Google, Search Engine | featured news

Google’s announcement that it is sharing more user data across its services has already raised the hackles of privacy advocates, technology writers and at least one national data-protection agency.

Google Inc's quarterly results fell short of Wall Street's heightened expectations for the holiday season as declining search advertising rates contributed to a rare miss, triggering a 9 percent slide in its shares.

For Google, it's personal. The Internet search giant is no longer going to roll out the same search results to everyone... It's doing this in three ways. First, it's expanding search beyond public Web pages to the photos and posts you and others have shared privately. Second, as you type a person's name into Google, it will automatically suggest people you are close to or may be interested in. Third, Google is guiding users to profiles and Google+ pages related to the topic of interest.

Google’s recent ~$1b 3-year deal with Mozilla for Google to be the default search provider for hundreds of millions of Firefox browser users, which comprise over a quarter of the global browser/search market, has much broader and more serious antitrust implications for Google’s already very tenuous antitrust situation than most everyone appreciates.

With Google incessantly branching out into even more ventures such as music and social networking, its search business could continue to act as a minor Catch-22 situation in future by helping competition in other business lines.

Google has expanded its search blacklist to include many of the top file-sharing sites on the Internet, including The Pirate Bay. The changes were quietly processed and appear to be broader than previous additions. Google’s blacklist prevents the names of sites appearing in their Instant and Autocomplete search services, while the pages themselves remain indexed.

The search giant agrees to remove a Google Places review that defamed a businessman, 18 months after it was posted.

Google is considering participating in a bid for troubled Internet search pioneer Yahoo!, according to a published media report. Google has held talks with at least two private-equity firms about helping them to finance a purchase of Yahoo!'s core business, according to the report, published Saturday on The Wall Street Journal's Web site.

You can't Google this. OK, maybe you can. But MC Hammer doesn't want you to. The venerable rapper, who helped usher hip-hop into the pop mainstream in the early '90s, has rolled out a search engine he hopes will outperform Google, Bing and other established tools.