Portals and Search Engines

Social network users may be more vulnerable to identity theft and other online threats than they realize, says a survey by security software firm Webroot. It found 66% don't restrict any details of their personal profile from being visible through a public search engine, and more than 50% aren't sure who can see their profile pages. Moreover, 33% include at least 3 key pieces of personal data on those pages. The survey's findings come as online hangout Facebook simplifies its privacy controls so it's easier for users to restrict access to their pages.

The U.S. Department of Justice confirmed on Thursday that it is investigating a settlement involving Google Book Search for possible antitrust violations, following months of speculation that the agency had its eye on the service.

When Sohu.com, a leading Web portal in China, announced plans last year to spin off its fast-growing online games business, investors balked.

In the past eight months, Ask.com has unfurled a set of changes to its search engine that the IAC unit calls a success, although its share of U.S. search queries has actually shrunk during that time period.

WASHINGTON (AFP) - Microsoft is integrating messages from prominent users of Twitter, the hot micro-blogging service, into the results generated by its new Internet search engine Bing.

Bing is now doing Twitter. The recently launched Microsoft search engine is now allowing users to search for various kinds of real-time data, including tweets from Twitter.

Looking for a competitive edge in the Internet search wars, Microsoft plans to index Twitter updates in real time for Bing, its recently rebranded search engine.

Microsoft announced Thursday that it has added tweets to the list of content discoverable through Bing, its new search engine.

WASHINGTON (AFP) - New search engine Bing helped Microsoft increase its share of the search market in the United States in June but, still lags behind Yahoo! and Google, a Web analytics firm reported Wednesday.

A new piece of malicious software has been discovered that cheats Google and potentially other search engines out of money.

LONDON/SEATTLE (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp's new Bing search engine gained U.S. market share in its first month in operation but still trails dominant rival Google Inc, according to data released on Wednesday.

The creators of a new job-hunting Web site say they've built a specialized search engine that digs around the Web looking for jobs that may not be advertised elsewhere.

Google has fixed an issue with the Outlook synchronization tool it released recently for its Apps hosted communications and collaboration suite, Google said Tuesday.

Internet search engines and software applications can catalog huge volumes of information, but they aren't smart enough to trace personal relationships between people, according to the executive chairman of World-Check, a company that maintains a database of individuals that banks and other companies might want to think twice about doing business with.

WASHINGTON (AFP) - A deluge of search queries for Michael Jackson led Google News, the news aggregator of Web search engine Google, to initially believe it was under attack, the Internet giant said on Friday.

Chances are you've heard or read about Google's phone management system Google Voice, but you're not really sure what it does. There's a good reason for this aura of mystery. Google Voice got its start as a phone service called GrandCentral, which the search giant bought in 2007. It's been in beta ever since -- but unlike other Google betas that are open to the general public, this one was limited to former GrandCentral users and a select group of industry elite.

CANNES (Reuters) - A U.S. recovery is likely to begin this autumn, the worst of the crisis has passed and it is "reasonable to be optimistic for 2010," internet search giant Google's chief executive Eric Schmidt said on Friday.

News of Michael Jackson's death intersected AOL's planned update of its AIM service, resulting in AIM going dark for about 40 minutes on Thursday afternoon.