But Microsoft’s ads won’t take on Google, Yahoo, or even Ask.com directly by name. Instead, the Bing ads will try to convince you that by using “today’s search engines” you’re missing out on all that your search experience could be. To back up this assertion, Microsoft offers some internal data indicating 42 percent of all searches need to be refined after the first query, AdAge reports. Furthermore, Microsoft has found 25 percent of all post-search clicks hit the back button instead of a Website link when looking at a search results page.

The inability to find what you want on the first try may be where Microsoft believes Bing has an edge. In March, when screenshots of Microsoft’s new search engine leaked online under the codename Kumo, the photos showed a “related categories” feature on the results page. If you were looking for a set of new stereo speakers, for example, you would see links to reviews, manuals, prices, and so on related to the specific product you were seeking. There were also examples of Kumo/Bing yielding different related categories in a search for entertainers with related categories like biographies, song lyrics, and albums. The ability to refine your search with directly relevant categories could be a very helpful search tool, as opposed to starting all over from scratch with a new query if you don’t find what you’re looking for.

If Bing’s “related categories” feature can offer results directly relevant to your query each and every time you hit the search button, then Microsoft may be able to peel off some, but definitely not all, of that Google mojo. However, Bing’s competitors may already have features comparable to related categories in their arsenals. Google rolled out its own set of tools to help you refine your search at its recent Searchology event, and Yahoo will launch search refinement tools in the coming months.

Whether Bing’s features are a huge jump forward over Google’s new tools or Yahoo’s upcoming overhaul is hard to know, since no one outside of Microsoft has had a chance to try Bing. This week, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is expected to demonstrate Bing during the D: All Things D conference, which runs from May 26 through 28. It’s not clear if Ballmer will announce a launch date for the new search engine from All Things D; however, once Bing is finally available to the public, I have no doubt many people will want to test drive the new search engine. But even if Bing can win over some early converts, the true test will be whether those users are still ‘Binging’ instead of ‘Googling’ a month or two later.

Service is not the only obstacle for a challenger to Google’s dominance, either. To keep users coming back for more, Microsoft must dislodge the idea from the public consciousness that the name Google is synonymous with Internet search. Will 100 million greenbacks be enough to convince people that ‘to Google’ is not actually a verb? Microsoft may think so, but what do you say?

Microsoft May Rename Live Search ‘Bing’: Massive Ad Campaign Planned

GeoCities no longer accept new accounts, and recommended it’s users to Yahoo Paid hosting services. This is a meesage from GeoCities Website.

After careful consideration, Yahoo! has decided to close GeoCities later this year. You can continue enjoying your GeoCities service until then — we just wanted to let you know about the closure as soon as possible. We’ll share more details this summer. For now, please visit the help center for more information.

About GeoCities

Yahoo! GeoCities was a web hosting service founded by David Bohnett and John Rezner in late 1994 as Beverly Hills Internet (BHI).

The Sunnyvale Web portal said it would carry out the layoffs, the third round in just over a year, in the next two weeks in hopes of saving money and freeing resources to hire elsewhere in the company. Executives said the cuts will be focused on Yahoo’s product managers and engineers.

After three months on the job, CEO Carol Bartz is still grappling with turning Yahoo around in an environment in which advertisers are slashing their budgets. Although she’s made some relatively minor tweaks at the company, Bartz is still weighing several bigger decisions such as whether to team up with rival Microsoft Corp. in search advertising.

Against that backdrop, Yahoo’s first-quarter profit fell 78 percent to $118 million (8 cents per share), from $537 million (37 cents) a year ago. The comparison isn’t quite as dire as it seems, however, because Yahoo’s quarterly earnings in 2008 were helped by a $401 million gain from an investment in Alibaba, a Chinese e-commerce company.

Absent those proceeds, Yahoo’s first-quarter profit would have declined 16 percent.

First-quarter revenue fell 13 percent to $1.58 billion from $1.82 billion for the equivalent period in 2008. Yahoo attributed some of the decline to the sale of its Kelkoo shopping search engine and unfavorable foreign currency exchange rates.

Excluding fees paid to partners, Yahoo would have had $1.16 billion in revenue.

The results met analyst expectations of 8 cents per share in profit and $1.2 billion in adjusted revenue.

Sameet Sinha, an analyst with JMP Securities, said that Bartz has made clear that Yahoo’s revival is no short-term project. The longer it takes, he said, the more pressure she’ll be under to reach an agreement with Microsoft, which has been Yahoo’s on-again, off-again suitor for more than a year.

