Making Sense of Trillions in Offshore Dollars

How do you present 260 gigabytes of international financial documents, revealing trillions of dollars in undisclosed wealth As my colleague Rick Gladstone reports, an enormous leak of confidential financial records, obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, has exposed the identities of thousands of people who benefit from offshore tax havens.

The consortium’s Web site attempts to present the findings of the group of 86 investigative journalists, who spent the past 15 months sifting through the contents of a computer hard drive that arrived in the mail. The offerings are rich.

There is a list of some of the better-known individuals with offshore trusts, including a deputy speaker of Mongolia’s Parliament, who is now considering resigning, and the songwriter Denise Rich. There is also geographic analysis, including the fact that most people the journalists identified who had set up offshore entities lived in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan.

A good starting place to understanding what this all means for offshore banking novices, however, is this guide to stashing one’s cash.

Creating an offshore bank account is not illegal, the interactive reminds us, but there are many ways to skirt the law, should one desire. Tactics for getting one’s money out of the country covertly include creating a fake lawsuit and smuggling gems.

The payoff becomes clear by the end of the offshore money game. By investing $1 million over three years at a modest interest rate of 3 percent, one could avoid $31,207 in taxes (based on an applicable Canadian tax rate.) The incentives get bigger, of course, the more one has to hide: $50 million, over 10 years at a 6 percent interest rate, could yield $15 million in tax savings.

German Soccer Fans Fight Homophobia

While the terraces of European soccer stadiums are well-known bastions of xenophobia, racism and even fascist salutes, supporters of a team in Hamburg, Germany, displayed a very different sort of politics this week, unfurling banners against homophobia at the start of a match.

Video posted on the club’s YouTube channel showed the choreographed display by fans of F.C. St. Pauli, who held aloft rainbow-colored placards promoting the Alerta Network, a coalition of 13 anti-fascist, international fan groups, behind a banner reading: “Love Whoever You Want â€" Fight Homophobia.”

A choreographed display against homophobia at Hamburg’s Millerntor Stadium on Monday by fans of the German club F.C. St. Pauli.

In other parts of the stadium, the club’s supporters draped the banner of the “Football Fans Against Homophobia” campaign, which shows two players kissing, and held up balloons and a sign reading, in English: “It’s OK to Be Gay.”

Gegen Homophobie! Forza FC St.Pauli #fcsp #fcstpauli http://t.co/mAufTt6rzb

â€" Jim Maloney (@stpaulimogwai) 2 Apr 13

An online fanzine of the St. Pauli Ultras, as the most die-hard supporters are known, explained that the demonstration would be followed by a lecture at their clubhouse on Friday to promote the message that “we all have a responsibility to promote a climate in and outside of the stadium and against overt and covert discrimination based on sexual orientation to proceed.”

While the Hamburg fans clearly demonstrated their tolerance of homosexuality, and there are persistent rumors that some members of the national team may be gay, German soccer is still waiting for its first openly gay player. Last September, a German magazine published an interview with an unnamed player in the country’s top division who described the difficulty of remaining in the closet about his sexual orientation. “I pay a high price for living my dream of playing in the Bundesliga,” the player said. “I have to put on a show and deny my true identity every day.”

German Soccer Fans Fight Homphobia

While the terraces of European soccer stadiums are well-known bastions of xenophobia, racism and even fascist salutes, supporters of a team in the German city of Hamburg displayed a very different sort of politics this week, unfurling banners against homophobia at the start of a match.

Video posted on the club’s YouTube channel showed the choreographed display by fans of F.C. St. Pauli, who held aloft rainbow-colored placards promoting the Alerta Network, a coalition of 13 anti-fascist, international fan groups, behind a banner reading: “Love Whoever You Want â€" Fight Homophobia.”

A choreographed display against homophobia at Hamburg’s Millerntor Stadium on Monday by fans of the German club F.C. St. Pauli.

In other parts of the stadium, the club’s supporters draped the banner of the “Football Fans Against Homophobia” campaign, which shows two players kissing, and held up balloons and a sign reading, in English: “It’s OK to Be Gay.”

Gegen Homophobie! Forza FC St.Pauli #fcsp #fcstpauli http://t.co/mAufTt6rzb

â€" Jim Maloney (@stpaulimogwai) 2 Apr 13

An online fanzine of the St. Pauli Ultras, as the most die-hard supporters are known, explained that the demonstration would be followed by a lecture at their clubhouse this Friday to promote the message that, “We all have a responsibility to promote a climate in and outside of the stadium and against overt and covert discrimination based on sexual orientation to proceed.”

