ReadWriteEnterprise

In September 2010, the U.S. Senate debated the latest draft of a bill for combatting online piracy. You may think you've heard of this bill, but there's a good chance you haven't. It was called COICA. It had a provision that seemed strange, as though it belonged to another era.

It called for the creation of some type of site or service that would publish a list of Web sites suspected of trafficking in illicit or counterfeit intellectual property. The hope was that someone might write a plug-in or a browser patch that would act the same way anti-porn filters work, by denying users access. The concept was denounced as a kind of blacklist.

This week LinkedIn announced they are acquiring hosted search service IndexTank, and will incorporate their technology into the overall LinkedIn search algorithms. IndexTank powers the search behind Reddit.com, Spoke and Blip.tv, among others. LinkedIn claims more than 120 million members, with half outside the US and two million company pages on its service.