The safety risk to search engine users declined by about one percentage point according to a study from McAfee, "The State of Search Engine Safety." Sites that offer adware, spyware, viruses and exploits are considered risky.

Ok, so the New York Times doesn’t exactly get Google’s top algorithm execs to tell us how the search engine calculates search results, but they do get fresh insight as to how Google decides to update it’s technology.

The article includes interviews with Amit Singhal, Matt Cutts and Udi Manber.

Insights include details of Google’s internal system for evaluating search queries, called Debug.

Yahoo has announced the launch of its new Yahoo Search Marketing Commercial API Program, giving both individuals and agencies access to their APIs for the new Panama platform.

The Search Marketing Expo opened in Seattle with a Q&A session with Google’s Matt Cutts; it seems Matt came back from his vacation with mischief on his mind.

It looks like the Israel-based browser plug-in maker has taken some advice from last fall to heart, and made the information they can provide more easily accessible to users of local search.

I haven’t seen many comparisons yet of the new Mashup Editors so Jay Neely’s stuck out when he told me about it today. He compares Yahoo Pipes to Microsoft’s PopFly and also does an early analysis of Google’s Mashup Editor.

How about you? Have you tried any of the new RSS Mashup Editors? What do you think of them?

Lobbyists work on behalf of all sorts of nasty causes – some people might not approve of oil companies and tobacco corporations, for example.  But lobbyists also work on behalf of charitable organizations and the like.  And now one more lobbyist works for Google.

Launching a site quickly around an idea to claim a first mover advantage is rapidly becoming a mantra for new Web 2.0 startup sites. 

In 2005 JupiterResearch noted that less than 10 percent of RSS feeds had advertising in them, and no major advertisers were using feeds as part of their marketing strategies. 

How the times have changed. 

Google is acquiring Feedburner and sees it as a way for its base of hundreds of thousands of advertisers to reach some of the most active groups of Web users — social network members who use mini-applications called widgets or the growing audience surfing the Internet over mobile phones, executives said.