While the Hamburg fans clearly demonstrated their tolerance of homosexuality, and there are persistent rumors that some members of the national team might be gay, German soccer is still waiting for its first openly gay player. Last September, a German magazine published an interview with an unnamed player in the country’s top division who described the difficulty of remaining in the closet about his sexual orientation. “I pay a high price for living my dream of playing in the Bundesliga,” the player said. “I have to put on a show and deny my true identity every day.”

German Soccer Fans Fight Homphobia

While the terraces of European soccer stadiums are well-known bastions of xenophobia, racism and even fascist salutes, supporters of a team in the German city of Hamburg displayed a very different sort of politics this week, unfurling banners against homophobia at the start of a match.

Video posted on the club’s YouTube channel showed the choreographed display by fans of F.C. St. Pauli, who held aloft rainbow-colored placards promoting the Alerta Network, a coalition of 13 anti-fascist, international fan groups, behind a banner reading: “Love Whoever You Want â€" Fight Homophobia.”

A choreographed display against homophobia at Hamburg’s Millerntor Stadium on Monday by fans of the German club F.C. St. Pauli.

In other parts of the stadium, the club’s supporters draped the banner of the “Football Fans Against Homophobia” campaign, which shows two players kissing, and held up balloons and a sign reading, in English: “It’s OK to Be Gay.”

Gegen Homophobie! Forza FC St.Pauli #fcsp #fcstpauli http://t.co/mAufTt6rzb

â€" Jim Maloney (@stpaulimogwai) 2 Apr 13

An online fanzine of the St. Pauli Ultras, as the most die-hard supporters are known, explained that the demonstration would be followed by a lecture at their clubhouse this Friday to promote the message that, “We all have a responsibility to promote a climate in and outside of the stadium and against overt and covert discrimination based on sexual orientation to proceed.”

While the Hamburg fans clearly demonstrated their tolerance of homosexuality, and there are persistent rumors that some members of the national team might be gay, German soccer is still waiting for its first openly gay player. Last September, a German magazine published an interview with an unnamed player in the country’s top division who described the difficulty of remaining in the closet about his sexual orientation. “I pay a high price for living my dream of playing in the Bundesliga,” the player said. “I have to put on a show and deny my true identity every day.”

A Place Where Old Computers Go to Live

SEATTLE â€" Paul Allen, Microsoft’s other founder, with Bill Gates, has a number of museums. There is the Jimi Hendrix Music Experience and his Flying Heritage Collection. The common theme is “hands on.” You can play a musical instrument and the planes fly.

That is no less true for the Living Computer Museum, a relatively new addition. Housed in a three-story warehouse south of downtown Seattle, its striking feature is that almost all the computers, even those manufactured in the 1960s, actually work.

The showcase machines are legends â€" like the Digital Equipment Corporation KL-10 introduced in 1974 and esoteric XKL TOAD-1, a clone of the DEC10. (The Digital Equipment meme runs throughout the museum, possibly because these are the computers Mr. Allen grew up programming.)

Opened rather quietly last fall, the museum hasn‘t attracted much publicity. That may be true in part because it appears that the collection has been intended for Mr. Allen and his more technical friends, as much as the general public. Indeed, the showcase computers, housed in a realistic “machine room,” are systems you probably have never heard of â€" unless you were a computer hacker in the 1960s or 1970s.

One sign that the museum may continue to cater to a rather elite clientele is the party that Mr. Allen held on Tuesday evening to introduce the museum to 150 industry pioneers and a handful of computer journalists â€" as least those who were writing about computers in the 1970s.

Attendees included pioneers from a number of computing eras: Mr. Gates, of course â€" the two men posed together, recreating an iconic picture from the 1980s; Bob Frankston and Dan Flystra of Visicalc (the first spreadsheet); Chris Espinosa, who worked with Steve Jobs in the original garage; Larry Tesler, who came to Apple from Xerox PARC to help design the Lisa; Les Ernest, the assistant director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, who could arguably be said to have invented the predecessors of both Facebook and Twitter; Lee Felsenstein, the designer of two early personal computers, the SOL and the Osborne 1; Nolan Bushnell of Atari; Esther Dyson, one of the first PC industry impresarios, and her brother George, the computer historian.

