google

Microhoo: When will the mating dance end?

The Microsoft-Yahoo mating dance or proposed shotgun wedding continues to drag out. Microsoft persists in saying nice things about Yahoo and outlining the reasons why the acquisition of $45 billion to $50 billion still makes sense (going after the high-profit-margin money with search and ads).

Yahoo recently outlined the reasons why Microsoft should pay more than $31 per share, citing a projected doubling of operating cash flow from $1.9 billion to $3.7 by 2010.

At the same time, as Mike Arrington reports, Yahoo is making efforts to ensure that the most valuable talent at the company doesn't … Read more

Google goes dark for Earth Hour

Google made an environmental gesture today by turning the lights out on the U.S. version of its search page. The black background doesn't save energy, but it's Google's way of observing Earth Hour. The global event, created by the World Wildlife Fund, encourages people around the world to turn off their lights at 8:00 PM today, March 29, for an hour.

Analyze, create robots.txt files in Google

Google's Webmaster Central has become a very important resource for anyone who has a Web site, works on a Web site, or, like SEO practitioners, helps others with their Web sites.

Google continues to roll out more features and better functionality to existing features, and now they just did a little bit of both with the addition of their Generate robots.txt function.

Google had previously added a robots.txt analyzer, which at this point is still the more useful of the two tools. For those who aren't aware, the robots exclusion protocol helps with instructing search engines … Read more

Video ads now showing on Google, Yahoo search

Video ads for select keywords are now showing up on Google and Yahoo search sites. I took a look and I have to say I prefer the Google ads because they seem less intrusive and obnoxious.

I typed in "smartphone" on Google's search site and saw a hot link that said "watch commercial" under the second sponsored listing on the right side. Clicking on that link opened a small 2-inch-by-2-inch window below the listing that automatically played the 34-second ad. I could pause the video or hide it.

I got a similar experience when I … Read more

FuseCal web-based calendar sync (Alpha release)

FuseCal currently in alpha, lets you add iCal-based calendars (and a few other formats) to a master calendar, then choose whether all those events, just the ones you pick, or events filtered by keyword will be synced to Outlook, Apple iCal, Google Calendar, or another program.

If this works well it will help to usher in a whole new world of calendar management that has to date been a nightmare.

Via: Lifehacker

Tech changes ideas about knowledge, solitude

Tech has changed our lives in so many ways. Two areas that interest me are our thoughts about knowledge itself, and our experience of solitude.

I used to like the game show Jeopardy and even tried out for it. I flew to Los Angeles for the day and passed the test when my daughter was five months old, proving to myself that my brain hadn't totally gone to mush. I didn't get called to be on the show, but the tryout was still a good experience.

But now, with Google and smart phones, we have all that information … Read more

Why are we clicking less on Google search ads?

The latest paid-click data for search engines shows that Americans are clicking on paid search ads less than we did last year--not an encouraging trend for the state of online advertising.

For Google alone, which represents about 60 percent of the U.S. search market and is a bellwether for Internet companies, this deceleration in paid-click growth has been going on since at least October. Year-over-year monthly growth rates in paid clicks have fallen from 37 percent in October to 27 percent in November, 12 percent in December, 0 percent in January, and now 3 percent in February, according to … Read more

Google: No kids allowed

Google's terms of service, while ignored by the vast majority of users, contain a pretty shocking clause: Under 18's are not permitted to use any of Google's Web properties. That's right, kids--no search, YouTube, Gmail, news, or images.

Under 18s wishing to watch YouTube videos of skateboarding dogs, or perform research for a school project will have to go elsewhere--Ask.com or Microsoft's Live.com search, perhaps. The message from Mountain View seems clear: We don't want your (underage) business.

Google's terms of service, thick with legalese, state that:

"You may not … Read more

Amazon adds redundancy and geographical resiliency to EC2

Amazon is introducing what is definitely the "must-have" utility for it's EC2 cloud computing offering to become a reality. Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service now has an application programming interface (API) that lets developers choose where its application physically runs.

As Martin LaMonica writes on News.blog:

This Availability Zones feature is important because people can now add redundancy to their application. Choosing multiple zones, people can have server instances with separate power, cooling, network access, and physical servers

This is an important move by Amazon and I would expect it to be echoed by … Read more