May 2008, Week 4 Weekly Round Up of Important Search Engine Related Happenings

Here are all the news, launches, updates or any thing that happened in world of Search Engines. All in a nutshell for you all to enjoy.

Google Webmaster Tool Develops Glitch, Sitemaps Cannot be Deleted?

According to Search Engine Roundtable, Google Webmaster Tools has supposedly developed a glitch, due to which Webmasters aren't able to delete Sitemaps from their user profiles.

There are several threads at Google Groups that suggest that no matter how many times Webmasters delete the Sitemaps, they keep on reappearing.

Yahoo! Search May 2008 Weather (Index) Update

Yahoo! has announced that it would be rolling out its 'Weather Update', that would include changes in the crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms. The expected update will continue for a couple of days, but Yahoo! expects to finish it soon.

As expected, there might be some unusual ranking changes and page shuffling in the index, but Yahoo! hopes to finish the update as soon as possible and that should surely keep the confusion and concerns among the Webmasters to a bare minimum.

Google Finally Providing Online Diagnostics of Malware Detection for Site Owners & Webmasters!

Earlier this month, Google had announced, the launch of 'Safe Browsing Diagnostic', an online tool that was meant to provide information about Google's automatic detections and investigations of the suspicious websites. This service is now fully functional and is showing near accurate data according to Google.

All you have to do is to add “google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=" before any domain name and you'll be presented with detailed results about the malware detection on the particular website. You can also check out the more simplified version at
http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2008-05-23-n62.html.

Microsoft All Set To Launch Social Bookmarking!

According to Microsoft's John Martin, Microsoft has launched a preview of its Social Bookmarking Service. This service is available for both MSDN and TechNet.

This new service will not be fully operational in the 'preview' version and will only be available in English. However, it will enable the users to:

1. Bookmark any URL on the web.
2. Apply tags.
3. Save the bookmarks in the 'My Bookmarks Tool'.

Microsoft has enabled the bookmarks, bookmarkers and tags as links, hence making it easier for the users to 'surf' through them and discover new content and people. The Social Bookmarking Tool will also be embedded in user profiles, thus empowering the members of the community with new tools to increase their visibility, impact, and influence.

These are the news, reviews and events that have marked their impact on the Search Engine Industry this week. Sit tight for more news from this ever evolving domain. Have a great weekend!

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