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Posts Tagged ‘Yahoo Search’

Google, Mozilla Claim AOL’s China Portal May Harm Your Computer

Google Chrome and Firefox both throw up a malware warning for AOL’s Chinese portal (click at your own risk), and Google even warns people who run a search for ‘AOL China’ that the site may harm their computer, as you can tell from the screenshot above.

As far as I can tell, Internet Explorer 8 (with Protected Mode turned on), Bing and Yahoo Search don’t flag anything out of the ordinary with the website. Curiously, neither does AOL Search, which is powered by Google.

I continued to the site, which is located at both chinese.aol.com and cn.aol.com, and the warning message tells me the website is getting flagged because it contains elements from the site www.tq121.com.cn, which is said to appear to host malware. The URL www.tq121.com.cn earlier led me to weather.com.cn, but no warning messages pop up when visiting that site.

Digging a bit deeper, I found that the Safe Browsing Diagnostics page for chinese.aol.com reports the domain name tq121.com.cn to function as intermediary for distributing malware hosted at xzgfgh.8866.org. (Best not to visit any of those, obviously).

Looking at the Safe Browsing Diagnostics page for the latter URL turns up red flags for sited hosted on the network The Planet, a hosting company that is suffering from a couple of security issues of its own at the moment, as you can tell from similar warning messages appearing when visiting legacy domain domains.theplanet.com.

We’re sure that these are just pieces of a bigger puzzle, but it’s definitely worth reporting that a website owned by an Internet company the size of AOL appears to be used to distribute malware. And frankly, it’s worrying that Google and Firefox both raise warning flags while behemoths like Microsoft and Yahoo consider everything to be perfectly safe.

(Thanks for the tips, Michel Wester and Andrew Hartnett)

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Live From Yahoo SearchSpeak 2010

We’re here at Yahoo’s Sunnyvale, CA headquarters for an event the company is holding called “SearchSpeak” to talk about, you guessed it: their search product.

Speaking here are:

• Shashi Seth, Senior Vice President of Search Products, Yahoo!
• Prabhakar Raghavan, Senior Vice President of Yahoo! Labs and Yahoo! Search Strategy
• Larry Cornett, Vice President, Consumer Products, Yahoo! Search
• David Pann, Vice President of Search Advertising, Yahoo!

And Executives from Yahoo! Search for Mobile, and Yahoo! Labs including:

• Yoelle Maarek, Senior Director at Yahoo! Research in Haifa, Israel
• Ricardo Baeza-Yates, Vice President of Yahoo! Research Europe and Latin America
• Preston McAfee, Vice President and Research Fellow at Yahoo! Research in Burbank, CA

Find our live notes below (paraphrased):

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Ubuntu’s default search engine to change in deal with Yahoo

Canonical, the company behind the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution, revealed today that it has established a revenue sharing agreement with Yahoo. As part of the deal, the Firefox Web browser that is shipped in Ubuntu will be configured to use Yahoo as the default search engine.

Rick Spencer, the leader of Canonical’s desktop team, announced the search engine change today on a public Ubuntu mailing list. The specific terms of the agreement have not been disclosed. According to Spencer, the new default will appear in the current development version of the distribution “as soon as reasonably possible” and will be in place in time for Ubuntu 10.04, which is scheduled for release in April.

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Friendster Strikes Deal With Yahoo Southeast Asia

More news from the social network Friendster. The site, which was acquired in December by Malaysian payments company MOL Global, has struck a deal with Yahoo Southeast Asia. The purpose of the deal is to integrate product features and cross-promote across both Friendster and Yahoo. Both Friendster and Yahoo stand to gain from the partnership as Friendster has a significant Asian audience and Yahoo also has a steady following in the regional area for certain web services.

Friendster, which was sold for just under $30 million, has over 90 million registered users and 90 percent of its daily traffic coming from Southeast Asia today. The partnership will involve a a new social application built by Friendster that will be prominently displayed on Yahoo Southeast Asia properties and a cross-promotion of Yahoo products on Friendster.

Yahoo Search will also feature results from Friendster user profiles and fan profiles, similar to the deals struck with Twitter and Facebook by the search giants. Friendster users will also be able to link their Friendster account to their Yahoo! account to share their Friendster network activity updates and inbox via their Yahoo accounts. So, users can check their Friendster account and send updates directly from their Yahoo homepage. Users will also be able to publish their Friendster network activity to Yahoo Messenger and other Yahoo applications.

