google

What Yahoo's Google gambit says about the failure of 'Panama'

So if Yahoo thinks so much of Google's search technology, why did it waste all those millions on its 'Panama' ad system?

All I can say is that Jerry Yang must really pack a pair.

After spending millions to build a Google-like algorithm, the company plans to test Google's AdSense for Search service.

Say what?

"This is only a limited test, and does not necessarily mean that Yahoo will join the AdSense program," the company said.

Sure.

Yahoo can spin this as a experiment on 3 percent of its traffic and thus stand on terra firma … Read more

Yahoo to try using Google for search ads

Yahoo will test the use of Google advertisements on some of its search pages, the companies said Wednesday, a move that raises the possibility of a significant departure from Yahoo's present ad strategy.

"Yahoo will be testing Google's AdSense for Search service, which will deliver relevant ads alongside Yahoo's own natural search results. This is only a limited test, and does not necessarily mean that Yahoo will join the AdSense program," Google spokesman Daniel Rubin said.

The test is narrow in scope, Yahoo said: "The test will apply only to traffic from yahoo.com … Read more

Why Google puts privacy second

European regulators sent shock-waves through the search engine industry earlier this week, when they proposed significantly tighter rules for logging data. If the EU adopts the proposed rules, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft will have to significantly reduce the amount of time they keep identifying search logs, and will have to start treating IP addresses as personally identifiable data -- something that Google has been particularly vocal against.

Google has recently engaged in a major public relations effort to try and make a credible argument for keeping log data. The company has trotted out respected employee researchers to try and make … Read more

Real estate site offers Google Street View

Trulia, a residential real estate search engine, has incorporated Google Maps Street View into its Web pages, the company said Wednesday.

The combination presents Google's view of a particular property from the road and lets users virtually pivot around to see the surrounding area. It works in the 40 cities where Google has supplied imagery for its Street View service.

It's nothing that couldn't have been done manually before by typing an address into a separate window with the Google view, or likely even with an on-page mashup, but having the curbside vantage readily available is certainly … Read more

Google App Engine: Cashing in on the user data

Google's announcement of its App Engine has naturally generated a lot of buzz, as well as some fear, uncertainty, and doubt. There is the concern that Google will corral even more user data via its App Engine, becoming a kind of 21st century data and advertising baron, as Microsoft has been the operating system and productivity software baron in the last three decades.

If you extrapolate from Google's growing share of search and advertising, and include a growing share of Web applications through its APIs and the fledgling App Engine, you could imagine a Google that becomes the … Read more

What's a better investment: Computers, chips, or coffee?

Sometimes I'm so uninspired I can't come up with a decent blog post to save my life. When that happens, I turn to what comforts me: numbers. Yes, I know how weird that sounds. What can I say, I'm a geek.

Anyway, I just got to wondering how investors in various technology companies fared over the long haul. I was just as interested in how technology companies performed versus companies with a more traditional business model.… Read more

Dave Winer looks into Google's App Engine and sees the future

Software pioneer Dave Winer knows about disruptive technology. He was instrumental in formulating RSS, XML-RPC, OPML, outliners, and podcasting.

Here's part of what Dave had to say about Google's App Engine, a foray into making its infrastructure available to developers.

Now, what Google announced is really exciting! I'm not kidding. It's even better than I hoped. Yes, it's only Python, but IBM's PC-DOS was only BASIC and Pascal when it first came out, and it didn't matter. Yeah, I preferred C, but I coded in Pascal because that's what you had to … Read more

Yahoo extends Flickr with video

In a bid to broaden Flickr if not actually crush YouTube, Yahoo is adding videos to what has just been a photo-sharing site.

The change, which the company plans to launch publicly later Tuesday, is a modest but significant extension of Flickr's features. The videos, limited to 90 seconds and 150MB, will be shown as thumbnails alongside users' photos, and will inherit all the features of photos stored on the site: users can add comments, captions, comments, geotags, and privacy restrictions so only friends or family may view the videos, the company said.

The company sees the videos in … Read more

Speed up Gmail searches the old-fashioned way

Gmail is great for many reasons, but one of them is the built-in power search tool. It's constantly indexing your e-mails to makes them easy to parse through on a later date.

My colleague and how-to guru, Dennis O'Reilly, of CNET's Worker's Edge has a few tips for people who want to speed up the way they search for old e-mails as their in-boxes continue to grow and fill up with messages. His tips involve using good old-fashioned operators, the little shortcuts you can put in front of a query to flavor your results.

You can … Read more