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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

Four weeks ago, renowned British astrophysicist Stephen Hawking posed a question to Yahoo Answers. "How can the human race survive the next hundred years?" he asked.

Since then, people have posted more than 25,000 responses. Hawking will select his choice for the best answer this week, Yahoo says. And on Wednesday, he will talk about the fate of the world in an exclusive audio clip that will be posted on Yahoo Search and Yahoo Video.

Hawking is just one of a handful of celebrities Yahoo has tapped to pose questions on Yahoo Answers, including Donald Trump, Al … Read more

Bombs have been falling on Lebanon for two weeks now. The news is all over the Web. But, as a generous tipster pointed out: In Google Earth, the skies over Beirut are clear, the grass is green and the buildings are standing.

What' up, Google?

A Google representative said the freshness of the images is solely the responsibility of Digital Globe, the company that provides satellite images to Google Earth. "Google has no editorial control or control over the time line," she said.

She couldn't say how often new images are streamed to Google, but said that, … Read more

An Arkansas judge has given final approval to a $90 million settlement that Google reached to settle a click-fraud lawsuit.

In the ruling, the judge rejects claims by opposing attorneys that the amount was not adequate compensation for advertisers who have been charged for fraudulent clicks on online ads.

"We're pleased Judge Griffin has affirmed the settlement as appropriate and fair to advertisers," said Nicole Wong, associate general counsel at Google. "We look forward to continuing to manage invalid clicks effectively and provide our advertisers with an outstanding return on their investment."

Attorneys for the … Read more

Google posted on Thursday second-quarter earnings that beat analyst expectations as revenue from advertising continued to rise.

Net earnings for the quarter were $772 million, or $2.49 per share, excluding one-time items like stock-based compensation. Revenue was $1.68 billion, excluding traffic acquisition costs, which are commissions paid to content partners.

Analysts had expected Google to earn $2.22 per share on revenue of $1.65 billion, according to a survey by Thomson Financial.

Confused about the direction of search technology? We certainly are. That's why we were particularly interested in this primer on "Search 2.0 vs. Traditional Search."

A lot of blogs and sites write about this important area of development, often in generalized or densely technical terms. But Read/WriteWeb, a part of the Web 2.0 Workgroup blog network, helps explain the status of search technology the best kind of learning tool: examples.

Specifically, the blog summarizes five hot technologies that are on the front lines of search development--Swicki, Rollyo, Clusty, Wink and Lexxe. (Is it … Read more

Yahoo shares fell nearly 22 percent on Wednesday to a two-year low of $25.70 one day after the search giant posted second-quarter revenue that fell shy of analyst estimates and said it would launch a new advertising platform a quarter later than expected.

Shares of Google, which reports its second-quarter results on Thursday, slipped 1 percent to $399.

Several analysts downgraded Yahoo after the announcement, including Jackson Securities, which downgraded Yahoo to "hold" and JP Morgan to "neutral."

One of the hottest interactive battlefields between Yahoo and Google involves a land grab. But rather than the virtual kind of the late '90s, this one involves real brick and mortar.

Yahoo may have raised the stakes significantly by doing a deal with Zillow, the popular site that just came out this year but is already changing the game in property search and research. The partnership makes perfect sense for Yahoo as it tries to strengthen its presence in local markets while pursuing a strategy as the social-networking portal of choice, having already acquired such sites as Flickr and Delicious.… Read more

Don't try this at home!

H. D. Moore, creator of the Metasploit hacking tool, has crafted a search engine that finds malicious software using Google queries. The new "Malware" search engine finds Web sites hosting malicious files after a person enters the name of a virus or Trojan horse.

To find the malicious software the new search tool uses a fingerprint of the executable and then searches for it using Google, according to the Web site. However, those who do try it won't find much. Google has not indexed most malware yet and the signature database … Read more