The cross promotion between Friendster and Yahoo has already been implemented but the search results and activity update integration will be rolled out over the next few months.

Friendster, which was founded in 2001, has raised over $45 million in venture capital to date, and is sitting on some potentially lucrative IP. Friendster is no longer hot in the U.S. and still has members in the Asia/Pacific region. The social network, which just rolled out a much-needed redesign, appointed Richard Kimber as its new CEO, who used to head Sales and Operations in South East Asia for Google.

The partnership makes sense; and Friendster should be doing everything it can to try to own the user base in Southeast Asia, considering that the social network is performing poorly in other parts of the world.

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Anxious Yahoo BOSS Developers To Speak With DOJ About Microsoft Deal

In July 2008, Yahoo announced a radical new product called BOSS, or “Build Your Own Search Service” that lets developers tap into Yahoo’s core search index with an unprecedented amount of flexibility. Now, in light of the Microsoft/Yahoo search deal that was announced last summer, the future of BOSS is uncertain. That’s bad news for the many developers who have built projects on the BOSS APIs, some of whom are building businesses off of the service. Now, after being met with months of silence and uncertainty, some BOSS developers are taking action: they’ve scheduled a conference call with the Department of Justice to discuss their concerns.

It’s understandable why the developers are agitated. Google and Bing both offer APIs, but they limit monetization options, limit the ways developers can change the way their search results are presented, and have myriad other restrictions that BOSS doesn’t. All of which means that developers can’t easily port their applications over to one of the alternatives.

A developer identifying himself as “Phil” on the BOSS Yahoo Group sent a letter to the DOJ outlining his concerns. The DOJ has apparently responded, saying that they will hold a conference call with any concerned developers (the group contains instructions for any BOSS developers who wish to join). We have a request in with the DOJ to verifiy that the call is scheduled, but it sounds legitimate.

We’ve reprinted Phil’s letter to the DOJ, which outlines the developers’ concerns, below:

Dear sir/madam,

I represent a group of people who are concerned about a certain aspect of an
antitrust issue which we understand is currently being examined by your office.
The matter at hand is the Microsoft-Yahoo deal. Our concern is the following:

In July 2008, Yahoo introduced a new program called Yahoo Boss. Boss is a
programming framework (called an API) which allows developers to create new
search engines which use the Yahoo database. In Yahoos own words:

“BOSS (Build your Own Search Service) is Yahoo!’s open search web services
platform. The goal of BOSS is simple: to foster innovation in the search
industry. Developers, start-ups, and large Internet companies can use BOSS to
build and launch web-scale search products that utilize the entire Yahoo! Search
index. BOSS gives you access to Yahoo!’s investments in crawling and indexing,
ranking and relevancy algorithms, and powerful infrastructure. By combining your
unique assets and ideas with our search technology assets, BOSS is a platform
for the next generation of search innovation, serving hundreds of millions of
users across the Web.”

(Quote from http://developer.yahoo.com/search/boss/)

The reason this program is so important is because before Boss, tens, if not
hundreds of millions of dollars would be required to start a new search engine.
Boss changed all that by making Yahoos own servers and search results available
to third parties. In the year and a half since, tens, if not hundreds of
companies and web developers have spent thousands of hours developing new
websites, web applications and search engines using Yahoo Boss. By May 2009,
Yahoo Boss was serving 30 million search queries a DAY through these websites
(http://www.ysearchblog.com/2009/05/19/key-milestones-for-searchmonkey-and-boss/
). Clearly, Yahoo Boss is a unique program which has been the biggest catalyst
in search engine innovation and competition in years.

Google and Microsoft do have their own similar APIS, but they are severely
limited. Googles API gives the user but a small number of search results, while
both Google and Microsofts apis disallow open monetization, thus rendering them
meaningless from a competitive point of view.

Over the many months since the Microsoft-Yahoo deal was announced, countless
developers have been asking Yahoo for information on the future of Yahoo Boss,
yet in vain. Yahoo refuses to tell us whether the framework will be shut down or
not. This is even after the two companies announced that all the details of
their deal had been fleshed out. This has given us the distinct feeling that the
decision to shut down Boss has already been made, but that they prefer to keep
that quiet in order to not “rock the boat”.

Obviously, this is of great concern to us. In addition to all the time and work
we have put in, Boss is the ONLY factor which has allowed broad and viable
competition in the search engine industry. Shutting down Boss would by default
mean shutting down all the websites using it, in addition to signifying the end
to the aforementioned competition.

