DealBook: Alibaba Invests in a Search Engine for Apps

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DealBook: China Internet Giant Buys Stake in Search Engine

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N.S.A. Said to Search Content of Messages to and From U.S.

The N.S.A. is not just intercepting the communications of Americans who are in direct contact with foreigners targeted overseas, a practice that government officials have openly acknowledged. It is also casting a far wider net for people who cite information linked to those foreigners, like a little used e-mail address, according to a senior intelligence official.

While it has long been known that the agency conducts extensive computer searches of data it vacuums up overseas, that it is systematically searching — without warrants — through the contents of Americans’ communications that cross the border reveals more about the scale of its secret operations.

It also adds another element to the unfolding debate, provoked by the disclosures of Edward J. Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor, about whether the agency has infringed on Americans’ privacy as it scoops up e-mails and phone data in its quest to ferret out foreign intelligence.

Government officials say the cross-border surveillance was authorized by a 2008 law, the FISA Amendments Act, in which Congress approved eavesdropping on domestic soil without warrants as long as the “target” was a noncitizen abroad. Voice communications are not included in that surveillance, the senior official said.

Asked to comment, Judith A. Emmel, an N.S.A. spokeswoman, did not directly address surveillance of cross-border communications. But she said the agency’s activities were lawful and intended to gather intelligence not about Americans but about “foreign powers and their agents, foreign organizations, foreign persons or international terrorists.”

“In carrying out its signals intelligence mission, N.S.A. collects only what it is explicitly authorized to collect,” she said. “Moreover, the agency’s activities are deployed only in response to requirements for information to protect the country and its interests.”

Hints of the surveillance appeared in a set of rules, leaked by Mr. Snowden, for how the N.S.A. may carry out the 2008 FISA law. One paragraph mentions that the agency “seeks to acquire communications about the target that are not to or from the target.” The pages were posted online by the newspaper The Guardian on June 20, but the telltale paragraph, the only rule marked “Top Secret” amid 18 pages of restrictions, went largely overlooked amid other disclosures.

To conduct the surveillance, the N.S.A. is temporarily copying and then sifting through the contents of what is apparently most e-mails and other text-based communications that cross the border. The senior intelligence official, who, like other former and current government officials, spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the topic, said the N.S.A. makes a “clone of selected communication links” to gather the communications, but declined to specify details, like the volume of the data that passes through them.

Computer scientists said that it would be difficult to systematically search the contents of the communications without first gathering nearly all cross-border text-based data; fiber-optic networks work by breaking messages into tiny packets that flow at the speed of light over different pathways to their shared destination, so they would need to be captured and reassembled.

The official said that a computer searches the data for the identifying keywords or other “selectors” and stores those that match so that human analysts could later examine them. The remaining communications, the official said, are deleted; the entire process takes “a small number of seconds,” and the system has no ability to perform “retrospective searching.”

The official said the keyword and other terms were “very precise” to minimize the number of innocent American communications that were flagged by the program. At the same time, the official acknowledged that there had been times when changes by telecommunications providers or in the technology had led to inadvertent overcollection. The N.S.A. monitors for these problems, fixes them and reports such incidents to its overseers in the government, the official said.

The disclosure sheds additional light on statements intelligence officials have made recently, reassuring the public that they do not “target” Americans for surveillance without warrants.

Bits Blog: The Limits of Facebook’s Search Tool

11:41 a.m. | Updated to clarify that companies like hotel chains were improving their Facebook presence even before Facebook introduced its search tool.

As I reported in Monday’s New York Times, Facebook is rolling out its Graph Search feature on Monday to all of its English-language users in the United States.

Peter DaSilva for The New York Times Loren Cheng, head of the team of linguists working on Facebook’s Graph Search, says users’ own search experiences will be the biggest force prompting them to share more information.

In theory, the tool, which has been undergoing refinement since public testing began in January, will allow users to search through their social network to find friends or other connections with a common link — say, “women who like Mitt Romney and Nancy Pelosi and live in San Francisco” (Facebook reports there are 12) or “my friends who like hiking.”

In practice, Graph Search has many limitations. Because Facebook uses so-called structured search technology to scan the boxes and buttons that users fill out on the site, it’s only as good as the boxes checked.

For example, when I searched my social network for “friends who like ice cream,” Facebook only returned 12 results. Left out was the silent majority who regularly lick cones and never bothered to tell Facebook.

Graph Search also tends to be too literal, often failing to discern the broader meaning of specific data points. For example, a search for “my friends who work at newspapers” returned no results, even though several hundred of my Facebook friends have listed specific newspapers as employers.

In short, Facebook’s Graph Search lacks the intuitiveness that people increasingly expect — and often get — from Web search engines like Google.

“You can search for restaurants my friends like, but ‘like’ is still binary on Facebook — they hit the like button or not,” said Nate Elliott, a principal analyst at Forrester Research who studies social media. “What if I want to find restaurants my friends love on Facebook. Or ones that get at least 3 out 5 stars?”

“There’s a lot of nuance required to make this really useful,” he said.

Over time, Facebook plans to encourage people to share more data to make Graph Search more valuable.

When I was on my profile page over the weekend, for example, the site prompted me to like more television shows, pulling up a long list of suggested titles, from current hits like “Game of Thrones” to moldy oldies like “Benson,” a political comedy popular in the 1980s.

The company is also considering how and when to prompt people to check in more frequently and write reviews without being too pushy about it.

“After you check in, half an hour later, do you want to rate that restaurant?” said Loren Cheng, who leads the team of linguists working on Graph Search. Or would you prefer to be prompted during dessert? Facebook is trying to figure that out.

Mr. Cheng said users’ own search experiences will be the biggest force prompting them to share more information.

“In user experience studies of likes, they say ‘why does it matter that I like something, why does it matter if I check into some place?’ ” he said. “You almost have to get them to a search result and they say, ‘wow, that’s what can I get. Tell me what I can do to get better results.’ ”

The search feature will also get more powerful later this year, when Facebook intends to add the ability to search through the text of status updates as well as information posted to Facebook by some third-party applications, like hotel and restaurant review sites and the streaming music service Spotify.

Consumer brands are already scrambling to tune their pages for Graph Search, said Susan Etlinger, an industry analyst with the Altimeter Group.

For example, big hotel chains have already been trying to make sure every property has its own Facebook page. Those pages could be easily liked by customers and found in a future search by their friends.

“Down the line, when people are searching for a hotel, you want to show up as a hotel with a positive reputation,” Ms. Etlinger said. “The experience you have at a Marriott in Minneapolis may not correspond to your experience in Houston.”

Facebook’s partnership with Bing, Microsoft’s search engine for the broader Web, will also benefit from better Graph Search, since Bing users who choose to link that engine with their Facebook account can pull up results from their social network along with overall Web results.

“When I look at the potential to create a more unified experience, they are making a very smart play,” Ms. Etlinger said.

Tool Kit: Swindles and Spam, Lurking in Your Search Results

Though the major search engines discourage such deception, that hasn’t stopped companies from engaging in such practices — and fooling users in the process.

Even someone with decades of search expertise, like Duane Forrester, a senior product manager at Bing, can fall victim to a Web scam.

“I was looking to buy a new lens for a digital camera, and I found a store that had one for $200 less than everyone else,” Mr. Forrester said. “Turns out the store was a fly-by-night shop out of the U.K. that sold broken products. I called the company and got my refund, but I still fell into the pothole.”

Millions of “dirty” sites litter the Web. The Web security firm Blue Coat Systems concluded in its 2012 security report that search engines topped the list of spam entry points, before e-mail and other sources. At a minimum, off-topic spam results are a nuisance. More perniciously, spammers can infect computers with malware and phish for sensitive personal data like credit card information. Here are some ways to avoid search spam.

