google

Google's Schmidt: We like Yahoo

Remember the old Saturday Night Live bit about Generalissimo Francisco Franco being still dead? The skit comes to mind whenever there's a twist in the Yahoo-Microsoft novella.

So it was last evening that The Wall Street Journal reported that Yahoo and Google were inching even closer to a search outsourcing deal. From Yahoo's perspective, the Google angle is a great way to try and convince Microsoft to sweeten its two-month old buyout bid.

So far, Microsoft has not budged. But a Citigroup analyst earlier Thursday suggested that Microsoft shares could handle a bigger Yahoo bid. I was hoping … Read more

Great Google quarter--and a new quote feature

Google announced a great quarter today, with net income jumping 31 percent to $1.31 billion for the first quarter, and I was equally impressed by a new feature on Google News that extracts quotes from news stories.

It comes in handy if you are looking for quotes from individuals and the sources, and you can slice and dice the quotes by relevance, date and time. However, it is a bit inconsistent right now. The two screens below shows how "words that matter" works:

I did another Google News search on "Eric Schmidt" and I got … Read more

Google clears Wall Street profit estimate

Google topped pessimistic Wall Street profit expectations Thursday, reporting a net income increase of 31 percent to $1.31 billion for its most recent quarter.

Excluding various items, that meant earnings per share of $4.84, well above the $4.52 expected on average by analysts surveyed by Thomson Financial. Revenue, which benefited an "immaterial" amount from the acquisition of DoubleClick, was $5.2 billion in the quarter ended March 31, compared with $3.7 billion for the same period a year earlier, the company said.

Excluding $1.49 billion in partner commissions called traffic acquisition costs, Google'… Read more

Google settles a score with ComScore

Chief Executive Eric Schmidt got straight to the point as he opened up Google's quarterly earnings conference call. Click growth, he said in a matter-of-fact tone, was much higher than speculated upon "by third parties." Hmm. Wondering who he might have been referring to?

Late Tuesday, ComScore put out a report suggesting that growth in paid-search clicks in the United States is slowing down. Then Google included this nugget in its earnings release Thursday afternoon:

Aggregate paid clicks, which include clicks related to ads served on Google sites and the sites of our AdSense partners, increased … Read more

Buzz Out Loud 705: Why court the pwnage?

In the news today, Safari saves your bacon with a hole-patching update, and NASA says it's better at math than teenagers (which we fervently hope is true). Yahoo and Google get closer to a deal, which we fervently hope is just going to happen, already, so we can quit speculating, and we're planning our summer road trip to Pittsburgh. Listen now: Download today's podcast EPISODE 705

NASA statement on student asteroid calculations http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2008/apr/ HQ_08103_student_asteroid_calculations.html

Yahoo-Google deal advances http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9920997-7.html http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120839839184321833.html… Read more

Google and Microsoft: Your next health care partner?

Google and Microsoft may eventually become the envy of medical researchers, as the technology behemoths take on the role of hosting health care databases for consumers' own personally controlled health records (PCHRs).

The movement toward consumers controlling their own health records and the means that will get them there raises several issues of concern, according to a report in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Under a PCHR, a patient would set up a portal that could authorize their doctors, health care providers, researchers, and family members to provide and share information relating to the patient. Those records and information … Read more

Google, AOL execs: Opting out of targeted ads OK by us

WASHINGTON--As advocacy groups bristle at online advertisers' increasingly sophisticated targeting techniques, top privacy lawyers at Google and AOL on Thursday backed "opt-out" technology as a way to give Internet surfers more say in the process--although they admitted it's far from perfect.

At the moment, a group called the Network Advertising Initiative allows Internet surfers to say no to targeted ads from more than a dozen major Web ad networks, including Google's DoubleClick, Yahoo and its Blue Lithium subsidiary, Microsoft's Atlas advertising unit, and AOL-owned Advertising.com and Tacoda. The system works by placing a cookie--a … Read more

OpenSocial apps now available to Orkut users in India

And now, the latest in social network developer platform announcements: Orkut, the community site owned by Google, has rolled out a directory of applications to its users in India and will continue to expand geographically over the next few weeks.

India, along with Brazil, is one of Orkut's main hubs of popularity; in Brazil, it faces many of the same issues that massive social networks like Facebook and MySpace do in the U.S. Despite having been developer in-house in Google's Mountain View, Calif.-based headquarters, the site has never really taken off stateside. Meanwhile, rival MySpace is currently launching an India-centric portal … Read more

Google tweaked search 450 times in 2007

Google is typically tight-lipped about it the inner workings of its search business, but there are a few nuggets worth looking at in a Popular Mechanics interview with Udi Manber, the Google vice president who oversees search quality. Among them: Google rejiggered its search algorithm 450 times last year.

The job of the algorithm is to best match Web pages with people's search terms. One tweak the company tried last week was increasing the "diversity" of search results so the listed Web pages would cover a broader scope in an attempt to compensate for the ambiguities of … Read more

Google will derail the Microsoft-Yahoo deal

Over the past few months, we've been inundated with constant stories about the future of Yahoo. Will it be gobbled up Microsoft? Will Yahoo get away? For quite a while, no one was quite sure. But after seeing what's going on with Google and the deal it may soon strike with Yahoo, the writing could be on the wall.

Last week, Yahoo announced that it had formed a temporary deal with Google that involved the company outsourcing its search ads to Google. At that time, the online firm said that it would give it a two-week trial period to see how it worked and make a decision after that time.

But after foregoing that two-week stipulation and deciding instead to try to form a deal now, Yahoo seems anxious and more willing than ever to sell itself to any other company but Microsoft.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Yahoo and Google are closer than ever to forming a deal that would see Yahoo increase its revenue by as much as $1 billion per year and throw a wrench into Microsoft's plans post-acquisition.

And while the Journal is reporting that the Yahoo-Google deal may have a stipulation in it that says it can be dissolved if Microsoft acquires the company, I'm not so quick to believe that any deal between the company won't put the hooks in Microsoft.

And if you ask me, when the deal is reached, Microsoft will be forced to back off.… Read more