Would Google destroy Digg or take it to the next level?

Date July 23, 2008

Digg commenter Hiji writes, “This is the beginning of the end. In a few years all the major blogs and social-media sites will be owned by large corporations, putting us right back where we started.”

The topic of discussion is, of course, TechCrunch’s rumor that Digg will soon be acquired by Google for somewhere in the [...]

Google talks acquisition with Digg

Date July 22, 2008

Social news site Digg.com, a perpetual target of acquisition rumors, is in “final negotiations” to sell itself to Google for $200 million, according to a TechCrunch report Tuesday that cited multiple sources.

The two companies have been in talks to bring Digg into the Google News group, but it could be a few weeks before the [...]

Facebook Now More Popular Than Sex

Date July 12, 2008

A couple weeks ago Facebook surpassed MySpace to become the largest global social network. Aside from becoming the largest website, there are not many other goals that they could strive to achieve when it comes to traffic. Actually, there is one more goal that would be nice to accomplish: become the number one search term [...]

Google, Yahoo spiders can now crawl through Flash sites

Date July 2, 2008

As anyone who has had the pleasure of doing web design and development through marketing agencies knows, Flash tends to be wildly popular among clients and wildly unpopular among, well, pretty much everyone else. Part of the reason for this is because Flash is so inherently un-Googleable; anything that goes into a Flash-only site is [...]

Google envy is alive and well in Redmond

Date June 20, 2008

The weepy countdown to Bill Gates’ last day on the job as a full-timer must be getting to Steve Ballmer. Always full of surprises, the big galoot is at it again.

Eric who?

(Credit: Dan Farber/CNET News.com)
In a revealing interview with The Financial Times, Ballmer distanced Microsoft from any criticism that it’s lost a step over the [...]

Ask.com caves to Google’s privacy pressures

Date June 18, 2008

Ever the publicity hound nipping at Google’s heels, Ask.com has issued an open letter to the public about adding a privacy policy link to its home page.

The letter highlights the fact that, weeks ago, several privacy groups asked Google to play up the privacy policy on its start page. The search giant didn’t immediately add [...]

Ask.com caves to Google’s privacy pressures

Date June 18, 2008

Ever the publicity hound nipping at Google’s heels, Ask.com has issued an open letter to the public about adding a privacy policy link to its home page.

The letter highlights the fact that, weeks ago, several privacy groups asked Google to play up the privacy policy on its start page. The search giant didn’t immediately add [...]

Google gives priority to fast ads

Date June 18, 2008

Google on Wednesday added a new factor, Web page loading speed, to the criteria by which it judges which text ads to place next to search results.

The search company, which makes almost all its revenue from the text ads, gives a boost to advertisers with better ad quality. Google announced Wednesday that quality now includes [...]

Yang talks up Google partnership in DC

Date June 18, 2008

Yahoo’s CEO Jerry Yang made the rounds on Capital Hill on Wednesday, in an effort to dispel antitrust concerns surrounding its search advertising deal with Google.

During his one-day visit, Yang met with Sen. Herb Kohl, D-Wisc., who chairs the Senate Antitrust Subcommittee.

Kohl has previously expressed concerns that the deal between two technology search rivals could [...]

Is the Google-Yahoo deal good news for IM

Date June 14, 2008

Instant-messaging power users, rejoice: a barrier between two previously isolated realms of online chat is coming down.

A minor sidelight in the Yahoo-Google search ad deal announced Thursday is that the two companies “agreed to enable interoperability between their respective instant-messaging services, bringing easier and broader communication to users,” the companies said. They’re not sharing further [...]