Then there was John Draper, known as “Captain Crunch” for discovering an inexpensive method for getting free phone calls by using the whistle from a cereal box. Mr. Draper, who said he is working on his memoirs and now living in Las Vegas, gently teased Mr. Gates, because it was Mr. Draper’s word processor, known as EZ Writer, that I.B.M. chose to offer with the first PC in 1981. Mr. Gates had not yet developed Word.

Mr. Gates said he remembered Mr. Draper, who was indirectly instrumental in creating Apple Computer, by teaching the company’s two founders how to make phone fraud devices known as Blue Boxes. (Mr. Jobs and Stephen Wozniak then sold the devices to raise money to start Apple.)

That Mr. Allen has managed to resurrect so many historic computers is remarkable. He has done it with a relatively small team of seven engineers and a handful of outside consultants. In some cases they have gone to extraordinary lengths to recreate machines where the original instruction manuals have long since vanished.

In other cases they have had to finesse the job, when original parts are no longer available or frequently fail. For example, Keith Perez, the lead restoration engineer for the museum, acknowledged that the beautiful display panel of flashing lights for a vintage IBM 360 now blinked with the aid of a number of LED lights. The originals burned out frequently, even at lower than normal power settings, he said.

At the end of the event, two buses took Mr. Allen’s guests to a downtown hotel for dinner, where engineers swapped tall tales from various computer eras. Before he left for the evening Mr. Allen told the group that when he and Mr. Gates worked for MITS, the maker of the first personal computer, in Albuquerque, he would handle telephone support calls after he finished his day job of writing software.

The computer maker had underpriced the machine at $439, and it was such a hot seller that to lower its costs the company had begun shipping the machine without any internal memory. People would then call to say they had assembled the computer and turned it on and it didn’t work, he recalled. Mr. Allen would then ask them if all the lights on the computer’s front panel were lit. If they were, that meant there was no DRAM (dynamic random access memory) in the computer, known as the Altair.

When he told the callers this, he said, they would invariably ask, “What’s memory”

Facebook Shows Off Its Flavor of Android

Mark Zuckerberg, the co-founder and chief executive of Facebook, is holding a live news conference to show Facebook’s new phone software, designed for Google’s Android’s operating system. The New York Times is there and will update this post with details as they are revealed.

MENLO PARK, Calif. â€" Mark Zuckerberg, the co-founder and chief executive of Facebook, said the company has developed new software to showcase the social network on mobile devices powered by Google’s Android operating system.

“You’re going to be able to turn your Android phone into a great social phone,” said Mr. Zuckerberg.

The new interface places a heavy emphasis on photos, much like the recent changes made to Facebook’s news feed feature on the Web.

Analysts say Facebook needs to find a way to play a bigger role in delivering what consumers want from their phones: ways to communicate, find information, shop and be entertained. The company would especially like to become that workhorse for the vast majority of its users who live outside the United States and from whom, so far, it barely profits.

Brazil and India are home to the largest blocs of Facebook users after the United States, and their numbers are growing swiftly as smartphone penetration increases in those countries. Many Indian cellphone makers, for that reason, have Facebook already installed on their home pages.

But Facebook makes little money by advertising to those international users. Facebook made a little more than $4 a user in North America and $1.71 in Europe, but barely more than 50 cents in the rest of the world, including large markets like Brazil and India.

Ads are its principal moneymaker, and Facebook is under intense pressure to show Wall Street that it can make more money, and fast. Its stock market value is still far below its initial public offering price, and many analysts blame the company’s belated push into mobile devices.

With Price Cuts, Retailers Anticipate New iPad

Apple has been pumping out new versions of its flagship devices for so long now that it’s a question of which month, not whether, it will introduce new iPads and iPhones.

The electronics retailer Best Buy on Wednesday took its best guess that the latest iPads are coming soon from Apple by slashing prices on one line of the Apple tablets by 30 percent.

The price cut applies only to third-generation versions of the devices, not the latest vintage, otherwise known as fourth generation iPads. Best Buy is now selling the least expensive third-generation iPad, with 16 gigabytes of storage, for $314.99, down from its previous price of $449.99. A third-generation iPad with 64 gigabytes of storage and support for LTE cellular networks now sells for $545.99, down from $779.99.

Jonathan Sandler, a Best Buy spokesman, said the steep price cuts are not unusual, “especially when looking ahead to potential new product launches by our vendors.” Mr. Sandler stressed that Best Buy has no privileged insight into when Apple might introduce new iPads, beyond the seasonal product introductions most people expect from the company.

