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Google is set on Thursday to significantly change the way some people use its search engine.

The company is introducing a new feature called SearchWiki that will allow people to modify and save their results for specific Google searches. They can move the sites that appear in rankings up or down, take them out altogether, leave notes next to specific sites and suggest new sites that are not already in the results (or are buried too far down in the results to see). Users must be logged in to Google to use SearchWiki and can revisit their annotations when they perform the same search later.

Apple’s iPhone has been used for everything from following the 2008 election to deciding where to grab a bite on the go. Now, it’s helping lead-footed drivers avoid costly speeding tickets.
NMobile and Trapster are two mobile applications that provide up-to-date, detailed maps of speed-enforcement zones with live police traps, speed cameras or red-light cameras. After launching, each application pulls up a map pinpointing the locations of speed traps within driving distance. An audio alert will sound as vehicles approach an area tagged as harboring a speed trap.

Eliminating price competition among retailers for high-end cameras and TVs is a great benefit for consumers — or so Sony executives argued Thursday.

At a chat with reporters in New York, Stan Glasgow, the president of Sony Electronics in the United States, and Jay Vandenbree, the company’s president for consumer sales, discussed its new rule that bans retailers from discounting Sony’s Alpha digital camera line, its more expensive televisions and some other high-end products.

Most start-ups hope to hit the big time with a killer application or a deep-pocketed investor. But for one Silicon Valley company, it was a litter of wriggling, caramel-colored puppies that put it on the map.
The flurry of attention began last month when a Bay Area couple’s pet Shiba Inu, a kind of Japanese hunting dog, gave birth, and its owners decided to train a Webcam on the newborn pups so they could keep an eye on them from work. (The owners say they would prefer to remain anonymous for personal and safety reasons.)

Online virtual worlds were dealt a heavy helping of reality this week.

First off, Google announced that its Lively experiment will shut down at the end of the year. The Web-based portal to all things virtual only started in July, making this one of Google’s shorter experiments.

Google portrayed the move away from user frivolity as a sound business move. “It has been a tough decision, but we want to ensure that we prioritize our resources and focus more on our core search, ads and apps business,” the company said on a blog post.