According to Nielsen’s US search share data for February, Microsoft’s Bing search engine gained 1.6 point of search share during the month. Bing gained a point of market share in the previous and their market share reached 12.5 percent this month. Google’s share was 65.2 percent, 1.1 points of search share less than the previous month. Yahoo’s share was 14.1 percent, a decrease of .4 points from the previous month.
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Bing Gains US Market Share In February
March 16th, 2010Google Adding Hacking Notification to Webmaster Tools
March 5th, 2010Google has announced that they will begin displaying “Notice of Supected Hacking” messages in their Webmaster Tools when they detect that a website has potentially been hacked. The messages will provide example URLs of the hacked pages, next steps for fixing the issue, instructions on getting back into Google’s search results after the issue has been fixed. Google will also being added notifications of spammy or abused user-generated content and abused forum pages or egregious amounts of comment spam. Once you have signed up for Google’s Webmaster Tools you can instruct Google to forward these messages and other messages, including malware notifications, to an email address you select.
Bing Gains Point of US Search Share in January
February 19th, 2010According to Nielsen’s US search share data for January Microsoft’s Bing search engine gained a point of search share in January, increasing its share to 10.9 percent. Google’s share was 66.3 percent, a point of search share less than the previous month. Yahoo’s share was 14.5 percent, an increase of a tenth of point over the previous month.
Yahoo and Microsoft Receive Regulatory Clearance for Search Pact
February 18th, 2010Yahoo and Microsoft announced today that they had received regulatory clearance from US and European regulators. Under the pact Microsoft’s Bing search engine will power Yahoo Search and Microsoft’s AdCenter search advertising service will provide search ads to Yahoo Search. The companies had announced the pact in late July and reached a finalized agreement in December. The companies have set a goal of serving results from Bing in Yahoo Search in “at least the United States by the end of 2010″. The transition to serving ads from Microsoft’s advertising service in Yahoo Search is planned to occur “prior to the 2010 holiday season, but may wait until 2011 if they determine that the transition will be more effective after the holiday season”. They expect a full transition by early 2012. According to the companies, Yahoo will build its own “search experience” on top of Bing’s search results by “integrating rich Yahoo! content, enhanced listings with conveniently organized information about key topics, and tools to tailor the experience for Yahoo! users”
Google’s Chrome Continues to Gain Market Share
February 3rd, 2010Google’s Chrome continues to gain market share according to Net Applications data. It market share has increased 3.7 percentage points to 5.22 percent from the year ago period. Last month it surpassed Apple’s Safari as the third most popular web browser behind Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Mozilla’s Firefox. Internet Explorer market has continued to decline. In the last year it last 7.2 percentage of points, though it continues to have the highest market share with 62.12 percent share. January mark the first month that Internet Explore 8 was the most popular version of Internet Explorer. It had a market share of 22.37 percent, version 6 had a market share 20 percent and version 7 had market share of 14.53.
Google Increased US Search Share In December
January 14th, 2010According to Nielsen’s December data Google share of US searches was 67.3 percent, an increase of 1.9 percent from the previous month. Yahoo’s share dropped .9 percent to 14.4 percent and Bing’s share dropped .8 percent to 9.9 percent. Nielsen also reported that there were 9.9 billion searches performed during the month.
WordPress 2.9 Released
December 21st, 2009Version 2.9 of WordPress was released on Saturday. The new version includes a trash feature, a built-in image editor, plugin compatibility checking, and support for the embedding content using the oEmbed standard. With trash feature posts and comments that are deleted will be placed in a trash folder instead being completely deleted. The image editor allows images to be cropped, edited, rotated, flipped, and scaled and the post announcing the new version indicated that this is the first of “many planned media-handling improvements”. To help the users planning to upgrade to newer versions, WordPress will now present data compiled from other users as to whether installed plugins are compatible with the new version. Support for oEmbed standard allows for embedding of images, video, and other content by pasting an URL into a post. The standard is supported by YouTube, Flickr, Hulu, Scribd, PollDaddy and other websites.
The new version requires that your server run MySQL 4.1.2 or higher, previously versions only required 4.0 or higher. WordPress will check if the server has a supported version of MySQL during the auto upgrade process.
A full lists of changes in 2.8 is available at the WordPress Codex.
Google Expands Personalized Search Results to All Users
December 7th, 2009For several years Google has provided users signed into a Google account the option of receiving search results that have customized based on their previous search queries. On Friday Google announced that it will expand Personalized Search to all users. With Personalized Search, Google customizes search results in attempt to show results that are the most relevant to a user’s query when there query has multiple meanings. It will also show websites that the user frequently clicks on in search result higher in the search results. For users not signed into a Google account the customized results will be based on the searches linked with a web browser cookie. This means that a multiple users using the same web browser will receive customized results based on a combination of all users’ searches and users using multiple devices will receive different customized results on each device. The customization is based on up to the last 180 days of searches.
Yahoo and Microsoft Finalize Search Pact
December 7th, 2009Yahoo and Microsoft have finalized their agreement that will have Microsoft provide the search results and advertising for Yahoo Search. The definitive agreement was originally scheduled to be completed in late October and was delayed while details were worked out. The pact will still need to receive regulatory approval before it can begin which the companies said that they hope will occur in early 2010.
Google to Add Notification of Outdated Applications to Webmaster Toolsations
November 23rd, 2009Google will soon begin sending messages via the Webmaster Tools alerting webmaster that “content management systems (CMSs), forum/bulletin-board applications, stat-trackers”, and other web applications on their websites are out of date. This is an expansion of the alerts that Google began sending in October of 2008 to alert webmaster that they were running versions of applications that were known to contain security vulnerabilities. The notification will be limited to applications that Google is able to determine the version that is on the website by parsing the source code of the website’s pages. While some applications, most notably WordPress, include this information there are many other high profile applications including Joomla and Drupal do not. In their post announcing the feature, Google proposed that developers begin including a generator meta tag that includes the version number of the application in the web pages generated by the application.