The third-generation iPad is a bit of an oddity so it’s not surprising to see a retailer try to clear out its inventory of the devices. Apple introduced the product in March of last year and then, in an unusual move, released a fourth-generation iPad in the fall. The newer version has Apple’s new lightning connector and a faster processor, raising the question of why any customer would bother buying a third-generation device without a significantly lower price.

Walmart, meanwhile, has begun offering a more modest discount on iPad minis. Normally selling it for $329, the retailer is now offering the device for $299.

The iPad is facing a lot of tough competition from the likes of Amazon, Samsung, Google and Microsoft and has been losing share. But some analysts believe the company enjoys advantages over rivals that will give it a significantly bigger position in the years to come than it has in smartphones, where the iPhone accounts for a bit over 20 percent of worldwide shipments.

In a research note published on Wednesday, Toni Sacconaghi, an analyst at Bernstein Research, estimated that Apple will account for 40 percent of the worldwide tablet market in its next fiscal year, down from 57 percent during its last fiscal year. Mr. Sacconaghi thinks Apple will sustain higher market share in tablets than in smartphones in part because it has been more aggressive in courting more price sensitive consumers with the iPad mini, the iPad has better global distribution than the iPhone and there are more apps optimized for the iPad than there are for competing tablets.

Could Google Someday Answer All Your Questions

In a front-page article in The New York Times on Thursday, I wrote that Web search is at its biggest crossroad since its invention, as users demand more from search and Google faces a broader array of rivals than ever.

Google, in response, is widening the scope of its ambition to include things that today’s Internet users might never even think to ask the search engine. Might Google someday help you, for instance, figure out how to get the $200 you need by next week, force your cat and your girlfriend’s dog to get along or tell you whether your husband is picking up the children from school

Those are three of the types of information needs that currently go unmet online, Google discovered in a study the company did. Thirty-six percent of people’s information needs are unmet, Google found, and most are things people need to get through the day. The rest of the time, when people do find what they need, 59 percent do it using Google, the study found.

But Google wants to be the place people go to satisfy all their information needs.

“Our goal here really is to satisfy as many information needs as possible,” said Patrick Riley, a search analysis engineer at Google. “There are always things we’re not able to do, but there are a lot of possibilities, with the type of data that people are willing to share, that we can really use to make people’s lives better.”

To do the study, Google asked 150 volunteers to download a mobile app that pinged their phones at various times during the day to ask about their information needs at that moment, where they looked for the answer and whether they found it.

Their answers broke down into four categories. The first two Google already does well â€" answering simple questions (“when is Columbus Day”) and more exploratory ones (“biography of Yves St. Laurent.”) The other two are more challenging â€" tasks to complete (“does my local library have this book available for checkout”) and complex issues that often do not have a single answer or an answer findable on the Web (“best path to deal with borderline personality disorder” or “is my wife picking the kids up from school”)

Even though cold, hard data is sacred at Google, the study shows why its engineers also have to rely on human interaction and intuition, Mr. Riley said.

And the results show that search is far from a solved problem, said Amit Singhal, Google’s senior vice president for search.

“Search is by no means perfect,” Mr. Singhal said. “If anything, it’s really, really imperfect, far away from the dream we want to build.”

He envisions the company climbing a pyramid, he said, with data at the bottom, then information, then knowledge and finally wisdom.

What would the ancient philosophers think of finding wisdom in a search engine

T-Mobile Breaks Free of the Cellphone Carrier Conspiracy

Breaking Free of the Cellphone Carrier Conspiracy

60 Seconds With Pogue: Cellphone Billing: David Pogue says T-Mobile’s billing makes a lot more sense than that of its competitors.

Where, exactly, is your threshold for outrage

Would you speak up if you were overbilled for a meal Would you complain if you paid for a book from Amazon.com that never arrived

Or what if you had to keep making monthly mortgage payments even after your loan was fully repaid

Well, guess what If you’re like most people, you’re participating in exactly that kind of rip-off right now. It’s the Great Cellphone Subsidy Con.

When you buy a cellphone â€" an iPhone or Android phone, let’s say â€" you pay $200. Now, the real price for that sophisticated piece of electronics is around $600. But Verizon, AT&T and Sprint are very thoughtful. They subsidize the phone. Your $200 is a down payment. You pay off the remaining $400 over the course of your two-year contract.

