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Yahoo said today it is holding its second annual Key Scientific Challenges Program, which is open globally to any graduate student enrolled in a PhD program at an accredited institution.

The Key Scientific Challenges Program focuses on a number of issues, from developing algorithms that make information more personally relevant, to finding insights about online advertising and experimenting with new sociological models for how people engage with the web.

"Yahoo! and the entire online industry face challenges that are increasingly complex and require an interdisciplinary approach to solve," said Prabhakar Raghavan, head of Yahoo! Labs.

"The Key Scientific Challenges Program provides graduate students an unmatched environment that brings together social scientists, economists, computer scientists, and statisticians to collaborate in an unprecedented way. The students get the benefit of testing their research ideas in the real world, and Yahoo! gains new perspectives on the technical problems core to improving the Internet."

Winners of the Key Scientific Challenges Program will receive:

•     $5,000 in unrestricted seed funding for lab materials, travel to academic conferences, professional society memberships, and other resources to drive their research.
•     Exclusive access to selected global-scale Yahoo! datasets.
•     Personal mentoring and collaboration with Yahoo!’s world-class research scientists.
•     An invitation to present their work at the Key Scientific Challenges Graduate Student Summit, to be held in September 2010 at Yahoo! headquarters in Sunnyvale, California.

Applications for the program must be submitted by midnight PST on March 5, 2010. Winners will be announced in the spring.

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Those who have been following the search industry for some time, may recall that Google had some legal issues with the (former) magazine Perfect 10 (nsfw). The company, which ceased publication of its magazine, but still operates on the web, has issued a press release saying that its five year battle with the search giant is "about to heat up."

This week, Perfect 10 completed its filing of a motion for sanctions against Google in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California. Perfect 10 is accusing Google of "widespread discovery abuse," which the company says includes multiple violations of three separate court orders.

Perfect 10’s legal feud with Google began back in 2004. The case dealt with Google’s use of thumbnails from Perfect 10’s site. It was essentially a question of whether or not that was considered fair use. Google had eventually lost the case, but the ruling against Google had been tossed out by an appeals panel. That was in 2007. However, it did not end there. Fast forward to now.

"Google appears to have the view that it is above the law," says Perfect 10 President, Dr. Norm Zada. "We spent a great deal of time and effort obtaining Court orders requiring Google to produce documents critical to our case. In our view, Google has not complied with those orders."

Perfect 10 says the case revolves around the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which was passed by Congress in 1998 to address issues concerning copyright infringement on the Internet.

"Under the DMCA, a search engine such as Google may receive limited immunity from monetary damages for copyright infringement if it complies with the requirements of the DMCA," Zada says. "The search engine must act expeditiously to remove or disable access to infringing material upon receiving notice of infringement from the copyright owner, and it must adopt a procedure so that copyright holders will not have to provide the search engine with notices about the same infringing material or the same infringers over and over."

Perfect 10 says it has argued that Google has "failed to satisfy" these things. Perfect 10 says a judge ordered Google to produce its DMCA log, which the company says is defined as "a spreadsheet-type document summarizing DMCA notices received, the identity of the notifying party and the accused infringer, and the actions (if any) taken in response."

Perfect 10 is insisting in its press release that Google has violated multiple court orders, and that Perfect 10 can’t "fairly litigate the case" without such documents. 

Perfect 10’s  motion for sanctions against Google is currently set for hearing on December 21. It will be interesting to see how this plays out. Perfect 10 hasn’t had the best of luck in the past.

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Google has announced the release of a new feature for the Sidewiki API, which the company says makes it easier to retrieve all Sidewiki entries for an entire domain. It allows you to look for new entries created on any page of a site, and subscribe to them via RSS.

If you are unfamiliar with Sidewiki, it is available as part of the Google Toolbar for Firefox and Internet Explorer or as a bookmarklet for Chrome, Safari, or other browsers that don’t support the Google Toolbar.

When using Sidewiki, an expandable window can be viewed on the left-hand side of the web page. When expanded, you can see comments by users or contribute your own. This works for any web page. There is a good chance that your site has been commented on via Sidewiki, and you don’t even know about it.

This actually brings up a pretty good reputation management point. If you are a webmaster, you may want to at least install the bookmarklet in your browser if you don’t use the Google Toolbar. This will allow you to keep tabs on what is being written about your site.

These comments are out there for other Sidewiki users to view. More information about how Sidewiki works can be found here. Google has created a top ten list of ways that people are already using Sidewiki. It may give you some ideas:

1. Jason Young speaks from personal experience and gives detailed insight into tuning a bass guitar on EMG’s Bass Tips site.

2. Antony Carthy, a programmer in South Africa, wrote tips on how to find latitude and longitude coordinates on Google Maps.

3. Google’s own Matt Cutts warns visitors about a deceptive website.

4. Shalin Gala of PETA calls on readers to sign a petition next to an article about animal mistreatment.

5. Ron Burk suggests a missing reference for a medical article.

6. The Mayo Clinic uses Sidewiki to welcome visitors with a special webmaster entry on its homepage (this one requires Sidewiki to view).

