Google is prepping to launch its own mobile messaging app similar to WhatsApp, and WeChat likely in 2015, reports The Economic Times. The app will no1t require a Google login. The publication, based in India, focuses on how this app will support the local market, but provides insight into features and functions.

Yelp has created a demonstration, along with several other shopping and travel Web sites, that shows Google's bias toward its own pages in search results. The Chrome browser extension strips Google+ pages from Google's search results, forcing the search engine to display only the organic results if Google did not favor its own sites and links. While the Business Insider notes that Yelp isn't complaining Google dominates search, but rather that it uses the dominance to distort markets outside of the search industry.

What has the industry done to fix holes in mobile apps? Earlier this year, McAfee released a report that estimates 197% increase in mobile malware from 2012 to 2013, during a time when Bluebox Security revealed a flaw in millions of smartphones that could allow dangerous software to masquerade as a legitimate app and seize control of a phone. The flaw is believed to affect up to 99 percent of Android phones. The fear was that it could be used to turn a real Android app into one that would allow hackers to read personal data on the phone, send …

We heard it was coming. Now it's here. Microsoft began to rebrand Bing apps to MSN. Will Bing, the search engine, and Bing Ads, become the business brands that support the underlying search and ad features on MSN. Metro Bing apps for News, Weather, Travel, Finance, Sports, Health & Fitness, Food & Drink are now MSN apps. As the industry debated Microsoft's divestiture of Bing, were we really hearing about the Bing search and advertising technology melding behind the MSN brand?

A who’s who of Hollywood -- with the help of lawyer Marty Singer -- is going after Google for letting their nude photos remain searchable, online. “Representing over a dozen celebrities whose iCloud accounts were hacked and whose nude photos were stolen in late August, [Singer] is excoriating Google in a letter that threatens a $100 million lawsuit,” The Hollywood Reporter writes. “According to Singer, Google hasn't been expeditiously removing owned work from its platforms pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.”

Sometimes traffic from search engines don't make the big difference in click-through rates as expected. How much organic traffic can a site gain by ranking at the top of the search engine query listings? Philip Petrescu admits asking that question too. He started digging into Google Webmaster Tools, which allowed him to see how many people click on his Web site when searching for the keywords. This saved a lot of time and allowed me to make better choices in the future with the keywords he targeted. Here's how it works.

Rather than serve the full results, Google will show a link to a story along with the headline for news sites such as bild.de, bunte.de, and hoerzu.de, Google Germany's country manager Philipp Justus told PC World. The decision came after an ongoing legal battle that started by several German news publishers -- members of the collecting society VG Media. They sued in June after Google refused to compensate the publishers.