Google News

January 01, 2005 - Google launches GooglePack- a software application that makes it easier to maintain programs running on your computer. With this free download, Google makes it easier to add or remove programs from a pc. The install comes with the Google Updater which keeps all applications updated automatically.

November 11, 2005 - Google Personalized Search is released from the labs and allows a more accurate search for people who create an account.  The personalized search bases your search off previous searches and will produce results relating to those searches first.  For example, if you searched fruit a number of times and on this search you used "apple" as a search term, you would recieve fruit results instead of Apple Computers.

November, 2005 - Google launched two new programs to increase AdSense profits for web masters.  Web masters can now earn for referring others to join Google AdSense or for installing special browser software.

September 16, 2005 - Google speaks out on GoogleBombs. A common easter egg of Google searches was the search term "failure". The first result would continually bring back President George W. Bush's biography on the White House web site. This has been around for over two years now and due to many complaints that this was an attempt by Google to show their personal opinion towards the White House, Google has explained why this is happening.

A GoogleBomb is an attempt by web masters to change the outcome of Google search queries. Google ranking system involves using HTML anchor text while linking to a web page. When anchor texts are used, it gives a virtual vote to that web page and increases its overall importance. The more web masters who link to a particular page, the more important Google understands the page to be.

What happened is many web masters teamed up and cheated the system by using anchor text for the White House using "failure" in the text. After hundreds of thousands of web sites linked to it, it became the most important web site for that search term. Google does not condone this activity as it falsifies search results. They are working on ways to improve their ranking technology to prevent GoogleBombs from occuring in the future. For now, Google is not going to alter the search results for failure but they warn web masters who are using GoogleBombs to stop. [an error occurred while processing this directive]