ReadWriteWeb

A spokesperson for European Commission Vice President Joaquin Almunia confirmed to ReadWriteWeb this afternoon from Brussels that the Commission has yet to come to a decision over whether to issue a Statement of Objections to Google, specifically with respect to an official investigation into whether the company weights search results - especially searches for commercial products - against certain sites, including online retailers.

The confirmation comes after a Bloomberg News report this morning appeared to indicate the EC had yet to reach a decision about an investigation concerning whether Google makes arbitrary choices with regard to which sites receive higher-ordered results in Google News. As Comm. Almunia's spokesperson tells RWW, his statement was actually in response to something else entirely: specifically, a question submitted by another commissioner into whether, over a two-year period, the Commission has obtained evidence showing Google actively demotes specific retailers.

Security firm BitDefender has come out with a new cloud-based endpoint security service. Called Cloud Security for Endpoints, it is available now. You can centrally manage a variety of clients across different locations, provided you have an Internet connection to all of them most of the time.

We last wrote about them earlier this summer, covering their Total Security 2012 product. and last covered cloud-based endpoint tools in August when we wrote about Digital Persona.

A week after version 2.5 of Google's tweaks to the search rank algorithm - A.K.A. Panda - rolled out across the Web, new data from Searchmetrics show that the changes appear to be rolling back. Panda is designed to reduce the impact of content farms and other low-quality sites that game Google's page ranking algorithm.

Out of the 30 domains that were hit hardest by last week's changes, 10 of them have recovered to receive more traffic than before Panda 2.5, with another 10 restored to 80-90% of their pre-Panda 2.5 visibility. Only four sites did not recover their SEO visibility: bettermedicine.com, faqs.org, ohinternet.com and The Next Web.

Google recently rolled out version 2.5 of its tweaks to the search ranking algorithm - codenamed Panda - to improve the quality of search results for users. Panda suppresses the impact of content farms and other low-quality sites that game the system.

New data from Searchmetrics show that consumeraffairs.com, savings.com and prnewswire.com were among the biggest losers. Consumer sites like Motor Trend and technology blogs The Next Web and Technorati also lost significant ground since the update. The biggest winner in Google's Panda update? YouTube, Google's own Web property.

Google's recent improvements to its search-ranking algorithms, codenamed "Panda," have just rolled out in all languages except Chinese, Japanese and Korean. The changes are intended to reduce the effect of "content farms," sites that churn out lots of low-quality content to skew search results in their favor. Reports show that Panda appears to be working; the biggest content farms have shown marked decreases in traffic since Panda first launched in the U.S.

The changes began in February for the U.S. market and expanded internationally, though still only for English results, in April. Google reports that the algorithm changes affected almost 12% of English queries and the inclusion of new languages will affect 6-9% of queries worldwide.

NSS Labs has released its latest report: Endpoint Protection Product Group Test Report: Host Intrusion Prevention. As in its recent socially engineered malware protection test, AVG and Panda received "caution" ratings from NSS for their respective enterprise endpoint protection products. Enterprise products from Norman and NSS president Rick Moy's former employer ESET also received "caution" ratings. Norman's anti-malware appliance, however, was recently certified by NSS.

The study examined security products' ability to prevent client-side exploits - attacks that take advantage of vulnerabilities in software such as Adobe Reader or Web browsers. Operation Aurora, which hit Google and many other major companies late last year, is an example of such an exploit.

This week NSS Labs released their Q2 2010 Corporate Endpoint Protection Products report. NSS has only publicly announced the two products it specifically recommends against: Panda's Internet Security 2010 (Enterprise) and AVG's Internet Security Business Edition 9. However, it takes only a quick look at Trend Micro's web site to guess how NSS rated Office Scan (hint: very well). Some vendors have protested NSS's ratings in the past, but like it or not NSS is changing the way security testing is conducted.