Ben Charny

There’s more Dell in your Google. Google says later this year it’s going to use Dell-made equipment in a $30,000 souped-up search engine Google sells to Web sites and businesses. There’s a larger point to this deal than how Dell products are now part of the guts of a rather obscure Google search device. Looked […]

Google seems to be morphing into the poor man’s Microsoft. The latest evidence of this surfaced June 5, when Google began testing an online spreadsheet feature that’s a much less substantial, but free, version of Microsoft’s Excel. Google’s is a spreadsheet for soccer moms, Little League baseball coaches, church bazaar organizers, college students or small […]

Google is emerging as the poor mans Microsoft. The latest evidence of this surfaced June 5, when Google began testing a free, online spreadsheet feature. This is a spreadsheet for soccer moms, Little League baseball coaches, church bazaar organizers, college students or small businesses of less than 10 employees. Its for the otherwise curious who […]

The popular sitcom “Seinfeld” is, rather famously, a television show about nothing. Now comes a search engine about nothing. New products from Baynote, in Cupertino, Calif., lets Web site operators tap into the collective wisdom of their sites’ visitors to steer them toward better results. What Baynote says sets it apart from Google, Yahoo and […]

Google’s to debut an online spreadsheet feature Tuesday, as it heightens its battle with rival Microsoft for the heart of business and consumer computer desktops. Google Spreadsheets will allow more than one person to work on the same document, along with other staple spreadsheet features. Sign-ups for a beta, or test, version begin Tuesday. Especially […]

Yahoo’s nascent Yahoo Answers feature may be just the thing to help Yahoo to take on a hard-charging Google and other competitors, believes Lehman Brothers analyst Douglas Anmuth. Answers, which debuted in December, in theory allows anyone to mine the collective knowledge of Yahoo’s 208 million active registered users. In practice, the feature allows people […]

In a scathing attack, technology entrepreneur Mark Cuban recently wrote of how Internet search engines are so bad at fighting click fraud they might as well be the bad guys’ “bag man.” Click fraud, loosely defined, is when fraudulent means are used to inflate the number of times an Internet ad is clicked on. The […]

No. 1 Internet video provider YouTube now lets its registered users become, in essence, their own Internet TV channel. What YouTube’s done is provide a way for its users to organize and present the videos uploaded to the site. In so doing, YouTube’s created a kind of uber-TV network where the stations are manned and […]

Items added by Google users to Google Base, Google’s free listings feature, are now part of the search results of comparison shopper Froogle, plus the Google Maps localized search engine, Google recently said. Google felt the need June 1 to set the record straight about where Base items go, after several news reports over the […]

Google’s introduced Reply by Chat, which lets Gmail e-mail users move their conversations to the Google Talk instant messaging application, or a Gmail feature called “chat.” So if you’re about to reply to a Gmail e-mail message, you can instead send your reply as a chat message, says a Google representative. The Reply by Chat […]

The U.S. Postal Service was recently asked to start delivering packages and letters based on someones e-mail rather than street address. The request is from Los Angeles-based Inventerprise LLC, which wants to conduct a trial run of its so-called Shelmail e-mail-to-snail addressing system sometime in 2008. The Shelmail proposal is noteworthy because it suggests that […]

Recent comments by Google execs make it clear that Google views Dell Computer as its secret weapon against chief nemesis Microsoft. In fact, there’s lots of evidence pointing to an important nexus between Google’s recently rebuffed antitrust allegations about a new Microsoft Web browser and the three-year-long deal Google recently reached with Dell. The connection […]