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Google opened the door to its online library late Thursday with the launch of a book-specific search page.

Print.Google.Com makes official the search goliath’s project to digitise the world’s books. But the launch drew backlash from the Association of American University Presses, in the form of an open letter focusing on Google Library, a service that went live in December.

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Sourced from SearchDay Ever wonder what all of those mysteriously-named Windows “processes” are doing, and how they got loaded on your computer in the first place? Use the helpful ProcessLibrary.com to find out.

Control-ALT-Delete used to perform a very simple, but (sadly) vital function: rebooting your Windows computer. In recent versions of Windows, pressing Control-ALT-Delete now brings up the Windows Task Manager, which offers alternatives to handling misbehaving software without the brute force approach of a hard reboot.

The Task Manager has four views: Applications, Processes, Performance and Networking. The Applications view shows you currently running programs. Use the “End Task” button on this view to kill a program that isn’t working as expected—or to get rid of a “mousetrapped” browser that’s repeatedly displaying an offensive web site.

The Performance and Networking views offer interesting statistics, but aren’t really useful unless you’re a serious Windows geek.

It’s the Processes view that offers the most insight into what’s going on with your computer. Unfortunately, it also displays information in maddeningly cryptic fashion, showing “Image Name,” “User Name,” “CPU” and “Usage” details. Two of these offer the most meaningful information: Image Name is the name of a process that’s currently running in memory, and CPU shows you how much capacity of your computer’s central processing unit is being consumed by the process.

If your computer is sluggish, the processes view will tell you which process is hogging your system resources. Use the “End Process” button to kill it. Be careful, though—killing some processes could lock up your computer and potentially result in loss of data.

Problem is, it’s almost impossible to determine what most processes are from their image names. I’m convinced that the people who write Windows processes are highly trained in the art of obfuscation. Some of the more common processes include lsass.exe, alg.exe, svchost.exe, csrss.exe and smss.exe. And there’s no “properties” information to tell you anything about what these things are doing or how they got started in the first place.

Enter ProcessLibrary.com. This searchable database makes it easy to find information about even the most obscure process running on your computer. Take Isass.exe, for example. If your computer uses a current version of Windows XP, this process is almost certainly running. What is it?

Local Security Authority Service. “This is a system process of the Microsoft Windows security mechanisms. It specifically deals with local security and login policies.” In addition to this description, ProcessLibrary.com also tells you the author of the process, and whether it’s associated with the operating system or a particular piece of software.

Even more importantly, it also indicates whether the process is something nasty, like a virus, Trojan or spyware, and assigns the process a security risk from zero to five.

ProcessLibrary.com isn’t an altruistic effort—it’s the work of a company called UniBlue that sells a program called WinTasks Pro that’s designed, surprise surprise, to help you deal with or eliminate nasty processes. Nonetheless, the amount and quality of information offered on the site makes it a worthwhile resource.

ProcessLibrary also has a DLL Search that’s useful for decoding cryptic error messages.

Other sources for this type of information include Sysinfo.org’s Startup Applications List and Task List Programs from Answers That Work. Google’s specialized Microsoft search is also another great resource for finding information about startup processes, from these sites and many others.

Sourced from SearchDayZoomInfo is a free service that’s gathered information about more than 25 million people—including you, if you have even a minimal presence on the web.

Searching for information about people is one of the most common things people do on the web. Look at any of the query reporting services, such as Google’s Zeitgeist, the Lycos 50 or the Yahoo Buzz Index , and the names of celebrities or notorious people invariably crowd the top the lists.

Searching for information about people you know, like friends, neighbors, ex-lovers (and admit it—yourself!) is such a common activity on Google that it has become a verb. Problem is, Googling someone who hasn’t accumulated a lot of PageRank or other Google cred du jour is at best a crap shoot, with results that make it all but impossible to distinguish between John Doe and Jon Doh.

ZoomInfo was created specifically to help searchers locate accurate, reliable information about people. The service crawls the web much like others search engine, but focuses on information about people. Using a combination of artificial intelligence and natural language techniques, ZoomInfo connects information about individuals from disparate sources and gradually builds up online resumes that include employment information, educational background and other details.

It’s a useful service, but not without flaws. Because ZoomInfo profiles are assembled by machine algorithms, without any human or editorial intervention, they essentially amount to a “best guess” collection of anecdotal information about individuals.

Others have found more serious flaws in their profiles. Searchblog author John Battelle, for example, found ZoomInfo reported that he was the founder of WebMD, CEO of Northern Light and CEO of A9 among many others. Battelle is no slouch—he was a co-founder of Wired Magazine, publisher of the Industry Standard, etc. But ZoomInfo mistakenly bloated his vita in bizarre ways.

ZoomInfo provides tools for focusing the scope of your searches, which can be very helpful when searching for information about someone with a common name. Next to every search form is a drop-down menu that allows you to narrow your search for people associated with a particular company or university.

For even more options, the advanced search page lets you find profiles ZoomInfo has collected for all employees associated with a company, alumni from a university or people mentioned on a specific web site.

ZoomInfo caches the pages it crawls, allowing you to examine the sources from which information is extracted. A link on each web summary that tells you the number of sources that were used to compile a profile; click this link and you will get a page that looks like search results showing summaries and links to the full text of the web pages.

What about privacy issues? The information ZoomInfo has collected is all freely available on the web. The company doesn’t buy data from information brokers or other sources. And the focus on professional and educational details, rather than personal information, combined with a straightforward privacy policy, should alleviate most concerns.

“The information we’re collecting is to a large extent the stuff you’re proud of,” said Russell Glass, ZoomInfo’s director of consumer products. Glass rightly points out that once information gets on the web there’s not too much anyone can really do to control or remove it.

To help assure accuracy, ZoomInfo allows you to edit your web summary, or create a new profile if the company hasn’t yet built one about you.

ZoomInfo publishes some interesting statistics about its service. For example, nearly two million of the 25 million people profiled are board members. Nearly half a million are consultants, 30,000 are store managers, 1,727 are mimes (!), and there are even web summaries of five award winning novelists.

ZoomInfo says that it plans to expand the scope of its service by adding many more profiles of celebrities sometime this quarter. Later in the year, it also plans to launch a search site for company information, showcasing a database it has built on more than 4.5 million businesses

Sourced from SearchDay

Earnings reports from Yahoo! and Google highlight the resurgence of online advertising.

Yahoo!’s first-quarter profits doubled in the first quarter, jumping to $205 million from $101 million a year ago, as revenue zoomed 55% to $1.17 billion.

Powerful as the results were, Google’s were even more impressive. Revenue doubled to $1.26 billion, and profit jumped to $369 million from $64 million a year ago. Much of this revenue growth came as a result of users clicking on the ads that appear on a search results page based on the keywords entered. Every time a user clicks on an ad, advertisers pay Google.

Google’s shares soared on Friday, a day after the earnings were released, reaching the highest levels of their brief history. The shares of Yahoo! also finished the week with a gain, albeit a more modest one, after posting results on Tuesday. Its shares are below the recent highs reached in late 2004.

Google is the top search engine by a large margin, allowing it to attract more advertisers and collect more ad dollars.

Google also kept users interested in the site by introducing a number of new features like a separate Web search for video content, a desktop search application and a satellite map search feature.

There is some concern that Google’s profits are built on a single revenue stream. The company has talked recently of adding more graphical ads, such as the ones that appear on Yahoo!, to address this issue.

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Google has added high-resolution satellite images to its Maps and Local search services, offering a birdseye view of millions of locations throughout the U.S. and Canada.

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