Day: July 29, 2009

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Yahoo to use Microsoft Search

Good news for Microsoft. They reached a deal with Yahoo for Yahoo to use Microsoft’s new and rebranded search engine called Bing to power Yahoo searches. This, along with Bing’s big advertising push, should help Microsoft greatly against Google. It will also help that Bing is the default search engine in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Add to that Mirosoft’s uptick in image coming from the Windows 7 operating system release in October and you have a good story of Microsoft on the upswing (ignoring previous story of course).

The bad news for customers is that we lost another competitor in the field of search. Implementing a good search engine requires not only computer and mathematical skills, but also a vast array of servers which hold search results and send bots out to crawl the internet for new content. Therefore a big company is needed to truly compete in search. (There are smaller search engines that are quite good such as Cuil, but these ventures still require a lot of cash and have yet to gain market share or brand awareness).

This deal leaves us with only two big search engines left. According to research firm ComScore the existing search market is:

65% – Google
19.6% – Yahoo (now to use Bing)
8.4% – Microsoft Bing

Yahoo will still manage their own ads, but apparently using all Microsoft technology.

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Emergency Microsoft Patches

Bad news from Microsoft. Below is an excerpt from the Washington Post article titled Microsoft’s Emergency Patch Mess.

Microsoft today released a pair of emergency software updates (Redmond calls them “out-of-band” updates). Yes, that’s right folks: If you use Windows — and especially if you browse the Web with Internet Exploder Explorer – it’s once again time to update.

The backstory to these patches is a bit complex, so here’s the short version: A while back, Microsoft introduced several security flaws into a set of widely-used third-party software development tools, and today it’s correcting that error by issuing an updated set of tools. Another update tries to block attackers from exploiting those weaknesses while third-party software makers figure out how to fix their code with the updated tools.

On a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the most dire and far-reaching, Eric Schultze, chief technology officer at Shavlik Technologies, said he’d put the seriousness of today’s out-of-band patch releases at an 8.

“When I was at Microsoft, there were a couple of issues that we referred to as ‘Voldemort,’ meaning they were so nasty you didn’t even want to speak their names, and this one is kind of like ‘Son of Voldemort,'” Schultze said. “You really start to lose confidence in Microsoft’s security mechanisms when something like this happens.”