“Carol Bartz is in there making some significant changes, but she said that it’s not one or two quarters of changes,” Sinha said. “There’s still a long way to go.”

Yahoo cut 1,000 jobs in January 2008, and trimmed 1,500 more in October. An announcement about the new cuts was widely expected Tuesday after leaks to the media last week.

Bartz said she hoped she could make Yahoo more streamlined, in part by reducing some of its inefficiencies in its workforce.

“We sort of had one product management person for every three engineers, so we had a lot of people running around and telling engineers what to do.” Exasperated, she used some of the salty language that she’s known for, but that is rarely heard in conference calls with investors, declaring “But nobody was f- doing anything.”

“Excuse me, I knew that would slip out one of these times,” she said.

Yahoo had 13,500 employees at the end of the first quarter.

Bartz has eliminated several of Yahoo’s minor services, continuing a process started under her predecessor, Jerry Yang, and is contemplating more significant changes. Career site HotJobs is a candidate for sale while Yahoo Maps may be outsourced to another company, analyst Trip Chowdhry of Global Equities Research said in a recent research note.

Last week, Yahoo sold its 10 percent stake in Gmarket, a South Korean e-commerce site.

Bartz has said she wants to focus Yahoo on its core properties, where it is already successful, including its home page, e-mail and finance.

Meanwhile, Yahoo continues to feel the impact of the economic downturn. Display advertising revenue dropped 13 percent. Search advertising revenue fell 3 percent, reversing double-digit growth in previous quarters.

Yahoo’s results contrasted with Google, which is facing some of the same economic headwinds, but nevertheless reported a 6 percent increase in first-quarter revenue.

Bartz said that she is pleased with how Yahoo performed in the first quarter under difficult circumstances and that she expects the business to turn around with the economy.

Yahoo to lay off 675 after profit slides 78%

Unlike the case of Napster, The Pirate bay doesn’t actually host the copyrighted files, it simply allows users to posts links to copyrighted files on third party servers.  That’s why the they were charged of “assisting making available copyrighted material” instead of “assisting copyright infringement”

Could this be the end of torrent file sharing? And how about other torrent search engines, could they be next, If simply posting links to copyrighted materials can be charged of “assisting making available copyrighted materials”, surely there are many sites that fits this profile. One problem is, most of the links to copyrighted materials are posted by users and not necessarily the owners of site.

How about Online file sharing sites like rapidshare, megaupload, easyshare and others, Some of it’s users upload copyrighted materials, Even though they deleted files if found to be in violation of their terms of service. Problem is how to determine if the files are copyright, as most of the uploaded files are archived and renamed. Are the owners of the site also liable?

And One Big question, since Google, Yahoo, MSN Live.com also indexes copyrighted materials, are they also liable?

The overall number of videos watched online in the US in January climbed 4 percent from the previous month to 14.8 billion, with YouTube viewing accounting for 91 percent of that growth, comScore reported Wednesday.

Google-owned websites, predominantly YouTube, ranked at the top of the US online video heap with 6.4 billion snippets watched during the month, according to comScore.

Fox Interactive Media, which owns online social-networking service MySpace, had the second highest number of videos viewed – 552 million.

Yahoo! online destinations were third with 374 million videos watched, the industry tracking group reported.

Approximately 147 million US Internet users watched an average of 101 online videos each in January, with 102 million of those people using Google-owned sites, according to comScore.

AFP: YouTube topped 100 million US viewer mark in January: comScore

Search Trends

Google Trends

• Google Trends is a web-based tool under development by Google Labs. The tool measures the search volume for terms in Google’s search engine over a specified period of time. Google Trends will display graphical results for a specific term’s popularity and allow you to compare search volumes with other search terms. Google Trends also compiles and displays a list of the most popular terms for which people have recently searched.  Learn More.

Yahoo Buzz!

• Yahoo! Buzz is a service much like Digg offered by search engine Yahoo!. It allows users to submit links and vote for submitted links; Yahoo! Buzz then ranks the submitted links in order of votes received and search engine trends and places the highest ranked links on the front page of their site.

Live Search xRank

• xRank keeps track of notable people and puts them in order for you. We count Live Search web searches for movie stars, musicians, and other famous people. Then, we compile our findings into an insightful ranking formula that tells you who the world is searching for most. The result is a cultural snapshot of who’s hot and who’s not!

