Tracking the suspects of Boston bombings through Internet sleuthing

The Boston Marathon bombings on April 15, 2013 killed three civilians and hospitalized 183 more (including 13 people who had their limbs amputated). Without any suspect who claimed responsibility for the terrorism, police authorities used the power of the Internet to gather information that may lead to the arrest of the bombers.

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The FBI specifically requested civilians to help them track the suspects by sending photos and videos of the marathon to the agency’s website. This announcement has activated crowdsource sleuthing. In a photo submitted by an amateur detective, for instance, a young man with a baseball cap was seen calmly walking from the sight of explosion. This man would be later identified as Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, one of the bombers.

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There, was however, a drawback to Internet sleuthing. Without any training in profiling criminals, some amateur detectives uploaded photos of innocent bystanders and pointed them out as the terrorists. Sulahaddin Barhoum, for instance, was wrongly accused as a Boston bomber after his photos from the marathon went viral on the Internet. He had to go to FBI to clear his name and protect his family.

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Although Internet sleuthing has helped track the Boston bombers Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and his brother Tamerlan, it remained questionable for critics. Wrong information could damage the reputation of the wrong guys, just like what happened to Barhoum. Speculations may also impede the investigation process.

But police authorities are no fool. They have clandestine plans in catching criminals. Could the FBI be only making the Internet sleuthing scenario to create panic for the suspects, a tactic that had eventually led to the arrest of Dzhokhar and the death of Tamerlan?  

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People can find photos and videos of the Boston Marathon bombings through MySearchResults.com, an Internet portal that handles aggregate data from other search engines. Follow this Twitter page to keep abreast of the latest happening in information technology.

German copyright law takes aim at Google links

The ancillary copyright bill was approved by Germany’s parliament, the Bundestag, on March 1, granting publishers the right to charge companies for reproducing their online content. However, search engines like Google, Bing, MySearchResults, and Yahoo! are still allowed to display snippets or small excerpts from publishers’ websites for free. However, what defines a ‘snippet’ or a ‘small excerpt’ is a bit of a grey area in the copyright law.

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In its original form, the ancillary bill had Google carping. Google would bear the brunt had the bill been passed in its damaging form – requiring news aggregators and search engines to pay royalties for the commercial use of snippets or excerpts of their content. Oppositions said that the original proposal would force Internet giants like Google into a profit-sharing scheme that’s encroaching the free flow of information and innovation online.

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Other activists saw the original proposal as an offshoot of lobbying against the glaring sales disparity between Google and German press publishers. Apparently, Google earns billions of euros from its advertising and online services without having to sell advertising campaigns on its news aggregation service in Germany while the news publishers are earning a measly amount from their online advertisements.

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These congruent validations made up the rationalization to repurpose the ancillary bill. A last-minute change on the copyright law by the Free Democratic Party required only the companies reproducing the whole content to compensate the publishers.

The Bundesrat is yet to decide on the ancillary copyright bill.

MySearchResults handles aggregate data from major search engines. Try it at MySearchResults.com.

To Caesar what’s Caesar: Sounding the alarm for attributing aggregated content

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Who’s policing the Internet?

At least against indiscriminate acts such as aggregating content sans proper attribution. To clarify, no such thing as an anti-aggregation campaign exists, but a curator’s code must. Aggregation and curation are now the buzzwords of a booming enterprise: crafting stories, ideas, or subjects on Web 2.0. Both almost synonymous, either is the version of syndication for mostly blogging, including micro, and article manufacture. The Huffington Post (HuffPost), AllTops, and Esquire are all aggregators in a sense.

And then there are those who have risen to the call.


 
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Last year, Mr. Simon Dumenco’s double-hit, Advertising Age article on two Twitter trending topics was hunted down by a couple of traffic-seekers. The writer, however, observed that as the bigger game player, HuffPost was pinging back less traffic than its smaller counterpart, Techmeme. This incited Dumenco to espouse the Council on Ethical Blogging and Aggregation.