7. Jesse Poe from New York offers up great insights in a review of an iPhone app by Daniel Johnston, one of his favorite musicians.

8. Alfonso Grandis from Italy talks about his eye-witness account of a recent earthquake.

9. David Davis, a software engineer from California, improves a snippet of code in a programming tutorial.

10. Michael Roizen from the Cleveland clinic adds his advice about H1N1 vaccinations.

Google recommends commenters contribute expert insight, helpful tips, background information, and added perspective when using SideWiki. The company has said in the past that it uses "multiple signals" based on the "quality of the entry," what they know about the author, and other user-contributed signals like voting and flagging. They say they want to only keep the most relevant entries appearing in the sidebar.

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Call it "The Battle of the Bands and the Social Networks."  Following Weezer-MySpace and U2-YouTube match-ups in the past ten days, a third pairing will soon be added to the mix as a live Foo Fighters performance is scheduled to stream on Facebook this evening.

The free performance is supposed to start at 7 PM California time (the Foo Fighters will be using the Studio 606 complex in Northridge as a base of operation).  It’s sure to be a big draw, considering that the band has over 821,000 Facebook fans.

Of course, in all honesty, the Foo Fighters and Facebook don’t have much hope of matching U2 and YouTube.  Reports indicate that U2’s Sunday night broadcast generated 10 million streams, which is an astonishing number.

Factor in U2’s bigger fan base, plus the fact that this is a Friday, and again, no one should look for a repeat performance (in a manner of speaking).

Still, the spate of major concerts that’ve been streamed (toss in Hulu’s coverage of the Austin City Limits Music Festival, if you like) seems to represent the start of a trend, and should mean a lot to music fans who don’t feel like flying across the country and spending still more money on tickets.

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The FBI has charged nearly 100 people in the U.S. and Egypt as part of "Operation Phish Phry," one of the largest cyber fraud phishing investigations ever.

The people charged in Operation Phish Phry targeted U.S. banks and victimized hundreds of account holders by stealing their financial information and using it to transfer around $1.5 million to bogus accounts they controlled.

More than 50 people in California, Nevada, and North Carolina, nearly 50 Egyptian people have been charged with crimes including computer fraud, conspiracy to commit bank fraud, money laundering and aggravated identity theft.

Robert Mueller, FBI Director

"The FBI is both a law enforcement and national security agency, which means we can and must address every angle of a cyber case," said Robert Mueller, FBI Director.

"This is critical, because what may start as a criminal investigation may lead to a national security threat. At the start of a cyber investigation, we do not know whether we are dealing with a spy, a company insider, or an organized criminal group."

Mueller described the current environment as a "cyber arms race," where law enforcement and criminals compete to stay one step ahead of each other.

In the case of Operation Phish Phry, money appears to be the driving motive, which on the surface seems obvious. But Mueller pointed out," Something that looks like an ordinary phishing scam may be an attempt by a terrorist group to raise funding for an operation."

"Cyber crime might not seem real until it hits you," Mueller said. "But every personal, academic, corporate, and government network plays a role in national security."

Matt Cutts has appeared in yet another Google Webmaster Video, and this time he has a whiteboard with him so he can illustrate what he’s talking about. What he’s talking about this time are uncrawled URLs in search results.

Cutts says Google gets a lot of complaints from webmasters who say the search engine is violating their robots.txt files, with which they intend to keep Google from crawling certain pages. Sometimes those URLs still end up in search results.

According to Matt, what is happening in most cases is that when someone’s saying "I blocked example.com/go" in robots.txt, it turns out that the snippet Google returns in search results just brings back a URL with no text for the snippet. The reason for this is that Google didn’t actually crawl the page.

"It did abide by robots.txt. You told us this page is blocked, so we did not fetch this page," says Matt. It is a URL reference. "We saw a link to it, but we didn’t fetch the page itself," he explains.

Google didn’t actually fetch the page itself, and that’s why there’s no text snippet. In case you were wondering what the point of showing them at all is, Cutts breaks out an example looking at the California DMV, whose site is: www.dmv.ca.gov.

Cutts notes that at one point the California Department of Motor Vehicles had a robots.txt that blocked all search engines. "Now these days pretty much every site is savvy enough, you know, at one point the New York Times and eBay and a whole bunch of different sites would use robots.txt," he says.

If someone searches for "California DMV" in Google, there’s pretty much only one answer, he says. So that is the answer that Google wants to return. Luckily for Google a lot of people were linking to that page with the anchor text "California DMV". That helps Google be able to return the result without having to crawl the page.

Cutts also says that they can get descriptions from a directory like the Open Directory Project (DMOZ). He cites Nissan and Metallica.com as examples of sites that used to block Google with robots.txt. They had been listed in the Open Directory Project, however, and Google went and got the information from there to include as the snippet.

When this type of thing happens, it looks like the page was crawled, when in fact it wasn’t. "So we are able to return something that can be very helpful to users without violating robots.txt by not crawling that page," says Cutts.