MSN A-List

• MSN A-list tracks popular searches on MSN network, topics ranges from News headlines, Health, sports to top Books and more..

AOL Hot Searches

• Find out what are the hottest topics and most searched news and keywords on AOL Network

Ask.com IQ Reporting

• Ask.com IQ (Interesting Queries) – See the most popular search terms each week based on millions of Ask.com searches.

Search.com top Searches

• Lists of popular search terms on Search.com a part of CNET Networks, Inc.

Lycos 50

• The Lycos 50 lists the people, places and things which are most on the public mind as reflected by Lycos user searches over the past week.

Website Trends

Alexa.com

• Alexa.com is both a search engine and website tracker. You may search for information on Alexa.com, as you would when using a search engine like Google, or you may enter a url into the search bar to receive traffic statistics and other information about that site.

Larry Page is the son of the late Dr. Carl Victor Page, a professor of computer science and artificial intelligence at Michigan State University and one of the University of Michigan’s first computer science Ph.D. graduates, and Gloria Page, a computer programming teacher at Michigan State University. Although his mother was Jewish, Page was raised similarly to his father, and did not practice any religion. He is also the brother of Carl Victor Page, Jr.. a co-founder of eGroups, which was later sold to Yahoo!.

During an interview, Page said that “their house was usually a mess, with computers and Popular Science magazines all over the place.” His love affair with computers started when he was six years old when he got “to play with the stuff lying around.” He became the “first kid in his elementary school to turn in an assignment” from a word processor.  His older brother also taught him to take things apart, and before long he was taking “everything in his house apart to see how it worked.” He said that “from a very early age, I also realized I wanted to invent things. So I became really interested in technology…and business. So probably from when I was 12 I knew I was going to start a company eventually.”

Page attended a Montessori school in Lansing, Michigan, and graduated from East Lansing High School. Page holds a Bachelor of Science degree in computer engineering from the University of Michigan with honors and a Masters degree in Computer Science from Stanford University. While at the University of Michigan, “Page created an inkjet printer made of Lego bricks”, served as the president of the HKN,  and was a member of the solar car team.

Other Information

• Born  Lawrence Edward “Larry” Page, March 26, 1973 (1973-03-26)
• Lansing, Michigan
• Occupation  Computer scientist, technology innovator, entrepreneur
• Net worth  $15.8 billion USD (2008)
• Known for  Co-founder of Google, Inc.
• Spouse(s)  Lucinda Southworth

Links

• Larry Page – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Google was co-founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were students at Stanford University and the company was first incorporated as a privately held company on September 4, 1998. The initial public offering took place on August 19, 2004, raising US$1.67 billion, making it worth US$23 billion. Google has continued its growth through a series of new product developments, acquisitions, and partnerships. Environmentalism, philanthropy and positive employee relations have been important tenets during the growth of Google, the latter resulting in being identified multiple times as Fortune Magazine’s #1 Best Place to Work. The unofficial company slogan is “Don’t be evil”, although criticism of Google includes concerns regarding the privacy of personal information, copyright, censorship and discontinuation of services. According to Millward Brown, it is the most powerful brand in the world.

Trivia

• “Googol” is the mathematical term for a 1 followed by 100 zeros. The term was coined by Milton Sirotta, nephew of American mathematician Edward Kasner, and was popularized in the book, “Mathematics and the Imagination” by Kasner and James Newman. Google’s play on the term reflects the company’s mission to organize the immense amount of information available on the web.
• They have found in user testing, that a small number of people are very typical of the larger user base. They run labs continually and always monitoring how people use a page of results.
  The name ‘Google’ was an accident. A spelling mistake made by the original founders who thought they were going for ‘Googol’
• The prime reason the Google home page is so bare is due to the fact that the founders didn’t know HTML and just wanted a quick interface.
• The infamous “I feel lucky” is nearly never used. However, in trials it was found that removing it would somehow reduce the Google experience. Users wanted it kept. It was a comfort button.
• Infact it was noted that the submit button was a long time coming and hitting the RETURN key was the only way to burst Google into life.
• Due to the sparseness of the homepage, in early user tests they noted people just sitting looking at the screen. After a minute of nothingness, the tester intervened and asked ‘Whats up?’ to which they replied “We are waiting for the rest of it”. To solve that particular problem the Google Copyright message was inserted to act as a crude end of page marker.
• On Jan 31, 2009, between 6:30 a.m. PST and 7:25 a.m. Google flags every search results with the message “This site may harm your computer”.
• Google announces a $125 million deal that settles a lawsuit with publishers that had sued it over its book search. Not only does it put the search feature in the clear, but it may see Google become a major retailer of out-of-print books.
• Orkut is very popular in Brazil. Orkut was the brainchild of a very intelligent Google engineer who was pretty much given free reign to run with it, without having to go through the normal Google UI procedures, hence the reason it doesn’t look or feel like a Google application. They are looking at improving Orkut to cope with the loads it places on the system.
• Google makes changes small-and-often. They will sometimes trial a particular feature with a set of users from a given network subnet; for example Excite@Home users often get to see new features. They aren’t told of this, just presented with the new UI and observed how they use it.
• They use the 20% / 5% rules. If at least 20% of people use a feature, then it will be included. At least 5% of people need to use a particular search preference before it will make it into the ‘Advanced Preferences’.
• Gmail was used internally for nearly 2 years prior to launch to the public. They discovered there was approximately 6 types of email users, and Gmail has been designed to accommodate these 6.
• They listen to feedback actively. Emailing Google isn’t emailing a blackhole.
• Employees are encouraged to use 20% of their time working on their own projects. Google News, Orkut are both examples of projects that grew from this working model.

