The way that advertising appears on social networks is about to change… if Google has anything to say about it, that is. The current reigning “king of all that is searchable” is trying to patent a new algorithm they call “FriendRank.” FriendRank is similar to its older brother, PageRank, only it uses social networking and friends lists to create popularity data. The idea is to find the most influential friend in a group of friends on a social network, and then display ads on their profile. The end result? Targeted advertising for less dollars and a possibly a few new friends to boot. Not a bad deal at all.

In other Google news, it looks like the US Justice Department is investigating the advertising deal between Yahoo and Google. There are worries that it could be breaking antitrust laws, and that the two together would create a monopoly of Internet based advertising. They are requesting documentation not only from the two web giants, but also from all web advertising companies. Google’s general council Keith Walker still considers the deal to be “pro-competitive.” We will keep you abreast of this developing situation.

In other legal news, a judge has officially ordered YouTube owner Google to give all of its user information to Viacom. Viacom is aiming to prove that illegal, pirated videos are more popular online than the “traditional” videos made by users. A victory would be huge for Viacom, as it would leave Google open to a contributory infringement charge. Although Google has since complied with the ruling, the company has yet to comment publicly on the matter.

While the big brass at Google might be staying silent, those actively working on the search engine are letting their voices be heard. A Google search of the term “Viacom” has two news articles concerning the ruling ranking above the media giant’s corporate website, both with a distinct “anti-Viacom” slant. The article from CNET labels Viacom as “corporate bullies,” while the eCanadaNow piece quietly bemoans the breach of privacy. Both the articles and the search results prove that the pen - and, in this case, the search engine - is mightier than the legal summons. We’re now saying that Google skews the search results for their own political ends, but it sure is a big coincidence. Don’t you think?

Ever wish you that you could smash ten pages of Amazon.com customer reviews into ten lines? You can now, thanks to Pluribo. This handy little Firefox extension strolls through a product, checks out the reviews, and converts them into a compact, easy to read summary. Pluribo is a great way to get the gist of what everyone is saying without actually sifting through those tedious reviews yourself. Oh… and it’s completely free. Can’t beat that.

We’ve talked about Blender before. For those new to the Free Line, Blender is a free, open-source 3D graphics tool comparable to expensive programs such as 3DS Max and LightWave 3D. The Blender Institute, the group behind the feature-length film “Big Bucks Bunny,” is currently hard at work on their first video game. Tentatively titled “Apricot,” the game centers around a chipmunk looking for his nuts. The game, which is still in early stages of development, currently has no release date.

Today we’ve got a special treat for you- we’re going to cover some of the coolest new search engines to grace the internet. These engines are gunning to be the next Google, and they are using interesting combinations of old technology and new to embrace what the web has to offer.

Clusty is one of the most prominent of the engines we’re looking at today. They’ve been around for a short while, and are starting to pick up a fan base. Clusty searches and returns results in clusters. A cluster is like a group or folder of related information. So, if you search for hats, you will get several different kind of hat clusters as a result, such as “cowboy hats” and “ball caps.” So, it narrows down your search for you and makes searching for related data a snap.

Topicle, on the other hand, is a much more limited search. It only retrieves a set of websites hand picked by the community. The community aspect to Topicle plays a big part in the quality of your search results. This pretty much wipes SEO out of the equation. If you want to be found on Topical, you have to impress real people with you content, not just spiders. It is easy to sign up and starting adding your own choice picks to the engine, so go ahead and give it a try. Think of it as a MySpace for web searching.

Next up we’ve got Wikia Search, the brain child of Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. We’ve reported on WikiaSearch in the past for the Free Line, and it has come a long way since then. The first open crowd-sourced search engine, this also relies on the community to tag, edit, and rate webpages. Is this the future of search? I’m not quite so sure. But the same thing worked well with Wikipedia, so we’ll see.

Of course, not everyone wants a large community of strangers choosing their search results. Wiki’s do have their downside, and if someone isn’t constantly editing, someone can easily sneak in and spam the search results. Mahalo is a search engine that has a set of engineers who work day and night creating great searches for you. It’s not based on a community, but rather an editorial process with several editors.

And finally, Strands plans on taking Amazon’s Select head to head, by creating an open and free suggestion engine for businesses. If you sell something online, you can have it referenced and stored in Strands. It quickly serves up recommendations that are fairly accurate, almost as good as Amazon’s. If they keep this up Amazon will have some real competition on their hands, and they’ll probably just buy them.

