Google

WASHINGTON--The U.S. economy as a whole may not have the sunniest prognosis lately, but Google's chief economist and other industry watchers on Friday diagnosed the Internet sector as relatively healthy.

During a panel discussion at Google's D.C. headquarters, professor-turned-in-house-economist Hal Varian argued that an analysis of search queries at his company's site mirrors deeper economic trends. Job-related searches are up as a share of total searches, for instance, and real-estate and luxury goods searches are down--exactly what you'd expect in a "recessionary environment," Varian said.

But overall, the total number of searches … Read more

Click fraud decreased in the first quarter of 2008, in part because of measures Yahoo and Google took to counteract the bogus clicks on online advertisements that can waste advertisers' dollars, according to a new study.

Overall click fraud dropped to 16.3 percent of clicks in the quarter compared with 16.6 percent in the fourth quarter of 2007, said Click Forensics, a company that monitors the phenomenon and is in the business of helping clients prevent it. It was only the second time the rate dropped since Click Forensics started studying it, the company said.

"Yahoo and … Read more

Google found its new chief information officer, Ben Fried, on Wall Street--and at least on paper, it looks like a good fit.

Even though Google is a Silicon Valley company thousands of miles away from the buttoned-down brokers of lower Manhattan, the two domains have more in common technologically and culturally than one might think.

Wall Street companies and Google have different objectives, but both have a similar modus operandi. They use lots of cutting-edge computer equipment, often with plenty of in-house customization, to get ahead of the competition.

Most companies buy off-the-shelf software, but Wall Street firms like to … Read more

In my presentation yesterday here at Web 2.0 Expo, I showed Yahoo Suggest as an alternative to Google Suggest for quick-n-dirty keyword research. Both tools are free. Google Suggest is also built into the Google Toolbar's search box, so it's super convenient: just start typing keystrokes and it makes suggestions (think: auto-complete), the suggestions listed in order of popularity. In fact, it was Google Suggest that my daughter Chloe used to identify her top search term, "neopets cheats" and thus named her site "The Ultimate Neopets Cheats Site" since Google Suggest showed that &… Read more

Google has found its new chief information officer, CNET News.com has learned: Benjamin Fried, a programmer who rose through the ranks to run much of Morgan Stanley's computing infrastructure.

Fried, a managing director who led Morgan Stanley's Application Infrastructure group, will take the new post in May, Google spokesman Matt Furman confirmed Thursday.

According to an internal Morgan Stanley memo seen by News.com, Fried will leave Morgan Stanley at the end of the month "to pursue opportunities outside the firm."

The memo also indicated that Fried is no stranger to Google. While at Morgan … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--The company behind Photophlow, a site that presents a lively chat room interface around the Flickr photo-sharing site, plans to demonstrate on Thursday a similarly elaborate presentation of Google's YouTube video service.

Start-up Oortle's service, called Videophlow, lets people post videos into a chat room and lets those in the room control the video playback. And as with Photophlow, people can use Videophlow to take advantage of YouTube features such as searching, adding comments, or marking videos as favorites.

"You'll even be able to throw a tomato at the screen for everyone to see," … Read more

Google is expanding its advertising business into a new domain: graphical ads that appear on mobile devices.

As with the company's text-based mobile ads, the Google image ads are displayed on the basis of keywords that appear on Web sites that people visit with their mobile phones, Google said Wednesday.

Mobile devices are a new frontier for the Internet in general and for the advertising business that Google and many others are building atop it. The mobile Web has been hobbled by tiny screens, slow and unreliable connections, and carriers' data-access fees, but a new era is arriving.

Apple'… Read more

Zoho users with a Google username and password will be able to log directly into Zoho applications, according to Sridhar Vembu, founder and CEO of AdventNet, parent company of Zoho.

"Users won't need a separate Zoho account," he told me at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. The Google sign-on integration should be finished within two weeks, he said.

Vembu was impressed by Google's cooperation and willingness to work with a competitor. Zoho and Google Docs are both trying to replace Microsoft Office. Google has been willing to contribute code, such as OpenSocial, to … Read more

Update: I listened again and got the actual quotation.

Google has never expressed much enthusiasm for getting into the desktop operating system, but some might wonder if the company has updated its thinking, now that it's trying to spearhead the Android project to bring an operating system to mobile phones.

The answer: Nope.

"We don't have any plans to build an operating system," Marissa Mayer, vice president of search products and user experience, said on Wednesday during in an call-in show, KQED's Forum with Michael Krasny.

The comment came in response to a caller who … Read more