Search Biz: Alibaba Gains, Google Loses, & Eric Schmidt Says Don’t Call Me Daddy Anymore

Mar 18, 2008 at 5:17pm ET by Greg Sterling

China’s Alibaba.com, in which Yahoo is a significant minority shareholder, enjoyed a massive 340 percent gain in net profit tied to China’s fast-growing economy. As Google argued earlier, it appears that those doing business in Asia and China in particular are somewhat insulated from the United States’ economic woes.

Back in the US, Yahoo has launched a grant program/contest for female entrepreneurs called “Seeds for Success,” through Yahoo Small Business. As part of the program, Yahoo is giving away three grant packages, each worth approximately $25,000.

Search engine Hakia has begun to give away — rather, license — its “Ontological Semantics” technology to third party partners, bringing “semantic search” to the enterprise. Hakia was profiled in Danny’s “The Google Challengers: 2008 Edition.”

The rest of Search Biz is all Google today.

The biggest news is that Google lost a round in a legal battle over the “GMail” trademark in Europe. Google has been locked in multi-year trademark litigation with a German entrepreneur who received a trademark for “G-Mail” in Germany in 2000, before Google began the email service. Google still has a couple of appeals left, but the company may ultimately not be able to use GMail throughout Europe. It would have to use “GoogleMail,” which would mean the maintenance of two brands: one for Europe and one for every other region and country.

Digital Media Wire uses the linkbait headline, “Has Google Topper Eric Schmidt Lost His Mind?” to argue that Google CEO Eric Schmidt, in his “MicroHoo may break the Internet” discussions, is trying to divert attention from Google’s own dominance of the Internet by attempting to focus attention on Microsoft’s past alleged monopolistic practices. The author of the article, Paul Sweeting, draws a parallel between Microsoft’s OS domination of the desktop with Google’s domination of search, “the operating system of the Internet.”

Also from the whimsical headline department comes, “Google CEO: Stop calling me dad!” in Australia’s The Age. The article itself is much more mundane, discussing Google as a maturing company, Schmidt’s employment history, and its vision for cloud computing.

Greg Sterling is a Contributing Editor at Search Engine Land, and writes a personal blog Screenwerk, examining the broader world of media and advertising. He also posts at a Local Mobile Search, which is focused on the mobile Internet.

See more articles by Greg Sterling >

Search Biz covers business issues relating to the search engine industry. It appears several times during the business work week, whenever there is enough interesting and important business news to warrant a column.To get this column via email or feed, visit our columns page.

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