LinkedIn Investigates Security Breach; Google Search Loses Momentum

Every week, Mountain View makes news with technology developments, discoveries and sometimes controversies.

In the weekly “Bits and Bytes” column we’ll relay the past week’s news highlights from our backyard giants, start-ups and small businesses alike.

is taking steps to figure out why a major security breach -- six million user passwords showing up on an underground site -- occurred. The company hired outside forensics experts to work alongside the company engineers and the FBI. Yet some analysts say that, no matter what steps they take, the breach will stall the company’s growth.

It’s been a long journey: 35 years after entering space, NASA’s Voyager 1 is on the edge of the solar system, close to entering interstellar space. That means it’s now 11.1 billion miles from Earth -- a distance from which the craft’s radio signals take 16 hours and 38 minutes to reach the antennas of NASA's Deep Space Network.

remains the dominant U.S. (and world) search engine, but has lost momentum as users of Yahoo! and Bing increased, according to Hitwise. In May 2012, Google accounted for 65.02 percent of U.S. searches, as opposed to 68.11 percent the year before. Bing-powered searches, on the other hand, accounted for 28.12 percent of searches versus 26.79 percent from the year before. For Yahoo searches, the figure is 14.95 percent versus 14.5 percent.

On Thursday, Google announced that it's donating a whopping $1 million to the . The grant, the district, is aimed at improving math education for kindergarteners through eighth graders. It will be funneled into training teachers to use new instructional strategies and software.

once again brings good news: small businesses added 40,000 new jobs in May, according to its small business employment index. Still, average monthly pay dropped to $2,688 in May, down slightly from the April figure of $2,692.