Google Starts Shopping For Businesses Again

Sep 24, 2009 at 10:07am ET by Barry Schwartz

Google CEO sees one small acquisition a month from Reuters reports Google's CEO as saying they are back in the business of acquiring businesses. He told Reuters, "acquisitions are turned on again at Google and we are doing our normal maneuvers, which is small companies." "My estimate would be one-a-month acquisitions and these are largely in lieu of hiring. There may be larger acquisitions, but they really are unpredictable," Schmidt added. Google slowed or halted all acquisitions sometime around early January of this year. Most recently, Google acquired reCAPTCHA, but you can read abou [...]

Filed in: Google: Acquisitions, Google: Business Issues

Google Acquires reCAPTCHA To Improve OCR & Rumors Of Brightcove Acquisition

Sep 16, 2009 at 3:13pm ET by Barry Schwartz

The big news is that Google has officially acquired reCAPTCHA. reCAPTCHA are those funny looking letters you see when you fill out forms, asking you to enter in the letters into a box, in order for you to validate that you are indeed a human. Why did Google buy them? Not for the CAPTCHA feature, but as a way to improve their OCR technology, the technology they use to understand scanned words. reCAPTCHA has a pretty large database of letters they collected matched to what actual humans thought those letters were. This is somewhat similar to how Google Image Labeler works, where Google [...]

Filed in: Google: Acquisitions, Google: Business Issues

Google CEO: We Considered Buying A Newspaper

May 21, 2009 at 11:06am ET by Greg Sterling

This had been reported before, but Google CEO Eric Schmidt acknowledged that Google had looked at investing in or buying a newspaper in an interview in London with the Financial Times: FT: Would you ever consider buying a newspaper; they’re cheap right now? ES: We’ve actually looked at this and we’re trying to avoid crossing the line between the infrastructure and technology that Google provides and the content that our partners provide. There is a line and we’re trying to stay on our side it. Schmidt thinks that charging for news won't work online. He cited a few exceptions for " [...]

Filed in: Google: Acquisitions, Google: Business Issues, Google: Partnerships

“Heard” Mentality: Twitter In Acquisition Talks Or Not?

Apr 3, 2009 at 9:43am ET by Greg Sterling

TechCrunch reported late last night that Twitter was in late stage talks to be acquired by Google. That sent what used to be called the "blogosphere" into a frenzy. Kara Swisher, of AllThingsD, striking back against what she believes was sloppy journalism (and TechCrunch more generally), said no: In fact, Twitter and Google have simply been engaged in “some product-related discussions,” according to one source, around real-time search and the search giant better crawling the microblogging service. Said a source close to Twitter: “There was a discussion with [Google executive Marissa [...]

Filed in: Google: Acquisitions, Google: General, Google: Partnerships, Google: Web Search, Microsoft: Business Issues, Microsoft: General, Microsoft: Other, Top News

Google Implements ‘Orion’ Technology, Improves Search Refinements & Adds Longer Snippets

Mar 24, 2009 at 10:09am ET by Greg Sterling

Google is announcing two changes to search results this morning. The first involves the use of longer "snippets" (text extracts containing the keywords) when users input queries of three words or more. The objective is to provide more context to help the user determine if the site is worth visiting. Many search engines have attempted to address this same problem with visual tools or "previews" of one sort or another. (Vanessa will postscript with more detail about snippets.) It's difficult to predict whether or how longer snippets will affect user behavior but it may create incentives to in [...]

Filed in: Features: General, Google: Acquisitions, Google: General, Google: Outside US, Google: User Interface, Google: Web Search, Top News

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