LEARN TO SPOT SPAM Mastering the art of smarter searching won’t always shield you from getting spammed. That is why, as a first step, you should look before you click.

Don’t assume that the top results are the most useful or even the safest. Look at the letters that follow the period at the end of a Web address. Top-level domains like .com and .info, as well as top-level country code domains like .fr (for France) are prime targets for spammers.

One reason is that spammers know that spelling mistakes happen. It’s common to forget the “o” in a dot-com search, for instance. So if you want a site that ends in .com, but mistakenly type in .cm (the country code for Cameroon), you might get spam instead of the page you wanted.

Many sites will also take advantage of Web address shorteners like Bitly to direct you to an unsavory source. So be cautious about clicking those truncated URLs as well.

Both Google and Bing tip searchers off to potentially unsafe sites, wherever possible. If a search engine warns you that a site is potentially unsafe, browse at your own risk. And as Mr. Forrester’s tale shows, a site that is offering discounts that appear too good to be true may indeed be offering deals too good to be true.

In addition, before making any purchase on a lesser-known site, take a look around. Do you see a listed address? If so, map it. Look for the e-mail address. If your only contact option is a Gmail or Yahoo account, something may be awry.

A site’s language, too, may be a giveaway, especially when you are conducting a local search.

Flagrant grammar and spelling errors may signal that the owner is based elsewhere. And if you spot the term “free” scrawled across a Web site, proceed with caution.

SOME SITES ARE RISKIER It is important to know what separates a potential spam site from a harmless one. The difference may be counterintuitive. For example, pornography domains may be safer to browse than some mainstream content. According to Cisco’s 2013 annual security report, “online advertisements are 182 times more likely to deliver malicious content than pornographic sites.”

Matt Cutts, who heads the Web spam team at Google, said this was because pornography sites were well monitored. “People who run porn sites are tech-savvy, and they pay a lot of attention to visitors, so they notice unusual things quickly,” he said.

Though a search result may be safe, it may not be useful. A prime example is Yahoo Answers. The community-driven site consistently ranks high across the major engines on question-related queries. But the quality of its answers varies greatly and the site is often more useful for a chuckle than legitimate insight. Learn to spot and selectively skip these sites.

Similarly, instructional sites like eHow may place a higher premium on quantity over quality content, so you might not find exactly what you are searching for there.

Be wary of Web pages that oversell you on their supposed legitimacy. One Better Business Bureau logo is fine. A series of logos promoting a site’s professionalism or expertise is a red flag.

Almost anyone with rudimentary Photoshop skills can create and attach fake logos on to a site. You can crosscheck any awards by going to the source.

It is also a good idea to check whether a Web site is certified. The Department of Homeland Security offers more information on this.

SOME SEARCHES ATTRACT SPAM Some searches are more enticing to spammers than others. Credit report queries are a top target. Remember, there are only three major national credit agencies. If you are using an outside party to check credit reports, do so carefully.

Be extra cautious when conducting travel and insurance searches. Some sites create travel tips for the express purpose of drawing you into their hotel or other travel-related business. It is best to seek out travel information from a more trusted site.

Search results for lyrics, videos and screen savers also pose an increased risk. For example, pages with downloadable content, like those offering ring tones, provide an enticing built-in audience for spammers because the user is actively looking to install software.

When you search also matters. Spammers tend to come out in force on Cyber Monday and other big shopping periods.

Nor is spam limited to text. A site with many broken image links may be designed that way intentionally. It is easier to sell an outdated model if customers don’t see the product. Use a reverse image search service like TinEye to find out if an image has been pulled from another site.

BEEF UP YOUR BROWSER As the search leader, Google is targeted more than any other engine. Chrome users can install a spam extension that lets users identify potential spam sites and block them from their search results by clicking on a “spam” text link next to each result.

You can also change your Google ad settings and opt out of the company’s advertising cookies.

SEEK OUT CUSTOM ENGINES Another way to avoid getting spam — and to get more relevant results — is to go directly to a specialized search engine, where the results are already filtered for your query.

You could go to Google Books for book searches and know you will more likely get book results for “The Great Gatsby,” say, and not offers for “Gatsby” T-shirts. There are also engines like Science.gov and Scirus — both useful for science-related queries. Another valuable specialized engine is iSEEK Education. Lastly, you can use the image service Picsearch to filter photo searches.

Bits Blog: Google Introduces New Search Tools to Try to Read Our Minds

Ask for the population of India on Google, and you will also get the population of China and the United States, because Google knows those are the most common follow-up questions.

Google keeps trying to read our minds.

The company revealed some new search tools on Wednesday at I/O, its annual developers conference. Taken together, they are another step toward Google’s trying to become the omnipotent, human-like “Star Trek” search engine that its executives say they want it to be.

When people ask Google certain questions, it will now try to predict the person’s follow-up questions and answer them, too. Ask for the population of India, for instance, and you will also get the population of China and the United States, because Google knows those are the most common follow-up questions.

“The ‘Star Trek’ computer shouldn’t just answer questions, it should make you more intelligent, should anticipate what you expect next,” said Amit Singhal, senior vice president for search at Google, in an interview before the conference.

This is an extension of Google’s knowledge graph — its semantic search product that aims to understand the meaning of things, not just keywords. It is why a search for Barack Obama brings up links to Hillary Clinton and Honolulu, for instance.

Google Now, the service that sends you information on traffic and weather before you even ask for it, is also digging deeper into our minds. Google is adding more entertainment alerts, like new music based on videos watched on YouTube, and turning Google Now into a robotic to-do list and a stronger competitor to Apple’s Siri. Tell Google to remind you to buy milk next time you are in a grocery store, for instance, and the alert will automatically pop up when you step in a Safeway.

Google is also trying to make search more conversational by encouraging people to talk to their phones and computers and hear answers out loud. Voice search has already been possible on both types of devices, but on Wednesday, Google announced that people can now talk to its Chrome browser to perform a search, by saying, “O.K. Google.” (If Google has its way, we will all soon be walking around shouting, “O.K.,” because “O.K. Glass” is the command to activate its Internet-connected glasses.)

Google also uses location information to answer questions. So people can ask, “How far from here to Santa Cruz?” and Google will know where “here” is, or they can ask, “How tall do you have to be to ride the Giant Dipper?” and Google will know that is a ride nearby.

In another step to personalize search, Google is expanding its tool that plucks information from Gmail and presents it in search results. Already, a search for “flights” by logged-in users produces flight information from Gmail. Now, you can ask Google to show your photos from your trip to New York last year, and it will find them on Google Plus and show them to you.

Underlying many of these developments is Google’s privacy policy, which it revised last year to permit the company to use information shared with one Google service on another one. That is why Google can, for instance, pull information from Gmail to show up in search results or send you alerts about new movies because of a trailer you have watched on YouTube.

Coverage of the annual Google I/O conference for developers, May 15-16, 2013.

Bits Blog: Google Search Terms Can Predict Stock Market, Study Finds

The terms people search for on Google have been used to forecast how many Americans have the flu, travel plans and the price for which cars sell. Now a scientific study shows that Google search can be used to predict the stock market.

Using Google Trends, a service that shows the popularity of search terms, researchers from Warwick Business School in England and Boston University’s department of physics found that the type of terms people search Google for on a given week can predict whether the Dow Jones industrial average will rise or fall the following week.

The study, titled “Quantifying Trading Behavior in Financial Markets Using Google Trends,” was published Thursday in Nature’s Scientific Reports.

