Hitwise, a web analysis business, said on its Analyst Weblog that Facebook was the most visited site last week, overtaking Google Search for the first time. Hitwise suggests that Google Search accounted for 7.03% of US Internet visits last week, compared to 7.07% for Facebook. If Google's non-search services )Gmail, YouTube, Maps etc( are also included, Google remains in the lead with 11.03% of US Visits. Yahoo also beats Facebook, with 10.98% of US visits.

Google released Street View imagery for Hong Kong . Hong Kong is a fun and busy place where it's easy to get lost, perhaps less so with these photo maps. [Thanks Keith!] If you're looking for a Leberwurstbrot in Hong Kong... [By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: Google Street View Hong Kong | Comments ] [Advertisement] Want to make money with your website? AllPosters.

OK, I can see myself waste some time with this. Google Reader Play is a casual, push style way to feed yourself distracting/ enlightening/ inspiring snippets, imagery and videos. You can star a specific page, Like it or share it, but just jumping from page to page using the bottom navigation works too. Note Reader Play is personalized. Google writes ,

Ten years ago, the best-available translation software analysed the source text to determine its structure: subject, object, nouns, verbs, phrases, etc. From the structure tree, a new text could be generated in the target language. The precise details of Google's translation algorithms are not published, but the structure tree is not the main mechanism. Instead, there is a corpus - an enormous database of parallel works.

If you've opted in to YouTube's HTML5 experiment, the videos will play in your own browser's player, instead of in an Adobe Flash player. This was discussed in the Forum a few weeks ago. YouTube can serve HTML5 videos if you have an HTML5-capable browser with the h.264 video codec )i.e. Chrome but not Chromium, Safari v4+, or IE with Google Chrome Frame(. Videos containing ads continue to use the Flash player.

Wikipedia has a whole page dedicated to criticism of Google . [By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: Criticism of Google at Wikipedia | Comments ] [Advertisement] Want to make money with your website? AllPosters.

Do some people confuse public Buzz messages with private email conversations? I don't know, but some of the following conversations I found using Gmail's Buzz search sounded a bit odd. One of the conversation, for instance, was by a person who only follows one person and only has one follower. Then again, how would this misunderstanding come about, if that's the case, as Buzz says "Public on the web" next to the Post button,

This snippet is from Popular Science , May 1967, page 94: [Hat tip to George R!] [By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: The Ask-Our-Computer Service )from 1967( | Comments ] [Advertisement] Want to make money with your website? AllPosters.

In the year 2025, perhaps we'll be seeing: 1. YouTube Super Zoom What it is: When watching a video, you can press the pause button and zoom in on smaller stuff you see in the background. For example, we see a mayor walking through a museum, and there's a painting by Vermeer in the background. Hit pause and the zoom icon, and click on the Vermeer painting, which is highlighted with a "zoomable" color )as are some other objects in the scene(.

TechCrunch reports that YouTube announced they will roll out auto-captions to all English videos now, for content creators who want this )before, only a portion of videos received this option(. As a disclaimer, Google noted that )quote TechCrunch( ... ... Just like any speech recognition application, auto-captions require a clearly spoken audio track. Videos with background noise or a muffled voice can't be auto-captioned.

SiteLinks are now appearing in Google's Sponsored Links. An AdWords SiteLinks unit consists of a regular text ad with four additional links. These ad units were sighted in August 2009, and trialled in November 2009 in conjunction with some of Google's Agency Partners, including Gillissa in the UK. Each link can be up to 35 characters. Up to 10 links can be entered by the advertiser, although only 4 will show at a time. The links are not always displayed,

Fake news site Onion has a piece titled Google Responds To Privacy Concerns With Unsettlingly Specific Apology . [Thanks Scjm] [By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: Onion: "Google Responds To Privacy Concerns W ... | Comments ] [Advertisement] Want to make money with your website? AllPosters.

Bill Bunten, the Mayor of Topeka )the capital city of Kansas, USA( has signed a proclamation declaring that during March the city will be known as Google, Kansas. This is being spun by the press as a name change, but that's not the case. The city's official name remains Topeka, even though during March it will be )also( known as Google. The wording of the proclamation is interesting.

Knol is a Google service that allows anyone to publish an article about almost anything. When Google's VP of Engineering, Udi Manber, announced Knol in December 2007 it was widely regarded as a "Wikipedia killer". If Knol's users could replicate the success of Wikipedia, the pundits proclaimed, then Google would gain an enormous commercial benefit.

At Gmail Buzz I've been subscribing to Robert "Weirdchina" Kong Hai and noticed that some of his buzz posts received tons of comments. I've asked Robert about this, and here's his reply: Your right, my posts do get a lot of attention, I'm having a fun time on buzz! I think the social media community is very surprised that my 19 posts have received almost 3000 comments and 1500 likes. This might even be the most on Buzz. I also have more then 13,

Caleb writes, "There's a strange snippet for the query [2010 academy awards]. It's longer and more carefully constructed". TomHTML in the forum wonders "if there is any partnership between the Oscars and Google". )I asked Google for a comment and will post an update if there's more info.( [Thanks Caleb and Tom !

Google's director of research Peter Norvig has video-answered some questions from Reddit )Reddit has an overview of the questions that lets you jump straight to the specific bit(.

On January 12th, Google said they "are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all." To check whether Google China really stopped censoring, you can try this test: enter human rights into Google.cn, and scroll down to the bottom. Do you see the following?

Online photo editor Picnik has been acquired by Google, as the Picnik blog announces . The Picnik team is excited, writing that "It means we can think BIG. Google processes petabytes of data every day, and with their worldwide infrastructure and world-class team, it is truly the best home we could have found." TechCrunch comments that "Interestingly, Picnik is Flickr's default photo editor"... Flickr being a competitor to Google's Picasa Web Albums.

Sergey Brin's resume before he co-founded Google contains some interesting bits, including two comments hidden in the HTML )this looks authentic, but if you know more please comment(. The first one reads: <!-<H4>Objective:</H4> A large office, good pay, and very little work. Frequent expense-account trips to exotic lands would be a plus.-> The second one: <!- <IMG ALIGN=LEFT SRC="pics/diamond.gif"> <H4><A HREF="/cgi-bin/sergey/HyperNews/get/forums/datamine.