Those of you who have been beta testing Windows Vista have probably already seen it, since it’s the default homepage for IE7, but Microsoft’s Live.com has come out of beta.

As you can see, Microsoft has learned a bit and no longer has a default homepage so filled with junk that you can’t figure out what you want. It’s quite sparse, don’t you think? Even Google has more stuff than that on their front page these days.

The Google Earth Blog is reporting that there have been some worldwide updates to the aerial and satellite photography for many areas in both Google Earth and Google Maps.

A nice update for those of you that like to explore via these tools. I do wish my area would get a little more high resolution love in some parts, though. It’s pretty damn cool, and somewhat creepy, to see your own car in your driveway.

Continuing to make their Google Book Search more useful, Google has added downloads of public domain books to the service.

While it is a noble goal to make these classic books available for free to readers across the world, I wonder why they didn’t just partner with the already existing, and very extensive, Project Gutenberg. And why, of all formats, did they choose PDF?! I admit, it’s nice that you get to see the covers of the scanned books, the illustrations, the original type, the coffee stains and all of that, but you can’t copy and edit the text. That reduces their public domain usefulness by quite a large amount.

The Project Gutenberg’s downloads are available in many formats, mainly text and HTML, which are both completely editable and searchable, but also in audio format via the mp3 codec. Some of the audio versions are done with primitive ear-jarring text-to-speech technology that would make even Stephen Hawking go mad, but others are done by actual people and are quite a pleasure to listen to.

Now I feel like reading, or possibly listening to, something from the Project Gutenberg Top 100.

In order to make it easier to find actual paper and ink copies of books you might search for on Google Book Search, a “Find Libraries” link has been added to search results. When searching for an author or book you can then link directly to WorldCat and find a copy of the book you want at a local library (after supplying WorldCat with your postal code, state, province or country).

I had some problems with the Find Libraries link not appearing half the time, though. The post on GoogleBlog says, “Queries on Google Book Search will automatically include results from library catalogs when appropriate.” This apparetly means that the link won’t appear unless the book has been digitized as part of the Library Project. I’m not sure what the point of that is, really, but you can always just go directly to the source and cut out the middle man. WorldCat also integrates with your browser search bars.

In response to the recent AOL privacy blunder Unspam Technologies, Inc., a Utah based anti-spam firm, launched a new service to keep search engines guessing as to the real preferences of their users.

The traditional advice given to maintain your privacy online is to regularly delete the “cookies” from your browser. Lost in the Crowd takes a different approach. The free service works with AOL, Ask.com, Google, MSN, and Yahoo and lets users register the tracking cookies from their favorite search engines. Lost in the Crowd then runs random searches at random times from its servers. Because the service has the users’ tracking cookies, the searches appear to come from the users using the actual search engine themselves.

I wonder how long it will take the search engines to filter out queries from UnSpam’s servers?

For those who think that the recent AOL privacy slip-up is not an issue since the data was masked by User IDs, here is a perfect example of just how easy it is to connect a people to their data.

Let’s just hope, as the article says, that there is a silver lining behind this type of situation and people begin to pay attention to these types of privacy issues.

Unfortunately, people are far too lazy and tend to quickly forget that most things they do online should be thought of as a matter of public record. Who among us doesn’t have an embarrassing forum post or some other form of online shenanigans databased and indexed “forever” via Google or the Wayback Machine?

Proof of this lies in the alarming amount of people that still use the name of their cat or significant other as their main password.

In spite of the horrible press that MySpace has been receiving lately (or possibly because of it), Google has laid down $900 million to MySpace owners News Corp. for the right to provide search services for the popular social networking site.

The deal replaces Yahoo!, who previously supplied MySpace with search services.

With that much money to spend, maybe Google should just skip the middle man and buy Yahoo! out themselves. Wait, no, competition is good.

Do you assume that the details about you search for are just between you and your search engine? If you use AOL, you might be sorely mistaken.

Of course, other search engines have shown us glimpses of what people search for in the past, but it’s usually not connected to users in any way, as was the case with AOL’s release.

I’d almost say that they get what they deserve for using AOL, but bad things can happen when information like that is released inadvertently.