It has been reported in Australia that new copyright laws could bring search engines to a halt.  Google warns that if these laws pass as written, it could bring the country to a “pre-Internet era”.  As the law is written, search engine companies would need to get permission to index and cache copyrighted material that come up in search requests.

Google has stated that “given the vast size of the Internet, it is impossible for a search engine to contact personally each owner of a web page to determine whether the owner desires its web page to be searched, indexed or cached.”

If this law were to pass, it could possibly pave the way for countless copyright owners to take legal action against search engines.  Google believes that the laws fail to bring Australia’s Copyright Act into the digital age, though Australian lawmakers believe the laws have been designed to keep pace with technological advances and change.  Google is not only fighting in the Aussie courtroom, but also in Europe, where several news agencies have complained that Google is caching and indexing their written word for search purposes without permission.

Everyone loves free shipping.

Not everyone loves the game you sometimes have to play when ordering from Amazon and are just short of the free shipping quota. There’s no internal search function to find inexpensive items, which makes sense from a business POV, I suppose.

That’s where Amazon Filler Item Finder fits in, though. It’s a search engine that helps you find lower priced items (under $15, to be specific) you can add to your order in order (good grief, sorry about that) to qualify for free shipping.

Let’s say I needed to add the paltry amount of $11.16 to my order. Well, a quick search reveals many items worth just that much. After a quick perusal of the results, I definitely would have to addThe Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection from the Living Dead to my cart. Well, if I didn’t already own it, that is. Damn I love zombies.

That’s a surprisingly zombie-laden cluster of search results. I wonder if there is some type of connection.

A new beta of Google Earth has been released with some nifty new drawing tools that were previously not available in the free version. Now you can draw directly on the maps and even build up 3D visuals with the polygon tool.

I also found a page with a visual representation of high-resolution imagery by location. If you prefer hard textual data, though, you can check out the PDF.

I’ve been using the beta for a good while and find it to be just as stable as the released product. Go download it if you haven’t yet.