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In June, Google Sites retained its lead in the U.S. core search market capturing 61.5 percent of the searches conducted, down slightly from 61.8 percent in May. Google was followed by Yahoo! Sites (20.9 percent, up from 20.6 percent in May), Microsoft Sites (9.2 percent, up from 8.5 percent in May), Ask Network (4.3 percent), and AOL LLC (4.1 percent).
Americans conducted 11.5 billion searches at the core search engines, representing a 7-percent increase versus May. Google Sites handled more than 7 billion core searches (up 6 percent from May), followed by Yahoo! Sites with 2.4 billion (up 9 percent), and Microsoft Sites with more than 1 billion (up 15 percent).

Link: More At ComScore.

Out of the blue, Google has announced a new 3D virtual world called ‘Google Lively’. The world is similar to Second Life, or the upcoming ‘Home’ for PS3.
Users can create their own 3D "rooms," and deck them out with furniture and other accoutrements, in addition to being able to add themed music to complete your personalized virtual space in Google Lively. Users will be able to visit others’ rooms, leave items for other Google Lively netizens as well as being able to stream photos and video.
"Based on feedback from ASU [Arizona State University] students and with help from the Google Desktop team, we added support for playing YouTube videos in virtual TVs and showing photos in virtual picture frames inside our rooms. Better yet, the gadgets you have in your Lively rooms can also run on your desktop."
- Niniane Wang, engineering manager.
As of now, Google Lively only runs on PC’s running Windows XP or Windows Vista, with a special browser plugin that uses Emergent’s Gamebryo engine.

Source: TechRadar
View: Google Lively

Records kept at Colt Express Outsourcing Services, an external company Google and other companies use to handle human-resources functions, were stolen in a burglary on 26 May. An undisclosed number of employees’ details and those of dependents, such as names, addresses, and social security numbers, were on the stolen computers. It is understood that Colt did not employ encryption to protect the information.
It is still unclear how many more of Colt Express’s clients were affected by the breach. US employees of CNET Networks (publisher of ZDNet.co.uk) were also affected by the burglary, with around 6,500 employees’ details stolen.
Although there is no evidence of misuse of the data to date, the information obtained could be used by ID thieves to create fake accounts and identities.
It has only come to light now that Google was one of the companies affected. Google itself was not burgled, nor were any of its internal systems compromised.

View: ZDNet

In most parts of the world you might "Google" for the answer, a Chinese may"Baidu" it;. But a Russian would more likely "Yandex" it !
Yandex ( Russian: Я́ндекс ) is a Russian search engine and one of the largest Russian Web portals. Yandex was launched in 1997. Its name can be explained as "Yet Another iNDEXer" ( yandex ) or "Языково́й (language) Index". The Russian word "Я" corresponds to English "I" (as the singular first-person pronoun), making "Яndex" a bilingual pun on "Index".
Few outside of Russia have heard of the Yandex search engine, but that may soon change. Yandex has 44% of the Russian market—10 points ahead of Google—and is now the No. 2 search outfit in Europe, according to researcher comScore. Yandex is expected to list its shares on Nasdaq this fall, fetching as much as $2 billion. That would be Russia’s largest-ever initial public offering in tech, valuing the company at around $5 billion. Although Yandex declined to comment about the listing, analysts and investors are expecting a blockbuster. "This IPO should be very popular," especially among investors eager to tap into Russia’s Internet market, says Konstantin Belov, an analyst at Uralsib, a Moscow bank.

Link: BusinessWeek

In a major step forward in search technology, Adobe is working with Google and Yahoo to make Flash files searchable in online search. The project will enable searches on Flash content to return text and links, which can then be indexed, and hence available in search results for the users. Content from a Flash application or even a game or advertisement will be available to search engines, reports InfoWorld. Pages containing a Flash .SWF file will be returned in a search. Google has already implemented this, while Yahoo, ever the laggard, will enable Flash search in a future version, whenever that comes out.
As for images and video, no luck yet. From Google’s own description: "If your Flash files only include images, we will not recognize or index any text that may appear in those images. Similarly, we do not generate any anchor text for Flash buttons which target some URL, but which have no associated text. Also note that we do not index FLV files, such as the videos that play on YouTube, because these files contain no text elements."

