We're nearing the end of the year, Spybot-S&D 1.6 is out for about half a year now, and 2.0 is nearing beta. An important part of our 2.0 preparations of course evaluating where we could do better, we dug through a heap of statistics, and wanted so share a nice one with you:

Spybot-S&D 1.6 already improved the scan speed a lot, still, people complain about the time a full system scan takes again. This graph shows a "nice" explanation: the number of detection patterns used to detect malware has doubled since the release of 1.6 in July this year, to 343,003 detection patterns in this weeks update.

The graphs first steep increase can be explained with the addition of detections that needed the new capabilities of the 1.6 engine, and should you wonder about the following valley, that was a point where the new capabilities were used to reduce the amount of patterns needed, without actually reducing the detection range.

Conclusion? We have a massively improved detection range, and we're going to improve the scanning time this costs in 2.0 to counter the negative side (speed) of it.

This week, we're proud to report about a special event we visited last week. We get our share of "virtual" prizes and are proud about them, but they can't beat a physical trophy, which, sitting always present on a shelf, is a very nice sign of bundled encouraging appreciation by you, our users.

Last week, Deutsche Telekom's download portal softwareload.de presented the results of their Software of the Year 2008 survey in thirteen categories, and Spybot - Search & Destroy made the Gold prize as best Freeware, personally presented in 14 pounds of glass that'll look quite impressive among its colleagues. We thank all users who have voted in our favour there, even though we were lazy enough to not even advertise the voting here.

We're not just sitting on these merits of course, but are working hard on Spybot-S&D 2.0. We've justed added a screenshot gallery to the already existing weekly blog and project tools milestone for those curious about the future.

This weeks news start with our forums new Malware Removal Guides part. As you hopefully have noticed, we try to write down a few sentences about each threat Spybot-S&D detects. Thinking on how we could improve that service in preparation for Spybot-S&D 2.0, we decided to add more information. Removal guides are surely not a new idea, and not all can be really complete, since malware likes to use hiding methods that make them difficult to detect, and textual explanations already start to lack when it comes to randomized filenames. Still, some information is better than none, and we decided we'll just try and give our best in describing manual removal. Rolling out hundreds, if not thousands of guides will take a few days, maybe weeks, but you can already see the first ones here and comment here.

The Spybot 2.0 blog also has a new entry on usability for error handling concepts.