He also notes that when you don’t want pages to show up, you can use the "noindex" meta tag at the top of the page. When Google sees this tag, it drops the page from its search results completely. Another option is the URL removal tool.

Four U.S. states are among the first to receive grants from the Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), to map broadband use in homes.

California received $2.8 million, Indiana $1.3 million, North Carolina $2.035 million and Vermont $1.2 milliamp.

"Broadband will bring many benefits to the Nation, such as job creation and innovation, but these benefits have been delayed by the lack of comprehensive, reliable data on the availability of broadband service," said Assistant Secretary for Communications and Information and NTIA Administrator Lawrence E. Strickling.

Lawrence E. Strickling,
NTIA Administrator

"This program addresses an important need and will provide a valuable tool in bringing broadband and jobs to more Americans."

The NTIA says the national broadband map will publicly display the geographic areas where broadband service is available along with details about the service, speeds and if its offered at schools, libraries, hospitals and colleges. The national map will be searchable by address and show the broadband providers offering service in local areas.

NTIA received applications from all 50 states, 5 territories, and the District of Columbia to participate in the program. The agency is reviewing the remaining 52 applications and will continue to announce grant recipients on a rolling basis throughout the fall.

"The four award recipients submitted well-formed proposals that are both fiscally prudent and serve as a model for others," Strickling added.

"We are committed to making the program succeed nationwide and will continue to provide guidance to applicants where necessary to help them improve their proposed projects."

Often, the source of a statement means everything.  It might, for example, be more newsworthy if Gordon Brown labeled Americans "silly" than if (or when) Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called us all evil pigs.  And Matt Cutts would just like everyone to know that one source of a study on advertising isn’t exactly Google’s best friend.

This morning, a lot of headlines declared that at least two-thirds of Americans don’t want to be tracked by advertisers online, even for the sake of more relevant ads or discounts.  The articles got their figures from a new study. 

But Cutts wrote on his blog, "One of the study’s co-authors was Chris Jay Hoofnagle.  Hoofnagle has served as the Senior Counsel and Director of the West Coast Office of Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC).  You haven’t heard of EPIC?  EPIC was the group that in 2004 argued that Gmail should be shut down: ‘In a letter sent to California Attorney General Bill Lockyer on Monday, the Electronic Privacy Information Center argued that Gmail must be shut down because it ‘represents an unprecedented invasion into the sanctity of private communications.’"

Cutts then added, "I can guess what you’re saying.  ‘That was five years ago.  People didn’t know then how useful Gmail was going to be.’  Okay, then did you know that EPIC lobbied the government to shut down Google Apps earlier this year?"

In light of this information, the fresh study doesn’t look quite so ominous for Google and the online advertising industry.

British news sites are starting to see a lot more traffic from the US. UK Internet visits to News and Media websites grew by 8% last year according to Hitwise, and US Internet visits to UK News and Media sites have gone up by 54%.

"BBC News ranked as the 21st most visited News and Media website in US during August, while the Daily Mail was 47th and the BBC Homepage 65th," says Hitwise’s Robin Goad. Other British sites in the US News and Media top 200 last month included: the Telegraph (71st), the FT (115th), The Sun (117th), Times Online (131st) and the Guardian (134th)."

Goad names sites like Digg and the Drudge Report as being key for driving US audiences to UK news sites. Google is the biggest driver of US traffic to British News sites, accounting for 13.5% of visits in August, and Drudge follows this, accounting for 10.6%. In third place is Google News, accounting for 5.3%.

According to Goad, email also plays a major role in driving US traffic to UK news sites – Yahoo! Mail (2.5%), Gmail (1.6%) and Hotmail (1.4%) all appeared in the top 10.

On a state-by-state basis, Californians are driving the most traffic to British news sites, followed by New Yorkers. "Slightly more surprising is the list of states that over index most as visitors to UK-based news sites, with Arizona and New Mexico ranking second and third after California," says Goad. "Residents of Wyoming are the least likely to visit."

I’d be curious to know what kind of traffic social networks like Twitter and Facebook have driven to these sites.

About a month ago – and after a longish period of quiet – Google arranged to acquire video compression specialist On2 for $106.5 million.  More deals may be on the way, as well, since Eric Schmidt implied this week that the search and advertising giant’s only getting started.

Google has "begun seriously looking at acquisitions again," Schmidt told The Nikkei.  The cloud computing sector is of particular interest to Schmidt’s corporation, as you might have guessed due to its ever-increasing focus on Google Apps and Google Chrome OS.

Then, with respect to the locations of acquisition targets, it doesn’t look like Google’s limiting itself to America.  Or even its market share strongholds of America and Europe.  Schmidt said, "We think there’s a pretty big investment opportunity in Japan."

You can be sure that a lot of emails will make their way from Japan to Mountain View, California as a result of that statement.

Anyway, Google should have plenty of cash as it goes shopping; the corporation’s stock is currently trading at 454.95 per share, up almost 84 percent from its 52-week low of 247.30.  Google has a market cap of about $144 billion right now.