Demand Media has filed for an IPO. The company, known as a content farm to some, produces much of its content on sites like eHow and others in direct response to what it determines people are searching for on the web. Its filing shed new light on how much it depends on SEO and Google, […]
Long expected, Facebook’s new Facebook Questions service is now being offered. It allows Facebook users to specifically ask question to and get answers from others in Facebook’s now 500 million strong community. The service just went live at 1pm Pacific Time today, and we’re working on a detailed look at all the features (this is […]
Nary a week goes by this summer that we don’t hear more rumors about Google’s interest in online games, social networking, and/or some combination of the two. Tonight, the Wall Street Journal is quoting unnamed sources that say Google is talking with “several makers of popular online games” to have those games included on a […]
As we (and others) hinted a couple weeks ago, Ask.com is re-launching as a cross between a traditional search engine and the question-and-answer service that it was back in the site’s heyday. NOTE: SEE OUR FOLLOW-UP PIECE, Ask Comes Full Circle With “Q&A” Offering The new Ask.com homepage represents a pretty dramatic change. Search is […]
Microsoft announced earnings and beat expectations of Wall Street. Microsoft reported, “record fourth-quarter revenue of $16.04 billion for the quarter ended June 30, 2010, a 22% increase from the same period of the prior year. Operating income, net income and diluted earnings per share for the quarter were $5.93 billion, $4.52 billion and $0.51 per […]
As TechCrunch discovered today, Twitter is now showing a sample of matching usernames/accounts for name-based queries on Twitter.com. A search for matt mcgee (without the @ symbol) now shows my account and the names of two others above the tweets that match the search query. There’s also a small link to view a more complete […]
BusinessInsider reports Yahoo’s latest SEC filing announces they can now buy back $3 billion in stock over the next three years. The Yahoo Board approved the repurchase program allowing the $3 billion in buy backs. The transactions can occur either on the open market or in privately negotiated transactions. Some are questioning if Yahoo should […]
On Monday when Apple released its iOS 4 software update it changed its terms and privacy policy. One of the provisions of the new privacy terms — though few typically read them — concerns location monitoring and sharing in the background. Here’s what it now says about location: To provide location-based services on Apple products, […]
Via paidContent comes news that Google might launch a micropayment system for newspapers by the end of the year. paidContent references this article from the Italian newspaper La Repubblica, which says Google is encouraging publishers to try out a system called NewsPass. In its article, paidContent describes NewsPass like this: La Repubblica says that, with […]
Google News, which has always prided itself on being a 100% computer-generated news aggregator with no human intervention, is doing an about-face. The Nieman Journalism Lab reports that a limited test is underway which involves human editors from “partner news organizations” manually choosing certain articles “to be featured on Google News.” The new Editors’ Picks […]
Confused about why Google was showing a picture on its home page today. Apparently, plenty of people were, some to the point of being upset. In reaction, Google’s dropped the feature. Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice president of search products and user experience, confirmed the change via an update to the official Google blog post that […]
If you visit Google today, you may notice the home page is a bit different. About a week ago, Google began letting users to upload their own background images on Google.com, to help them customize the Google home page. To drive more awareness to this feature and to inspire users to change their home page, […]
Google is backtracking on its previous refusal to hand over private data collected in April by its Street View cars to several European governments. The Financial Times reports that Google will initially give the intercepted data to officials in Germany, France, Spain, and Italy sometime within the next two days. The Financial Times quotes Google […]
Bing’s received plenty of praise for its home page that shows a different picture each day. How long until Google would copy it, some have wondered. Today, almost exactly a year since Bing launched, Google has rolled out its own feature that lets you put a picture on the Google home page. In a blog […]
Citing unnamed sources TechCrunch is reporting that Bing will take over the role of default search provider on the Safari browser in the new iPhone OS. These rumors aren’t exactly new and we’ve written and speculated about them before:
Today, Facebook announced new simplified privacy controls designed to ease a settings overload problem that it admitted has challenged its users. Did it succeed? I’d give it an A for effort but a C+ to B- for actually solving the overload problem. Rather than a “one click solution” or a single-page recap, there remains a […]
Facebook is holding a special press conference today, where it will be discussing the new “simplied” privacy settings that the company has developed in hopes of easing recent concerns over privacy. I’ll be live blogging the news. NOTE: See Drill (Down), Baby, Drill: Facebook’s New “Simple” Privacy Settings Still Pretty Complex, our story after this […]
Earlier today, Twitter posted new rules about how third party ad companies can insert ads into the Twitter “timeline” of tweets. Is this a death knell for those third party companies? Not necessarily, but it’s sure a crimp in some of their plans. Below, what the new rules seem to ban and allow. The Background […]
Jason Calacanis plans to commit “Facebook suicide” today and become the latest in a line of prominent tech people to delete their accounts. I considered doing the same back in December but have hung in there. That’s not due to gaining more faith in Facebook. Instead, I shifted to sharing via a fan page. You […]
It’s Day 2 of Google I/O, Google’s annual developers conference. The morning keynote gets underway at 8:30AM Pacific. What to expect? How about Google TV? An Android Tablet? TechCrunch found evidence that’s what we may be hearing about. We’ll see shortly. My liveblogging begins, below. Those at home can also watch live. I/O sessions are […]
It’s Google I/O, Google’s annual developers conference. The morning keynote gets underway at 9AM Pacific. Let’s see what surprises Google has in store for today. My liveblogging begins, below. For those at home, you can also watch along live — I/O sessions are being broadcast here on YouTube. Due to traffic, I arrived 15 minutes […]
It seems like a match made in SEO heaven: An old, trusted, powerful domain like Yahoo.com and a content factory like Associated Content. That partnership is coming soon thanks to Yahoo’s announcement today that it’s agreed to buy Associated Content. Financial terms were not announced, though some reports peg the sale at about $100 million. […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Google May Finally Disclose AdSense Split … If You’re An Italian Newspaper, That Is How much money does Google keep for itself from AdSense ads that publishers carry? Unless you’re a […]
Want to see what people share on Facebook with the entire world — perhaps without realizing it? There’s a new site that makes this easy, Openbook.
