Internet, Websites | featured news

For Web sites that depend on their ranking in search results, Google’s secret — and frequently fluctuating — search algorithm can evoke a complex blend of admiration and fear.

The operator of Web sites for Justin Bieber, Selena Gomez and others agreed to pay a $1 million civil penalty to settle federal charges that it had illegally collected information about thousands of young children.

As July melted into August, college towns around the country began to swell with incoming freshmen, returning students and faculty, and campus bookstores began to stock their shelves.

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs will receive a website, GIBill.com, from a marketing company accused of deceiving veterans by steering them to for-profit colleges while it masqueraded as an unbiased source of information.

The federal personnel chief said Thursday that his agency “messed up” the problem-filled launch of the government’s updated job board, and he apologized “to all the applicants who’ve had trouble” finding and applying for jobs for more than three weeks. “If we had the ability to roll back the clock, I sure would do it differently,” John Berry said at a briefing on USAJobs, the federal employment Web site that the government took over from Monster.com 18 months ago.

It seems like an answerable question, right? But no one really knows how many websites or individual Web pages make up this seemingly infinite digital universe that is the Internet.

Jim Carrey is launching his new website with a bang. The 49-year-old actor posted a video love letter to "The Help" star Emma Stone on www.jimcarreytrulife.com Wednesday that many online deemed "creepy." The one-minute, 53-second video shows Carrey speaking into a handheld camera and sincerely professing his love for the 22-year-old actress.

Adobe is working to make it easier for designers to build their own Web sites. A new application from Adobe, codenamed Muse, lets designers create and publish functional Web sites in a similar way to how they would mock-up a site in InDesign or Illustrator. Muse offers users a familiar Adobe tool set in a WYSIWYG interface. Muse is not designed...

The parent company of GoDaddy.com, a top registrar of Internet domain names, has been sold to a group of private investment firms for $2.25 billion, a person familiar with the transaction told The Associated Press.