Search News & Articles

As widely rumored, Yahoo has just announced 2,000 redundancies spread across many of its units, as the company aims to slim down, focus on core profitable areas and return to looking after users and advertisers.

The formidable power of Facebook and the social revolution got a boost from a new online study that shows consumers find social sharing equivalent to Google search in helpfulness when looking for a product to buy. So says the Sociable Labs consumer research study Social Impact Study: How Consumers See It. 

Competition in the smartphone and tablet market is getting tougher between Apple and Google. Apple is reportedly reducing its dependence on Google in various online and mobile services, and with recent reports that Baidu will soon be a default search engine for iOS mobile devices in China, Google might just lose its already weak hold in this market.

Despite the vast amounts of revenue generated from the service, Google's search service has remained relatively staid for users, bar the odd funky logo. However, according to the Wall Street Journal, it will soon be getting up to speed, offering direct answers to questions and more relevance via semantic searching.

In the last flailing act of a wounded beast, Yahoo won't do the decent thing and go quietly into the night, but will throw lawsuits at anyone it can claw some money from. The latest target is Facebook and the weapon of choice, some super-simple patents.

When you have a name like mine, Google searches can either be your best friend or your worst enemy. One false move on my part and it won’t be hard to hide from search results. Additionally, if you have a common name, it’s not always easy to ensure that potential employers, suitors or others likely to Google you are getting the results that represent you. Sure, you can try to boost or push down your own results, but it’s not always easy to figure out. Until now. Thanks to BrandYourself, users can optimize the links you want to push up in Google results for your name.

Google is in the wars again this week, reinforcing use of its own Wallet product and banging heads with Apple. While on the desktop, it has been busy with the smaller changes, tweaking Gmail and Google+ a little more.

As Google faces legal opposition over its new privacy policy in Europe, expect more long, drawn-out legal battles. Meanwhile, the company is clamping down on spam in Google+, as Chrome's browser share shrinks and Android 5.0 Jelly Bean moves closer to an unveiling.

Graphs are so 1999. Today, it’s all about the infographic -- the busy composite images with lots of metrics that simultaneously cater to my ADD and lust of for semi-useful details. Local search provider, Localeze, has  published a new infographic that details the growth of local search.

This week, the Apple dragon woke from sleeping on its mountain of cash to pick up a search company, Chomp. That's likely as part of a revamp of iTunes as it prepares for its next generation of hardware launches, with more glimpses of components out in the wild.

Social media sentiment is increasing in importance, so much that Google has started indexing Google+ content. The search giant is even updating its results pages to likewise reflect content from its home-grown social network. Twitter is likewise taking advantage of search engines incorporating its social media stream, and is evident with the microblogging service's latest partnership with Yandex.

After causing a privacy fuss a few weeks ago, Google is back in the news again having been found circumnavigating Apple's Safari browser privacy to track user's surfing habits. On the positive side, it has found new ways to unlock Android phones and added further features for Google+ to keep it gaining in popularity.

When business is doing great, you don't just sit back and ride the wave -- you go out find yourself a Chief Technology Officer. At least that's what Ektron did.

Once there were radios, then came television, and now, with computers quickly becoming America’s primary source of entertainment, advertisers are being forced to take notice. The latest trends in online advertising reflect this changing vantage point, as a new analysis from eMarketer shows video will be the fastest growing digital ad format over the coming years, slowly but surely gaining momentum against search and banner ads. The oracle has spoken. 

In a letter to the Yahoo board, Chairman Roy Bostock announces that he won't be seeking re-election at the next shareholder's meeting. Is Bostock stepping down? Or is it more like jumping ship?