Yahoo! Sets 90-Day Data Retention

Source: Yahoo! Press Release

Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) announced a new global data retention policy that sets an industry-leading approach to user data privacy.

Under the new policy, Yahoo! will anonymize user log data within 90 days with limited exceptions for fraud, security and legal obligations. Yahoo! will also expand the policy to apply not only to search log data but also page views, page clicks, ad views and ad clicks.

"In our world of customized online services, responsible use of data is critical to establishing and maintaining user trust," said Anne Toth, Yahoo!'s Vice President of Policy and Head of Privacy. "We know that our users expect relevant and compelling content and advertising when they visit Yahoo!, but they also want assurances that we are focused on protecting their privacy."

To read the full story, Visit Yahoo! Press Release

Live Search will be testing a New Crawler - msnbot/2.0b

Source: Live Search Webmaster Blog

Live Search team is likely to test a new crawler - msnbot/2.01b. However the new crawler will follow the current robots.txt protocol set for MSN. Here goes the post from the Live Search Webmaster Blog....

Live Search is committed to continuing to improve how we discover and crawl your content. In the coming weeks, we will be testing an update to MSNBot, which may show up as a new crawler name in your referrer logs. The new crawler user agent string will appear as:

msnbot/2.0b (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)

You’ll still see the current version msnbot/1.1 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm) as Live Search’s primary user agent. We intend to ensure that any robots exclusion protocol you are using is respected. As such, you don’t need to update your Robots.txt file. We plan on crawling at a slow speed during the tests with the updated version.

When the new crawler replaces our current crawler, we will keep you up-to-date here on the Webmaster Center blog. If you have any questions about the Live Search web crawlers, you can post them in our forums.

Microsoft Releases oxite - Open Source Blogging Platform

clipped from www.readwriteweb.com Today, Microsoft released an alpha version of its own open source content management system, Oxite. The source code for the software is available under the Microsoft Public License. While Microsoft mostly describes Oxite as a blogging platform, the Oxite team also points out that you could use it as a content management system to develop more or less any type of site. Oxite currently powers Microsoft's own Mix Online and also uses some recycled parts from Channel 9 . Some of the major features of the software include support for Gravatars, pingbacks, trackbacks, RSS feeds, commenting, and the MetaWebLog API (so you can use your favorite blogging client to post to your Oxite blog directly).

Search Ranking Algorithm

Source: seobook.com

British ISPs filtering Wikipedia

clipped from news.cnet.com Internet service providers in the U.K. have begun filtering access to Wikipedia after the site was added to the Internet Watch Foundation's blacklist. The following notice appeared on Wikipedia on Saturday when many UK users attempted to edit content: Wikipedia has been added to a Internet Watch Foundation UK website blacklist, and your Internet service provider has decided to block part of your access. Unfortunately, this also makes it impossible for us to differentiate between different users, and block those abusing the site without blocking other innocent people as well.

Google WebMaster Tools Update: One Place for changing your Site's settings

Google Webmaster team has blogged on Dec 4th about adjusting settings for the website, such as crawl rate or georaphic target.

By adding a new settings link in webmaster tools google consolidated few features in a single page.

The settings that have been moved to the new Settings page are:

1. Geographic Target
2. Preferred domain control
3. Opting in to enhanced image search
4. Crawl rate control

To know more , Visit Google Webmaster Central Blog