New Google Search Engine Boosts 'Blogging'

New Google Search Engine Boosts 'Blogging'

Sep 15, 7:51 AM (ET)

By MICHAEL LIEDTKE

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - A new Google Inc. (GOOG) specialty search engine sifts through the Internet's millions of frequently updated personal journals, a long-anticipated development expected to help propel "blogging" into the cultural mainstream.
The new tool, unveiled Wednesday at , focuses exclusively on the material contained in the journals known as Web logs, or "blogs."http://blogsearch.google.com
Mountain View-based Google, the Internet's general search engine leader, first set its sights on blogs with its 2003 acquisition of a small startup called Blogger that makes software to publish and manage the journals.
Since that deal, Google had been expected to build a blogging-focused search engine - a mission finally accomplished by a group of by developers in the company's New York office.
"There really has been a need for a world-class search product to expose this dynamic content to a worldwide audience," said Jason Goldman, who came to Google in the Blogger deal and is now the company's product manager for blogging search.
Over the past two years, blogs have become an increasingly popular vehicle for sharing opinions and information, sometimes breaking news and more often prodding the mainstream media into reconsidering how it has handled some big stories.
First word of Google's new searching tool was, in fact, disseminated by a blog.
A few people have been able to make a living largely off their blogs, or parlay them into book deals. Blogs also have been a source of embarrassment and angst, resulting in the firings of several workers, including a Google product manager, who angered their employers with revelations posted on their sites.
No one knows for certain just how big the so-called "blogosphere" has become. Technorati, the niche's top search engine so far, says it indexes 17.1 million sites spanning about 1.5 billion links.
Goldman declined to disclose the size of Google's blogging index.
Despite blogging's steady growth, its appeal has remained narrow, skewing primarily to younger audiences and technological trendsetters.
But given Google's broad reach, its specialty search engine is expected to provide blogging with additional momentum. Google said to tool would allow searches not just for blogs written in English but also in French, Italian, German, Spanish, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Portuguese and other languages.
The appearance of the new Google tool, which catalogs the latest blog postings by looking at the Web feeds they generate, also makes it more likely that two other tech powerhouses and fierce rivals, Yahoo Inc. (YHOO) and Microsoft Corp. (MSFT), will develop a similar feature.
Microsoft's next operating system, Vista, is supposed to feature built-in tools for Really Simple Syndication, or RSS, and Atom - the two most widely used techniques for letting people subscribe to Web feeds to keep abreast of the latest postings on blogs and news sites.
"This sort of feels like 1995 when the Web was just starting to explode. Now it feels like the same thing is happening to blogging," said Bob Wyman, chief technical officer for PubSub, which offers a Web feed subscription service.
Google, Yahoo and Microsoft's MSN already had been indexing blogs in their general search engines, but the broad approach reaps results that often buries blog links or points to outdated information.
By focusing exclusively on blog feeds, Google theoretically will be able to deliver fresher and more relevant results.
Google's expansion, coupled with the likely invasion of Yahoo and Microsoft, could spell trouble for the early specialty engines that have helped bolster blogging in its early stages. Besides Technorati, this group includes Feedster, IceRocket and DayPop.
Although the pioneers have played an important role in blogging's growth, they remain so small that only Technorati attracts enough visitors to register in the monthly Internet traffic measurements compiled by Nielsen/NetRatings.
Technorati drew 545,000 unique visitors last month, less than 1 percent of the 73.1 million that swarmed to Google's main search page, Nielsen/NetRatings said.
In a Wednesday posting on his blog, Technorati founder David Sifry welcomed Google's competition, describing it as "a validation moment for the blogosphere" and promising to counter with "some tricks up our sleeves."

Careful or they'll hear your password

Careful or they'll hear your password
September 15, 2005

Computer scientists at the University of California at Berkeley have found a new way to crack computer passwords: By listening.

Professor Doug Tygar and graduate student Li Zhuang use off-the-shelf microphones to record keystroke sounds and run the noise through a modified program originally designed to recognize human speech. On its first pass, the program correctly identifies only half the typed letters. The results are then fed through software that spots spelling and grammar errors. Data from these programs are used to train the keystroke recognizer, so that it gets more accurate with each pass. By the third run, ''we get 96 percent of all the characters," said Tygar.
Tygar said that when assigned to crack a 10-digit password, the software replies with 75 possibilities. ''This means we can break into one of every 75 people's accounts, on the first try," he said.
Even more alarming, sound snoopers don't need direct access to the computer. They could aim a sensitive parabolic antenna from a building across the street. They might tap the target's telephone and collect keystroke sounds from its microphone. Many computers even have built-in microphones that ''Trojan horse" software could trick into switching on and relaying the sounds to a remote location.
Tygar said that computer users should adopt alternatives, such as ''two-factor authentication," produced by companies like RSA Security Inc. of Bedford. This method involves two passwords -- the typical kind, and a second numerical one generated by an electronic device. The second password changes once a minute.
''That sort of system would be robust against our attack," said Tygar, ''because you'd never type in the same password twice."
The research was subsidized by the US Postal Service and the National Science Foundation as part of a program to identify computer security threats.

