Inside Search

Google experienced more copyright removal notices for URLs in the last month than it did for all of 2009.

The search engine processed more than 4.3 million URL removal requests in the last 30 days, and it plans to redirect this data as a signal for search rankings. The bevy of infringing Web content spurred Google to take into account valid copyright removal notices for websites to verify its search algorithms yield the highest quality results.

Google elaborated on its Inside Search blog: 

• Sites with high numbers of removal notices may appear lower in our results. This ranking change should help users find legitimate, quality sources of content more easily—whether it’s a song previewed on NPR’s music website, a TV show on Hulu or new music streamed fromSpotify.

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Caption contests are everyone’s favorite, even if they’ve been overused, and Google has decided to do one of its own. As you’d expect from the world’s search monster, it challenges you to describe a bunch of illustrations that depict people using Google search.

Available at the Inside Search site, the contest invites you to:

Come up with your most creative caption illustrating what these characters are searching for on Google. You can also vote for your favorites and share them with friends!

The company teamed up with artists Matthew Diffee, Emily Flake, Christoph Niemann, Danny Shanahan and Jim Woodring to come up with a bunch of funny cartoons that all share a a common twist – characters running Google searches. Upon submitting your caption, it should appear on the site. You can then share it using a unique link or vote on other submissions. It’s a nice little time-killer, go ahead and give it a try.

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