Another Google Summer Of Code Concludes

Google's fifth Summer of Code has ended, and by all accounts, it was quite a success. Indeed, the students' official success rate this year was judged to be the highest ever, and with 2,000 mentors and 1,000 students participating, that's no statistical fluke.

The Summer of Code is, in case you didn't know, a program Google runs to bring young people into contact with free and open source projects. Accepted students are given a choice between many different projects (there were 150 options this year), along with mentors and stipends.

This presents them with the opportunity to pick up coding skills, forge professional connections, and make a little cash. It's a very good deal for which many people compete.

And that brings us back to this year's record-high success rate. As a post on the Official Google Blog acknowledges, "85 percent of our student participants have successfully completed their projects." That number hasn't been higher than 83 percent in the past.

Leslie Hawthorn, the Summer of Code Program Manager, then continued, "We'd like to congratulate all of our student participants for their hard work and tremendous achievements this summer. We're excited to hear that many of our students have planned out the next few months of their coding work with their chosen open source project."

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

“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

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.

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)

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: Select a verified site… http://www.vijaykumarpoola.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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