Need another data point from the search world illustrating the rise of concern over Facebook’s privacy changes. How about that chart above? It shows a huge spike to traffic at wikiHow, which has a handy guide on how to delete your Facebook account. Earlier this week, I wrote about how there seemed to be an […]
As I covered in my article about Google’s new look, while the new design appears to have been widely accepted without complaint, there are some who want “old” or “Classic Google” back. Google tells me that’s not going to happen. But there is an unofficial way to force the old look to appear, for those […]
It’s kind of crazy. I’ve been playing with Facebook’s “Posts By Everyone” search feature recently, and many people who hide their profile information have no problem sharing sometimes really personal updates with the world. Are there people on Facebook who don’t understand how to keep their updates out of the public eye? And why doesn’t […]
After months of testing, Google is releasing a new look-and-feel for its search results today, a three column design that provides a permanent menu of search options and tools to help searchers refine their queries. Google also gains a freshly-updated logo along the way. The new user interface — UI for the tech crowd — […]
Google will launch an online bookstore called Google Editions this summer. That’s the word from Chris Palma, Google’s Strategic Partner Development Manager, who confirmed the company’s plans today at a publishing industry panel in New York. According to the Wall Street Journal, Google Editions will launch in late June or July, and will let shoppers […]
paidContent reports on Yahoo’s executives salaries for 2009. Yahoo’s CEO, Carol Bartz earned $47 million in 2009, with a salary of $969,872 and $13 million in stock, almost $30 million in options, and some other earnings. Yahoo clarified that $42 million was not actually realized in the year and the amount Bartz will actually realize […]
Twitter’s rumored Promoted Tweets are now official, launching only a day after the very similar TweetUp launched (will that be DOA?). Promoted Tweets has two phases, which might be described as an AdWords phase and an AdSense phase. The AdWords part is what is launching first. Marketers buy keywords (for now on a CPM basis) […]
Hot on the heels of the TweetUp announcement comes news that Twitter plans to announce its own advertising platform on Tuesday. The New York Times says the program will be called “Promoted Tweets.” The advertising program, which Twitter calls Promoted Tweets, will show up when Twitter users search for keywords that the advertisers have bought […]
Bill Gross, who all but created paid search in the late 1990s when he founded GoTo.com, has launched TweetUp, an advertising ecosystem that does for Twitter search what AdWords (and other paid search platforms) does for web search. It’s not officially tied to Twitter, and will compete with Twitter’s expected ad platform (whenever it launches). […]
Recession? Economic slowdown? Financial gloom-and-doom? Not online, and not as far as Internet advertising is concerned. The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) says that U.S. online ad revenue hit an all-time high of $6.3 billion in Q4 of 2009, a 2.6% increase over the fourth quarter of 2008 and a 14% increase over Q3 of 2009. […]
With several lawsuits pending and words like “extortion” being thrown around like baseballs on opening day, Yelp is making changes that it hopes will end the confusion (and lawsuits) over how it operates. The first change — and most important one, in my opinion — is that advertisers will no longer be able to choose […]
Twitter’s search results have changed thanks to the addition of a feature that wasn’t much of a secret in recent weeks. When using search.twitter.com, or the search box on Twitter.com, the results now show up to three “most popular tweets” at the top, above the most recent results. For example, a search tonight for ipad […]
The answer to that question is “yes.” Wolfram Alpha says its iPhone app is now available for $1.99, a huge drop from the $49.99 price when the app debuted last fall. It’s also offering refunds to users who paid the higher price. “Our number-one priority as of today is to get Wolfram|Alpha in the hands […]
Earlier today, a Google PR person gave me a pair of 3D glasses at the Where 2.0 conference and said I’d need them tomorrow. Hmm, was Google Maps going 3D? Or maybe an April Fool’s joke? But helping my son with his science project tonight, I came across a possible answer — a new 3D […]
In a sign of continued trimming at Yahoo, the company has announced that it’s closing the Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN) — Yahoo’s counterpart to Google’s Adsense — as of April 30. YPN was launched about five years ago, but never formally advanced beyond the “beta” label. A Yahoo spokesperson gave us this statement confirming YPN’s […]
The reactions to Google’s partial withdrawal from China continue. Yesterday, there were hearings in the US Congress where representatives showered praise on Google while competitor Microsoft was said to be supporting tyranny. Meanwhile, there is a nice round-ups of reactions from China folks on the web, including a great cartoon of something you never see […]