enabling users to quickly obtaing relevant information and make better decisions related to their pressing health issues/problems. By providing more content from its new partners, Bing is augmenting instant answers with health data that helps users gain more information when they conduct health-related searches on Bing. So now, when you do a health-related search on Bing, it will cull its library of health resources and pull out relavant documents and presents a brief, informative summary above the regular search results. According to the Bing search blog, the search engine derive this information from analysis of index of medical sources and extraction of meaningful data automaticall. So, you can rest assure that the health information provided by Bing are authoritative. This is of course very important for health related information. This new Bing instant answers covers not only the general type of health queries but specific ones as well. It allows users to quickly explore other point of interest relevant to the health search query. Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . Bing Makes Search
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search-engine,
search-on-bing,
seo,
tools
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It has been quite awhile since Google’s GDrive project has been talked about. In fact it seems that Google may have shelved the project already. But not until now, as Google just announced that Google Docs users can now upload, store and organize any type of file in Google Docs. This may not be GDrive per se, but it could be Google’s baby steps towards launching GDrive or possibly turning Google Docs into it. Users can now upload any file, not just those currently supported by Google Docs, up to 250MB at a time. Free storage is up to 1GB and this does not include the files converted into any of the Google Doc supported formats. If you need more storage, you can purchase additional space at $0.25 per year. So basically, Google is going up against other cloud storage service such as Dropbox, Box and others. And given the popularity of Google Docs, Google just might give those other cloud storage service a run for their money. In addition, those files can be stored in shared folders as well. Hence making it easy to store, organize and collaborate on files. Uploaded files are also easily searcheable just like any Google Docs documents, spreasheets, presentations and PDFs. Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . Google Makes Google Docs a Cloud Storage
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storage-service
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If you’re an avid Yahoo! user, you probably love the functionality of the homepage. Click any one of their tabs, like ’shopping’, and you’ve got a world of products at your fingertips. Well yesterday, Yahoo announced that as of March 11, 2010, Yahoo! Shopping is partnering with PriceGrabber . Moving forward, Yahoo! shoppers will be asked to sign up with PriceGrabber in order to take advantage of product searches and do what they love best: go shopping! What’s interesting here is that the Bing/Yahoo search deal didn’t cover Yahoo! verticals like shopping, travel, health, finance, etc. Brian Smith of SingleFeed tells us that “Here’s an example where Bing Cashback would have been a very good partner to ‘power’ Yahoo Shopping, but Yahoo decided to go a different route instead and partnered with a competitor to Bing. Not sure if this has happened with Yahoo’s other verticals.” What does this mean? Other Yahoo! tabs will probably start outsourcing their services by partnerning with related sites. Think Yahoo! Travel partnering with Kayak . And Yahoo! Health partnering with webMD . … You get the picture. Read the official letter from the Yahoo! Shopping team. Read more from Comparison Engines about the new partnership between Yahoo! Shopping and PriceGrabber. Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . Yahoo! Goes Shopping With
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