Analytical company Covario has reported that Yahoo, for the first time in the last two years, received large budgets on search advertising in the second quarter of 2008 from Google.

According to Covario, Yahoo increased its own share in the U.S. by 10% in Q1'08 to 14% in Q2'08. At the same time Google shifted from 86% to 81% over the same period.

Covario also noted a general decline in the growth of commercial search because of unfavourable period of economy, budgetary constraints and better optimization, which helps reduce the budgets for advertising. According to the company, the rate of annual market growth declined from 52% to 43%.

Known research company SecTheory, working on Internet security, has reported that the security of users when dealing with services and personalized Google homepage is under threat.

The reason for this is the company’s policy that supports not tested applications from third parties. Placing unknown gadgets on the home page, user might fall victims to hackers who may intercept their personal information.

When login at iGoogle.com, the user’s data is redirected by malicious gadgets creating the possibility of phishing.

In comments to Associated Press Google has reported that all gadgets are regularly scanned for the malicious code and placed on quarantine if discovered. Nevertheless, this comment did not satisfy the representatives of SecTheory, because there were a few examples of gadgets that remained on Google’s hosting despite the presence of malicious code.

According to Redorbit

Microsoft finishes beta testing of a tool for managing sites in the Live Search system - Webmaster Tools. In addition, there were included new features.

Among the innovations there is "Crawl Issue" which shows problems of indexing a site by MSN bot. Webmaster Tool also shows more data on backlinks and makes the data more interactive, allowing to download and filter them.

Google Translate will soon become "alive". One of the richest translation and localization services will soon expand its proposed set of services involving real translators.

Foreign translators and volunteers, and not the company employees, will likely carry out professional translations and improve Google's machine translation, or complete a translaction on order from scratch.

Google Translation Center will allow users to upload the document and select the required professional from the register. This style of work may allow customers to receive translation at a reasonable cost of not only individual pages, but also of whole sites.

Yahoo Inc. announced the beginning of the compensation program in connection with the closure of its own online music store on September 30 of this year.

According to the company, customers who paid for the purchase of music would receive compensation coupons for the purchase of tracks from the new Yahoo's partner Rhapsody. Music will be sold in MP3 format without copy protection.

According to the Yahoo's press secretary Kerry Davis, a "small amount" of users will be affected by the closure of the store. Yahoo does not give the actual number of users who will lose their money.

According to Chicago Tribune