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Google purchases display ad specialist Teracent for an undisclosed sum, showing the search engine is going after market share enjoyed by Yahoo and Microsoft. Teracent uses machine learning technology to pick and choose from thousands of creative elements in display ads, including images, products, messages and colors. Teracent might seem like a small purchase in the wake of Google's $750 million bid for mobile display ad provider AdMob, but the deal underscores Google's commitment to boosting its display ad market share.
Google Automates Captions in YouTube for Accessibility
Google is pairing its automatic speech recognition technology with its YouTube caption system to offer automatic captions. Auto-caps use the same voice recognition algorithms that power automatic voice mail transcription in Google Voice to generate captions for video on the fly. This a boon for deaf and hearing-impaired users who want to enjoy the millions of videos on the YouTube video sharing service. Google's YouTube team is also launching automatic caption timing, making it much easier for users to create captions manually.
Google, Microsoft Bing Are Squeezing Yahoo in Search
Google paced the market with 65.4 share, up from its 64.9 percent share in September, comScore claimed. Microsoft Bing nearly reached double digits with 9.9 percent, up from its 9.4 percent share in September. Google and Microsoft's collective gain came at the expense of Yahoo, which plummeted to 18 percent in October from the prior month's total of 18.8 percent. That's Yahoo's lowest share ever and its largest month-to-month share decline since August 2008.
Google Nips and Tucks Google Book Search Deal
Google, authors and publishers Nov. 13 narrowed the scope of their agreement to let Google sell access to millions of out-of-print books online, limiting it to include works registered with the U.S. Copyright Office or published in the U.K., Australia or Canada. The revised deal also addresses concerns from Amazon, the Department of Justice and others that Google would have too much control over orphan works. The Open Book Alliance, formed in August with Amazon, Microsoft and Yahoo to oppose the Google Book Search bid, blasted the revised settlement in a statement.
Microsoft Bing Wields Wolfram Alpha vs. Google in Data Duel
Microsoft Nov. 11 inked a deal with Wolfram Alpha to begin offering computational search. Google does not do this, but a company engineer hinted that it is heading there. Right around the time Bing unveiled its deal with Wolfram Alpha, Google added World Bank data to its search service. Users can search for such topics as electricity consumption per capita, or carbon dioxide emissions per capita for certain countries. When is Google going to start calculating equations itself, rather than just surfacing the data from other sources? Google's Ola Rosling responds...
Wolfram Alpha Tells of Bill Gates, Microsoft Interest
Microsoft's interest in Wolfram Alpha, the mathematically oriented search engine that provides definitive answers rather than links, extended back even before the search engine's launch in May. In an official blog post, a Wolfram Alpha team member describes how Stephen Wolfram's demonstration of the search engine's capabilities drew a perhaps-unexpected reaction from Bill Gates.
Experts Say Google's AdMob Bid Shouldn't Spark Antitrust Concerns
Experts say the mobile ad market is too immature, small and fragmented for antitrust regulators to quell Google's bid to buy mobile ad exchange AdMob. AdMob could give Google 30 to 40 percent of the mobile ad market overnight if the deal passes muster. Given that position, it's tempting to think antitrust groups would be concerned with this buy. IDC analyst Karsten Weide, Kelsey Group analyst Michael Boland and Greystripe CEO Michael Chang all say the deal is good for the mobile ad space, which has been stymied by the recession. That could be Google's pass with the DOJ and FTC.
Google Caffeine Search Upgrade Coming in 2010
Google's Caffeine next-generation search infrastructure won't be available until sometime in January, Google principal engineer Matt Cutts confirmed Nov. 10. Google is taking Caffeine live in one data center, where only a small percentage of Google's users will be exposed to the new search infrastructure. In January, Caffeine will be rolled out in additional data centers to serve more Google searchers. Caffeine's emphasis is on speedier Web crawling and indexing, a smart move with Microsoft Bing aggressively ramping its efforts and Yahoo integrating its search engine with its homepage.
Google AdMob Bid Galvanizes the Mobile Ad Industry
Google woke up the mobile ad market by offering to buy AdMob Nov.9, challenging moves made by Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL in the last two years. Google picked AdMob from a crowded field that includes Millenial Media, JumpTap and others. So, are the other mobile ad network players indignant or scared? No. The general belief is that the mobile Web ad space is a green field, and that Google's purchase of AdMob will pave the way for Internet companies to strike deals with others in the mobile ad network long tail. Analysts and executives from Millenial and Greystripe weigh in.
Google Book Search Hearing Delayed Again
Google and the authors and publishers with which it is trying to settle a five-year copyright feud ask the judge hearing the case for another delay so that they can make the deal more palatable for the Department of Justice. Legal eagle Michael Boni of Boni and Zack adds that the parties in the settlement have met with the DOJ as recently as Nov. 6. What this latest delay means for the planned December or January hearing date is unclear.
