Back in a Bit

Finding easy-to-read web content

In its current version, Google Accessible Search looks at a number of signals by examining the HTML markup found on a web page. It tends to favor pages that degrade gracefully–that is, pages with few visual distractions, and pages that are likely to render well with images turned off. Google Accessible Search is built on Google Co-op’s technology, which improves search results based on specialized interests.

Watch your language — most of you are wrong

Google is usually great for helping sort out uses of English, so you can check the difference between a pedaller and a peddler — though that doesn’t stop Guardian journalists getting it wrong, of course. But there are times when the majority of people get things wrong. In today’s Guardian, Patrick Barkham reports that “according to the Oxford English Corpus, a database of a billion words, dozens of traditional phrases are now more commonly misspelled than rendered correctly in written English.”

Yahoo gives up quest for search dominance

‘We don’t think it’s reasonable to assume we’re going to gain a lot of share from Google,’ Chief Financial Officer Susan Decker said in an interview. ‘It’s not our goal to be No. 1 in Internet search. We would be very happy to maintain our market share.’

Yahoo’s comments underline the difficulties any Internet company faces in trying to challenge Google’s dominance of the Web search industry. Google has at least double the market share of Yahoo and Microsoft Corp. in Internet search, the largest and most profitable segment of online advertising.