'Dark Knight Rises' reportedly earns $160 million

This undated film image released by Warner Bros. Pictures shows Christian Bale as Batman in a scene from the action thriller "The Dark Knight Rises."

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- "The Dark Knight Rises" was on track to earn $160 million, which would be a record for 2-D films, over the weekend following a mass shooting at a Colorado screening of the Batman film.

Citing box office insiders, The Hollywood Reporter, Los Angeles Times, New York Times and other media outlets reported Sunday that the latest Batman sequel earned $160 to $162 million.

That amount would best the $158.4 million debut of "The Dark Knight" in 2008 and give "Dark Knight Rises" the third-highest domestic weekend opening ever after the 3-D films "The Avengers" with $207.4 million and "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - Part 2" with $169.2 million.

Tickets for 3-D films cost a few more dollars than 2-D screenings, netting extra cash at the box office. Movies released in 3-D typically earn under half of their income in 3-D screenings, sometimes as little as a third.

Sony, Fox, Disney, Paramount, Universal and Lionsgate joined "Dark Knight Rises" distributor Warner Bros in publicly withholding their usual revenue reports out of respect for the victims and their families.

Box-office tracking service Rentrak also did not report figures following the Aurora, Colo., shootings that killed 12 and injured 58 at a midnight screening of the new Batman sequel on Friday.

"This tragedy did not seem to impact the box office in a major way," said Paul Dergarabedian, an analyst for Hollywood.com who specializes in box office. "For this film to still be in the rarified air of the top-three openings of all time is phenomenal, given the unfortunate circumstances surrounding the release of this film."

Dergarabedian noted that the box-office ranking of director Christopher Nolan's final installment of his Batman trilogy would not be official until Warner Bros. and other studios release their final weekend box-office tallies Monday.

News by AP

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Google Punishes Itself For Breaking Its Own Rules

Google Search Engine

Type 'web browser' or 'Internet browser' into Google's search bar and you'll notice something missing from top results: Google's own popular browser, Chrome.

Google is purposely demoting search results for Chrome, after Aaron Wall of SEO Book revealed that the company appeared to have paid for sponsored posts promoting its browser. The company said it will demote Chrome for at least 60 days.

The marketing campaign, which was first reported at SEO Book, pointed out that bloggers were being paid for generic posts linking to a video promoting Chrome. The sponsored posts fall afoul of Google's own policy of paying for links:

Google and most other search engines use links to determine reputation. A site's ranking in Google search results is partly based on analysis of those sites that link to it. Link-based analysis is an extremely useful way of measuring a site's value, and has greatly improved the quality of web search. Both the quantity and, more importantly, the quality of links count towards this rating.

However, some SEOs and webmasters engage in the practice of buying and selling links that pass PageRank, disregarding the quality of the links, the sources, and the long-term impact it will have on their sites. Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google's Webmaster Guidelines and can negatively impact a site's ranking in search results.

Google maintains it did not approve the campaign. “We have consistently avoided paid sponsorships, including paying bloggers to promote our products, because these kind of promotions are not transparent or in the best interests of users,” Google said, according to the Washington Post. “We’re now looking at what changes we need to make to ensure that this never happens again.”

As Search Engine Land reports, Google says it's being harsher on itself than other offenders: "While Google did not authorize this campaign, and we can find no remaining violations of our webmaster guidelines, we believe Google should be held to a higher standard, so we have taken stricter action than we would against a typical site," part of its statement read.

But Google has leveled harsh punishments in the past: When the New York Times revealed JC Penny was using a 'link scheme' to come up first in search results, Google quickly plummeted their search rankings, sounding a warning to others about repercussions of trying to game Google's system.

News by Huffingtonpost

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