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Motorola Backflip / Enzo bringing Android contortions to AT&T

Just when we though this decade had run short on phone form factors, Motorola comes along to blow our minds with this new Backflip / Enzo / Motus device. Amazingly, the most interesting part of this device might not even be the reverse hinge design, which flips the keyboard back behind the screen and faces out when not in use, but the fact that there’s a clear-as-day AT&T logo on it — something we’d heard rumored, but dared not believe until we saw it with our own eyes. The rest of the leaked photos go on to corroborate earlier rumors: there’s a touchpad on the back of the keyboard to aid in no-look scrolling, it’s running Blur on top of Android 1.5 (with a few AT&T apps, Yahoo search and no Gmail), and it runs the same 528MHz processor as the CLIQ. Hard to believe this very same company builds the Droid.

[Thanks, Jeff B.]

Motorola Backflip / Enzo bringing Android contortions to AT&T originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 16 Dec 2009 18:31:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Bing Tries To Buy The News

Rupert Murdoch is pointing a gun to Google’s head, and Microsoft is helping him pull back the trigger. For the past few weeks, Murdoch and his officers at News Corp. have been very vocal about their distaste for Google and their desire to lead other media companies in a boycott of sorts.

Murdoch keeps threatening to stop letting Google index the WSJ.com and his other media sites, and wants other news sites to join him in this self-imposed silence. The folks at Microsoft’s Bing think this is a great idea. Not only that, but the FT reports that Microsoft is in fact in discussions with News Corp. and other publishers about the possibility of paying them to remove their sites from Google’s search index. This report comes on the heels of a meeting in Europe where Bing dangled the prospect of premium spots in search results to publishers and outright money for search R&D.

Microsoft is not afraid to buy search market share, which is what it’s doing with the Yahoo search deal and even its Cashback program. But with these latest talks, it is literally trying to buy the news, or at least exclusive access to the news.

Bing can’t buy all the news, it can only buy certain brands. If Bing can somehow become the only place you can find news results and working links to the Wall Street Journal and other top papers such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the LA Times, for instance, that would be a big reason to switch for a lot of folks. But it’s not clear how much Bing would have to pay the news companies of the world for them to give up all the traffic Google sends them in return for a fraction of that traffic and some cash.

Even Google couldn’t afford to strike such deals. Says Murdoch, of Google, “If they were to pay everybody for everything they took from every newspaper in the world, and every magazine, they wouldn’t have any profits left.”

In order to actually make a dent in Google’s market share, Bing would have to pay such exorbitant sums to so many different news companies that it would be difficult to recoup its investment. Bing certainly get some marketing buzz out of any such move, but that’s about it.

The big problem with a search engine trying to buy market share by buying parts of the news is that information spreads so quickly these days, exclusives last about 30 seconds. That information will end up on a site that is indexed by Google. Or the same news will be broken by someone else on the Web before the WSJ.com even gets to it.

Exclusive indexing goes against the Web’s inherent openness. Companies that try to curtail that openness don’t last long on the Web.

Image via PhotoXpress.

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Bing Keeps Growing While Yahoo’s Steady Decline Continues

Google’s dominance in the search engine market isn’t likely to end anytime soon, but Microsoft’s Bing managed to continue its slow but steady growth last month. According to the latest data from Compete, Bing’s market share only grew from 8.7% in August to 8.8% in September, but the total query volume on Bing grew 8.2%. All the other major search engines except for Ask (+1.3%) registered a decline in total search queries last month.

Sponsor

Yahoo

Yahoo Search continues its steady decline. Yahoo Search lost another 1% market share last month and has now lost a total of 5% since September 2008 when it still owned 18.8% of the market according to Compete. The total search volume on Yahoo was down 8% and Yahoo served 100 million less queries in September than August.

Google, Ask and AOL Hold Steady

Google’s market share grew slightly from 72.3% to 72.6%, while Ask and AOL remained stable. Based on this data, Bing seems to be eating into Yahoo’s market share, but isn’t growing at Google’s expense.

Searches Per Day

Compete’s Mark Madjarac points out that Bing’s numbers are even more impressive when you take into account that Bing’s users tend to perform fewer searches on the service (5 searches per user per day) than Google’s users (5.6 searches). Yahoo users performed an average of 7.8 searches per day.

Discuss

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