今天我们为你准备了特殊的内容，我今天将给大家介绍一些可能改变互联网的新型搜索引擎。这些引擎都梦想成为下一个Google，同时它们也是今天互联网新老技术的一个完美结合。

Clusty是今天我们主要要来关注的一个搜索引擎。它们发布已经有短时间了，并且已经有了自己的用户群。·Clusty的搜索结果是分成小堆的，一个小堆就类似一个有关联的组或文件夹。比如如果你搜索帽子，它就会出现不同小戳的帽子信息，这也是搜索关联信息变得更方便。·

下面要说的Topicle，是一个更专注的搜索引擎。 ·它只显示社区成员挑选出来的结果。所以社区成员的意见对搜索结果的质量有很大影响·。你只需要简单的注册之后就可以参与挑选搜索结果了。可以把它看作天涯版的搜索引擎。

接下来看一下Wikia Search，·它是Wikipedia创立者Jimmy Wales的另一作品。我们之前在免费帮介绍过WikiaSearch，结果它不断的跳票·。它是第一个开放的搜索引擎，同时它也依赖于用户、标签、编辑和相关网页。这是搜索的未来吗？还真不好说。但是Wikipedia就是这么成功的，所以我们拭目以待吧。

当然，不是所有人都希望得到一群不认识的人选出来的结果。所以维基风格确实有弊端。·Mahalo是一个由一群工程师日夜为你编辑的搜索引擎·。它的结果不取决于用户，而是由网站编辑们暗自商量的。

最后，Strands·打算通过建立一个免费开发的推荐系统来完全模仿亚马逊的推荐系统。如果你在网上卖东西，你可以推荐并存在Strands里。它可以快速的找到非常精准的推荐结果，跟亚马逊不相上下。如果它们一直做下去亚马逊恐怕就会面临一个不小的竞争对手了，或者干脆把它给买掉。

The 12th Annual Webby Awards announced their winners on Monday, including a list of celebrities who have used the internet in new and interesting ways.

Nine Inch Nails‘ frontman and freeline enthusiast Tent Reznor is entire new album for free. It’s called The Slip, and it comes with a simple note that reads, “Thank you for your continued and loyal support over the years — this one’s on me.”

StomperNet is preparing to re-open its doors to new members for the first time in over a year. StomperNet made some great changes over the last years, including recruiting a dozen world class faculty members and adding one-on-one personal coaching for all members. We’ve just released the first in the third series of free videos entitled “Going Natural”. The first in Going Natural 3.0 will give you a taste of what being a Stomper is all about. We’ve got the link to this very informative video about maximizing your AdWords campaigns — and you won’t want to miss it. I wouldn’t sit here day after day expounding the virtues of the Free Line, with out putting my money where my mouth is. So got get yourselves some free knowledge. “This ones on me”

On Tuesday, Yahoo launched a partnership with McAffee, allowing Yahoo to integrate Site Advisor scanning into their Yahoo search.

Amazon is suing the state of New York over an internet sales tax that requires out of state companies to collect sales tax from shoppers in New York This is the first State to pull this maneuver, since most States require only that companies within the State have to pay retail sales taxes to that state.

The folks at StomperNet recently released a video with a look Inside StomperNet — it’s an inspirational three act story about the actual results online business owners have gotten inside the world’s leading internet marketing training organization. It passed 3000 views on YouTube and is the most watched video on Vidilife so far today. If you’re an internet entrepreneur and want a little inspiration, follow this link to watch this video.

New York Times.com design director, Khoi Vinh, said in a recent interview that they hand code every single webpage — and getter faster and better results in their cross-platform browser consistency.

We have a link to an article on Wired’s How To Wiki that will show you how to improve Amazon’s automated suggestions. It’s a cool and easy way to both save time and find more stuff you’d like — automatically.

Google recently talked with the New York Times about a new approach to visual search that could be as revolutionary for searching images as PageRank was for text based searching. They’re calling it VisualRank, and it’s an algorithm for blending image-recognition software methods with techniques for weighting and ranking images that look most similar.

The time and date has passed for Microsoft to “do something” in their attempt to purchase Yahoo. The latest Wall Street Journal article with three bylines cites no sources, specifically, but says Microsoft is considering both a move to elect Microsoft friendly directors or to take the fight directly to the shareholders.

Google released a storm of pranks for April Fool’s day, some funny and some not. The most memorable was a joke about a new feature on email that almost started a flame war on Wikipedia.

Google is taking Google Docs offline with Google Gears. This is in an attempt to compete with Microsoft Office Live and Adobe Air’s new Buzz word processors, who both have offline and online capabilities.

Adobe Air, the programming language that can take Flash offline, will see a release soon for the free operating system, Linux. This is a huge thing for Linux users. And for an example of a cool program using Adobe Air, check out Stompernet Scrutinizer.

Amazon launched TextBuyIt last Thursday. It allows any user to order something from Amazon directly from their cellphones.

This week’s award for Pushing the Free Line goes to Scribd, who will now take any book you have and scan it to text for free. You send it to them, they scan it in and then store it in their iPaper format.

