Alibaba suspends public trading to buy back its stock from Yahoo

Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba has suspended public trading of its shares in Hong Kong as it prepares to buy back its 40 percent stake held by Yahoo.

The transaction is said to be worth between $10 billion and $11.5 billion.

In a filing with the Hong Kong stock exchange, Alibaba representatives said the company would be releasing a statement today that would be “potentially price sensitive.”

Late last year, Alibaba began rounding up the financing … Continue Reading

96 percent of Google’s revenue is advertising, who buys it? (infographic)

A whopping 96 percent of Google‘s $37.9 billion 2011 revenue came from advertising, but who is putting all that cash in Google’s wallet?

Google is best known for its web search product, which has completely overturned how we research and find answers. But the search itself is only the basis upon which its golden empire has been built. Advertising based on search, as well as banner advertising on websites touches nearly every industry. It even … Continue Reading

Yahoo revenue down 13 percent in Q4, CEO says better execution needed

Yahoo‘s revenue dropped 13 percent compared to the same period last year, the company reported today. In its quarterly earnings’ announcement Tuesday, Yahoo reported $1,324 million in GAAP revenue for the fourth quarter of 2011, while costs increased by 10 percent. Excluding traffic acquisition costs from Yahoo’s partnership with Microsoft and others, the company brought in $1,169 million — down just three percent compared to last year.

The numbers aren’t very surprising as Yahoo continues … Continue Reading

Google+ introduces new Q&A feature for crowdsourcing answers from friends

Google has taken social interaction with your friends to another level. The search engine giant has introduced a new Google+ feature that allows you to ask friends about your search results.

Google is testing the new “Ask on Google+” feature, which pops up at the bottom of your search results. Click the link to ask your friends any question related to restaurants, movies, how to make friends on Google+, or other topics. Your question will … Continue Reading

Yahoo considers selling Asian assets, continues fickle CEO search

Yahoo’s board is considering selling its holdings of Alibaba Group and its Japanese affiliate back to the majority owners, a move that would score the company around $17 billion as it tries to find solid footing in troublesome year.

Yahoo has been shaky in 2011 with falling revenues and uncertainty after the firing of CEO Carol Bartz. A cash infusion and and restructuring of assets might be just the thing to help the company find … Continue Reading

Google chronicles the evolution of search (video)

Have you ever wondered how Google’s search got so good? An insightful new video released by Google uses employee interviews and engaging graphics to show how Google’s core search product has evolved since it began in 1997.

While it’s easy to focus on evolving Google products like Gmail and Google+, Google still makes most of its revenues on search and advertising. And its core search product is still one of the most helpful ways to … Continue Reading

Google’s Motorola Mobility acquisition will get a decision from EU in January

Regulators in the European Commission will give a thumbs-up or thumbs-down to Google’s acquisition of Motorola Mobility sometime in January 2012.

Google must get the approval of both U.S. and EU officials before the acquisition can be completed. Since the deal would put the search giant into a particularly close relationship with an Android manufacturer — one of many such OEMs — anti-trust concerns hang in the balance.

EU officials have set a provisional deadline … Continue Reading

Search startup Blekko closes $30M funding round

Ambitious search engine startup Blekko has closed a new $30 million funding round, the company announced today.

Unlike search giant Google, Blekko uses slashtags to help filter results, which means it searches only the sites you want and discards the bulk of spammy and artificially-gamed SEO sites. The startup launched its search engine in 2010.

The new round was led by Yandex, the top Russian search engine company that also operates in Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Belarus … Continue Reading

A timeline of turmoil at Yahoo

Here’s a timeline of major events in the history of Yahoo.

January 1994: Jerry Yang and David Filo create Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web while studying at Stanford University.

April 1994: The search engine is renamed Yahoo.

March 1995: Yahoo is incorporated.

April 1996: Yahoo goes public, closing at $33 a share.

1997- 1999: string of acquisitions includes Four11, Viaweb, Yoyodyne Entertainment, Geocities and Broadcast.com.

January 2000: Yahoo stock hits all-time high of … Continue Reading

Why everyone wins in July’s search engine market results

Yahoo gained some ground while search leader Google lost some footing in July’s search engine market.

This is according to ComScore’s data, released today. Yahoo had 16.1 percent market share in July, up from 15.9 percent in June, while Google held steady at 65.1 percent, just barely down from 65.5 percent in June.