The researchers tracked 98 search terms from Google Trends between 2004 and 2011. These included investment-related words, like debt, stocks, portfolio, unemployment and markets, and non-investment terms, including lifestyle, arts, happy, war, conflict and politics.

One of the leading search terms used to predict the markets was the word “debt” — an increase in such searches heralded a sell-off of stocks. A decrease in searches found the market rose slightly the following week.

But the results do not take into account volatile markets where a big sell-off can force investors to abandon ship sooner than they anticipated.

And sometimes Google Trends can give scientists inaccurate information when the proper context is not applied. For example, earlier this year Google Flu Trends said it believed that nearly 11 percent of the United States population had influenza. Yet the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention put the coughing and sniffling peak at 6 percent of the population. It turns out Google didn’t anticipate how outside influences, like media coverage of the flu and the rise in discussions on social media, would affect its data and statistics.

In 2010, researchers at Indiana University-Bloomington performed a similar study and found that people’s emotions on Twitter could help predict the stock market.

Daybees Aspires to Be the Google of Event Search Sites

That is the proposition behind a new Web site called Daybees, which went live in Britain last month and plans to expand to the United States and other countries soon.

Daybees bills itself as “the world’s largest events search engine,” with a database of more than 1.5 million happenings of all kinds, whether Bon Jovi concerts or bake sales.

Daybees is one of the growing number of so-called vertical search engines, which aim to carve out a niche for themselves in the lucrative online search business, an area dominated by Google and coveted by other Internet giants like Microsoft and Facebook.

In areas like online shopping, travel or real estate, vertical search sites are well established. But Daybees maintains it is the first site, at least in the English-speaking world, to offer such a comprehensive listing of entertainment options without being tied into any commercial arrangements with the organizers.

While 1.5 million might sound like a lot of events, Daybees lets people fine-tune their searches for things to do by keyword, by location or by time and date. And Daybees argues that its results are more focused than those turned up by Google.

“I love Google,” said Gary Morris, the founder and chief executive of Daybees. “I use it umpteen times a day. But if I want to find an event that’s taking place at a certain time on a certain day, 2,000 feet from my front door or wherever, it’s impossible.”

“I was relying a lot on concierges and locals for information,” he added. “And what I found was that people’s knowledge of local events was not very good.”

While companies like Ticketmaster operate online listings, these tend to be limited to events with which the companies have commercial arrangements. Daybees says it is independent, and gets no commissions — at least not yet — though it does offer links to Web sites that sell tickets.

Independence comes at a price. So far Daybees, set up with an investment of about $1 million from Mr. Morris and Andrew Molasky, a partner and director, earns no revenue.

Not only does it not accept commissions, it also has eschewed advertising. Mr. Morris, a Briton with a background in the television business, and Mr. Molasky said advertising was a possibility, along with partnerships with ticket-selling firms, but added that they wanted to establish the site first.

“It doesn’t mean we don’t have a profit motive,” said Mr. Molasky, a Las Vegas real estate developer with a background in the entertainment business. “Our approach is, if you build it, it will come.”

That approach has fed the imaginations of countless start-up founders — and dashed the dreams of almost as many.

Vertical search is a hot area, with more and more ventures seeking to cash in on people’s desire to tailor search engines to specific needs.

The growth of vertical search has been driven by the spread of mobile Internet use, which has increased demand for customized, localized information, rather than the more extensive lists of results turned up by general search engines like Google or Microsoft’s Bing.

But Google has not stood still, fine-tuning its search engine and rolling out an ever-growing number of vertical offerings of its own, like online shopping and videos. Often, these are linked to other Google services like maps.

Analysts say that in Europe, where Google is especially strong, with more than 90 percent of the search market, compared with about three-quarters in the United States, it is particularly difficult for vertical search engines to establish themselves.

Indeed, the European Commission, in its antitrust investigation of Google, is looking into whether Google favors its own services in its search results, to the detriment of would-be rivals.

“Their ability to build scale or users has to be quicker than Google’s ability to innovate and incorporate such features,” said Chris Whitelaw, chief operating officer of the British arm of iProspect, a digital marketing agency. “I think Daybees probably has a window of opportunity, but they need to use it, otherwise Google will pinch their lunch.”

For many start-ups, including vertical search firms, getting on the radar screen of Google, Facebook or another Internet giant is exactly the point. That way, even if revenue proves difficult to generate, there is always the possibility of another way to cash in — a takeover.

“For some of these companies, the business model seems to be, How can we best annoy Facebook?” said Andreas Pouros, chief operating officer of Greenlight, a search advertising agency in London.

Mr. Morris and Mr. Molasky say their focus for now is on building the business. They developed the algorithms that drive the search engine in-house, with a small team of engineers.

The site lists some American events, and Daybees plans to have an American-focused site within six months, Mr. Molasky said. The name Daybees, he said, comes from the fact that “we are all busy bees, and it’s about filling your day.”

As Web Search Goes Mobile, Competitors Chip at Google’s Lead

Either way, Google lost a customer.

Google remains the undisputed king of search, with about two-thirds of the market. But the nature of search is changing, especially as more people search for what they want to buy, eat or learn on their mobile devices. This has put the $22 billion search industry, perhaps the most lucrative and influential of online businesses, at its most significant crossroad since its invention.

No longer do consumers want to search the Web like the index of a book — finding links at which a particular keyword appears. They expect new kinds of customized search, like that on topical sites such as Yelp, TripAdvisor or Amazon, which are chipping away at Google’s hold. Google and its competitors are trying to develop the knowledge and comprehension to answer specific queries, not just point users in the right direction.

“What people want is, ‘You ask a very simple question and you get a very simple answer,’ ” said Oren Etzioni, a professor at the University of Washington who has co-founded companies for shopping and flight search. “We don’t want the 10 blue links on that small screen. We want to know the closest sushi place, make a reservation and be on our way.”

People are overwhelmed at how crowded the Internet has become — Google says there are 30 trillion Web addresses, up from 1 trillion five years ago — and users expect their computers and phones to be smarter and do more for them. Many of the new efforts are services that people do not even think of as search engines.

Amazon, for example, has a larger share than Google of shopping searches, the most lucrative kind because people are in the mood to buy something. On sites like Pinterest and Polyvore, users have curated their favorite things from around the Web to produce results when you search for, say, “lace dress.”

On smartphones, people skip Google and go directly to apps, like Kayak or Weather Underground. Other apps send people information, like traffic or flight delays, before they even ask for it.

People use YouTube to search for things like how to tie a bow tie, Siri to search on their iPhones, online maps to find local places and Facebook to find things their friends have liked.

And services like LinkedIn Influencers and Quora are trying to be different kinds of search engines — places to find high-quality, expert content and avoid weeding through everything else on the Web. On Quora, questions like “What was it like to work for Steve Jobs?” get answered by people with firsthand knowledge, something Google cannot provide.

“There is a lot of pressure on search engines to deliver more customized, more relevant results,” said Shar VanBoskirk, an analyst at Forrester. “Users don’t need links to Web pages. We need answers, solutions, whatever intel we were searching for.”

But Google remains the one to beat, even as alternative search sites become popular. “They’re the specialty store you’re going into here and there,” said Danny Sullivan, an editor of Search Engine Land, a blog, “but they’re not your grocery store.”

Yet the promise of search is big enough that even though Microsoft loses billions of dollars a year on Bing and has failed to make a dent in Google’s market share, it keeps at it. Microsoft — which in February had 17 percent of the market, and 26 percent including the searches it powered for Yahoo — has said it views search as essential to its other products, from the Xbox to phones. And there is still a lot of money to be made as No. 2.

“You have millions of people a day saying exactly what they want, and if you’re an advertiser, it’s a beautiful vehicle,” Mr. Sullivan said.

