Search

Confused about the direction of search technology? We certainly are. That's why we were particularly interested in this primer on "Search 2.0 vs. Traditional Search."

A lot of blogs and sites write about this important area of development, often in generalized or densely technical terms. But Read/WriteWeb, a part of the Web 2.0 Workgroup blog network, helps explain the status of search technology the best kind of learning tool: examples.

Specifically, the blog summarizes five hot technologies that are on the front lines of search development--Swicki, Rollyo, Clusty, Wink and Lexxe. (Is it … Read more

Yahoo shares fell nearly 22 percent on Wednesday to a two-year low of $25.70 one day after the search giant posted second-quarter revenue that fell shy of analyst estimates and said it would launch a new advertising platform a quarter later than expected.

Shares of Google, which reports its second-quarter results on Thursday, slipped 1 percent to $399.

Several analysts downgraded Yahoo after the announcement, including Jackson Securities, which downgraded Yahoo to "hold" and JP Morgan to "neutral."

One of the hottest interactive battlefields between Yahoo and Google involves a land grab. But rather than the virtual kind of the late '90s, this one involves real brick and mortar.

Yahoo may have raised the stakes significantly by doing a deal with Zillow, the popular site that just came out this year but is already changing the game in property search and research. The partnership makes perfect sense for Yahoo as it tries to strengthen its presence in local markets while pursuing a strategy as the social-networking portal of choice, having already acquired such sites as Flickr and Delicious.… Read more

Don't try this at home!

H. D. Moore, creator of the Metasploit hacking tool, has crafted a search engine that finds malicious software using Google queries. The new "Malware" search engine finds Web sites hosting malicious files after a person enters the name of a virus or Trojan horse.

To find the malicious software the new search tool uses a fingerprint of the executable and then searches for it using Google, according to the Web site. However, those who do try it won't find much. Google has not indexed most malware yet and the signature database … Read more

A North Carolina public school district went to court to get Google to remove Social Security numbers and test scores for more than 600 students after the information was exposed on the Web, according to article in the Winston-Salem Journal online.

Catawba County Schools said it contacted Google after a student found the data on the search engine. The data was up until late last Friday, when the page was removed, the article says.

Danny Sullivan, editor of Search Engine Watch, got more information from the school district's chief technology officer, Judith Ray, who said that Google somehow bypassed … Read more

Ohio University, a school that has become a poster child for lax computer security, says it will spend up to $4 million this year to upgrade its network.

The announcement comes after an audit revealed that for 10 years the university's Computer Services department spent too little on firewalls while spending big on cell phones and gym memberships for employees.

That's the reason the school's computer system became a hacker amusement park. The University began investigating at least five separate Internet intrusions in April, which resulted in the compromise of personal data for more than 300,000 … Read more

Thanks to tabloid headlines, we all know that social networks such as MySpace and Facebook can be fertile ground for sexual predators. And we have learned that information posted in the naivete of youth can come back to haunt teenagers in later years, as prospective employers and others come across them in simple Google searches.

Now, however, a much larger interested party has taken to scouring social networks in search of information: the federal government. According to this article in New Scientist, the National Security Agency "is funding research into the mass harvesting of the information that people post … Read more

Figures on Web search in May show that Google's still on top.

ComScore Networks on Wednesday released figures that show Google gained market share for the 10th consecutive month. Google had 44 percent market share in the U.S., ahead of Yahoo at nearly 28 percent, MSN at nearly 13 percent, Time Warner's AOL at 6.7 percent and Ask.com at 5.3 percent, ComScore says.

Nielsen/NetRatings also released its latest figures on Wednesday and found that Google had 49.1 percent of all Internet searches conducted in the U.S. last month. That was followed … Read more

Bots often get a bad rap, thanks to spam and other scourges of life in cyberspace. But it's worthwhile remembering that not all Web robots are bad and, in many cases, still have noble uses. And those "well-behaved" robots have a home at Robotstxt.org.