Week in review: Wi-Fi goes to Washington

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are coming from. AOL also has revamped its shopping search to allow its members to narrow results for products based on category, brand, price, store and merchant rating.

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AOL also released a new tool designed to help parents evaluate entertainment for children. The Family Friendly programming guide will appear initially in AOL's Moviefone and CityGuide services, which provide listings of films, DVDs and events suited to families. The option will be extended later to other channels such as AOL music, games and books.

Meanwhile, Google is introducing new technology controls to thwart people who use blogs to manipulate rankings in its search results.

Otherwise known as "link" or "comment spam," the ruse is as old as Web marketing. Such Web site promoters use the comment form on forums, blogs or any Web page to place or gain a link pointing back to their own Web site.

		Roundup Week in pictures: Saturn's moon, Airbus' new jet New photos from the Huygens probe show river channels on Titan; Airbus goes oversize with its new plane.

And because Google and other search engines tabulate search results in part by a Web page's link popularity with other sites, the trick can boost a site's ranking--and more important, traffic. It can also produce irrelevant search results.

In other Google news, the search giant was dealt a setback when a French court ruled that it must refrain from using the trademarks of European resort chain Le Meridien Hotels and Resorts to trigger keyword ads. A Nanterre court in France ruled that Google infringed on the trademarks of Le Meridien by allowing the hotel chain's rivals to bid on keywords of its name and appear prominently in related search results.

The decision casts a shadow on Google's billion-dollar money engine--keyword-based advertising--and potentially on the company's financial prospects in Europe. About 98 percent of the company's revenue comes from keyword advertising linked to search technology, and many such ads are tied to branded or trademarked names of products and services.

Also of note
Intel unveiled a new version of its Centrino chip family for notebooks, a recipe it aims to use to boost the performance of lightweight wireless notebooks--mainly machines that weight about 5 or 6 pounds--making them more useful as everyday computers...A bill introduced in California's Legislature has raised the possibility of jail time for developers of file-swapping software who don't stop trades of copyrighted movies and songs...Online auctioneer eBay has notified

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customers that it will no longer allow them to log on through Microsoft's identity management service, Passport...Comcast will raise its broadband Internet speeds by at least a third later this year--part of its effort to fend off DSL rivals...Sega Toys unveiled a robotic dog--the iDog--that can be used to play and compose music.