EMarketer estimates that Google earns about three-quarters of search ad spending. Search engines bring companies troves of data and a measure of control as Internet users’ entry point to the digital world.

There are signs that people’s search behaviors are changing, however, with consequences for these companies.

Tool Kit: Facebook’s Graph Search Makes Use of Friends and Likes

In January, Facebook began testing its new search tool, an enhanced version of the search box at the top of the site. The tool, which Facebook calls Graph Search, gets its name from “social graph,” a technical term for the giant network of connections among friends, friends of friends and so on. The social graph includes not just members’ names, but also the pages they have liked and the places where they have checked in.

Graph Search lets a user concoct short phrases, instead of stand-alone search keywords, to search Facebook; for example, “books my friends like.”

The tool does have limitations; if you’re looking for the nearest sushi restaurant in a big city, or trying to browse the complete works of the author Susan Orlean, searching Facebook is not the way to do it. In many cases, though, Graph Search lets you take advantage of the clicking and typing your Facebook friends, and their friends, have already done.

You can start a Facebook search by going to facebook.com/about/graphsearch in a desktop or laptop browser, and clicking the big button at the very bottom of the page to replace the search box at the top of Facebook with the enhanced Graph Search box. Facebook has not made the tool available on mobile apps yet, but says it will do so later this year.

Once the tool is installed, try typing a description of what you want into the search box, preferably using the term “friend” or “like.” Pages will pop up, as well as suggestions for searches based on what you have typed so far, using conversational language. This differs from the keyword-oriented style of Google, in which a user tries to think of words associated with what is being sought. Graph Search looks at Facebook’s organized data — names, likes, friends, locations, photo tags and so on — but not status updates or comments.

FIND A BOOK One of the most obvious graph searches is “books my friends like.” That will display the Facebook pages created for specific books on which friends of yours have clicked the Like button. Moreover, Facebook will show you which specific friends of yours liked each book, so you know who suggested which one.

You may have to scroll down a page or two to find a book you have not heard of before, or to dodge the collective bad taste of the social graph. (My own friends are too fond of books about social networking.) One way around this is to search for “books liked by people who like what I like.” This both broadens the search beyond your friends, and narrows it to those who have clicked Facebook’s Like button on the same pages as you.

Some authors, like Ms. Orlean, are also active Facebook users who click the Like button on book pages. That means you can search for “books liked by Susan Orlean” to see more than a dozen reading suggestions from the author of “The Orchid Thief.”

FIND A RESTAURANT Facebook cannot match Yelp’s extensive listings, reviews and block-by-block location targeting for finding a nearby restaurant. But while Yelp has a Facebook-like friend network, chances are you have not built up a network of your own there. Instead, you have built up a much larger network of Facebook friends, many of whom have been clicking the Like button on restaurant pages.

With Facebook search, you can look for “restaurants my friends like in Boston” or “nearby sushi restaurants my friends like.” As with books, Facebook will tell you which friends like which restaurant, so you know whose advice you are getting.

Keep in mind that Facebook’s idea of “nearby,” unlike that of a phone app, is not GPS-targeted. It can mean anywhere within city limits, even if it’s 45 minutes away. Facebook search works best for advance scouting of new restaurants worth traveling to, like “Japanese restaurants near New York, New York, liked by people who live in Japan,” or “restaurants in San Francisco, California, liked by people who like what I like.” In New York City, you can specify individual neighborhoods like “Park Slope, Brooklyn, New York.”

German Bill Limits Search Engines’ Free Access to News

The bill, which follows years of debate, came as the newspaper industry in Germany, as elsewhere, struggles to find new sources of revenue as readers and advertisers move online in droves.

Chancellor Angela Merkel’s center-right coalition, which faces an election in September, watered down its original plans amid pressure from Internet lobbyists, lawyers and others who argued that it undermined freedom of information. The opposition parties could still block the bill in the Bundesrat, the upper house of Parliament, where the government has no majority.

Google began an ad campaign in German newspapers and set up a Web site called “Defend your Web” to lobby against the proposals, saying they would result in less information for consumers and higher costs for companies.

The “ancillary copyright” bill now makes clear that search engines can publish “individual words or small snippets of text such as headlines” without incurring any costs.

They would have to pay for use of longer pieces of content, though opposition parties said the wording of the bill was vague and could lead to courts having to rule on individual cases.

“It is not at all clear who is now meant to be protected from whom and why there is this law,” said the opposition Greens on their Web site on Friday, saying the bill served neither cash-hungry publishers nor the free flow of information.

Google echoed such criticism.

“The law is neither necessary nor sensible. It hampers innovation and hurts the economy and Internet users in Germany,” said Kay Oberbeck, communications director at Google.

But the association of German newspaper publishers welcomed the bill as “an important element in the creation of a fair legal space in the digital world.”

They have argued that search engines raise the vast majority of their revenue from online advertising and that a substantial part of this come directly or indirectly from the free access to professional news or entertainment content produced by news media companies.

The German draft bill states explicitly that it is not intended to protect newspapers from the effects of ongoing structural changes in the market.

With Graph Search, Facebook Bets on More Sharing

SAN FRANCISCO — Facebook’s greatest triumph has been to persuade a seventh of the world’s population to share their personal lives online.

Now the social network is taking on its archrival, Google, with a search tool to mine that personal information, just as people are growing more cautious about sharing on the Internet and even occasionally removing what they have already put up.

Whether Facebook’s more than one billion users will continue to divulge even more private details will determine whether so-called social search is the next step in how we navigate the online world. It will also determine whether Facebook has found a business model that will make it a lot of money.

“There’s a big potential upside for both Facebook and users, but getting people to change their behaviors in relation to what they share will not be easy,” said Andrew T. Stephen, who teaches marketing at the University of Pittsburgh and studies consumer behavior on online social networks.

This week, Facebook unveiled its search tool, which it calls graph search, a reference to the network of friends its users have created. The company’s algorithms will filter search results for each person, ranking the friends and brands that it thinks a user would trust the most. At first, it will mine users’ interests, photos, check-ins and “likes,” but later it will search through other information, including status updates.

“While the usefulness of graph search increases as people share more about their favorite restaurants, music and other interests, the product doesn’t hinge on this,” a Facebook spokesman, Jonathan Thaw, said.

Nevertheless, the company engineers who created the tool — former Google employees — say that the project will not reach its full potential if Facebook data is “sparse,” as they call it. But the company is confident people will share more data, be it the movies they watch, the dentists they trust or the meals that make their mouths water.

The things people declare on Facebook will be useful, when someone searches for those interests, Tom Stocky, one of the creators of Facebook search, said in an interview this week. Conversely, by liking more things, he said, people will become more useful in the eyes of their friends.

“You might be inclined to ‘like’ what you like so when your friends search, they’ll find it,” he said. “I probably would never have liked my dentist on Facebook before, but now I do because it’s a way of letting my friends know.”

Mr. Stocky offered these examples of how more information may be desirable: A single man may want to be discovered when a friend of a friend is searching for eligible bachelors in San Francisco or a restaurant that stays open late may want to be found by a night owl.

“People have shared all this great stuff on Facebook,” Mr. Stocky said. “It’s latent value. We wanted a way to unlock that.”

Independent studies suggest that Facebook users are becoming more careful about how much they reveal online, especially since educators and employers typically scour Facebook profiles.

A Northwestern University survey of 500 young adults in the summer of 2012 found that the majority avoided posting status updates because they were concerned about who would see them. The study also found that many had deleted or blocked contacts from seeing their profiles and nearly two-thirds had untagged themselves from a photo, post or check-in.