Yahoo’s move is the most exciting news to come out of today’s data. The company’s search share hadn’t budged since April 2011, … Continue Reading

Baidu adds English search results from Microsoft’s Bing

Chinese search giant Baidu announced on Monday that it would add English results from Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, to its own search engine.

The results from Baidu are currently primarily in Chinese. That includes search queries that users type in English. For example, typing in “Last.fm” will deliver search results in Chinese, even if the link in the search results points to the English version of Last.fm.

The new deal will give Microsoft a foothold … Continue Reading

Bing replaces Google as default search engine on BlackBerry devices

At the BlackBerry World 2011 conference today in Orlando, Florida, today, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer announced that its Bing search engine will be replacing Google as the default search and maps provider on all of Research in Motion (RIM)’s BlackBerry devices.

The Bing search engine has been steadily gaining market share — it currently holds 27 percent of the search engine market compared to Google’s 67 percent — and this deal comes as a major … Continue Reading

YouTube Instant creator accepts YouTube job, will continue at Stanford

The past few weeks have been good to Stanford student Feross Aboukhadijeh (pictured right with YouTube CEO Chad Hurley), who created the YouTube Instant site earlier this month and was then famously offered a job at YouTube. Aboukhadijeh announced on his blog today that he will accept the YouTube job offer while continuing his studies at Stanford, and he also revealed some interesting statistics and new features for his site.

Aboukhadijeh says that YouTube Instant … Continue Reading

Supposed Google-killer Cuil's reign of terror may finally be over

Cuil. Just writing that ill-begotten search engine’s name again makes me shudder. But hopefully, this may be the last we’ll hear of the site for some time. Cuil.com went down tonight, and according to former employees, it’s down for good, TechCrunch reports.

Current Cuil employees apparently weren’t paid this week, and they’re seeking other work, the ex-employees said. There aren’t any other details to go with at this time, but the situation certainly doesn’t look … Continue Reading

DEMO: Semantifi crawls the deep, dark recesses of the Web for answers

Semantifi is one of 70 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Fall 2010 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After our selection, the companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

Google and other popular search engines only search about 1 percent of the Web, according to research data from UC Berkeley. That just isn’t enough for deep-Web crawler Semantifi, which launched its new search engine … Continue Reading

Wowd launches tool to find what's important on Facebook

Facebook’s 500 million-plus users are a noisy bunch. To cut through the chatter, search engine Wowd today announced it has launched a new tool dubbed the Social Discovery Client.

Wowd has been telling Web surfers what’s popular online by gauging what gets clicked on the most, but the newly released tool for Facebook lets users easily filter updates from friends, create custom feeds, and block game spam. The tool must be downloaded and works with … Continue Reading

Bing bets big on entertainment: Adds music streams, games, TV shows, and movies

Bing is on a roll with updates for the summer. Yesterday, we reported on the search engine’s revamped iPhone app, and last night it unveiled its new entertainment section. The new portion of the site offers music lyrics and streaming, a collection of online games, a detailed list of TV episodes available to watch on the web, and improved movie-going resources.

The updates are in response to trends Bing has been seeing on the web. … Continue Reading

Yahoo releases iPhone apps for Search and Sketch-A-Search

Bing is on a roll with updates for the summer. Yesterday, we reported on the search engine’s revamped iPhone app, and last night it unveiled its new entertainment section. The new portion of the site offers music lyrics and streaming, a collection of online games, a detailed list of TV episodes available to watch on the web, and improved movie-going resources.

The updates are in response to trends Bing has been seeing on the web. … Continue Reading

OneRiot lets you search for Spock in realtime

Bing is on a roll with updates for the summer. Yesterday, we reported on the search engine’s revamped iPhone app, and last night it unveiled its new entertainment section. The new portion of the site offers music lyrics and streaming, a collection of online games, a detailed list of TV episodes available to watch on the web, and improved movie-going resources.

The updates are in response to trends Bing has been seeing on the web. … Continue Reading

TextDigger, Hakia say they can improve search

Bing is on a roll with updates for the summer. Yesterday, we reported on the search engine’s revamped iPhone app, and last night it unveiled its new entertainment section. The new portion of the site offers music lyrics and streaming, a collection of online games, a detailed list of TV episodes available to watch on the web, and improved movie-going resources.

The updates are in response to trends Bing has been seeing on the web. … Continue Reading