Interesting Facts

Google has found a search hijacking virus on 1 million computers. (The virus hijacks Google and other search requests and redirects them to websites that pay the cyber criminals behind the scam for traffic. According to security blog KrebsonSecurity, Google users will be greeted with a yellow warning at the top of their search results if they are infected. I'm off to Google now to do a quick search, fingers crossed.)

According to Symantec's OnlineFamily.Norton Service kids are searching for the following online:- 1. YouTube 2. Google 3. Facebook 4. Sex 5. MySpace 6. Adult Films 7. Yahoo 8. Michael Jackson 9. Fred (A popular fictional character whose YouTube channel has become a hit among kids.) 10. eBay (I don't know what age range the search covers, but I guess there are no real suprises apart from maybe Fred. Seemingly Fred Figglehorn is a fictional character on the video-sharing website YouTube. The videos are centered around a fictional 6-year-old, Fred Figglehorn, who has a dysfunctional home life and "anger management issues".)

Google started its life as a search engine called BackRub. (It indexed 75 million websites and 30 million HTML pages were downloaded by the crawler. Larry Page gave his email address and phone number on the FAQs page. I dare him to do that nowadays.)

According to US physicist Alex Wissner-Gross, a typical Google search on a desktop computer produces about 7g CO2. (This means that two search requests on the internet produces "as much carbon dioxide as boiling a kettle". Google says that a a typical search produced only 0.2g of carbon dioxide. I want to know what a typical search is!)