“These behavioral patterns seem to suggest that many young adults are less keen on sharing at least certain details about their lives rather than more,” said Eszter Hargittai, an associate professor of communication studies at Northwestern, who led the yet unpublished study among men and women aged 21 and 22.

Also last year, the Pew Internet Center found that social network users, including those on Facebook, were more aggressively pruning their profiles — untagging photos, removing friends and deleting comments.

Search of DNA Sequences Reveals Full Identities

The researcher did not reveal the names of the people he found, but the exercise, published Thursday in the journal Science, illustrates the difficulty of protecting the privacy of volunteers involved in medical research when the genetic information they provide needs to be public so scientists can use it.

Other reports have identified people whose genetic data was online, but none had done so using such limited information: the long strings of DNA letters, an age and, because the study focused on only American subjects, a state.

“I’ve been worried about this for a long time,” said Barbara Koenig, a researcher at the University of California in San Francisco who studies issues involving genetic data. “We always should be operating on the assumption that this is possible.”

The data are from an international study, the 1000 Genomes Project, that is collecting genetic information from people around the world and posting it online so researchers can use it freely. It also includes the ages of participants and the regions where they live. That information, a genealogy Web site and Google searches were sufficient to find complete family trees. While the methods for extracting relevant genetic data from the raw genetic sequence files were specialized enough to be beyond the scope of most laypeople, no one expected it to be so easy to zoom in on individuals.

“We are in what I call an awareness moment,” said Eric D. Green, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute at the National Institutes of Health.

There is no easy answer about what to do to protect the privacy of study subjects. Subjects might be made more aware that they could be identified by their DNA sequences. More data could be locked behind security walls, or severe penalties could be instituted for those who invade the privacy of subjects.

“We don’t have any claim to have the answer,” Dr. Green said. And opinions about just what should be done vary greatly among experts.

But after seeing how easy it was to find the individuals and their extended families, the N.I.H. removed people’s ages from the public database, making it more difficult to identify them.

But Dr. Jeffrey R. Botkin, associate vice president for research integrity at the University of Utah, which collected the genetic information of some research participants whose identities were breached, cautioned about overreacting. Genetic data from hundreds of thousands of people have been freely available online, he said, yet there has not been a single report of someone being illicitly identified. He added that “it is hard to imagine what would motivate anyone to undertake this sort of privacy attack in the real world.” But he said he had serious concerns about publishing a formula to breach subjects’ privacy. By publishing, he said, the investigators “exacerbate the very risks they are concerned about.”

The project was the inspiration of Yaniv Erlich, a human genetics researcher at the Whitehead Institute, which is affiliated with M.I.T. He stresses that he is a strong advocate of data sharing and that he would hate to see genomic data locked up. But when his lab developed a new technique, he realized he had the tools to probe a DNA database. And he could not resist trying.

The tool allowed him to quickly find a type of DNA pattern that looks like stutters among billions of chemical letters in human DNA. Those little stutters — short tandem repeats — are inherited. Genealogy Web sites use repeats on the Y chromosome, the one unique to men, to identify men by their surnames, an indicator of ancestry. Any man can submit the short tandem repeats on his Y chromosome and find the surname of men with the same DNA pattern. The sites enable men to find their ancestors and relatives.

So, Dr. Erlich asked, could he take a man’s entire DNA sequence, pick out the short tandem repeats on his Y chromosome, search a genealogy site, discover the man’s surname and then fully identify the man?

Mobile Apps Drive Rapid Changes in Search Technology

Google has repeatedly made the argument — and the commission agreed — that the speed of change in the technology industry made it impossible for regulators to impose restrictions without stalling future innovations.

Exhibit A is the mobile device. Nowhere has technology changed as rapidly and consumer behavior as broadly. As people abandon desktop computers for mobile ones, existing tech companies’ business models are being upended and new companies are blooming.

“Mobile is very much a moving target,” said Herbert Hovenkamp, a professor of antitrust law at the University of Iowa who has been a paid adviser to Google. “This is a market in which new competitors come in a week’s time.”

When the commission began its investigation 19 months ago, for instance, the iPhone did not have the Siri voice search, Apple did not have its own mapping service and Yelp’s mobile apps had no ads. By the time the inquiry concluded, all of that had changed. Google had new competitors on all sides trying to chip away at its hold on the mobile search and advertising market.

Still, Google is even more dominant on mobile phones than on desktop computers. It has 96 percent of the world’s mobile search market, according to StatCounter, which tracks Web use. It collects 57 percent of mobile ad revenue in the United States, while Facebook, its nearest competitor, gets just 9 percent, according to eMarketer.

But, analysts say, as people change their search habits on mobile devices — bypassing Google to go straight to apps like Yelp’s, for example — that dominance could wane, or a competitor could swoop in and knock Google off its perch.

“It’s important to recognize that many mobile apps are really vertical search engines,” said Rebecca Lieb, a digital media analyst at the Altimeter Group. “It is impossible to really say anyone dominates a section of mobile in a secure way right now.”

On cellphones or tablets, for instance, people increasingly skip Google altogether in favor of apps like Flixster for movie times or Kayak for flights.

Apple is taking on mobile search with Siri on the iPhone, which can answer questions about the weather or search for nearby restaurants. With its new mapping service, Apple has also entered local search.

On Friday, Blekko, a search start-up, introduced an app called Izik for Apple and Android devices. It tries to make searching more tablet-friendly by showing images instead of just links, and making it easier to swipe through many pages of results with a finger.

On mobile devices, said Rich Skrenta, chief executive of Blekko, “the user experience is so different that we think it opens things up. On your desktop, if it doesn’t look like Google, you think that’s not a search engine. On a tablet, it’s just vastly different.”

Jon Leibowitz, chairman of the F.T.C., said at a news conference Thursday that the speed of change in the tech industry meant that “you want to be careful before you apply sanctions.”

The commission also considered Google’s partnerships with cellphone makers like Samsung and HTC that license Google search on phones, so that a search box shows up on the home screen. In the end it decided not to take action against Google.

Some Google critics said that even though the competitive landscape is different on mobile devices, it should not have influenced the government’s analysis of Google’s behavior on the desktop Web.

“There’s no doubt that mobile applications, including Yelp’s, give consumers the ability to bypass the major search engines and go directly to the best provider of the service they’re looking for,” said Vince Sollitto, vice president for government relations at Yelp. Still, he added, “I don’t see how that impacts how someone is acting anticompetitively on the desktop.”

(One of Google’s concessions to the federal agency, that it would allow other Web companies to ask Google not to show their content in its own vertical search products — a chief complaint of Yelp’s — applies to mobile as well.)

But others said antitrust enforcement in the 21st century needs to be more agile.

Nick Wingfield contributed reporting from Seattle.

Europe Likely to Be Harder on Google Over Search

Few expect the European antitrust watchdog to be as lenient.

The Federal Trade Commission ruled on Thursday that Google had not broken antitrust laws, after a 19-month inquiry into how it operated its search engine. But the European Commission, which is pursuing claims that the company rigs results to favor its own businesses, operates under a different standard.

The agreement with the American authorities, analysts and competition lawyers say, is unlikely to alter the demands of European regulators, led by the competition commissioner, Joaquín Almunia.

“We have taken note of the F.T.C. decision, but we don’t see that it has any direct implications for our investigation, for our discussions with Google, which are ongoing,” said Michael Jennings, a spokesman for the European Commission in Brussels.

Faced with nearly $4 billion in possible penalties and restrictions on its business in Europe, Google submitted proposals in July to remedy the concerns of the European Commission, which covered four areas. In its deal with the F.T.C., Google made concessions in two of those areas but was not required to do so in the rest.

