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Auctioneers generally aren't allowed to bid in their own auctions; why should Google be any different?

That's what Santa Clara University professor of law Eric Goldman is wondering, publishing an essay Wednesday on his personal blog and Search Engine Land calling on Google to stop bidding in AdWords auctions to run "house ads" that promote Google products. Google's involvement in the process distorts the value of search ads for other advertisers trying to bid on the same keywords and makes it impossible to know whether Google is playing fair, Goldman wrote.

"Thus, when Google … Read more

Google's Chrome Web Store could be ready to launch by October of this year, suggesting that Chrome OS devices are likely on a similar schedule.

Google appears to be getting ready to let Web application developers start playing around with its Chrome Web Store, if a recent presentation at the Game Developer Conference in Europe is any indication. 1UP.com has a report out with pictures and video of Google's Mark DeLoura and Michael Mahemoff explaining how developers will be able to submit apps to the store, which was announced in May at Google I/O.

Most of … Read more

Starting this week, searchers on Yahoo will start to see a little "Powered by Bing" message at the bottom of the results page, as the two companies start the public phase of their huge search deal completed last year.

Yahoo announced the milestone along with several updates to various search products and features that had been up in the air ever since Yahoo and Microsoft signed their search outsourcing deal just over a year ago. Under that deal, Microsoft is to provide the back-end crawling, listing, and ranking technologies that generate search results while Yahoo retains responsibility for … Read more

ComScore has changed the way it measures market share in the search industry after deciding efforts to game the system had gone too far.

The new methodology was released this week to financial analysts, and Search Engine Land has a detailed Q&A with ComScore on the new methods. The company now differentiates between "explicit core search," defined as "user engagement with a search service with the intent to retrieve search results," and "core search," basically everything else.

That means ComScore is now measuring different numbers for what most people would probably consider … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--If Adobe Systems had its druthers, Google Android would turn into the Microsoft Windows of the 21st century.

If there was any doubt that Adobe's mobile strategy is now tied to the long-term success of Android, it was removed by a day-long presentation by Adobe executives and managers about how Adobe is adapting its technologies to Android. Dubbed the "Android Summit," the series of presentations to the press emphasized how core Adobe technologies such as Flash and AIR are being optimized for Android on phones, tablets, and eventually televisions when Google TV is released.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, … Read more

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--Net neutrality is a difficult concept to sum up in a pithy slogan. But it was a nice day for a protest in Northern California.

Several dozen people gathered Friday here in Charleston Park--a public park steps from the Googleplex--to protest Google's proposed Net neutrality guidelines developed with Verizon Communications. They trotted out the usual "hey hey, ho ho" and "what do we want/when do we want it" chants, hoping to make their voices heard as about two dozen Googlers on their lunch breaks watched in bemusement.

The group was not … Read more

Two Silicon Valley heavyweights are about to reenact the Java wars: this time, in a court room.

Oracle issued a press release late Thursday saying it has filed suit against Google for infringing on copyrights and patents related to Java, which Oracle acquired along with Sun Microsystems earlier this year. The terse release claimed Google "knowingly, directly and repeatedly infringed Oracle's Java-related intellectual property."

A copy of the complaint (PDF), which was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, says that "Android (including without limitation the Dalvik VM and the Android software development kit) and devices that operate Android infringe one or more claims of each of United States Patents Nos. 6,125,447; 6,192,476; 5,966,702; 7,426,720; RE38,104; 6,910,205; and 6,061,520."

A Google representative said the company had not yet been served with the lawsuit, and therefore couldn't comment until it had a chance to review it. An Oracle representative declined to comment beyond the complaint.

Back when Google first announced plans to develop Android in 2007, it immediately raised the blood pressure of Java developers at Sun. Google's Java implementation is different than the one advocated by a Java standards group, which worried those tech industry veterans who remember the problems that Microsoft caused for Java by following a similar path on Windows.

Of course, Java has been forked and fragmented many times over the years, destroying the "write once run anywhere" promise of the technology with different implementations on different computing platforms. Still, Oracle, on behalf of Sun, is arguing that Java is a mobile operating system competitor against Android, and that Google is using Java-derived technologies without a proper license.

Oracle also noted the interlocking history between Google and Java in its complaint, noting that "Google has been aware of Sun's patent portfolio, including the patents at issue, since the middle of this decade, when Google hired certain former Sun Java engineers." Google CEO Eric Schmidt led the team that developed Java at Sun prior to becoming CEO of Novell, and later Google in 2001. Urs Hölzle, senior vice president of operations and a Google Fellow, also played a significant role in Java's development in the 1990s, and apparently other Sun engineers have joined Google in the intervening years.… Read more

A vocal critic of Google and Verizon's Net neutrality proposal plans to hold a protest rally outside Google headquarters Friday that it says will remind Google not to be evil.

Free Press, one of the more strident opponents of the Net neutrality proposal unveiled on Monday, is organizing the protest along with MoveOn.org Civic Action, ColorofChange.org, Credo Action, and the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, it said in a press release Thursday. "With public backlash growing against the pact between Google and Verizon that threatens the free and open Internet experience, Internet users from across the Bay … Read more

Updated 11:10 a.m. PDT and 12:18 p.m with new information.

Google released two new Android applications Thursday that let users dictate actions to their phones and link their phones with information from their desktop Chrome browser.

The company held a press conference Thursday morning at its offices in San Francisco to discuss the new mobile announcements, and it kicked off the day by explaining that advances in wireless connectivity and processing power on smartphones are allowing powerful mobile applications to take advantage of cloud computing. Given that one out of every four search requests on Android … Read more