Microsoft Trumps Google, Yahoo in Total Time Spent Online
ComScore Nov. 6 said some 27 billion hours were spent on the Internet by 1.2 billion worldwide Internet users in September 2009. Microsoft Websites led the way, but 70 percent of the time spent on its sites was through Windows Live Messenger. Google came in at No. 2, with 9.3 percent of the minutes (2.5 billion hours). Yahoo was third with 6.3 percent of the minutes, or 1.7 billion hours, but dropped by 14 percent from its September 2008 share of almost 2 billion hours. Facebook nabbed the fourth spot, with 5 percent of the minutes, or 1.4 billion hours.
Google Dashboard Provides Too Much Info and Yet Not Enough
News Analysis: Google again finds itself in a no-win situation, this time with Google Dashboard. Some claim Google collects too much data in Dashboard, and others say it doesn't provide enough. Dashboard summarizes the data from the Web services associated with a user's account. It will list how many Gmail conversations we have going, how many Google Docs we have, Google Calendar appointments and even Web history if we've enabled it. But it does not include detail Google collects on us from its server logs, cookies and ads.
Google Commerce Search Launches for the Holidays
Google Nov. 5 launched Google Commerce Search to let online retailers power their online stores with Google's search technology. Preparing for the holiday e-commerce rush, Google will host this enterprise search product on its own servers in the cloud to assuage customers' concerns about handling holiday traffic spikes. Smaller companies such as Endeca, Vivisimo, Coveo and Microsoft's Fast enterprise search division already duke it out in the e-commerce search vertical, but now they will have to contend with the goliath in search.
Facebook Brings More Clarity to Privacy Policy, Social Ads
Facebook released detailed explanations on how users can alter their account information or jettison their profiles from the social network. Under the revised policy, users may change or delete their profile information. The deletion of data on Facebook has been a sticky issue for the company in the past, with users believing that once they deleted their accounts, their Facebook data was nuked from the Internet. Facebook said that when users remove information from their profile or delete their account, copies of that information may exist with the friends that data has been shared with, or who may have copied or stored the data.
Microsoft, Yahoo Delay Search Deal to Dot I's, Cross T's
Microsoft and Yahoo have delayed signing their blockbuster search deal to finalize the details, Yahoo said in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission Oct. 28. Financial analysts did not hit the panic button on the news, as the companies don't expect the deal to be consummated until 2010, pending regulatory approvals from the Justice Department. Yahoo also hosted a financial analyst day Oct. 28 for the first time since 2007 and analysts who attended concluded the company is still on recovery road: Microsoft is coming to the rescue with the pending search deal.
How Twitter Search Will Help Google, Microsoft Bing
News Analysis: Microsoft's recently launched Bing Twitter site is indexing tweets in real time. Not to be outdone, Google promises that Twitter content will be integrated into Google's search results page in a few months. Yahoo is allegedly working on real-time search with startup OneRiot. What are the implications? eWEEK solicits insight from search guru Danny Sullivan, social media expert Charlene Li and Gerry Campbell, CEO of real-time search startup Collecta. But perhaps the best answer lies in the Facebook phenomenon and the way real-time search fosters engagement at search sites.
Google Fits Wikipedia for Custom Search Skin
Google Oct. 26 wished its Custom Search application a happy birthday by issuing special Wikipedia skin to makes it easier for users to surf the leading resource Website. Wikipedia has long let users personalize their Wikipedia environment with certain configurations and the use of styles or skins. What Google has done is essentially marry the customization aspects of Custom Search with those of Wikipedia. Users may now use Custom Search to search across all Wikipedia articles for any topic, and find relevant pages linked from the Wikipedia page users are currently on.
DeepDyve Rents Research the Netflix Way
Looking to capitalize on the successful online rental model of companies such as Netflix, DeepDyve Oct. 27 began renting out its research articles to consumers and knowledge workers for 99 cents per article and via monthly subscriptions. While search engines such as Google, Microsoft and Yahoo fetch content for consumers, and Vivisimo, Microsoft's Fast division and Google Search Appliance help employees sniff out content from behind corporate firewalls, DeepDyve has made its database of 30 million scientific, technical and medical articles available to anyone willing to purchase copies.
Google Social Search Arrives to Surface Content from Twitter, FriendFeed, Yelp
Google launches Google Social Search from Google Labs Oct. 26. The experiment is designed to make search results more relevant by mining the rich Google profile information users provide. This includes all Gmail contacts and Gmail chat buddies, as well and people users are publicly connected to on social sites such as Twitter and FriendFeed. Not Facebook though. If there's Web content written by contacts relevant to the search query, Google's algorithm will sniff the content out and serve it up at the bottom of the search results page in a section called & Results from people in your social circle.&
Wowd, Kosmix Aim to Claim Corners of Google's Search Sandbox
Even as giants Google and Microsoft Bing made bold search engine moves at the Web 2.0 Summit Oct. 20 to 22, startups quietly made news of their own. Wowd joins the real-time search ranks, while deep search engine Kosmix buys search startup Cruxlux. Wowd anonymously nominates public Web pages for inclusion in Wowd search results when people visit them. It's Digg without the explicit voting. Cruxlux mines the Web for the relationships between people, places or things. Give Cruxlux any two topics, and it will sniff out the relationships between them and provide URLs to show the links.