A Google spokesman, Al Verney, declined to comment on the content of the company’s proposals to Mr. Almunia but said the company would “continue to work cooperatively with the European Commission.”

The Google case underscores a basic difference between the approaches to monopoly power in Europe and the United States. American antitrust regulators tend to focus on whether a company’s dominance harms consumers; the European system seeks to keep competitors in the market. Mr. Almunia has vowed to restore competition to the Internet search business in Europe.

“History shows that competition law is applied to monopoly power more stringently in the E.U. than in the U.S.,” said Jacques Lafitte, head of the competition practice at Avisa Partners, a consultancy in Brussels, who brought one of the original complaints against Google. “Whether the E.U. is right or not is a different question.”

Mr. Lafitte has some expertise in the matter. He is the former head of corporate affairs at Microsoft Europe and watched as that company did battle with regulators over its dominant computer operating system. Microsoft won a lenient settlement with the Justice Department in October 2001, he said, only to be slapped with nearly 1.6 billion euros, or $2.1 billion, in fines and penalties from the European Union from 2004 to 2008.

Google learned from Microsoft’s mistakes. It worked with authorities in both the United States and Europe to reach a deal rather than fight a desperate legal action. That approach appears to have paid off: last month, after a meeting with Eric E. Schmidt, Google’s executive chairman, Mr. Almunia said that the sides had “substantially reduced our differences.”

In its deal with the F.T.C., Google agreed to make concessions in two areas that concerned European regulators. In one, it will allow rivals to opt out of allowing Google to “scrape,” or copy, text from their sites. Google will probably offer the same concession to European authorities.

But in a second area of European concern — whether Google deliberately favors its own content in search results — the F.T.C. did not require changes.

Mr. Almunia has also demanded that Google put fewer restrictions on advertising distribution deals, an area his American counterparts did not explore.

The company will make a detailed set of proposed remedies in January. The European Commission will then allow the complainants to review them in a period of what is known as “market testing.” Antitrust lawyers say a final denouement could arrive by spring, depending on how hostile Google’s rivals are to the proposed remedies.

FairSearch, an alliance of Google rivals, accused the F.T.C. of rushing its decision. It said in a statement that closing the F.T.C. investigation “with only voluntary commitments from Google is disappointing and premature.”

The outcome in Europe may also be affected by Google’s dominance there. Google’s share of the United States search market was 67 percent in November, according to comScore, a digital analytics company, while its share in Europe was 83 percent that month.

In Search Engine Results, a Peek at What We Wonder

Search engines have long provided clues to the topics people look up. But now sites like Google and Bing are showing the precise questions that are most frequently asked, giving everyone a chance to peer virtually over one another’s shoulders at private curiosities. And they are revealing interesting patterns.

Frequently asked questions include: When will the world end? Is Neil Armstrong Muslim? Was George Washington gay?

The questions come from a feature that Google calls “autocomplete” and Microsoft calls “autosuggest.” These anticipate what you are likely to ask based on questions that other people have asked. Simply type a question starting with a word like “is” or “was,” and search engines will start filling in the rest.

People who study online behavior also say the autocomplete feature reveals broader patterns, including indications that the questions people ask of search engines often veer into the sensitive and politically incorrect.

“Your search engine is your best friend, and you talk to it about everything, even things you might not talk about to your real best friends,” said Danny Sullivan, editor in chief of Search Engine Land, a Web site that covers the search industry. “It’s a way that search engines reflect society.”

One category of question comes up with puzzling frequency in autocomplete: whether a certain person is gay.

Is Elton John gay? Is Paul Ryan gay? Is Michael Bloomberg gay? The question pops up often, too, when starting searches about George Clooney, the Yankees third baseman Alex Rodriguez, the actress Ellen Page, Genghis Khan, several cartoon characters and even the pope.

This line of questioning is so commonplace that a simple query on Google beginning with “is” can result in autocomplete predicting that you are about to ask, Is Frank Ocean gay? Do the same with Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, and it often fills out the question, Is Robin Roberts gay? Though these questions do not pop up every time, they do appear with surprising frequency.

Nick In’t Ven, senior program manager at Microsoft’s Bing search engine, said that the returns reflect the collective curiosities of its users (and that similar results turn up on Google). He could not say how many times people have to type in a question for it to dominate the feature, but said that for popular single terms, like “Facebook,” it is well into the millions.

Search engine experts said they cannot rule out that the phenomenon is the result of some bug in the system, but they added that it seems very unlikely.

“We base it on experience, what users have asked about around the world,” Mr. In’t Ven said. “We’re trying to reflect the world’s collective intentions.” If people wonder whether other people are gay, “that is the collective intention, and we abide with it.”

Mr. In’t Ven added that he and his colleagues at Microsoft have often discussed some of the strange questions. A few months ago, they became interested in the frequent inquiries from search engine users about cultural stereotypes.

Type “why are Americans,” and the autocomplete choices include “fat,” “stupid” and “patriotic.” Substitute “Chinese,” and the autocompletes include “skinny,” “rude” and “smart.” If autocomplete is any indicator, search engine users regularly wonder if Jews are smarter and whether African-Americans are better athletes.

In a statement, Krisztina Radosavljevic-Szilagyi, a Google spokeswoman, wrote: “The search queries that you see as part of autocomplete are a reflection of the search activity of all Web users.” She declined to give an interview about autocomplete, but added in her note that Google tries to accurately reflect the diversity of what is on the Internet, whether good or bad.

There are other possibilities for why these questions yield impolitic results.

One is the nature of language. Questions beginning with “is” might be more likely to lend themselves to asking about someone’s sexuality than questions beginning with, for example, “where.” However, on Bing, sexual orientation also is a regular topic with questions beginning with the word “was” (Was J. Edgar Hoover gay?).

Tool Kit: Tips to Search Smarter and Faster

By this point in the Internet era, everyone should know how to find information on the Web with a search engine like Google or Bing.

Easy, right? Just type what you are looking for in the little box.

There are even easier ways. Google and Bing have built right into their search boxes tools like calculators, currency converters and dictionaries. They developed a host of tricks you can use to slice through clutter to reach the information you need. In some cases the results appear right away; you don’t need to touch the enter key. Many of the shortcuts work with the Web browsers on smartphones and tablets.

“We really try to make Bing a place where you can go to get stuff done in the real world,” said Stefan Weitz, senior director of Bing, Microsoft’s search engine and chief rival to Google. “People expect search now to actually do a better job connecting them to the ultimate destination.” If you need any additional help, Google also offers online tutorials.

TRAVEL TOOLS A fast way to find driving directions with Google is to type your query directly in the search box, using the following format: from 1380 Mass Ave, Cambridge, MA to 815 Boylston Street, Boston. The result is a map along with driving distance, trip time and a link to directions.

If you are planning air travel, you can track fares and be directed to sites for ticket purchases. In the Google search box, type airport codes in the following way: BOS to ABQ. An initial listing of flights appears, along with drop-down calendars to select departure and return dates.

If you click on the “Flights from Boston to Albuquerque” link, you arrive at a more extensive tool for finding flight information, including a lowest fares calculator, available by clicking the small graph-shaped button, or an interactive map, by clicking the balloon button, where you can choose among different departure or destination cities.

Bing’s tool for air travel can be found using the same format of entering airport codes in the search box, and when you drill down further you have choices of buying tickets through sources like Travelocity, Priceline and Expedia.

With either Bing or Google, you can quickly check flight status using the following format: Delta flight status 1512.

Also useful for travelers are language translation tools. In either Bing or Google, use the following format: translate coffee to Turkish. The result, kahve, appears, and if you click the first link you can find tools for translating words into dozens of languages.

Converting currencies is also available by using the following format in either search engine: 100 U.S. dollars in Indian rupees.

