Nielsen Online released its rankings of U.S. search share for August, with overall search increasing 49.7 percent year over year to 10.8 billion searches. Google had a year over year increase of 61.3 percent and received 64.6 percent of searches. Yahoo had a year over year increase of 32.3 percent and received 16.0 percent of searches. Microsoft had a year over year increase of 50 percent and received 10.7 percent of searches.
July U.S. Search Share Results
Nielsen Online yesterday its rankings of U.S. search share for July, with overall search increasing 31.4 percent year over year to 10.5 billion searches. Google had a year over year increase of 41.4 percent and received 64.8 percent of searches. Yahoo had a year over year increase of 24 percent and received 17.1 percent of searches. Microsoft had a year over year decrease of .5 percent and received 9.0 percent of searches.
Google’s U.S. Search Share Reaches New High and Microsoft Reaches 2 Year Low in June
Nielsen Online yesterday its rankings of U.S. search share for June, with overall search increasing 27.0 percent year over year to 10 billion searches. Google had a year over year increase of 42.1 percent and received 66.1 percent of searches. Google’s had it highest percentage of searches ever, surpassing March of this year when it received 64.2 percent. Yahoo had a year over year increase of 24 percent and received 16.2 percent of searches. Microsoft had a year over year decrease of 20.7 percent and received 8.8 percent of searches. Microsoft’s percentage of searches was it lowest in the last two years despite the launch of the rebranding of their search engine as Bing at the beginning of the month.
Yahoo and Microsoft Reach Search and Ad Deal
Microsoft and Yahoo today announced they had reached a deal to form a search and advertising partnership. Under the partnership, Microsoft’s Bing search engine will power Yahoo Search and Microsoft’s AdCenter search advertising service will provide search ads to Yahoo Search for 10 years. The deal increases the reach of Microsoft search engine and search advertising service. Nielsen Online reported that in May Microsoft had 9.4 percent of U.S. searches and Yahoo had 17.2 percent of searches. While larger, the combined percentage is only 26.6 which is not even half of Google’s 63.2 percentage for the month. The companies indicated that they are “hopeful” that the deal will close, after possible regulatory review, in early 2010. Officials from the companies told CNET News that they expect “integrating Bing’s results into Yahoo in the U.S. will take several months” and that moving to AdCenter “could take a year”. The companies expect that full integration would occur within 24 months. The deal did not include a merger of the two companies display advertising businesses. The deal follows on an of talks about some type of agreement between the two companies that began with a hostile takeover offer by Microsoft early last year.
WordPress 2.8.2 Patches Security Vulnerability
Following less than two weeks after the release WordPress 2.8.1, which fixed a potentially serious security vulnerability, a new version has been released to patch another potentially serious security vulnerability. In versions before 2.8.2, comment author URLs were not fully sanitized which could lead to a cross-site scripting (XSS) attack. When viewing a page in the administrative interface that contains a specifically crafted comment author URL the user would be automatically redirected to another web page. That other web page could try to infect the user’s machine with malware or try to perform some other harmful activity.
Microsoft Claims Increase In Users Following Bing Launch
Microsoft has reported that they saw an 8 percent increase in unique users for their search engine during the month of June. At the beginning of the month Microsoft launched an update of the search engine and rebranded it as Bing. Microsoft also reported that in their own polling the number of people “likely to recommend” their search engine double during the month. The increase is not unexpected due the press coverage of the rebranding and the advertising campaign for the search engine that also began at the begging of the month. In the past Microsoft has made similar increases, but has been unable to sustain them.
WordPress 2.8.1 Released
WordPress 2.8.1, which fixes a number of problems with 2.8 and addresses a potentially serious security vulnerability, was released yesterday. The problems that were fixed were causing serious problems for some users. A work around was created so that some templates that were not working due how they called get_categories(). Dashboard memory usage was reduced to alleviate an issue where some people were receiving an incomplete page when they attempted to view the dash board. And an issue that caused the rich text editor not load was worked around. The security vulnerability allows any user of the blog, including subscribers, to view and in some cases modify plugin files if they did not explicitly check permissions. In Corelabs advisory about the vulnerability, they mention one plugin whose features could be disabled and another that could be modified to run arbitrary code when the blog administrator visits the plugins page. Extra security has been put in place to better protect plugins from this.
Home Broadband Adoption Continues to Increase in U.S.
A study by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project found that 63 percent of adults in the United States had access to broadband at home, an increase of 15 percent in the last year. This follows a 17 percent increase in the previous year and 12 percent two years ago. The study found that only 7 percent of adults use dial-up at home, a 50 percent decrease from 2 years ago. Among the groups who showed the largest increases in broadband access were older adults and rural users. Access among adults ages 65 or older increased 58 percent, 22 percent for adults ages 50-64, and 21 percent for adults living in rural America. The study also reported that 72 percent of adults reported access the Internet from home and that 79 percent of adults identify themselves as Internet users.
May U.S. Search Share Results
Nielsen Online has released its rankings of U.S. search share for May (PDF). Overall search increased 20.3 percent year over year to 9.4 billion searches. Google had year over year increase of 28.2 percent and received 63.2 percent of searches. Yahoo had a year over year increase of 22.3 percent and received 17.2 percent of searches. Microsoft had a year over year decrease of 14.6 percent and received 9.4 percent of searches.
WordPress 2.8 Released
The finalized version of WordPress 2.8 was released today. The changes made include better widgets, a theme browser/installer, performance upgrades, and over 790 bug fixes. The widget admin interface has been changed to allow for making immediate edits to widgets, having multiple copies of widgets, and the ability to save settings for inactive widgets. A new widget API should allow for developers to create improved widgets.
On the security front, changes were made that should improve plugin security from cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks. An empty index file has been added to the plugin directory so that servers that are configured to show the contents of directory when no index file exist will no longer show potential hackers what plugins are located in the directory that they could attempt to exploit.
A full lists of changes in 2.8 is available at the WordPress Codex.
According to a post by Matt Mullenweg on the WordPress Blog possible improvements in versions 2.9 and 3.0 include “improved media handling, better dependency checking, versioning of templates and themes, and of course the fabled merging of WordPress and MU.” Version 2.9 will also requireMySQL 4.1.2 or higher, up from the current requirement of 4.0.