Matthew Hicks

The Firefox browser may have put the spotlight on the open-source Mozilla Foundation, but the groups namesake suite also continues to progress. Mozilla has released an interim update to the 1.7 branch of the application suite, which incorporates about 350 security and bug fixes that previously were made in Firefox 1.0 when it came out […]

Microsoft Corp.s growing group of 1,200 Weloggers were among those feeling the pinch from a recent rash of spam messages to blog comments. Company officials confirmed this week that some Microsoft Developers Network bloggers had noticed a spike in spam and that the company was encouraging bloggers to turn on comment moderation while it investigates […]

Six Apart late Monday planned to release an update to its Movable Type Weblogging software to combat a recent surge of blog comment spam. Movable Type bloggers began informing the company early last week that comment spam had reached levels that were knocking out servers at Web hosting companies and wreaking havoc on affected bloggers. […]

Verity Inc. has partnered with Yahoo Inc. to deliver Web search results within its enterprise-search platforms and to receive a cut of the revenue from enterprise customers who click on search-based ads. Verity on Thursday rolled out Verity Enterprise Web Search, a software add-on to its K2 Enterprise and Ultraseek system that lets enterprise merge […]

After years of taking a back seat to easier-to-crawl HTML pages, multimedia files are beginning to gain respect among search engines. The spotlight this week turned to video, whether streaming or downloadable, as Yahoo Inc. late Wednesday posted an early test version of video search to its Yahoo Next site for public prototypes. Meanwhile, a […]

Yahoo Inc. wants to make driving easier by merging traffic information into its online maps and driving directions. The Sunnyvale, Calif., company announced late Wednesday that it has added information about accidents and road conditions into its online maps for 70 metropolitan areas. For 20 of those local areas, it also is providing real-time data […]

Google Inc. is combining online reviews into its Froogle shopping-search service, but rather than eliciting new opinions it is aggregating reviews and ratings from around the Web. The Mountain View, Calif., company announced on Wednesday a beta of Froogle Product Reviews, which so far is limited to electronics products such as MP3 players and computers. […]

Google Inc.s victory in a major search advertising case could spell the beginning of the end for trademark-infringement claims against search engines that sell keywords to trigger ads, legal observers say. A federal judge on Wednesday dismissed the major claim in insurer GEICOs trademark-infringement lawsuit against Google. The Government Employees Insurance Co. accused Google of […]

Not content with organizing billions of Web documents, Google Inc. is leading the charge in turning library collections into searchable digital content. In announcing Tuesday that it is working with five major libraries to scan millions of books for inclusion in its Web index, Google opened another battle in the intense competition among the leading […]

On the heels of a series of desktop search releases, Ask Jeeves Inc. is set to launch an application to scour users hard drives for e-mails and files. Ask Jeeves, of Emeryville, Calif., will release a beta of its desktop-search application late on Wednesday that offers a three-button query box for searching local files, e-mails […]