Products

• See Google Pruducts

Videos

Other Information

• Founded  Menlo Park, California (September 4, 1998)
• Founder(s) Sergey Brin, Larry Page
• Headquarters  Googleplex, Mountain View, California, United States
• Area served  Worldwide
• Key people  Eric E. Schmidt, (Chairman) & (CEO), Sergey Brin (Technology President), Larry Page (Products President)
• Industry  Internet, Computer software
• Market cap  US$ 96.472 Billion – At market close on January 22, 2009
• Revenue  ▲31.3% US$ 21.796 Billion (2008)
• Employees  20,222 – December 31, 2008

Competitors

• Yahoo!
• Ask.com
• Microsoft Live Search

Links

• About Google – Links to numerous Google resources.
• Product descriptions – Categorized listing with links.
• More Google products – A variety of Google tools.
• Google Press Center – News and public information.
• Executive Management – Our executives and board of directors.
• Corporate Addresses – Locations around the world.
• Investor Relations – Financial and corporate governance information.
• Ten things – Our philosophy.
• Help page – Support for Google products.
• Jobs at Google – Positions available in many locations.
• Contact us – Links to various business units.
• Official Site: Philanthropic Branch Google.org
• Website  Google.com

More Links

Yahoo Mobile will launch at the end of March in a form downloadable to any phone with a Web browser and from May in custom versions for hundreds of smartphones.

“There is a growing number of consumers out there who are not Apple iPhone users but want a rich starting experience,” Marco Boerries, the head of Yahoo’s mobile division, told Reuters in an interview.

Yahoo will also launch a version of Yahoo Mobile, designed to be a starting point for users to access the Internet, for the iPhone itself at the end of March. A test version for a limited number of public users is going live this week.

Yahoo Mobile offers a front page with colorful, boxy icons resembling the iPhone’s for launching popular applications such as a Web browser, mail, news, weather and social network sites like Facebook.

Users also have the option to easily add any software or Web sites they choose to download on their phones.

The company plans in coming months to promote Yahoo Mobile via a series of 70 major operator partnerships it has struck to reach 850 million mobile subscribers around the globe.

Fifty of those partnerships already offer Yahoo services and the company expects the rest to adopt Yahoo Mobile in coming months, Boerries said.

Yahoo has developed versions that work on hundreds of mid-range and high-end mobile phones from BlackBerry maker RIM, Nokia, Samsung, Sony Ericsson and Motorola, as well as phones running Microsoft Windows.

Boerries defines the universe of phones that can effectively run Yahoo Mobile as “every phone that’s shipped in the last two years that has a decent HTML-capable browser.” He added: “We don’t want to make lowest common denominator stuff.”

A more general version of the service downloadable from the Web will also work on older phones but will not be tailored to those phones’ specifications. Boerries demonstrated it on an old Sony Ericsson model.

Boerries said last year’s on-again off-again talks with would-be buyer Microsoft had not significantly distracted his team, and said he had kept his key staff together for years.

After some prior delays in introducing services such as Yahoo Go, Boerries professed relief that his fuller vision of putting the Web on phones had arrived on time: “It is really, for me, making it all come together.”

“This is like the uber-replacement of Yahoo Go.”

Yahoo offers iPhone-like Web for masses