TV in transcript form, coming soon on Google 
If you’ve ever wanted to sift through the content of TV shows, Google has a new service for you. Google Video, which actually won’t make any video initially available, will allow TV enthusiasts to read text transcripts of certain shows with accompanying still photos. Google began indexing video for this project in December, but isn’t saying yet which networks it’s recording, outside of news, sports and entertainment programs on ABC, Fox News Channel, PBS and C-Span. The search engine is able to quickly go through the content by looking at closed captioning text that comes along with the video. In December Blinkx released a similar TV video search service called Blinkx TV, and Google competitor Yahoo released its own test version of a video search service that month as well. Google isn’t saying if or when actual video will be available with such searches, just offering that such a feature would be a natural extension.

Study: Few webbies understand paid search
Media people have long understood that paid search means that some of the results that pop up off to the side after a keyword search paid their way on the list. But most web users don’t know it.  Only one in six internet users can tell the difference between paid advertisements and true results of a search. That's according to a new study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, which finds that only 38 percent of web searchers know the difference between paid results and unbiased ones. Of those, 47 percent say they can always tell which are paid.  Major search engines including Google, Yahoo and MSN include both results based solely on relevance to the search terms entered as well as sponsored links that paid to be displayed more prominently. The paid links usually show up above or beside the regular results and sometimes appear in a different color or are labeled as paid or sponsored. 

New worm wending its way via IM tools 
More security woes are imminent for Microsoft users, with a creative new twist. Hackers and spammers have graduated from sending viruses through email and are targeting other applications. A new worm called Bropia.A is traveling through the MSN network on MSN Messenger and Windows instant messenger applications. The worm sends a copy of itself to all contacts on the messenger contact list, then downloads a program that opens a back door into Windows systems. The application can then spread spam on instant messaging, disable the right mouse button of the infected machine, and make changes to Windows volume settings. Security firm Symantec says the worm is low-damage and medium-spread. In October the W32/Funner worm hit MSN Messenger but caused minimal damage.

That baby named Yahoo? Just an elaborate lie
When Jayson Blair duped The New York Times, his stories were at least believable. But a reporter for the Libertatea, a daily tabloid in Bucharest, Romania, aimed for a more outrageous brand of false journalism. The paper published a fictitious story last month about a couple who named their child Yahoo because they were so grateful for having met over the internet. Yesterday the tabloid fired Ion Garnod, the reporter who admitted making up the story to look good. The story included a picture of the baby’s birth certificate and made international headlines. It was actually Garnod’s own son’s birth certificate that he had modified.