Google is a big believer in automation. But did it really mean to pay for prime real estate at a search conference and leave its booth unstaffed? A tipster says that a Google exhibit at last week's Enterprise Search Summit was devoid of Googlers as late as mid-morning on Thursday. Can you think of a better caption for…
The Justice Department met with Google and Yahoo's customers and competitors this week as it continues to build an antitrust case for its litigious hired gun Sandy Litvack. On top of that, Canada is now on Google's case too, having hired antitrust lawyer David Kent. Never heard of him, sure he's a hoser, eh. In…
Want to know why newspapers are dying? Because they've been running boring cover stories about that confusing economic meltdown on Wall Street instead of what Americans really care about — stuff like wizards, cupcakes and sex toys. Bristol Palin headlines can stay above the fold, though. Online searchers love them…
Microsoft's never going to win in search, right? Its only hope against Google is that marketers will decide that search ads aren't worth the money. Microsoft has new research out which purportedly shows that Internet users exposed to both search and display ads are more likely to purchase an advertiser's product…
Google is the modern American voter's oracle, able to provide an answer to almost any question. Which is why the McCain and Obama teams pay to put their websites on its pages. Hitwise, a Web research firm, helped us dig up the search terms which the campaigns' have selected to show their ads against over the last 12…
CEO Eric Schmidt says Google is moving at full speed with plans to place ads on its archrival Yahoo, even though the Department of Justice is just gearing up to take action on the deal. The deal, signed in June, is set to start in weeks. "You face a question as a large company trying to change things: How many…
Instead of wasting its time telling people to "start wearing purple," Yahoo should air a campaign boasting of cool features it has that Google and MSN don't. Yahoo could start with a video much like the one here, which shows off a new Yahoo Search feature that allows searchers to play a song straight from a search…
Pantless Knights Productions, the folks who brought you last year's sketch rap hit "Mac or PC," have released a new project — the Search Engine Rap Battle. Think Eminem's 8 Mile but with MC avatars for Microsoft, Yahoo and Google. Some of the rhymes, like MSN's takedown of Google at the end of the clip after the…
A tipster tells us his boss searched Google Products for a "'Spit Happens' t-shirt" for his infant. Google found him a suitably innocent bodysuit on CafePress.com. It also found him a pair of gay porn videos, one called Nasty Nasty featuring "a stunning young man, the spitting image of a young Ben Affleck," and…
While Google and Yahoo have said that their planned search advertising agreement will only cover the United States and Canada, that hasn't stopped European Union officials from looking into the deal on behalf of the World Association of Newspapers trade group. The EU joins the United States's Department of Justice…
Valleywag just got forwarded an email outlining Microsoft's latest desperation move in its money-losing effort to catch up with Google in search. Through Florida online marketing company Kowabunga, Microsoft is willing to pay $2.50 per toolbar download to Web publishers who push the search software on users through…
If you wondered why Google continues to relentlessly gain market share, look no further than Microsoft's boneheaded concept of progress. "Good news," crows Microsoftie Carolyn Miller, announcing the addition of a fourth ad spot above Microsoft's Live Search results. That brings the total spots on Microsoft's…
Cuil, the would-be Google killer backed by Wal-Mart family money, has lost one of its highest-profile executives, Louis Monier. Monier, Cuil's VP of product, founded AltaVista and previously worked at eBay and Google. and VP of product Louis Monier just a month after the site's public launch. "We’ve heard but…
Newspaper publisher Tribune is now saying that timing was what put a link to a four-year old United Airlines bankruptcy story on the website of one of its papers. From there, it was indexed by Google and made its way onto the Bloomberg business wire, triggering a partially automated market selloff which crashed…
In an epic post, Google VP Marissa Mayer does some work to earn her hundreds of millions of dollars in equity by clarifying statements made earlier in a Los Angeles Times interview — Google has solved 90 percent of the search equation in the first ten years, but the remaining ten percent will take nine times as much…
The latest statistics are alarming: Google, far from peaking, seems to be increasing the rate at which its market share grows. In a year, Google has gone from 64 percent of U.S. search queries to more than 71 percent, Hitwise reports. At that pace, there will hardly be any search business left for anyone else by 2012.…
At a conference in San Francisco meant for startups, Google search-and-cupcake czar Marissa Mayer is currently live-demoing Google's latest launch, a news archive of scanned newspaper stories that goes back decades. The archive's scope of how many newspapers, over how many decades, isn't clear from Mayer's…
What did Microsoft get when it signed a deal in August to serve ads against search results on Facebook? The right to make money off the second-fastest growing search engine on the Internet, according to a ComScore study. Facebook served 173 million search queries in July 2008, up 10 percent from 157 million in July…
If there's a successful business model in the whole "user-generated content" revolution, it's in compnies getting for free services they used to pay for. Google is planning to let users rerank search results for it. Digg's users already do something like this for news headlines — likely why Google was interested in…
Dutch Valleywag reader Dirk Dijksma has come up with a clever twist on the old metasearch engine: He's collected all the sites that HR people use to suss out job applicants, and put them into one page called CVGadget with expanding/collapsing widgets that only show the top few of each set of results from Facebook,…
