Ask.com is laying off roughly 130 engineers and giving up on its own all-purpose search technology. It plans to go back to its roots of answering simple questions instead of indexing everything on the Web. Its exit leaves only two general search providers: Google and Microsoft.
Rich Skrenta thinks he has built a better search engine. This week, he's launching Blekko, whose web searches will only accept information from curated lists of trusted sites, mediated by users to filter out irrelevant results. But can Blekko compete with Google and Bing?
Celebrity books normally get a big marketing push. But the campaign for Decoded, the rap mogul's new book of lyrics, is unprecedented. Thanks to backing from Clear Channel and Microsoft's Bing, it's surely in a league of its own.
Just a few months after Google exited the Chinese search market, Microsoft and Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group have partnered to launch their own Chinese search site, Etao.
Microsoft Corp. and Facebook today expanded their partnership by unveiling a feature that lets users of Microsoft's Bing search engine to find websites preferred by their Facebook friends.
Yahoo is rolling out new search features starting today, with more options and snapshots appearing in capsules ant the top of the page. The company hopes to reverse its steady decline in ad revenue from searches. But will this be enough to help distinguish it from Bing?
Online advertisers may see up to a 78% price increase in paid-search rates once Yahoo and Microsoft wrap up their search alliance. Cost-per-click will likely rise sharply as advertisers shift to the single Bing search platform.
In August, Microsoft's Bing overtook Yahoo as the No. 2 U.S. Internet search engine for the first time, according to a Nielson report. Bing has been rapidly rising in popularity since its launch in June of last year. Can it give Google a run for the top spot?
Yahoo seems to be having trouble keeping its Asian partners happy. After South Korean and Japanese partners announced plans to ditch the Internet giant last month, Alibaba now says it may reconsider its partnership as well.
In a conversation with DailyFinance, Google co-founder Sergey Brin summarizes the future of the Internet behemoth in very simple terms: More searches more potential revenue = happy investors.
Here comes a faster Google. The search giant announced today a new enhancement called Google Instant that's designed to shave two to five seconds off a typical search query.
Carol Bartz has been running Yahoo for 18 months, and some investors are getting impatient. Revenue growth has been poor as Yahoo has been outpaced by the likes of Google and Facebook. If things don't improve soon, Bartz could be forced out.
In Google's latest effort to expand into online gaming, the search company has acquired Jambool, which provides a technology platform that allows online game developers to create virtual currency, along with virtual goods and services.
On a conference call to discuss IAC's second-quarter earnings, Barry Diller, the web company's chairman, at times sounded like he was taking personal responsibility for the failure to turn Ask.com into a viable alternative to Google.
Yahoo's domestic page views were under reported by comScore to the tune of some 1 billion views and the total minutes spent on its site gained an extra 850 million, according to a statement Yahoo released Tuesday.