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Soon, the effort caught on with the big guns: the editors-in-chief of Esquire, The Atlantic, and New York magazine were linking arms with the editors-in-chief of Slate, The New York Observer, and Longreads.com, the committee members. A panel meeting occurred in Austin, Texas. Aggregation, linking, and summarizing must be congruent with best practices put in black-and-white, they said. With this set in motion, similar efforts are expected to arise. This is not tantamount to seeking justice, but only to ending the disparities between misappropriated behaviors and the essence of consumer Internet. If it’s the parties involved policing their way to untangling the Web, so be it.  


MySearchResults self-regulates when it comes to aggregating content from the search giants to its portal. For specialized answers to your online queries, check out its site.

Facebook's Graph Search: It's a small search world

As if Google isn’t beleaguered enough with the European challenge to its dominance, equally stock-busting Internet heavyweight Facebook is expanding its empire into search functions through its Graph Search feature. Not that it’s going to see the competitive search engine queries from now on, as Google remains the untrammeled champion of search result sieving. Facebook, however, has something that Google doesn’t: friends.

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There’s nothing like peer pressure or word of mouth to influence search queries. Google could shrug this off by claiming that the world’s news and most relevant information archives are at its disposal, especially as it has been aggregating like a demon. But even news sites are creating their own circles of friends over Facebook. In time, Google’s reaction to this tighter, more focused ecosystem of research could be tested.

Already, Google is exhibiting its sang froid. Web and business analysts are also around to allay its insecurities of being overtaken as a premier search engine. For one, Facebook is yet to have a platform that will localize searches the way Google maps does. The queries conducted over Graph Search will play into the hands of very specific interests, such as local restaurants and movie schedules.

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Graph Search is predicted to generate revenue for Facebook, since it directly displays what consumers of different tastes want in any given circle of people. Products and services come up as search results based on popularity, or the number of Facebook “likes” they generate.

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It also boosts its partnership with Microsoft, whose own search platform, Bing!, will be used in the two-column interface of Graph Search results as the aggregator of recommendations. In all likelihood, Facebook will evolve into at least a special kind of a metasearch engine, much like MetaCrawler or MySearchResults.

MySearchResults was developed as a refinement for search results on the usual platforms, like Google and Yahoo!. As a metasearch engine, it scrounges for the top results across different search engines, allowing the user to prioritize certain results. Try it out here.

Most Googled in 2012

As a search results aggregator, MySearchResults has to be attuned to the comings and goings of trends in premiere search engines. An annual summary of Google’s most searched topics, also known as the Google Zeitgeist, services everyone’s informational needs. There’s just something for everyone with Internet.

The Google Zeitgeist wasn’t meant to flatter humanity’s choice of gossip, but its readers could be thankful there are equal parts meaty, groundbreaking scientific achievements in it with a slap of starch from Korean rapper Psy and way-over-the-fence insiders on celebrity break-ups.

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Are all of these tidbits useful? Yes. Consider weaving Whitney Houston’s death into an ornate metaphor about life’s scale with Felix Baumgartner’s skydiving trespass across the atmosphere’s sound barrier, or the Americans’ collective travails during and after hurricane Sandy. Counter-punch the alienation of existence with the knowledge that Gangnam Style is loathed in unison, but the world has a sense of humor.

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Notably, there’s Google having found its arm’s length with politics, as all manner of presidential elections and leadership changes were superseded on the general list by Kate Middleton, the London Olympics, and Diablo 3. Pop sensations One Direction and Selena Gomez ratcheted image searches along with a pregnant Megan Fox. The iPad 3 loomed over all this with a meta-sense of its arrival --- searching for the device that will revolutionize search queries on mobile.

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The Zeitgeist cut across 146 languages in its summation. Google’s quicker and more omniscient than ever.

Expand search results by checking out aggregates from different search engines. These are delivered by sites such as Mamma.com, MySearchResults.com, and MetaCrawler.com. Be in the know of search engines through this Facebook page.