Software, Search Engine | featured news

Microsoft, Oracle, Kayak and other technology and search companies in the FairSearch.org coalition have filed a complaint with the European Union over Google’s Android mobile operating system, saying that the platform gives the tech giant an unfair advantage in mobile search.

Here’s some news you probably didn’t expect to read: Yahoo just released its own Web browser. Well, sorta. The new software, dubbed Yahoo Axis, is being called a "search browser." Its main trick is the ability to bypass the standard list of links and instead send users directly to websites and pages via thumbnails.

In 2010, Google gave its search engine a jolt, moving the web’s de facto gateway onto a new software platform dubbed “Caffeine.” Designed by Google itself, Caffeine was a way for the company to more rapidly add new links to its massive index of websites, including news stories and blog posts and chatter from web forums. According to the company, it provided “50 percent fresher” search results than its previous indexing system, which was based on a seminal Google creation called MapReduce.

Google has beefed up security on its Android mobile-device software to better prevent "malicious" software from residing in its app store.

Mozilla and MIcrosoft have teamed up to release a special version of Firefox that integrates Bing as the default search engine.

Following a nearly four-month trial period, Google is taking its mobile commerce application, Google Wallet, nationwide. In a blog post announcing the news, the search giant said it needed the time to extensively test the app, which lets users pay for goods by tapping their smartphones against special wireless readers, which are powered by MasterCard’s contactless “PayPass” technology.

Google is launching a new Gmail web app and updates to Calendar and Docs to make them more useful when there's no Internet.

The search-engine giant is facing complaints in South Korea as mobile phones using its Android software gain dominance.

A major software attack that distributed malicious programs to around 260,000 Android phones has put pressure on Google to do more to secure its market for smartphone apps.

How long does a Chrome notebook battery last? Eighteen days, in the case of my test model. Sad. I know that this is a beta product, but that is a major fail, even in beta. This is the cloud-computing dream, the Microsoft headache that could challenge the ecosystem from Dell to Firefox.