Google发布了一系列愚人节恶作剧，有些很好玩有些则不是。最有争议的是那个关于Gmail新功能的玩笑，它也几乎引起了在Wikipedia上的一场论战。

Google发布了Google Docs的离线版本Google Gears。此举是为了与微软的Office Live和Adobe Air的新Buzz word进行竞争。

Adobe Air，这个可以离线使用Flash的程序语言，即将为免费的操作系统Linux发布一个新的版本。这对Linux用户来说可是个大新闻。如果你想找到一个超酷的Adobe Air应用程序的话，别错过了Stompernet Scrutinizer.

亚马逊发于上周四发布了TextBuyIt。它将允许用户直接通过他们的手机在亚马逊上进行购物。
本周获得最佳免费工具奖的是Scribd，它是一个可以把扫描过书籍免费识别成文本的程序。你可以把书发给他们，他们则会在进行扫描之后把它存成iPaper格式。

Google Analytics is now the de facto standard for free web analytics, from how many visitors you’re getting to what search engine keywords are bringing in the most traffic. Even though it is popular, a lot of its power isn’t getting tapped by most users. We’ve got a link to the top 20 resources – just for Google Analytics. Sometimes it’s amazing what you get for free.

And you may know that Amazon has been offering fulfillment services for business owners and other online merchants for some time. But until now, any business using Amazon’s fulfillment service had to go through a series of complicated and manual steps to ship anything. With the new Amazon API, this is all history – so if you’re selling physical products online, you might want to take another look at Amazon’s fulfillment service.

Ever wanted to share your iTunes music with your friends, but found out that’s harder than it should be? Well, check out the the free iTunes utility, Mojo. With Mojo you can easily share your iTunes library over the internet, and give your friends access to your songs.

If you use iTunes on Windows, you might be greeted with a surprise automatic installation of the new Safari web browser. The Mozilla Foundation, creator of Safari’s competitor, FireFox, is complaining, saying that users should at least have the choice whether or not to install Safari.

And finally, Google Doc’s has opened up its API, allowing users to add Google Gadgets inside of documents – for example, now you can create stunning reports for your Google Spreadsheet using the Visualization API. Developers will be able to really leverage the two technologies, which is great for people that use Google’s free online alternative to Microsoft Office. You know, it’s getting harder and harder to compete with Free.

**中文版视频：

Google分析现在实际上成为了免费网站分析的标准，从了解你一共有多少用户到哪些关键字带来了最多的流量。尽管它很流行，但是很多用户还没有物尽其用。我们为专门大家准备了关于Google分析的20个顶级资源。有些时候免费的东西也出乎你意料。

你也许知道亚马逊为企业主和网络零售商提供商品配送服务已经有一段时间了。不过到目前为止，任何想使用亚马逊进行商品配送的企业都必须办理一系列复杂而繁琐的手续。而通过最新亚马逊的API，这些都将成为过去——如果你在网络上出售实物商品，你也许需要对亚马逊的配送服务有新的认识了。

你是否曾想过和朋友分享你iTunes里的音乐，却发现实际情况要比想象中的困难？来看一下这个免费的iTunes工具，Mojo。通过Mojo你可以轻松的在网络上与朋友们分享你iTunes库里面的音乐，并且让他们进行下载了。

如果你使用Windows版的iTunes，也许你会发现某一天你的电脑里突然多出来一个新的Safari浏览器。而Mozillia公司，这个Safari的竞争者FireFox的创建者，不是很高兴，他们认为至少用户有选择是否安装Safari浏览器的权利。

最后，Google Doc开放了它的API，这将使用户可以在文件中添加Google Gadgets。比如，现在你可以通过图形API在Google电子表格中加入漂亮的图表了。开发者们一定会充分利用这两项技术，从而造福那些用Google文档作为微软Office替代品的用户们。你知道，与免费竞争越来越费力了。

Last week Google debuted a new service for the next generation of web content – a suite of tools to make building, editing and maintaining a website a complete snap. You can upload pictures, movies, calendars with simple ease. This new design is seen as a direct competitor to Microsoft’s Sharepoint services.

Amazon has joined the internet video craze by allowing users to upload videos interspersed with ads for items available on Amazon. When creating a video to upload you can choose which products to advertise, with products being no more than 10 seconds apart. The advertisement revenue will be a percentage of sales, and not done on a per click or per view basis.

MyBlogLog, a recent acquisition by Yahoo, has just released a Facebook style newsfeed for users. This feature pulls in user information across many networks, so that you can see their deli.cio.us bookmarks, Facebook updates and Twitter updates.

TrailFire is a website that guides you as you browse search results, suggesting more information and websites with related content. Users can also add their own related suggestions, making even more complex and useful results with each search.

For those of you who watch this video on Youtube, and want to save it to your hard drive to view later, we have a list of the top 10 video conversion utilities you can find online. These let you download and reformat Flash Video files into something you can watch in any video player of your choice.