The Guardian has revealed that software giant Microsoft will shortly commence a multi-million pound advertisement campaign in the UK, in an attempt to challenge the extensive dominance of Google in the UK search engine market.

According to an article on the news site, the software giant has come with a three-month long advertisement campaign with the help of the world-renowned advertisement company JWT, which will include three TV advertisements that will revolve around the punchline, ‘Bing and decide’.

Commenting on the upcoming advertisement campaign, the managing director and vice-president of consumer and online at Microsoft UK, Ashley Highfield, said in a statement that “People feel overawed by the internet and what they turn up when they are searching. We are also in a world where people have forgotten there is an alternative search engine.”

The Guardian also reported that the advertisements will run on UK TV channels for two months straight and then after every two weeks continuing till mid-June.

A Microsoft spokesperson also revealed that the TV advertisement campaign will be followed by a highly targeted digital campaign through out the country, making full use of digital media and social networking tools.

Originally published on ITProPortal.com

Google is ditching its one-year-old SearchWiki service for a new feature that would help web searchers to personalise their search results in an easier and more interactive manner.

The new feature allows users to tick a star marker next to the search results they prefer. These results would go in Google’s database, and would be featured the next time the user carries out search with similar keywords.

Starring is already available with Google’s mail service Gmail, enabling users to mark up their important mails by ticking onto star icon next to them, turning it to gold from colourless. The system is also available with Google Reader and could possibly be extended to other services from Google as well.

Unlike the erstwhile SearchWiki feature, the newly launched star feature simplifies the user’s future searches containing similar keywords without affecting the organic Google rankings at all.

Websites carrying star markers will be synchronised with the Google Toolbar, which is designed to manage the starred items just like other bookmarks.

Google’s product manager Cedric Dupont touted the star feature by saying, “The great thing about stars is that you don’t have to keep track of them. You don’t even have to remember whether or not you starred something. Simply perform a search and you’ll rediscover your starred items right when you need them.”

Originally published on ITProPortal.com

A recent report by a security firm is claiming that the recent wave of hacking attacks on Google, along with dozens of other firms, pilfered and modified crucial system source code by intruding into the employees’ PCs via privileged login credentials.

The hackers actually targeted only a small bunch of employees who were responsible for controlling source code management systems, which control several changes that developers introduce while they write any software, according to George Kurtz, CTO at the security firm McAfee.

The white paper, published by McAfee during RSA security conference in San Francisco, divulges some unexplored details about the recent attacks, codenamed as “Operation Aurora”, which impacted as many as 34 companies, such as Google and Adobe, starting from July last year.

Incidentally, McAfee assisted Adobe in investigating the kind of attacks launched on its systems, and even provided crucial details to Google about malware used in exploiting its systems.

Dmitri Alperovitch, McAfee’s VP for threat research, described the software configuration management (SCM) systems as the “crown jewels” of the companies.

Along the same line, he said: “No one ever thought about securing them, yet these were the crown jewels of most of these companies in many ways — much more valuable than any financial or personally identifiable data that they may have and spend so much time and effort protecting”.

Originally published on ITProPortal.com

Search engine giant Google has made it unsurprisingly clear that it will be backing HTC against Apple as the latter has filed an unexpected lawsuit against the former for infringing on 20 of its patents pertaining to the core of HTC’s portfolio, smartphones.

A Google spokesperson told influential tech blog Techcrunch that “We are not a party to this lawsuit. However, we stand behind our Android operating system and the partners who have helped us to develop it”

The growing importance and success of Android-based smartphones have been watched with unease from the Apple headquarters in Cupertino to a point where there were claims that Steve Jobs himself said that Google was looking to kill the iPhone.

A recent report, which showed that Android marketshare in the US grew while that of the iPhone dipped, further cemented the fear that Android will be the biggest threat to the iPhone in 2010.

Google’s growing ambitions has put it squarely in the path of Apple. It launched a web browser, a mobile phone and is preparing for a new operating system, Chrome OS, by the end of the year.

Apple has responded by buying a mobile advertising specialist, Quattro Wireless, and could, if it wanted to enter the search business, by acquiring what remains of Yahoo or entering a strategic alliance with Microsoft, something that would seriously p*ss Google.

Originally published on ITProPortal.com

Google has issued a comprehensive report that gauges the search engine optimisation (SEO) on a number of distinct properties, and estimated that it was actually falling short on many of them.

Dubbed as “SEO Report Card”, the report has been tailored to bolster up the user experience as well as visibility of some of its properties.

However, on the plus side, the search giant asserted that it will use the report card to significantly spruce up its SEO system, as well as to assist others by sharing the data with them.

The report encompasses 100 products from Google, and the company has said it is already working on a follow-up report that will involve international localisations.

Of the items on the radar, one of the most notable failures for the company lies in its ’search result presentation’ where it managed to score 33/100 or even lower in three distinct categories, with the category “title tag and format length” being the lowest.

