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With Knol, Google provides new tool for self-promotion
Google's Wikipedia competitor, Knol, is now open to the public. Take a hint from journalist Cyrus Farivar: "Yes, I added an entry on myself to Wikipedia. Why haven't you?" Unlike Wikipedia, Knol doesn't yet have complex rules requiring you to use a sock puppet account to write about yourself. Go literally make history!
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23andMe advisor bidding for Google-backed prize with Google's help
Genetics researcher George Church is a great believer in openness, according to a profile of him in Wired. So he shouldn't mind a bit if we disclose some facts about his business dealings that we find fascinating. To wit: More »
gaffes
Ad-free Google News generates $100 million a year -- and soon, some lawsuits
Marissa Mayer, the Google executive who runs all the parts of the search engine, just put her legal team in a pickle. She told conference-goers yesterday at Fortune's Brainstorm conference that Google News, despite being advertising-free, makes $100 million in revenues a year. Fortune writer Jon Fortt explained Mayer's thinking: More »
acquisitions
Report: Google and Digg talks on again
Google cofounder Larry Page and Digg CEO Jay Adelson were all smiles at Allen & Co.'s Sun Valley retreat. Was it because they had just wrapped up a long-rumored deal for Google to buy Digg, with the price in the neighborhood of $200 million? TechCrunch says talks are on again. (Photo by Reuters)
Yahoo Brickhouse head to leave, again
Chad Dickerson, who has been responsible for Yahoo's Brickhouse incubator since December, is leaving the company to be CTO at Etsy, an online handicrafts retailer. We hear Google, where former boss Bradley Horowitz now works, had been heavily recruiting Dickerson. With this move, Dickerson has deftly dissed both Web giants. Well done, Chad! [TechCrunch]
Chad and Steve
What Viacom really wants to know about YouTube videos
What is Viacom really after in its $1 billion lawsuit against Google over YouTube? Despite a lengthy invite list, Viacom PR was only to drum up "a small press gathering" to listen to CEO Philippe Dauman at a screening for Tropic Thunder last night, according to Greg Sandoval's report on News.com. Dauman called YouTube a "rogue company" — and expressed disappointment that Google did nothing to rein it in. Viacom's now being painted as a rogue itself, seeking to violate YouTube users' privacy in requesting viewing logs from the site. More »
acquisitions
Will Art Levinson leave Genentech after a Roche takeover?
South of the City and hard by the shores of San Francisco Bay, Genentech rarely attracts the attention of the founders of flashy Internet startups as they drive past its offices on the way to the airport. But the biotech company's longtime CEO, Art Levinson, is an integral part of the Silicon Valley scene, serving on the boards of both Google and Apple. That's why Swiss pharmaceutical giant Roche's move to buy the 44 percent of Genentech it doesn't already own for a price north of $38 billion could have reverbations well beyond the world of automated pipetting systems. More »
Twitter backer funds Google rival
Union Square Ventures partner Albert Wenger says he's invested $1.5 million in New York-based cloud-computing startup 10gen, a company founded by some ex-DoubleClickers and a Joost engineer, because there are "some serious issues" with Google's App Engine, a service which allows startups to run applications on Google's servers. Namely, Wenger thinks Google will run the platform's rules to its own competitive advantage. [Union Square Ventures]
Union Square Ventures partner Albert Wenger says he's invested $1.5 million in New York-based cloud-computing startup 10gen, a company founded by some ex-DoubleClickers and a Joost engineer, because there are "some serious issues" with Google's App Engine, a service which allows startups to run applications on Google's servers. Namely, Wenger thinks Google will run the platform's rules to its own competitive advantage. [Union Square Ventures]
the chart
Google loses search market share to Yahoo, Microsoft
Reversing a long trend, one research firm says Yahoo and Microsoft have posted gains in search market share — at the expense of industry leader Google. ComScore reports that 61.5 percent of all U.S. searches went through Google in June 2008, 0.3 percent less than in May 2008. Yahoo saw 20.9 percent of the searches in June, up from 20.6 percent in May. Microsoft went from 8.5 percent to 9.2 percent. Does this argue for a Microsoft-Yahoo merger? Not especially, since those small, hard-won gains would likely evaporate while the combined entity fumbles for years in post-deal internal politicking.
schadenfreude
Better Business Bureau: Don't do business with Google
Wall Street's not the only American institution down on Google today. The Better Business Bureau rates the search giant "unsatisfactory." Why? On its record, 2 out of 331 complaints over the past three years were listed as unresolved. And for this, the BBB deems Google "unsatisfactory"? We can just imagine Googlers' complaints: "How unfair! How bureaucratic! We demand to know the algorithm that has generated this result!" Funny, they sound exactly like Google's customers.
retail
Downtown San Francisco no longer capable of supporting three Starbucks per intersection
Next year's Macworld may be the last chance to make a shamefaced Starbucks run to the mall-kiosk latte dispenser in the Metreon. Why did the Seattle coffee monoculturist give six months' notice of that coffee-bar's closure, and 599 others? Why, to retrain loyalists on other locations within footsteps. We already know that you drink only at establishments where the coffee pickers are unionized, graduate-degreed, and constantly hugged. And so do we. But here's our map of the remaining South of Market Starbucks — and all the Blue Bottle locations — anyway. Only to show to your sleep-addled board members when they visit for a meeting. More »
geek love
Grabbing some love upstairs at Google
"You asked if I was headed upstairs for a meeting and I said, "not exactly. I am here for GoogleApps." Oh, Pink Scarf Girl. We want to find your Missed Connections "Moment" Man, too. White, male, 20s, dressed casual? Who could that be? Just be sure to use protection with what you're grabbing "downstairs," too. The best in daycare is so pricey these days.
search
Why you don't get what you Googled for
Have you noticed that you don't always get the exact terms you searched for anymore on Google? Instead of oh-so-literal keyword matching and filters such as +site:valleywag.com, Google lines up a team of technologies that try to guess what you're really looking for. Information retrieval specialist Amit Singhal walked through them in a Google Blog post . I edited out 80 percent of the verbiage — mostly by deleting the term world class every time it popped up — and left in the technical parts. More »
online advertising
Internet math: Google gets $1.10 of every new ad dollar
Even as Google's business growth softens, the company continues to eat everyone else's lunch. Search engine marketing firm Efficient Frontier claims "Advertisers are putting all of their new search dollars into Google, and pulling money out of Yahoo Search and Microsoft Live Search." For every new dollar spent on search this year, Google picked up most of that dollar and, in addition, took a bit of business away from Microsoft and Yahoo. That means more and more Internet ad revenue will be routed to a single company that gets 98 percent of its income from ads. What could go wrong?
acquisitions
Google acquires Russian ad firm, buys more room to grow
Google has acquired Russian online-advertising company Begun from its parent company, Rambler, for $140 milllion. There are two reasons why.— other than an obvious desire to produce more Russian Google commercials like the one shown here. More »
i hate it here
Mission hipsters choose Google as their new object of hate
Here we go again. New graffiti on the sidewalk at 18th and Dolores claims nothing short of "Mission Exploitation" by Google employees. A decade ago, the Mission Yuppie Eradication Project posted flyers urging Valencia Street's self-styled "artists" to vandalize luxury cars. Some did. In 2008, most Web 2.0 workers aren't rich enough to draw the righteous anger of their slightly-less-privileged neighbors. Except for Googlers who dare move into the city's youth-culture ghetto between Cesar Chavez and Market. More »
5:00 PM on Thu Jul 17 2008
By Paul Boutin
6,924 views,
26 comments
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