Gadgetell | Tech News, Reviews, and Interesting Things

At last, a browser toolbar that’s unobtrusive and useful!  Trustpilot has introduced a new toolbar that warns users if an E-tailer is reliable or not.  Search results are given a check mark in green, orange, or red.  Green means the site has a high rating and many positive reviews, orange means the site has an average rating, and red is a sign to stay away—the site has mostly negative reviews and lots of user complaints.

Trustpilot gives its ratings based on reviews and media stories it collects from the web.  At the present time, it claims to have over 1 million reviews and stories. The download is quick and free and is unobtrusive.  Keep reading for more details about this helpful toolbar.

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Sections: Computers, Security, Web, Downloads, Web Apps, Websites

Wow, imagine that…privacy issues once again being raised in regard to Google. Shocker. The latest is in reference to issues with the Chrome browser and is addressed in the company’s blog.

The latest word of the day is “anonymize”. That’s apparently what Google plans to do to get rid of user tracks. The Google blog referenced both their Suggest application as well as their sparkly new (cough cough) browser Chrome. Suggest is featured in Google Search, Toolbar, the iPhone…and obviously Chrome. It works like predictive texting.  You start to type in a word…it suggests what you might mean to say. Like….you start to type in “stre”, and it might suggest “street view” or “utter lack of privacy” or “you only need to sign off 3,793 papers to get your face off our program”, or “made by the ultimate rulers of all”. I’m just suggesting anyway.

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Sections: Computers, Security, Software / Applications, Web, Web Browsers, Google

I am sure you will all remember back in 2006 when Hyperphrase Technologies issued a patent claim against Google. Truth be told it had somehow slipped my mind that they were claiming “that Google’s AdSense and the AutoLink function of its toolbar infringed claims in four Hyperphrase patents relating to the contextual linking and presentation of information”

Well looks like the court has “upheld the parts of the summary judgment relating to AdSense, and some of the claims against AutoLink, but overturned the part of the ruling dealing with AutoLink’s alleged infringement of two of the patents.“ I think that what this means is that AdSense is free to go, but AutoLink has another trip to the courts ahead of it. This will be a disappointment as originally the courts cleared Google but the Court of Appeals overturned part of the judgment for “inappropriate interpretation” for “data reference,“ “one of the terms used in the patent claims to describe the way a link is made between a fragment of text and an element in a database”, which I am sure we are all the better for knowing!

Via [Macworld]

• Yahoo finally getting their act together
• Who’s On Crack in tech: 11.21.08 edition
• Google launches Searchwiki

Sections: Web, Websites, Google