WordPress 2.8.5 was released yesterday, which includes a fix for a denial-of-service (DoS) attack and a number of changes that removed code that could potentially be used to hack into WordPress. The denial-of-service attack utilizes specially crafted trackbacks that cause WordPress to use a significant amount of processing power when they are processed which could lead WordPress becoming unresponsive. The code removal changes were originally developed for the upcoming version 2.9 and were backported to improve security as soon as possible.
Mobile Searches on Google Grew 30 Percent in Q3
During Google’s third quarter earnings calls Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt reported that Google had a 30 percent quarter-over-quarter increase in mobile searches during the quarter. Jonathan Rosenberg, Google’s Senior Vice President of Product Management, said that smart phone adoption was a driver of growth and that mobile search has grown twice as fast as desktop search during the last year in Japan and some other markets. Schmidt also reported that Google made over 120 “search quality improvements” during the quarter.
Google Adds Crawler View and Malware Details to Webmaster Tools
Google has added two tools to their Webmaster Tools service under the “Labs” label.
The Fetch as Googlebot tool shows the contents of the page and HTTP response headers that Google receives for a specified page. Being able to see exactly what Google sees, when it requests a page, can be helpful in diagnosing problems that can cause Google to have trouble crawling and indexing websites. It can also help in diagnosing hacks that modify the content of pages when Google requests them.
When Google has detected that a website is infected with malware, the new Malware details tool provides samples of the malicious code that Google has detected. The types of code that Google will provide samples of include “injected HTML tags, JavaScript, or embedded Flash files” and the tool will also identify if URLs from the website are being redirected to another website that contains malware.
Google uses the “Labs” label to identify features that are still in development and that “may break at times.”
Google Expands Search Results Filtering Tool
Google has announced that they have added a number of new features to Search Options, their search results filtering tool included in the search results page. The tool already provided a number of options for filtering results based on the when the pages were created and now can filter results from the past hour and from a specified date range. Results can now also be filtered to include more or fewer shopping sites. Users who are signed into a Google Account and Web History enabled can have results filtered to include or exclude pages they have already visited. The Search Options tool was released in May.
Google Adds Links to Sections of Web Pages In Search Results
Google has announced that they have begun to include links to section of web pages in their search results. The new links come in two forms, the first form provides a set links to section of the web page relevant to the search query and the second form provides a link to jump to specific section of the page relevant to the search query. When these links are shown is determined algorithmically, but Google has provided information on what will provides the best chance for these links being shown. Anchor are needed in the web page so that sections of the page can be linked to, the anchors should use descriptive names, and there should be a “table of contents” which links to the anchors.
Google Introduces Parameter Handling to Webmaster Tools
Google has added the ability for webmaster to instruct Google to ignore URL parameters in Webmaster Tools. URL parameters are name/value pairs appended to end of URLs (example: http://www.example.com?sessionid=1232132). The problem with URL parameters is that each URL created by a variation of parameter may or may not change the contents of a web page, so search engines treat each version as a separate web page. When they are actually the same it can have as serious negative impact on the indexing and ranking of the pages in search engines. In general it is better not use URL parameters in these situations, but the new feature should help to better handle situation where they do exist. In help documentation for the new feature, Google states that up to 15 parameters can be set to be ignored and that they will treat the “requests as suggestions rather than directives.” Parameter handling can be found in the Settings section of the Webmaster Tools. Yahoo has provided the ability to set parameters to ignore, as well as well allowing a default value to be set for parameters, for some time.
August U.S. Search Share Results
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.