Ben Charny

Google has announced new partnerships with business software suppliers Oracle and Salesforce.com as it makes a big push into selling enterprise search features. As previously reported,Google also announced a relationship with business intelligence software provider Cognos. Essentially, the companies are now set to blend their features together through a new Google user interface, called a […]

What do Yahoo’s first quarter financial results (here as a PDF) of April 18 mean to Google? For one, there’s sobering reality. Yahoo executives reminded everyone listening to a conference call April 18 that the firm is a behemoth powerful enough to dwarf even Google. Yahoo’s audience is 500 million a month. One of every […]

Microsoft has alerted Web sites there’s to be a 5-hour outage April 18 in order to update AdCenter, which competes with Google’s AdSense and other online ad features. The updated AdCenter, online after 11 p.m. April 18, will have a number of changes, including invoices in the form of PDF files for easier printing and […]

The state of online ad spending takes center stage this week as Google and Yahoo report their latest earnings. The reason for the focus on average key word prices, prices per click and other mysteries of the online ad market? The two Internet behemoths generate nearly all their revenue by selling ads. In that light, […]

Smart phones using a version of Microsofts cell phone operating system will, for no apparent reason, begin to operate very slowly, or just as suddenly speed up to a sprint, according to those participating in a number of recent online forums. The problem is apparently the result of the kind of memory the operating system […]

Three people with connections to Google are participating in a new, $3.55 million round of funding procured by the search engine Kaboodle. They are Rajeev Motwani, a Stanford University professor who co-authored the research paper behind Google’s PageRank; Georges Harik, former director of new products at Google, including Gmail and Google Talk; and Ron Conway, […]

While Google’s never confirmed its existence, Web site operators routinely complain about the “Google sandbox.” They are talking about the apparent period of sometimes years between Google finding a Web site, and making it available in search results. The practice, perhaps better described as a Google sand trap, is meant to maintain the integrity of […]

A popular digital media company said April 17 that it now distributes more podcasts than there are radio stations on the planet. This highlights how podcasts are supplanting over-the-air radio broadcast in many peoples lives, according to a representative for FeedBurner, the Chicago-based firm that just passed the radio vs. podcast milestone. Loosely defined, a […]

Google has something cooking with Cognos, which provides business intelligence and corporate performance management software and services. According to a source, Cognos is set to unveil a new Internet search feature April 19 that involves a partnership of some sort with Google. Additional details weren’t available. Cognos, a publicly traded company, claims to serve more […]

Microsoft this week revealed it’s at work on a way to search the Internet using photos captured by cell phone cameras. So rather than using a keyboard to enter an Internet search query, people can e-mail Microsoft a camera phone photo of what they’re searching for. Photo2Search, as Microsoft calls the nascent feature, returns Web […]

Microsoft this week revealed that it is at work on a way to search the Internet using photos captured by cell phone cameras. So rather than typing in an Internet search query, someone can e-mail Microsoft a photo of what theyre searching for. Photo2Search, as Microsoft calls the nascent feature, returns Web pages either with […]

A financial analyst is questioning whether Google is using its features to promote its content and services, and in a way that conflicts with its advertisers’ interests. For example, Merrill Lynch analyst Justin Post writes of discovering how a link to Google Finance, Google’s new financial information site, is the top paid advertising link returned […]