by Vera H-C Chan A magnitude 7.0 earthquake flattened southern Haiti's fragile infrastructure, and horrific damage drew attention and aid from around the globe. In the United States, a president offered his take about the state of the union, following the ripple show of a Kennedy stronghold going to a Republican. And, the sports cups runneth over in a year that promises to be mighty competitive. Below, what January wrought. Unnatural Disaster Late afternoon on January 12,

Here are some of the search engine news stories we have found interesting this week: FacteryLabs fact search engine Need to research trending topics? Want the basics on a subject quickly and easily? (P Bradley Jan 26 2010) Google News Comes Back For More Google News has implemented a recrawl feature that allows us to focus on getting the newest articles around while still ensuring that we're displaying the most up-to-date information.

Wikipedia states : "A Wikirace ... is a race by as many people as you wish, using wikilinks to travel from one Wikipedia page to another. The first person to reach the destination page, or the person that reaches the destination using the fewest number of links, wins the race." Anyone dare race from Google to Doink the Clown ? [Via Milivella .

This week saw the birth of the Apple iPad. In spite of initial skepticism Steve Jobs has decided that the tablet has a future, and he is right. It will also change the way we search. Pandia argues that publishers should support at tool that lets tablet users safe the web and subscription based content at the same time. There has been a lot of negative comments on the iPad. It doesn't do this, it doesn't do that,

For those of you who doubt the severity of the animosity between Apple and Google, noted this weekend's story from Wired, which got the goods on comments Apple CEO Steve Jobs made during a Town Hall meeting after the launch of Apple's iPad : On Google: We did not enter the search business, Jobs said. They entered the phone business. Make no mistake they want to kill the iPhone. We won't let them, he says. Someone else asks something on a different topic,

About 22 months ago, Google was sued over its Street View program by a couple named Aaron and Christine Boring. The entire suit was dismissed a little while later. Now, the Borings have made a small bit of headway with an appeal, but it doesn't appear that Google has much to worry about. The United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit is sticking by the dismissal of the Borings' claims for invasion of privacy, unjust enrichment, injunctive relief,

Scott noticed that when you create a label named "buzz" in Gmail, the app will tell you: "Sorry, you can't create a label named 'buzz' (it's a reserved system label). Please try another name" Does anyone know what this could be? The label wasn't always reserved, according to Scott, who says he had used the name buzz before. Looking up the word "buzz" in Google, we get several definitions,