Google choosing between advertisers and searchers. Guess who is losing?

The first thing you need to keep in mind about Google’s business is that it’s an advertising marketplace.

The “search engine” part of Google, the part we love, is constantly under assault as Google tries to adapt and keep its business growing.

Now, with the introduction of Search Plus Your World earlier this month, Google has shown us it may believe it has enough clout that it can more or less ignore its original customers, … 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

SeatGeek partners with Hearst, powering ticket search in their major sports markets

Sports fans in San Francisco, Seattle, Houston and San Antonio will have a new way to search or the best deals on tickets. New York startup SeatGeek is partnering with Hearst to power ticket search on the websites for four of the media giants biggest metro newspapers. It’s another prominent partnership for a small company that has been on a hot streak in the last year.

SeatGeek crunches data to tell customers when the best … Continue Reading

Larry Page wasn’t lying about the Google+ engagement numbers

Google+ is a social network that is being built backwards. Hundreds of millions of people rely on Google, but not its social network. That makes things awkward in a lot of ways, and certainly Google’s efforts to find a foothold in the social space have seemed, until recently, feeble or forced.

But while my colleague Rocky Agrawal is right that companies often try to woo journalists and their audience with misleading numbers, I think Larry … Continue Reading

Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang resigns from board of directors and all other roles

Yahoo co-founder and former CEO Jerry Yang has resigned from the Yahoo board of directors and all other positions, the company announced late today. Yang also resigned from the boards of Yahoo Japan and Alibaba Group.

In a letter to board chairman Roy Bostock, Yang wrote:

“My time at Yahoo, from its founding to the present, has encompassed some of the most exciting and rewarding experiences of my life. However, the time has come for … Continue Reading

Why Google is ditching search

This story originally appeared on CNET and is republished with permission.

There has been a huge maelstrom about Google integrating Google+ into its search links. And it all misses the point.

Twitter and others are complaining that Google is throwing its massive 65 percent-plus market share weight around and quashing smaller competitors. The reason Twitter and others are so threatened is that the pattern of shared links within Google+ provides a decent enough indicator as … Continue Reading

Bing beats Yahoo in search market, Microsofties heard chanting “We’re number two!”

We jest, we jest. Microsofties don’t chant.

But we’re sure the company is mighty proud of today’s numbers released by comScore that show Bing’s market share has, for the first time ever, surpassed Yahoo’s search market share.

For the month of November 2011, Yahoo grabbed 15.1 percent of the U.S. search market for home and work locations, while Bing took home 15 percent of that pie.

However, for the month of December 2011, comScore says … Continue Reading

Facebook most-searched term and most-visited site of 2011

Don’t tell Google, but the top search term and the most-visited website of 2011 were one in the same: Facebook.

Inquiring minds asked about the world’s largest social network so much that Facebook accounted for 3.10 percent of all U.S. searches, according to data intelligence company Experian Hitwise.

Add in a few slight variations, and altogether, Facebook-related queries accounted for 4.42 percent of searches this year. This means the company has now been the top-searched … Continue Reading

Google paying nearly $1B for Firefox search deal

The prominent search box atop the popular Firefox browser played the coveted prize jewel in a Christie’s-like bidding war between the web’s wealthiest whales.

Google competed in an aggressive auction with Microsoft and Yahoo to maintain its place as the default search engine on Firefox, according to AllThingsD. It successfully renewed a three-year deal, but the placement came with a massive markup and will now cost the company $300 million a year.

That’s one heck … Continue Reading

Search underdog Blekko gets serious, makes major improvements (exclusive)

With 1.5 million unique users and 70 to 80 million queries per month, search upstart Blekko isn’t big enough to sit at the adult search table with Google, Yahoo or Microsoft. But don’t tell that to Blekko.

Fed up with the prevalence of spam in search results, Blekko launched in late October 2010 as a search engine with an opinion. It takes a stance on good and bad sites and attempts to deliver only high … Continue Reading

Rebecca Black, Google+, Ryan Dunn top Google’s Zeitgeist 2011

Hang your heads in shame Internet-goers. In a year of revolution and widespread economic distress, the fastest-rising search term on Google was YouTube “sensation” Rebecca Black, known for her awful “Friday” music video.

