DuckDuckGo, the privacy-focused search engine and browser company, has come under a lot of negative press recently and now are facing pressure from the US government. They have already been labeled as a search engine for “conspiracy theorists” by many media outlets despite not really catering to any one group of people. The reality of the search engine is that it is attractive to people that are not happy with increased data collection from groups like Google, Facebook, and many, many others. A benefit of this is that, until now, DuckDuckGo has also not altered or censored search results based on current political motivations or narratives.

When you use a search engine like Yahoo or Google you expect to get relevant results for your efforts.  In many cases this does really happen, but often times we enter what we are looking for and find very little that relates to the actual search. One of the reasons for this is (and has been for a long time) the ability of search providers to artificially alter the search results through internal ranking systems.  Google and Yahoo both have done this in the past and in some cases with good reason.

There is a term that often gets thrown around when we talk about technology and the way we now store data, reasonable expectation of privacy. This term has been used to get around some of the basic laws we have when it comes to accessing our digital lives. According to many corporations and some law makers, when you put information into a cloud based system (including Facebook) you give up your reasonable expectation of privacy. After all you put your data in someone else’s hands. If you wanted to keep it private you would hold onto it.

Yahoo has acquired startup company Wander which is behind the application Days. It is a form of personal visual diary. Users can set their photos and animated GIFs in one package during the day. The idea is to give the photo some extra context which is often not the case when images are individually mounted on services like Instagram.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Yahoo has reportedly entered into an agreement with Yelp to integrate their reviews in the search results. 

Controversial torrent service Pirate Bay once again changed the domain. Latest  .sx domain the Pirate Bay was on, was registered in the Dutch part of the Caribbean island of St. Martin (Sint Maarten), was seized probably due to the commitment and the impact of BREIN, a Dutch organization for copyright protection.

Hotfile, one of the most popular services for sharing files has ceased their operations. In a recent court settlement Hotfile has agreed to pay a fine of $80 million for copyright infringement to several movie studios. It is the result of a lawsuit for copyright infringement started in March 2012. submitted by Disney, Fox, Universal, Sony Pictures and Warner against Hotfile CEO, Anthony Tito.

Mozilla has released the financial report for the last year. The data is somewhat worrying because as much as 90% of this organization's profit comes from a single source.

According to research by the University of Southern California, Google has in the past year has dramatically increased the number of locations around the world from which serves queries to its search engine.

Facebook is removing another privacy feature from their social networking site. For a number of years users have been able to hide themselves on Facebook from people looking for them with a simple checkbox. Starting today users that had previously hidden themselves from search will no longer have that protection. This does not mean that all of posts are visible if someone does go looking for you, but you will no longer have that invisibility like you did before.