In addition to that, the search giant also said it needs to upgrade its destination sites images of logos led. The report pointed out that most of these logos were directed to pages where they were not supposed to

Originally published on ITProPortal.com

A Google representative has announced that the web censorship policies adopted by China can be classified as ‘Trade Dispute’ as local companies benefit when the government restricts the operations of foreign companies.

At the beginning of the year, search engine Google had reported that the company was the target of a sophisticated cyber attack, in which cyber criminals hacked into the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists.

Google had warned on its blog that the company will put a stop to its China operations if the Chinese government does not allow it to work in a censorship free environment as the cyber attack was traced back to China.

However, now, Bloomberg.com has reported that the Obama administration is planning to launch an official complaint against China with the World Trade Organisation (WTO) pertaining to the country’s stringent web censorship policies.

Illinois Senator Richard Durbin has announced that he plans to pass a legislation that will allow the government to prosecute US internet companies if they violate the human rights of their customers when a foreign government asks them to do so.

But the senator also added that “I recognize that the technology industry faces difficult challenges when they deal with repressive governments.”

Originally published on ITProPortal.com

Google is keen to get more developers like the prolific Edward Kim to code for the Android platform and has sent out a letter to some of them to inform them that they may receive a Nexus One as part of the company’s “device seeding program”.

Developers will need to have a 3.5 star rating with at least one application that have attracted a minimum of 5,000 downloads to qualify. Coders from Canada, the EU, Norway, Lichtenstein, Switzerland, Hong Kong, Taiwan, or Singapore will receive the handsets if they are selected.

According to Techcrunch, in the US, the developers will may receive a Droid rather than Nexus One (ed : better something than nothing though). Such a display of generosity have had some asking whether the whole thing wasn’t a scam in the first place.

However, Google sent a statement saying that “A thriving developer community is an important part of creating a better mobile experience for users around the world. We hope that offering devices to developers will make it easier for them to create and test great applications.”

It has been suggested that around 2,000 phones will be given away by Google during this campaign but already some are complaining that some countries like Australia have been unceremoniously left out.

Originally published on ITProPortal.com

An analytical study conducted by US security firm Damballa has been revealed that the cyber attack which was targeted at Google’s corporate infrastructure and that of 20 other US companies, was apparently carried out by a group of amateurs, who had been testing the attack since July 2009.

The company revealed that upon thorough investigation of the malware and CnC (Command And Control) topologies used by the cyber criminals, it was determined that the attack was a version of an increasingly common botnet attack, albeit a dangerous one.

Gunter Ollmann, vice president of research at Damballa, dismissing the Google attack as a state-sponsored operation, said in a statement that “I would say this particular botnet group was not well funded because the level of the tools used would have been far superior to what it was. Some of the codes within the malware were at least five years old.”

Explaining the functionality behind the alleged amateur botnet attack, Ollmann said that the botnet was based on basic command topology and relied heavily on Dynamic DNS CnC techniques which are hardly used by professional botnet developers who prefer more sophisticated techniques.

Mr. Ollmann went to add that criminals had targeted companies in seven other countries before setting their eyes on Google.

Originally published on ITProPortal.com

Topeka, a town in the State of Kansas, US, has unofficially changed its name to Google for the month of March in an attempt to secure a position in Google’s ‘Fibre for Communities’ program in which the search engine giant will roll out its fibre optic broadband connection to short listed cities at competitive prices.

In a recent post on the official Google blog, the company had announced that it plans to choose one city in order to test a new generation of broadband internet services, which according to sources, will allow users to access the internet at speeds 100 times faster then their present connections and enable data transfers at a speed of 1Gbps.

Commenting on the promotional gimmick, Topeka Mayor William W. Bunten, said in a statement that “I thought it was fun and would be interesting and would make us a little different from some of the other cities, Hopefully, the people at Google have a sense of humour.”

Google had asked US cities to file their requests before March 26th if they are interested in participating in the program and it seems that Topeka has some serious competition from cities like San Jose and Austin, Texas.

Originally published on ITProPortal.com

US-based tech website Venturebeat has reported that search engine giant Google has secured an important patent related to location based mobile advertisement technology, which was applied back in 2004, in an attempt to enforce its domination over the online advertisement market.

According to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office document, the patent awarded to Google will help the company in ‘Determining and/or using location information in an ad system.’

With the number of users accessing the web from their handheld devices is expected to rise this year, technology observers have predicted that the mobile online advertisement market will rise exponentially over the next few years.

However, the news of Google acquiring this patent will be a major concern for competitors who look to over throw Google with online mobile advertising platforms of their own including Cupertino based Apple, which recently acquired mobile ad network Quattro Wireless in an attempt to carve a niche for itself in the lucrative market.

Interestingly, the patent acquired by Google has some far-ranging implications which will make it impossible for competitors to enter the market, including location based ad targeting and modifying ads as per the users’ location.

Originally published on ITProPortal.com