View: Washington Post

Google may have put to rest the notion that it will be creating a Google phone, but there’s still quite a bit of excitement surrounding the Android platform that it is championing. Among the companies that have signed on with its Open Handset Alliance are manufacturers like HTC, Samsung and Motorola, not to mention a host of semiconductor companies and software developers, too. Andy Rubin, the man heading Android at Google, was in town gave us a sneak preview of Android’s interface and some of the applications independent developers have created for it.

To demonstrate the capabilities of the platform, Rubin had with him a touchscreen-enabled phone. We were not allowed to take photos of the device, but were told that this is the same one used at the Google developer conference. It had a shape and dimensions very similar to the HTC TyTN II. Details were not given but the Android platform has a minimum specification requirement of 200MHz, so we know it’s at least that fast.

The Android user interface, like any other mobile phone’s, has an information bar at the top which tells you how much battery you have left, which network you’re on and what time it is. The main screen area is a blank slate much like the desktop space on a PC. Swiping the finger at the sides of the screen will move this desktop around as it is larger than the actual resolution of the LCD. As expected, there are many Google applications by default, 20 in total, according to Rubin. These include a YouTube program with which you can search and view all YouTube clips, a Gmail app and Google Maps.

Like many of the smart phone operating systems out there, more than one application can run at any one time. As some Windows Mobile users will attest to, this may cause problems for the end-user, especially if they are not vigilant about keeping running applications in check to conserve memory usage and battery life. Android handles that by putting all the apps running in the background in "freeze dry", minimizing the system resources that they consume even though they may not be completely shut down. In the demo, Google Maps ran smoothly even with a music player and a photo application running. The proof of how well this will work in the real-world by real users will have to wait till one of the manufacturers ships a real unit.

Notifications like system errors, warnings, new messages and so on appear as an exclamation mark unobtrusively on the top left corner of the display. This is not unlike the blinking asterisk we’ve seen in Palm OS since many revisions back. Pressing and pulling down this alert will reveal a list of notifications including mail alerts, error messages and also a list of running applications. It doesn’t bug you like some of the pop up notifications you may get in Windows Mobile, but we’ll be curious to see how a very crowded notifications list will look considering most people won’t want to scroll through a list of alerts.

One of the main draws of Android is being able to engage the developer community. To that end, Google has set aside US$10 million in awards for developers who submit their apps for consideration. The first round of this Android Developer Challenge (ADC) has already ended with some interesting submissions shown. Enkin, for example, was written by a couple of college students and makes use of the phone’s camera together with the GPS chip to provide a unique real-time, real-world navigation experience. It appends names of locations over what you see through the camera lens of your mobile phone using GPS navigation technology. Check out the video created by the developers to see how this works. 

                                 
Enkin from Enkin on Vimeo.Rubin was not able to reveal when the first Android phone will be coming. But when asked, he does not think it will be a situation where those in Asia will have to wait long after an initial US launch. Asian software developers are also on the Android bandwagon, with over 20 percent of the submissions for the first phase of the ADC coming out of Asia. We’ll bring you more information about Android hardware launches as that becomes available. It won’t be long though, as we’re expecting the first ones to be out by the end of this year.

Source: Asia CNet

Google 1998 ^^

Google managed to spank the rest of the mobile search world during the first quarter of 2008, according to data from Nielsen Mobile. The search giant managed to capture 61 percent of the mobile search market in the first four months of the year, with Yahoo! taking a very distant second at 18 percent. MSN sat at third place with a measly 5 percent.

