Google is acting like an insecure brat: Twitter

Twitter lashed out at changes Google Inc unveiled for its search engine on Tuesday, describing the changes as "bad" for consumers and for Web publishers.

Twitter, a microblogging service that allows its users to broadcast short, 140-character messages to groups of "followers," said Google's changes would make it tougher for people to find the breaking news often shared by users of its service.

"As we've seen time and time again, news breaks first on Twitter. As a result, Twitter accounts and Tweets are often the most relevant (search) results," the company said in a statement.

"We're concerned that as a result of Google's changes, finding this information will be much harder for everyone. We think that's bad for people, publishers, news organizations and Twitter users," the statement continued.

Twitter's criticism, which came hours after Google announced new features aimed at making search results more personalized, underscored the growing competition between the Web companies. And it comes at a time when Google is facing antitrust scrutiny for favoring its own services within its search results.

A Twitter spokesperson declined to answer a question about whether the company might reach out to antitrust regulators about Google's changes.

"We are a bit surprised by Twitter's comments about Search plus Your World, because they chose not to renew their agreement with us last summer," Google said in a public post.

A 2009 agreement, allowing Google to offer a real-time feed of Twitter messages within its search results, expired in July.

Google also said it was abiding by code embedded within certain Twitter messages instructing search engines not to rank the messages within their search results.

Google launched a social network in June, dubbed Google+, that offers many of the capabilities available on Twitter and on Facebook.

With Tuesday's changes to Google's search engine, photos and posts from Google+ will increasingly appear within the search results.

The changes effectively create customized search results for people who are logged in to Google. A person who searches for the term "Hawaii," for example, might find private photos that their friends have shared on Google+ as well as public information about the islands.

Twitter's general counsel, Alex Macgillivray, a former Google attorney, said in a Tweet on Tuesday that Google's changes "warped" Web searches and represented a "bad day for the Internet."

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Google says Indians at top in searching adult content online (Dirty, dirty, Indians!)

New Delhi: Given the size of our population, one would have thought Indians get enough sex.

But that still doesn't stop us searching for more. Data collected by Google through its search engine shows that in 2011, seven Indian cities featured in the list of top 10 cities worldwide where the "sex" query was particularly popular.

The rankings might come as a bit of a surprise. Lucknow and Kolkata - cities which pride themselves on their high cultural values -- came in at No. 2 and 3, respectively. Pune was at No. 5, New Delhi at 6, Bangalore at 7, Chennai at 8 and Mumbai at 9. The only non-Indian cities in the list were Colombo, which topped the chart, Lahore at No. 4 and Hanoi at 10. In short, every single city in the top 10 was from Asia. Expect the demographic dividend to last for a while. The famed Indo-Pak rivalry spilled over to this sphere as well, with Pakistan emerging as the country from where Google received the maximum number of search queries for "sex" in 2011. Pakistan had topped the list in 2010 as well.

The data, which is part of Google's Trends application, also reveals that Pakistan tops the all-time list - which maps the period ever since the search engine started collecting the data - while India comes in third behind Vietnam.

Though Google says "Trends provides insights into broad search patterns" and "several approximations are used when computing these results," the data mirrors the volume of actual search queries. To rank regions and cities, the web firm "calculates the ratio of searches for the term coming from each city, divided by total Google searches coming from the same city."

The Trends data is not the only indication that people in India and Pakistan have sex on their mind. A few weeks ago Google had released its Zeitgeist report, which takes a look at the top search queries of the year.

In India, "How to kiss" topped the list of the most popular "how to..." searches. The same query topped the list in 2010 as well. "How to flirt" and "how to love" were the 10th and 11th most popular queries. The "how to kiss" query was equally popular in Pakistan in 2011. India and Pakistan share some basic intincts - which could add a whole new dimension to the phrase, "Make love, not war".

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When it comes to Sunny Leone, people of Madhya Pradesh salivate the most

Indore: Sunny Leone, the sizzling porn-star, whose explosive entry in the Big Boss reality show last month had millions of Indian hearts pulsating, was googled across Madhya Pradesh extensively.

However, MP lost in the race for Leone -voyeurism to J& K, Delhi, Orissa and Haryana. Nonetheless, the latest statistics of Google suggest that the porn star was accessed on web across the state, in towns both small and big.

Gwalior topped in search for Sunny Leone on the web in the last 90 days. It was followed by Jabalpur. Bhopal and Indore were fifth and sixth in the web search of Leone.

However, Bhopal was on top in searching provocative images of the porn star followed by Indore.

The searches were registered on and after November 18 when entry of Sunny Leone in the Big Boss was announced in media. Netizens in Madhya Pradesh googled most on November 22 to look for Sunny Leone on web. On this day she officially entered the Big Boss house.

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