Weekly Rap-up of Search Engine Industry News – 9/10 – 9/14

A summary of search related news items that occurred this week including CapGemini becomes big ally in helping Google distribute its Apps product, Yahoo! owned Right Media responsible for serving Trojan-laced ads on MySpace, PhotoBucket and other popular web destinations, Netscape announces new location of social news site – Propeller.com, 97th Floor releases social media extension for Firefox, and finally, Yahoo! is rumored to be interested in acquiring news aggregator BuzzTracker for 5 million.

Monday

• Google Gains Big Ally For Google Apps – Google has gained a major ally in working to distribute their Apps product. TechCrunch reports that CapGemini, who controls a million or so enterprise desktops and are one of the largest IT consulting businesses, will offer Google Apps to its clients. Google Apps directly competes with Microsoft Office as it include services such as email, calendar, word processing and spreedsheets. A PowerPoint type of application is supposedly on its way. CapGemini, which has distributed desktop applications from Microsoft for years (and will continue to do so), says this is a move towards the trend of “team productivity.” What they like in Google Apps is the ability for users to collaborate over documents online, and simultaneously.

Tuesday

• Yahoo! Owned Right Media Serves Trojan Viruses To MySpace & PhotoBucket Users - The Register reports that Right Media which is a wholly owned subsidiary of Yahoo! served up Trojan-laced banner ads on MySpace, PhotoBucket and other sites. The ads were served an estimated 12 million times over a three week period which started in August. The banners contained a Flash file that silently installed a Trojan back door on unpatched Windows machines that visited the popular web destinations. In a statement issued by a company spokeswoman, Yahoo said: “The ad has been identified as a high risk creative and banned from the exchange. However, we cannot control what happens elsewhere on the Net. We continue to enhance our protective tools and are committed to finding ways of keeping this type of activity away from consumers and publishers.”

Wednesday

• Netscape Announces Location of Social Media Site - Last week, Netscape had announced that they were killing their social news portal in favor of returning to their formal style of delivering news. They had stated that the social news site would be found at a new location. Now that location has been revealed, although there is nothing there at the writing of this post. Propeller.com will be the new location in which Tom Drapeau from AOL said they are “working hard behind the scenes to ensure a smooth transition before we officially launch at this new destination.” More coverage at SearchEngine Journal and TechCrunch.

Thursday

• 97th Floor Releases Social Media for Firefox Extension - 97th Floor has released an extension for the Firefox browser that promises to be an ultimate time saver in building powerful social media accounts. How does the tool work? When browsing social news sites (currently Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon and Del.ici.us) you will see icons appear next to each story title with the submission information. This will allow you to quickly see which sites a story hasn’t been submitted to so that you can be the first to submit it. being the first to submit stories helps one to become a power user at each of these social media sites over time.

Friday

• Yahoo! To Acquire News Aggregator, BuzzTracker - Michael Arrington of TechCrunch reports that there are rumors that Yahoo may have acquired news site BuzzTracker, a tiny news aggregation site, for $5 million. Michael thinks it is odd that Yahoo! didn’t make a run for TechMeme, the heavyweight in the automated news tracking niche. Until now, BuzzTracker has mostly been known for leaving spammy comments on blog posts that talk about TechMeme or Technorati to get a little extra traffic. But what are Yahoo!’s plans with this acquisition? All Things Digital suggests that they might be readying themselves to take on Digg.