In both search engines, to book reservations at restaurants, the search results for a restaurant in a major city will often include a link to OpenTable, a provider of restaurant reservations. (You may need to add a ZIP code or a city name for common names.) The right-hand column might also have other information like reviews and maps.

SOCIAL NETWORKS Both Google and Microsoft have been trying to figure out how best to interact with the trove of information locked away in social networking sites like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

Microsoft has entered into partnerships with Facebook and others allowing Bing users to connect with people who may know something about their search query. You can log into a Facebook account from the Bing home page, and while you search in Bing, a sidebar appears along the right side of the results page that may display Facebook friends who have some relationship to your search.

If your query is “Mexican restaurants in San Antonio,” and you hover over the image of a friend, you may see a Facebook comment or photo of their favorite place for good mole.

Google has its own social networking service, Google Plus, which enables users to share their favorite search results with friends also on the service.

SPECIALIZED SEARCHES Much has changed since the early days of search engines, and given the vastness of data now available online, knowing a few simple yet powerful shortcuts can pinpoint information more relevant to your search.

You can dig through the Web for specific kinds of files, for example PowerPoint files related to the Affordable Care Act. In Google use the format filetype:ppt the affordable care act. (The ppt part of the query is the extension for PowerPoint files.) Other popular extensions are docx, xlsx and pdf, for Word, Excel and PDF files. Bing flips the search format — type the affordable care act filetype:ppt.

Another very useful way to dig for information is to use the prefix site: to search within a site. For example, type site:washingtonpost.com Mitt Romney to get links to articles, blog posts and other references to Mitt Romney that appeared in The Washington Post. Bing reverses the format — type Mitt Romney site:washingtonpost.com.

To save time, in some instances you can preview information in search results. To preview videos without having to click on them, in the results page of Bing hover over the image of a video and in many cases it will play. And in Google you can see previews of Web pages by moving the cursor to the right of a search result and hovering over a small image of double arrows.

FINDING FACTS If you need a calculator, both Google and Bing can calculate some pretty fancy math queries by entering them in the search box, but Google goes further. Type 4 * 24 in Google and the answer appears as you finish typing, and below that emerges an in-browser calculator with scientific functions. You can also turn Google’s search box into a trigonometric graphing calculator; type, for example, cos(x) + cos(y) and a rotating three-dimensional graph is displayed. From there you can size the graph or grab it to view it from different angles.

Converting measurements is easy using the following format in either search engine: pints in a gallon; centimeters in a foot.

Stock prices are available in either Google or Bing by entering a stock symbol — followed by “stock” if there is any ambiguity. For example aapl stock or sbux stock, pulls up prices of Apple or Starbucks. In Google, using a company name works: Whole Foods stock.

Dictionaries are available as well by using the following format: define perspicacity.

Weather forecasts are quickly at hand by entering a ZIP code or city name, in either Google or Bing, as in weather Denver.

Likewise, to find movies playing in your area, all you need is your ZIP code: movies 10018. (Type in an actor or director followed by the word movies to see what else he or she did.)

But, if you are looking for someone to take out to a movie and impress with all your newfound knowledge, there is no search algorithm just yet. For that, you are still on your own.

F.T.C. Staff Prepares Antitrust Case Against Google Over Search

The government’s escalating pursuit of Google is the most far-reaching antitrust investigation of a corporation since the landmark federal case against Microsoft in the late 1990s. The agency’s central focus is whether Google manipulates search results to favor its own products, and makes it harder for competitors and their products to appear prominently on a results page.

The staff recommendation is in a detailed draft memo of more than 100 pages that is being shared with the five F.T.C. commissioners, said two people briefed on the inquiry.

The memo is still being edited and changes could be made, but these are mostly fine-tuning and will not alter the broad conclusions reached after an inquiry that began more than a year ago, said these people, who spoke on the condition that they not be identified.

Google said in a statement on Friday, “We are happy to answer any questions that regulators have about our business.” In the past it has said many times that “competition is a click away.”

The commission is also building a team to take Google to court, if it comes to that. Last spring, it hired a seasoned litigator to help with the case, Beth A. Wilkinson, a partner in the firm Paul, Weiss in Washington. In a further sign that it means business, last week it brought on a well-known economist as a consultant: Richard Gilbert of the University of California, Berkeley.

The F.T.C. staff memo does not mean that the government will sue Google for antitrust violations. Next, the vote of three of the five F.T.C. commissioners would be required. And each step is a further prod for Google to make concessions to reach a settlement before going to court. Last month, Jon Leibowitz, chairman of the F.T.C., said a final decision on whether to sue Google would be made before the end of this year.

The Google investigation echoes the Microsoft case in a basic way. Google, like Microsoft in the personal computer industry, has drawn complaints from rivals and antitrust regulators as it has expanded its business beyond its dominant product, search and search advertising. Google has aggressively built off this main business to fields including online commerce and smartphone software.

As it expands its empire, Google takes on new competitors and brings formidable resources. Rivals may suffer, Google says, but the company is improving its products and services, benefiting consumers and the economy.

The American inquiry is moving in tandem with a major antitrust investigation in Europe. The European authorities are pressing ahead and seeking changes in Google’s behavior.

Speaking in New York last month, Joaquín Almunia, the European Union’s competition commissioner, pointed to antitrust regulators’ concerns that Google is “using its dominance in online search to foreclose rival specialized search engines and search advertisers.”

Google is also being investigated by the attorneys general of six states: Texas, Ohio, New York, California, Oklahoma and Mississippi.

Given the momentum of the investigations, antitrust experts say, the F.T.C. staff recommendation was to some extent expected.

The F.T.C. investigators have looked at a wide range of Google’s business practices, according to companies that have been questioned and received subpoenas from the agency.

The areas of inquiry include accusations of manipulating the search results it displays to favor Google commerce services it has developed like Google Shopping for buying goods and Google Places for advertising local restaurants and businesses. In the civilian subpoenas, the F.T.C. calls this “preferencing.”

The investigators are also looking into whether Google’s automated advertising marketplace, AdWords, discriminates against advertisers from competing online commerce services like comparison shopping sites and consumer review Web sites.

Claire Cain Miller and Edward Wyatt contributed reporting.

At War Blog: Search Engines Log the Fearsome Journeys of War Families

A wife just found out her husband is going to war. Her husband stands in a doorway. She backs down a hallway away from the news of a deployment that keeps coming closer. She locks herself in a room, sits in front of a computer, and types into a search engine the phrase “husband off to Afghanistan soon.” She knows Afghanistan is not a word but a place. It is a country made of mountains, men, and machine guns where her husband will go to war and live or die. But she is searching for more.

This is just one search engine phrase that leads readers to my blog, Wife and War. When I see the search engine phrases soldiers and their spouses use in discovering my blog, I see the story of war. War is not fought by countries or militaries, but by people, men and women, who go to war and, if they are lucky, come home alive.

War is not over when a country withdraws its troops. War stays with a soldier. It slips through the pores of his skin and the ducts of his house, circulating like blood or heat. War stretches from an armored vehicle turning to face a village in Afghanistan to a dark living room where a spouse waits. War reaches into reintegration and the same living room, where a husband and wife stand on opposite sides in deeper darkness. There can be loud bombs, the kind where a soldier who was standing next to you is falling to the ground, dead. There can be quiet explosions, the way a bed feels half empty like a swimming pool draining. When deployment is over and the bed is full again, war is how two people lay in it, together but far apart.

The search engine phrases used by soldiers and their spouses show the battles they fight in combat and on the home front. Too often they fight these battles alone. Wounded by war, they end up isolated, sitting in front of a computer and searching for support. When I see the search engine phrases they use, I imagine their struggles.

