Search

While it remains the most popular search engine, Google's share of the U.S. search market dipped slightly in July to 43.7 percent from 44.7 percent the month before, according to the latest figures from comScore Networks.

Before that, Google's share had risen for 11 consecutive months. Behind Google is Yahoo at 28.8 percent, Microsoft at 12.8 percent, AOL at 5.9 percent and Ask at 5.4 percent, according to comScore figures released on Sunday.

Nielsen/NetRatings released its U.S. search market share figures on Monday and showed Google with 49.2 … Read more

AOL has fired two employees and its chief technology officer has resign Monday over the company's release of Web search data from 650,000 AOL members, according to a company e-mail and a source familiar with the matter.

The CTO, Maureen Govern, resigned effective immediately, according to an e-mail sent to employees by AOL President Jon Miller. Meanwhile, a researcher and a manager overseeing the research were fired, said a source, who requested anonymity.

AOL researchers posted the data on the user Web searches to a new AOL research Web site last month, but pulled it and apologized for the security breach … Read more

A dating Web site for Dutch farmers--Farm Date--has sued Google for displaying what it says are sponsored links to pornographic sites when you type "Farm Date" into the Google search engine, according to the Agence France-Presse.

The sponsored links are "very damaging for Farm Date's reputation," the article says, quoting Dutch farmer union FNV Bondgenoten, which is defending the Web site.

Farm Date, which looks like your typical dating site, only in Dutch, bills itself as a "respectable meeting website for farmers."

A Google spokesman asked on Wednesday to comment on … Read more

Power to the shopper. That could be the credo that defines a new era in the retail industry, if sites like Crowdstorm succeed.

The latest service to enter the so-called social shopping market, Crowdstorm "measures the buzz around products and allows users to recommend products to each other." The site is born from the same concept that launched such services as Wists, Yub.com and ShopWiki. Major players have also gotten into the act, including Yahoo with its Shoposphere and eBay through its affiliation with Kaboodle.

If anything, it's curious that such sites haven't taken off … Read more

YouTube is great for entertainment, but it's not the ideal place to look for an instructional video you can actually use. That's where VideoJug comes in.

The site, which launched in beta version a few days ago, aims to be the ultimate source of video instruction on just about anything imaginable, from identifying cancer to cooking pasta. "We are building a living encyclopedia of life, on video," the site proclaims.

Unlike most video-sharing communities, VideoJug produces its own instructional work, as well as gather and index videos submitted by the public. Many of them are produced … Read more

The legal and political fallout from AOL's publication of some 650,000 users' search histories continues.

On Monday, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the digital rights group in San Francisco, filed a complaint against AOL with the Federal Trade Commission.

The 11-page complaint (PDF) alleges that AOL violated federal laws prohibiting "deceptive trade practices" because its privacy policy said no such mass disclosure would take place.

AOL's privacy policy says "network information" of its users generally won't be shared with third parties. It defines network information as: "Depending on how you use the … Read more

Less than a month after "google" became a verb in Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary the namesake is warning companies about using the trademarked word improperly.

In covering the new verb, The Washington Post wrote: "Google, the word, now takes its place alongside the handful of proper nouns that have moved beyond a particular product to become descriptors of an entire sector--generic trademarks."

The venerated Washington Post received a letter from a Google trademark lawyer who objected to that characterization as "genericide."

According to an article in the newspaper about the letter, Google lawyers then … Read more

Guessing who will come up with The Next Big Thing is a perennial sport in this business, and today's emerging technologies provide reason for even more speculation than usual. Among the latest to weigh in with predictions is Dion Hinchcliffe's Web 2.0 Blog, which makes a valiant effort at sorting through start-ups that remain buoyed in the wake of MySpace and YouTube.

First on the list is Fanpop, a social site that's built around specific topics that it calls spots. (Fanpop's honchos explained to us why it's not a "social network" here.) … Read more

The University of California is considering joining Google's controversial book-scanning project, The Los Angeles Times reported on Wednesday (registration required).

UC officials are already having books from the 10 campuses throughout the state scanned and digitized as part of a competing project--called the Open Content Alliance--led by the Internet Archive, Yahoo and Microsoft.

While the Open Content Alliance (OCA) is sidestepping copyright issues by only digitizing books that are out of copyright, the Google Books Library Project is digitizing any books it can, but only offering snippets of a few sentences for books that are still protected under … Read more