It’s just like buying a house or a car: you put some cash down and pay the rest in installments. Right

Wrong. Here’s the difference: Once you’ve finished paying off your handset, your monthly bill doesn’t go down. You keep reimbursing the cellphone company as though you still owed it. Forever.

And speaking of the two-year contract, why aren’t you outraged about that What other service in modern life locks you in for two years Home phone service Cable TV service Internet Magazine subscriptions Baby sitter Lawn maintenance In any other industry, you can switch to a rival if you ever become unhappy. Companies have to work for your loyalty.

But not in the cellphone industry. If you try to leave your cellphone carrier before two years are up, you’re slapped with a penalty of hundreds of dollars.

If you’re not outraged by those rip-offs, maybe it’s because you think you’re helpless. All of the Big Four carriers follow the same rules, so, you know â€" what are you gonna do

Last week, the landscape changed. T-Mobile violated the unwritten conspiracy code of cellphone carriers. It admitted that the emperors have no clothes. John J. Legere, T-Mobile’s chief executive, took to the stage not only to expose the usurious schemes, but to announce that it wouldn’t be playing those games anymore.

It was a Steve Jobs moment: when somebody got so fed up with the shoddy way some business is being run (say, phone design or selling music) that he reinvented it, disruptively.

At the new T-Mobile, the Great Cellphone Subsidy Con is over. You can buy your phone outright, if you like â€" an iPhone 5 is $580, a Samsung Galaxy S III is $550. Or you can treat it like a car or a house: pay $100 for the phone now, and pay off the rest over time, $20 a month.

That may sound like the existing phone subsidy con, but it’s different in a few big ways. You pay only what the phone really costs. You don’t pay interest, and you stop paying when you’ve paid for the phone; in other words, your monthly bill will drop by $20 a month, just as it should. (You can also pay it off sooner, if you like. If you have a good month and want to put, say, $70 toward your phone payoff, that’s fine.)

T-Mobile doesn’t care what phone you use, either; if it works on T-Mobile’s network, you can use it. And why not Why shouldn’t you buy one phone you really love, and use it freely as you hop from carrier to carrier Would you buy a car that uses only one brand of gas

Yet another radical change: There are no more yearly contracts at T-Mobile. You can leave at any time. “If we suck this month, drop us,” said Mr. Legere. “Go somewhere else.”

In the new T-Mobile world, there are only three plans.

All come with unlimited phone calls, unlimited texts, free tethering (which allows your laptop to get online via your phone) and unlimited Internet. The only difference among the plans is how much high-speed wireless Internet you get each month: 500 megabytes ($50 a month), 2 gigabytes ($60) or unlimited ($70).

E-mail: pogue@nytimes.com

A version of this article appeared in print on April 4, 2013, on page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: T-Mobile Breaks Free Of Carrier Conspiracy.

The Arrival of Facebook’s Phone

Facebook Is Expected to Introduce Its Phone

SAN FRANCISCO â€" Facebook does not have to build a phone, as its chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, has long maintained.

Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, last month. The Facebook phone is aimed at the social network’s foreign users.

But it needs to find a way to play a bigger role in delivering what consumers want from their phones: ways to communicate, find answers to questions, shop and be entertained. The company would especially like to become that workhorse for the vast majority of its users who live outside the United States and from whom, so far, it barely profits.

The company will make its biggest leap yet in that direction Thursday, when it is expected to introduce a moderately priced phone, made by HTC, powered by Google’s Android operating system, and tweaked to showcase Facebook and its apps on the home screen.

The Facebook phone adheres to two crucial product announcements in the last three months: A new search tool that encourages users to use their Facebook friend network to seek out everything from restaurants to running trails, and a news feed remade for mobile devices.

The details of the would-be Facebook-centric phone are under wraps. But the motivation is certain.

“Facebook would like to be, literally and figuratively, as close to its users as its users are to their phones, within arm’s reach when they are searching for information, news, time wasting, shopping, communication,” said Rebecca Lieb, an analyst with the Altimeter Group.

That can be especially attractive if the new phone is affordable to emerging market users: Brazil and India are home to the largest blocs of Facebook users after the United States, and their numbers are growing swiftly as smartphone penetration increases in those countries. Many Indian cellphone makers, for that reason, have Facebook already installed on their home pages.

But Facebook makes little money by advertising to those international users.

By partnering with HTC, a phone maker based in Taiwan, the social network is signaling that it is “making an international push,” says Michael Pachter, an analyst with Wedbush Securities.