Wives wait while their husbands are gone. One wife folds laundry and finds a shirt in a gym bag that still smells like her husband. She places it into a drawer he will not open. She sleeps in a bed that is half empty and vast, like the ocean that separates them. She patrols a dark house, checking locks, surveilling a living room stretching like a desert and lit by the glow of a computer. She sits and types “I want my husband home from war in Afghanistan.” When her telephone does not ring in 12 days, she types “deployed husband ignoring me.” Another wife thinks about her husband getting killed, returning to her in a body bag, and what her life would be like without him. She drives home from the grocery store and her driveway is either empty or has an unmarked car in it. She types “who comes and tells you your husband died at war” and “how long does it take to be notified.” There is a wife whose husband is dead, his body blown up by a roadside bomb. She types “my husband died in combat.” There is a wife standing in a kitchen, cupping her stomach, typing “pregnant wife soldier died in combat.” There are wives who type “how war will bring you to your knees.”

When the war is over, soldiers return, and wives realize the war is not over. War scars and reintegration are hard. Wives sit in rooms, alone again, even though their husbands are home. They type “men who come home from Iraq and no longer want wives” and “I’m suffering because my husband is mean now back from war.” One wife types “wife of post traumatic stress” because that is what she thinks this is. Her husband is a ghost, sitting with his body turned toward the front door. He patrols their property, marching across grass with a gun. She types “wife war P.T.S.D. leave.” There are wives whose husbands are injured with shaken brains and they type “my husband just got a T.B.I. in Afghanistan” and “Iraq veteran startled by loud noises.” Trauma spreads over skin, over sheets, covering them. One wife types “wives sticking by soldiers after injuries.” Another types “wives leaving injured husbands American war.”

There are soldiers getting orders, getting ready to go to war, thinking about a country they have never seen, made of tents and terror. One soldier types “Afghanistan deployment pistol.” He wonders what it will feel like to have it next to him, all the time, for 12 months, even as he sleeps, his standard-issue M4 or the one he will wear at his waist, the M9. A soldier types “what we do on night raids” because he knows he will have to do it, kick down doors, clear houses, fire rounds, and kill terrorists.

When soldiers come home from war, they find houses and wives that are theirs but do not feel like it anymore. There is a soldier with half his face blown off. One soldier has a prosthetic leg attached to his hip, where he used to wear his holster and pistol. There are soldiers with invisible scars, shaken brains, and flashbacks. They wake up sweating, walk down dark hallways, into living rooms that feel dead, with windows like eyes, and type “I can hear my heart beating injury.” A soldier wakes up his partner, asking her if she hears it, a garbage can being knocked over or a car backfiring, because it sounds like artillery rounds going off. And he is yelling to get down. Later he types “is it possible that me and my fiancé both imagined gunshots in the middle of the night.” One soldier types “trench and checkpoint” because those words feel good. There is a soldier whose wife thinks he should not have a gun, underneath his side of the bed, the butt within reach. He tells her being without it is like losing a limb and he types “war stress and T.B.I. automatic pistol.” When fighting fills the house like smoke and his wife’s sob becomes a battle cry that he doesn’t want to hear, one soldier types “war veteran comes home marriage at war with wife.” And because soldiers are trained to know what is coming, he types “wife left husband because of P.T.S.D.”

When wives leave and soldiers are left even more alone, in a war that will not stop, they type “war vet wife divorced me couldn’t find a job.” And because it is hard to be home, harder sometimes than war, a soldier types “I am a soldier waiting alone and I wish I could stay on deployment.” Another soldier types “coming home from war and feeling dead inside.”

When my husband deployed with the Army, I had no contact with the military. I was alone. While he was gone for 15 months, I received one telephone call from a woman associated with the Army. I thought she was calling to tell me my husband was dead. She was not. She was calling to tell me that if I traveled anywhere overnight, I needed to tell the Army where I was going so someone could notify me if my husband was killed. I never heard from the Army again, not during that 15-month deployment or after, when my husband came home from war and we faced the challenges of reintegration and struggled, together, but alone, to reconnect.

The war is not over. Military suicide is at a record high and veteran unemployment is a problem. Veterans come home with massive injuries. Others suffer silently from P.T.S.D., guilt, depression, flashbacks or face the challenges of reintegration and reconnection. Many veterans are married, with spouses who struggle alongside of them. The search engine phrases that lead readers to Wife and War show that veterans and spouses are alone and searching for support online.

Amalie Flynn’s Wife and War blog is based on her experience as a military wife. She also has two other blogs: September Eleventh and Americans at War. Amalie Flynn’s memoir is forthcoming. You can find her on Twitter and on Facebook and on The Huffington Post.

Bits Blog: New Google Tools to Make the Search Engine More All-Knowing

When Google imagines the future of Web search, it sees a search engine that understands human meaning and not just words, that can have a spoken conversation with computer users and that gives users results not just from the Web but also from their personal lives.

On Wednesday, Google showed a few steps it has taken toward making that all-knowing search engine a reality. The new tools, like voice search that seems to outdo Apple’s Siri, make Google more useful. But some, like one that incorporates personal Gmail messages in search results, could also unnerve privacy-concerned users.

Karen Bleier/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesGoogle’s new tool is being offered to a million users who sign up at g.co/searchtrial.

Speaking at an event for reporters in San Francisco, Amit Singhal, senior vice president in charge of search at Google, called the announcements “baby steps in the direction of making search truly universal” and of building artificial intelligence into the search engine.

The Gmail tool, which Google is still testing with a limited number of users, shows results from Gmail if a user is signed in to his or her Google account. Search for Amazon, for instance, and in addition to links to the shopping Web site and information about the river, you could see the receipt from your recent Amazon.com order. Search “my flights” and Google will cull information about your forthcoming flight from your Gmail messages. Search for baby shower games and Google might show you a relevant but forgotten e-mail chain from last year between you and a friend.

Google says it wants to be able to see in your Gmail inbox that you have a reservation at a restaurant an hour away and alert you that the traffic is bad so you need to leave early, an extension of Google Now, which the company introduced in June. It also plans eventually to include personal information from other Google services like Docs and Drive.

Google is aware that the new tool could raise privacy concerns, a problem it has faced in the past when it tested new products, like Buzz, an ill-fated social network, only with Google employees. That is why the company is first offering it to a million users who sign up at g.co/searchtrial. It also emphasized that users can turn it off by moving a toggle at the top of the search results page or signing out of Gmail, and that all searches are encrypted.

“We have to do this very carefully, we know that,” Mr. Singhal said.

He added, “These are very useful things, services we need to bring to our users, and that’s the only way we can build the search of the future that we all want.”

Google also showed off voice search that seems to go far beyond what Apple’s Siri can do. These tools came to Android phones in June, and Google said it had submitted an app to Apple’s iTunes store that should be available in the next few days. In a demonstration, a Google executive verbally asked Google questions about the weather and maps, but also for more obscure information like a baseball player’s salary, a video on quantum physics and his personal flight information, and each time the search engine responded with the answer in a friendly voice.

Finally, Google showed the latest updates to the Knowledge Graph, which it introduced in May as a way to show real-world things and the connections between them. (Search “Twilight,” for instance, and on the right-hand side appears information about the movie and links to Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson.) Starting Thursday, Google will go further by showing you a horizontal bar of relevant information on top (search “what to do in Paris” and see the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre) and offering more intelligent prompts in auto-complete (search “Rio” and see “Rio de Janeiro” and “Rio, 2011 film.”)

Google also gave some astonishing statistics. There are 30 trillion URLs on the Web, and Google crawls 20 billion Web pages a day and does 100 billion searches a month.