The data comes almost four months after Google said that the number of mobile searches coming from iPhones was 50 times higher than any other handset. The discrepancy was so large that the company had engineers double-check the logs to make sure it wasn’t a mistake, but it turns out that it was all true. Despite the fact that smartphones have existed for far longer than Apple’s, it seems that—according to Google’s data—folks hadn’t been using the Internet (and, in turn, search engines) on their mobile devices like they are in the post-iPhone world.

Surely this is part of the reason why Google has skyrocketed to the top of Nielsen’s mobile search list. Google is set as a factory default search engine on all iPhones, with Yahoo! being offered as a secondary option (no Microsoft search product is available as a default on the iPhone, although users can navigate to the pages on their own if they so please).

Speaking of default search settings, however, Nielsen’s statistics are still surprising in other ways. For one, with the sheer number of Windows Mobile phones in the wild, why don’t Microsoft’s search options (MSN and Live Search) have a larger share? Windows Mobile 6 offers Live Search as a home screen option in its browser, and yet the search engine didn’t even make its way into third place; however, WM6 owners can also install Opera Mini, which offers Yahoo as a default search engine. Anecdotally, Opera Mini tends to be quite a popular browser alternative among friends who use WM6 and BlackBerry devices, which could be part of the reason why Yahoo managed to creep into second place on Nielsen’s list.

Another fairly major mobile search option that didn’t make the cut is the mobile version of Ask.com. With basically zero phones offering Ask.com as a default search engine, it’s all but impossible to capture any significant share until mobile Internet use becomes as commonplace as desktop Internet use.

Although Google and Yahoo! dominated Nielsen’s charts, they are still not without vulnerabilities. Less than half (44 percent) of mobile Google users rated their experiences toward the high end of the scale, leaving a lot of room for improvement. Yahoo! users were similar, with about 40 percent rating the search engine relatively high. The majority of both users were searching for general information on their mobile phones, although 29 percent of Google users and 24 percent of Yahoo users were looking for local listings. With increasing GPS and location-aware capabilities of today’s mobile phones, both search engines should be able to offer more targeted, local search results to users who are on the go.

Source: ArsTechnica

No sooner had the news that Microsoft and Yahoo! were no longer talking hit the web, the follow-up emerged. The much rumoured deal between Yahoo! and Google has been announced and sealed.
Expanding on the 2 week trial between the two companies (Yahoo! and Google), Google adverts will now appear next to Yahoo! search results in a system where both companies adverts will be put against each other in an auction style system. This makes the whole process easier to avoid anti-monopoly regulations.
The deal is expected to mean revenue at Yahoo! increases by $800 million eventually, with a cash flow increase of between $250 million and $450 million within the first 12 months.
Carl Ichan could not be reached for comment as to his position on this and how this would affect his (now seemingly impossible) plans to remove the board and sell Yahoo! to Microsoft.
Something tells me this still isn’t the end of this battle.

View: Yahoo!

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. - In the latest sign of its ambitious growth plans, Google Inc. has signed a 40-year lease to secure space for a huge office complex that will be built on a federal government research center near the Internet search leader’s Silicon Valley headquarters.
The 1.2 million-square-foot campus announced Wednesday fulfills a vision that Google first laid out with the NASA Ames Research Center in 2005. The NASA center is within a 10-minute drive of Google’s headquarters in Mountain View.
Google anticipates needing the additional space for the thousands of workers it expects to hire as tries to mine more profits from the Internet’s advertising market and expand into other areas of technology and media.

Link: Full Article at Yahoo

Google and Yahoo are reportedly moving closer to striking an advertising deal that could foil Microsoft’s takeover bid. The proposal would see Yahoo hand over its search advertising operation to Google in a deal that could yield Yahoo as much as $1bn in new revenues, according to reports in The Wall Street Journal.
The publication cited anonymous sources within Yahoo as saying that the outsourcing deal had been granted initial approval and will move forward. The arrangement would give Yahoo another weapon in its effort to ward off a takeover attempt by Microsoft. The Redmond giant has been attempting to push Yahoo’s board to accept its $42bn proposal since February.

View: The full story @ vnunet