HIAWATHA BRAY

© Copyright 2005 Globe Newspaper Company.

Yahoo Launches Test of E-Mail Upgrade

Yahoo Launches Test of E-Mail Upgrade

Sep 14, 12:42 AM (ET)

By MICHAEL LIEDTKE

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - Yahoo Inc. (YHOO) on Wednesday will begin testing a sleeker version of its free e-mail service, shifting to a more dynamic design that mimics the look and feel of a computer desktop application like Microsoft Corp. (MSFT)'s Outlook.
The Sunnyvale-based company plans to invite a "sizable" portion of its current e-mail accountholders to experiment with the retooled service, said Yahoo spokeswoman Karen Mahon, who declined to be more specific.
If the test goes well, all of Yahoo's e-mail users - an audience that spans tens of millions - eventually will be converted to the new system.
Yahoo imported most of the changes from Oddpost, an e-mail startup the company bought for an undisclosed amount last year.
The overhaul, described as the most extensive since Yahoo began offering free e-mail accounts eight years ago, represents the latest salvo in a technological tug-of-war for online traffic.
For the past two years, Yahoo and its main Internet rivals - Google Inc. (GOOG), AOL and Microsoft's MSN.com - have been unveiling a series of upgrades aimed at attracting and retaining their Web audiences so they remain appealing outlets for advertisers.
Google, which runs the Internet's most popular search engine, shook things up in the e-mail market last year by introducing a free service that included 250 times more storage than some of its rivals. Yahoo and MSN subsequently matched Google, which responded by more than doubling its e-mail storage limit to 2.5 gigabytes.
More recently, the major e-mail providers have been introducing other bells and whistles to keep their users happy and coming back for more ads. Yahoo's upgrade follows recent AOL improvements meant to make its e-mail service quicker and easier to use.
"Last year was the year of storage in e-mail, but now the real competition seems to be about who has the coolest user interfaces," Radicati Group analyst Marcel Nienhuis said.
Yahoo's e-mail service is currently leading the pack, with 63.6 million unique U.S. visitors during July, according to the most recent figures from comScore Media Metrix, a research firm. AOL ranked second with 48.7 million visitors followed by MSN's Hotmail (44.4 million), Comcast Corp. (CMCSA)'s Webmail (5.6 million) and Google's Gmail (5.4 million).
With its changes, Yahoo's e-mail will look more like a traditional inbox that operates through a software program installed on a computer hard drive instead of being hosted on the Internet. Yet Yahoo's redesigned service still relies on a Web browser and won't require its users to install anything on their computers.
Using "dynamic" html, Yahoo's e-mail accounts will feature an inbox containing all e-mails on the top of the page with a separate pane for reading e-mail below it. The feature is meant to enable users to scroll through an e-mail folder without having to click back and forth between Web pages.
Yahoo's test audience also will use a computer mouse to "drag and drop" e-mails from one folder to another and search all the content, including attachments, stored in the inbox.
"Our competition has been doing some interesting things in e-mail, but we think we have leapfrogged them all with all these new features," said Ethan Diamond, an Oddpost co-founder who works for Yahoo as a director of product management.

Microsoft to Release New Developers Tools

Microsoft to Release New Developers Tools

Sep 8, 9:00 PM (ET)

SEATTLE (AP) - Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) is releasing several new tools to help developers build software applications that work with its online search and communication products.
The hope is that such add-ons will draw more users to Microsoft products and help the company better compete with market leaders such as Google Inc. (GOOG) and America Online Inc. The tools will mostly be released at a Microsoft developer conference next week in Los Angeles.
Redmond-based Microsoft said Thursday the tools are for add-ons to its desktop, Internet and localized search technologies, as well as its MSN Messenger instant messaging program.
For example, one developer is working on a tool that would automatically translate instant messages from one language to another as they are being sent, said Adam Sohn, a director in the marketing group for Microsoft's MSN Internet unit.
Other tools are aimed at letting developers build specialized programs on top of its search engine, so that people could more easily conduct specialized searches from smaller data pools.
The releases include tools to build specialized products for its localized search function called Virtual Earth, which will allow results from multiple searches to be layered atop a single map. The tools will be free to some developers, in a bid to jumpstart interest in the developing technology.
Many companies, including Microsoft and Mountain View, Calif.-based Google, are working to improve localized search functions, both because they are helpful and because they have huge potential for advertising revenue.