Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Google Shares Interesting Malware Stats

Google is sharing some interesting statistics on malware, such as the number of entries on the Google Safe Browsing Malware List that have occurred over the last twelve months, and search results containing a URL labeled as harmful.

“We’re glad to share this sort of data because we believe that collaboration and information sharing are crucial in driving anti-malware efforts forward,” says Niels Provos of Google’s Security Team.

Number of Entries on the Google Safe Browsing Malware List

google-malware1

“As we mentioned in our Top-10 Malware Sites blog post, we have seen a large increase in the number of compromised sites since April,” says Provos. “The number of entries on our malware list has more than doubled in one year, and we have seen periods in which 40,000 web sites were compromised per week. However, compared to infections associated with Gumblar and Martuz — two relatively large and well-known pieces of malicious code, many compromised web sites now point to hundreds of different domains.”

In January of last year, 1.2% of all Google search queries contained at least one such result. The trend has mostly been downward in the time that has passed since then, although you can see fluctuations.

Search Results Containing a URL Labeled as Harmful

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Google says that as malware trends evolve, they’re constantly improving their systems to better detect compromised sites. The company notes that the increase in compromised sites they observed could partially be influenced by such improvements.

Tuesday, August 25, 2009

Yahoo to compete with Bing despite Microsoft deal


Yahoo Inc said on Monday it has revamped its search to compete against Microsoft Corp's Bing, even as it relies on the Redmond giant to power its queries.

The announcement of plans to put a new face on Yahoo Messenger and Mail and add functions to its search engine came after news that Google and Yahoo each lost a fraction of a point of U.S. search share to Microsoft last month [nN18441019].

"We are not a version of Bing," Prabhakar Raghavan, a senior vice president of Yahoo, said to reporters at the company's headquarters.

"We are Yahoo and that will continue...We collaborate on the back-end but we are competitors on the front-end," he said,

At a press event held at their headquarters, the company gave more details of its complex relationship with Microsoft.

At the end of July, Microsoft and Yahoo signed a 10-year deal under which search on Yahoo's websites will be generated by Microsoft's new Bing search engine. The companies hope the deal will take effect early next year.

Microsoft will license Yahoo's search technology, allowing it to integrate certain aspects of it into Bing. Microsoft's advertising search product, AdCenter, will also replace Yahoo's equivalent product, Panama.

Raghavan said that when Microsoft sends ads along with its answers to queries, Yahoo may or may not use all of them, depending on a complex formula.

A new series of boxes to the left of search results and ads will give users more ways to make use of what they have found, said Larry Cornett, Yahoo vice president of search products.

A box powered by Internet security company McAfee Inc, will filter dangerous links. Videos will play without leaving the search page.

A box to sites like Yelp, which provides user feedback on stores and restaurants, can be clicked to check out the quality of a sushi restaurant without leaving the search page.

Cornett, who demonstrated the new approach, said it was undergoing testing and will be available some time this year.

Comscore reported Microsoft gained 0.5 percent in July, but still only holds 8.9 percent of the search market, compared to 64.7 percent for Google and 19.3 percent for Yahoo.

Yahoo shares closed up 20 cents, or 1.35 percent, to end the day at $14.99 on the Nasdaq.

(Reporting by David Lawsky, editing by Leslie Gevirtz)

Monday, August 24, 2009

Change of Address tool to tell Google about your new URL

If you’re planning to move your site to a new domain, use the Change of Address tool to tell Google about your new URL. This will help us update our index faster and smooth the transition for your users.

For best results, follow these steps:

  1. Set up the new siteReview our guidelines for moving your site to a new domain. Set up your content on your new domain, then make sure all internal links point to the new domain.
  2. Redirect all traffic from the old siteUse a 301 redirect to permanently redirect the pages on your old site to your new site. This tells users and search engines that your site has permanently moved. Ask webmasters to update their links to point to your new domain and make sure incoming links to your old site are redirected correctly using the 301 redirects.
  3. Add your new site to Webmaster ToolsMake sure you have added and verified your new domain.
  4. Tell us the URL of your new domain
    New URL for www.vijaykumar.info:

    After submitting the change of address, check your Webmaster Tools data periodically to see if your new site has been crawled and indexed (if you have a Sitemap, one way to determine this is by checking Sitemap details for the new site to see how many of the pages have been crawled and indexed).

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Friday, August 21, 2009

Google Rolling Out AdSense Relevancy Improvements

Google announced (subtly) that it is rolling out a series of enhancements to AdSense’s contextual targeting capabilities to more accurately match relevant ads to AdSense publishers’ pages.

Unfortunately, not many details about these enhancements were given away, but Google says AdSense publishers will not have to update their AdSense accounts or ad code. Changes will be applied automatically.

adsense-logo

“Our machines are very good at the matching process, but there are still a few cases where their definition of relevance differs from our human definition of relevance,” says AdSense Product Manager Woojin Kim. “In these few cases, the system might end up serving ads that don’t seem immediately relevant to users. We understand that increased ad relevance contributes to a positive experience for users, publishers, and advertisers, so we’re continuously working on ways to improve the relevance and quality of ads that appear on your sites.”

The changes will not affect how other types of ads are matched to your sites. Placement-targeted ads that advertisers bid on to appear specifically on your page, for example, will continue to appear.

These relevancy-determining changes are not the only thing the AdSense team has been up to. This week, they announced that they have tweaked the default fonts for different ad formats, in order to trigger better performance. Category filtering was also announced for AdSense for Feeds.