Google released its 2011 Zeitgeist today, an annual collection of its global search term data. Following Rebecca Black was the budding Google+ social network, and in third place was Jackass star Ryan Dunn, who died in a car crash earlier this year.… Continue Reading

Google goes to Hollywood with new mobile movie search experience

It’s almost that time of year when we take off from work to celebrate the holidays. Of course, year-after-year we quickly realize that we’re left with far too much time to spend with family, and so we take a trip down the street to see what’s playing at the local cinema.

Now Google is offering up its own escape route with an enhanced mobile movie search experience.

When you query movies or theater names on … Continue Reading

White is the new black — on all Google products

Leave it to Google to dispel the myth that one shouldn’t wear white after Labor Day. The search giant and social network contender has stripped off the ominous, horizontal black bar hovering atop its pages to reveal a milky-fresh new hue for each of its web-based products.

The new Google bar occupies the same space as the Google logo and search box in most products and now provides people with one- or two-click access to … Continue Reading

Wolfram Alpha lets you spy on the flights overhead

It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s … okay so it’s just a plane. But wouldn’t it be cool to know everything about that aircraft overhead, like its altitude and where it’s headed? Computational search engine Wolfram Alpha now has the answers.

Wolfram Alpha is the sophisticated search engine capable of computing answers to factual questions; it’s especially handy for math and science queries. The startup launched with a bang in 2009 but wasn’t the … Continue Reading

Yahoo launches interactive recipe, shopping and entertainment search tools

Search Yahoo for a recipe or gift this holiday season and you might be surprised by what you see. The company is now greeting recipe and product searchers with interactive, image-based windows atop the search results page to save them time on their internet quests.

The new search tools function like guidebooks for recipe and product queries, letting you filter and compare results, and they even let you log in to Facebook from the search … Continue Reading

Google spices up search queries with experimental ‘Sources’ feature

Google is testing a new features to its search product that fills up the page with more information based on the query, reports SearchEngineLand.

The new feature, called Sources, displays additional content in a right column of the search results. As you can see in the screenshot below, typing “Rihanna” pulls up a photo of the pop star, a brief description of who she is from Wikipedia and lots of biographical details (birth date, real … Continue Reading

Google revamps search for more recent results, affects 35% of all searches

Google has tweaked its basic search algorithm to promote fresher and more relevant content, with 35 percent of searches to be affected, the company announced today. The adjustments will impact searches for recent and reoccurring events, and other fast-changing information.

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. Thus, the company needs to keep you coming back for more … Continue Reading

Travel search service Hipmunk adds Google Calendar integration

Travel search site Hipmunk has added another wonderful new feature to help you book your travel plans: Google Calendar integration.

The new integration will allow users to check their flight (or train) listings against their personal schedule within Google Calendar to determine the best possible times to book a trip, Hipmunk announced today.

While other travel search sites allow you to import your travel schedule into Google Calendar, Hipmunk is the first that lets you … Continue Reading

Google smashes Q3 expectations with $9.7B in revenue

Search giant Google brought in $9.72 billion in the third quarter this year — or $7.5 billion minus traffic acquisition costs. That amount crushed consensus Wall Street analyst estimates of $7.23 billion, and is a 33 percent increase from the same quarter one year ago.

Google brought in $2.73 billion in income off that revenue in the third quarter this year, up from $2.17 billion in net income the same quarter a year earlier. Google’s … Continue Reading

Microsoft said to be eyeing Yahoo — but don’t hold your breath

The latest big name interested in buying Yahoo may be Microsoft, according to a Reuters report from last night.

Sources tell Reuters that one camp in Microsoft is excited about the deal because it would give them a strong web portal and destroy AOL as a competitor. But another Microsoft group (lets call them the “realists”) say that the company shouldn’t be spending billions on a property without much growth potential.

No matter how much … Continue Reading