Internet, Stock Market | featured news

As the search volume on generic terms such as "debt", "portfolio" and "stocks" fell, the Dow Jones average tended to go up - and vice versa. An investment strategy based on these search volume data between 2004 and 2011 would have made a profit of 326%.

For a few surreal minutes, a mere 12 words on Twitter caused the world's mightiest stock market to tremble. No sooner did hackers send a false Associated Press tweet reporting explosions at the White House on Tuesday than investors started dumping stocks - eventually unloading $134 billion worth. Turns out, some investors are not only gullible, they're impossibly fast stock traders.

Companies can use social media such as Facebook and Twitter to unveil key information about their operations as long as they’ve told investors where to look for it, the Securities and Exchange Commission announced Tuesday.

Facebook joins the Nasdaq-100 Index, a move accelerated by the departure of Infosys, which is moving to the New York Stock Exchange.

A federal judge Thursday temporarily blocked the government from enforcing a new insider trading law that would require about 28,000 executive branch employees to disclose details of their financial transactions on the Internet.

A commerce site called Limited Run, in announcing that it was deleting its Facebook page, claimed that 80 percent of its ad-clicks on Facebook came from "bots" or automated accounts, and only a fifth from genuine users.

Google Inc announced a stock split designed to preserve the control of co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin over the No. 1 Web search engine, as it posted revenue in line with estimates.

A hacker network that claims to be based in Saudi Arabia paralyzed the websites of Israel's stock exchange and national airline on Monday, escalating an international cyber war that has jolted this security-obsessed country.

Investors appear to be souring on social networking shares, a development which bodes ill for the eventual IPOs for Facebook, Twitter and other players in the industry. Perhaps unnerved by the lackluster reception for Zynga shares, the sector took a pounding in Monday's trading.

Groupon, the company that pioneered online group discounts, saw its stock climb by nearly a third in its public debut Friday, showing strong demand for an Internet company whose business model is considered unsustainable by some analysts. Groupon's stock jumped $6.40, or 32 percent, to $26.40 in late morning Friday after trading began at about 10:45 a.m. Earlier, the stock was trading as high as $31.14. Big fluctuations are common for companies that have just gone public as investors gauge what to do with the stock. The stock is trading on the Nasdaq Stock Market under the ticker symbol "GRPN."