“The more people you get to use it on phones, the more ads you can deliver,” Mr. Pachter said.

Facebook made a little more than $4 a user in North America and $1.71 in Europe, but barely more than 50 cents in the rest of the world, including large markets like Brazil and India.

Ads are its principal moneymaker, and Facebook is under intense pressure to show Wall Street that it can make more money, and fast. Its stock market value is still far below its initial public offering price, and many analysts blame the company’s belated push into mobile devices.

Mr. Zuckerberg announced last year that Facebook was retooling itself as a mobile-first company. He has consistently said that it is not in the company’s interest to manufacture a phone.

“It’s not the right strategy for us,” he told market analysts in an earnings call in January. He wanted rather to see Facebook integrated into every device that its billion users hold in their hands.

Two-thirds of Facebook’s roughly one billion users worldwide log in to the social network on mobile devices.

A study commissioned by Facebook and carried out by the research firm IDC found that those users checked their Facebook pages an average of 14 times a day; in short, users checked in two-minute bursts adding up to about half an hour each day. Mostly, the users check their news feed.

The new Facebook-optimized phone will use a modified version of the Android software, The New York Times reported last week. When turned on, it will display the Facebook news feed.

Facebook already functions much like a phone, allowing users to chat, send group messages and even, in one experiment with users in Canada, to make free phone calls over the Internet. Its platform hosts a variety of applications that deliver things like music and news, and its newsfeed has been tweaked to showcase photos, which is what Facebook users post by the millions everyday.

There are fledgling experiments with commerce. Facebook users can buy online and offline gifts on Facebook with their credit cards. Equally important, Facebook’s insistence on real names means that Facebook can be something like an identity verification service. It is well-positioned to be a kind of mobile wallet, containing the equivalent of an identity card and seamless way to buy things.

“They want to have all the services that consumers want to use in the mobile world,” said Karsten Weide, an analyst with IDC. “They want to be the major consumer Internet platform.”

The Thursday announcement, which Facebook has described as an opportunity to “come see our new home on Android,” illustrates a fundamental problem for the company. Facebook must accommodate itself to mobile operating systems controlled by Internet rivals, Apple and Google.

Mr. Weide described them as “frenemies, mutually dependent but competing.”

A version of this article appeared in print on April 4, 2013, on page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: Facebook Is Expected To Introduce Its Phone.

Daily Report: Google’s Eroding Lead in Web Search

Though Google is the undisputed king of search, alternative services are chipping into its share of the market, Claire Cain Miller reports in The New York Times.

The nature of search is changing, especially as more people search for what they want to buy, eat or learn on their mobile devices. This has put the $22 billion search industry, perhaps the most lucrative and influential of online businesses, at its most significant crossroad since its invention.

No longer do consumers want to search the Web like the index of a book â€" finding links at which a particular keyword appears. They expect new kinds of customized search, like that on topical sites like Yelp, TripAdvisor or Amazon, which are chipping away at Google’s hold. Google and its competitors are trying to develop the knowledge and comprehension to answer specific queries, not just point users in the right direction.

People are overwhelmed at how crowded the Internet has become â€" Google says there are 30 trillion Web addresses, up from one trillion five years ago â€" and users expect their computers and phones to be smarter and do more for them. Many of the new efforts are services that people don’t even think of as search engines.

Amazon, for example, has a larger share than Google of shopping searches, the most lucrative kind because people are in the mood to buy something. On sites like Pinterest and Polyvore, users have assembled their favorite things from around the Web to produce results when you search for, say, “lace dress.” On smartphones, people skip Google and go directly to apps, like Kayak or Weather Underground. Other apps send people information, like traffic or flight delays, before they even ask for it.

People use YouTube to search for things like how to tie a bow tie, Siri to search on their iPhones, online maps to find local places and Facebook to find things their friends have liked. And services like LinkedIn Influencers and Quora are trying to be different kinds of search engines â€" places to find high-quality, expert content and avoid weeding through everything else on the Web. On Quora, questions like “What was it like to work for Steve Jobs” get answered by people with firsthand knowledge, something Google cannot provide.

Today’s Scuttlebot: Anonymous vs. North Korea, and Hijacked Webcams

The technology reporters and editors of The New York Times scour the Web for important and peculiar items. For Wednesday, selections include a children's car seat that electronically monitors the occupant and sends alerts to a smartphone, South Korea stepping up its efforts to deter cyberattacks and a virtual currency's surge in popularity.