Internet, Search Engine | featured news

Google co-founder Larry Page has ruminated about his past year as CEO and mused about the challenges ahead in an unusual dispatch that he shared Thursday.

Yahoo is laying off 2,000 employees as new CEO Scott Thompson sweeps out jobs that don't fit into his plans for turning around the beleaguered Internet company. The cuts announced Wednesday represent about 14 percent of the 14,100 workers employed by Yahoo.

A Tokyo court has ordered that Google suspend its autocomplete search function after a Japanese man claimed it violated his privacy and cost him his job. The case is a first involving the search function, which instantly suggests words or phrases a person may want to look for before the user has finished typing. So far, Google, headquartered in California, has refused to halt the feature, saying it will not be regulated by Japanese law and did not violate any privacy policies, according to the Kyodo news agency.

Yahoo said it would appoint three new independent directors to its board in April, as the Internet company aims to complete an overhaul of its board and leadership while avoiding a proxy fight with an unhappy large shareholder.

When Google included smaller Web sites in the fees it charges to incorporate its maps online, many of them rebelled.

Yahoo has put the IP squeeze on Facebook, slapping it with a patent lawsuit during the quiet period in the run up to the social network's IPO.

According to one analyst, Apple made $1 billion from Google last year to make it the default search engine in Safari.

In 2010, Google gave its search engine a jolt, moving the web’s de facto gateway onto a new software platform dubbed “Caffeine.” Designed by Google itself, Caffeine was a way for the company to more rapidly add new links to its massive index of websites, including news stories and blog posts and chatter from web forums. According to the company, it provided “50 percent fresher” search results than its previous indexing system, which was based on a seminal Google creation called MapReduce.

Yahoo’s new CEO Scott Thompson is preparing a massive restructuring of the Internet search firm, including layoffs that are likely to number in the thousands, according to a report.

On Thursday, Google's much-discussed new privacy policy goes into effect.