google

NEW YORK--There were massive video animations projected on the sides of post-industrial buildings, trippy progressive songs blasted into the streets, and famed artists and designers hobnobbing with software developers over an open bar. A white tent emblazoned with Google's iconic logo sprawled across the cobble-stoned Gansevoort Square, and Thursday night's bubbly partygoers surveyed the scene in awe.

Even for New York's Meatpacking District, the grit-meets-glamour setting of innumerable Sex and the City episodes, it was an odd display.

Earlier this week, Google had announced iGoogle Artist Themes, a new set of designs for its personalized-home page product, … Read more

Google is starting to provide a fuller picture of the work it's undertaking to create a practical tool for image searches.

On its Google Research blog Thursday, the company offered a brief introduction to VisualRank, a system that sorts out images by means of visual cues rather than by text associated with the images. The write-up is a distillation of a much longer paper (PDF), "PageRank for Product Image Search," that two Google researchers presented last week at a conference in Beijing on Web technologies.

The VisualRank system is not yet live, and Google intimated that the … Read more

Update 6:50 p.m. PT: I updated with Google's no-comment, too.

Yahoo could announce a deal within a week to carry Google search ads, potentially including a nonexclusive arrangement to allay antitrust concerns, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.

Yahoo and Google recently concluded a limited two-week test to see how well a partnership might work--and to get some bargaining leverage in Microsoft's attempt to acquire Yahoo.

Yahoo has been trying to fend off Microsoft's advances, arguing that it doesn't value the search pioneer highly enough. But the possible deal, as described by the Journal, … Read more

LOS ANGELES--Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt gave a speech and chatted with IBM's CEO Sam Palmisano onstage Thursday at IBM's Business Partner Leadership Conference here. The two talked up their relationship, which primarily involves a joint research project. In October, Google and IBM announced a cloud computing initiative, based on Google's expertise in distributed, parallel computing and IBM's industrial enterprise management technologies, for public use by universities.

IBM is taking some of the learnings from the project and plans to operate a cloud that will allow partners to house their Web-based applications and sell them to … Read more

LOS ANGELES--Speaking at IBM's Business Partner Leadership Conference here, Google CEO Eric Schmidt reiterated his position that social networks are still too closed. "If it's not searchable by Google, it's not open, and open is best for the consumer," he said.

He added that "searchable by Google" means also searchable by other search engines, such as Yahoo. "People should be able to move from place to place, and their data is available everywhere," Schmidt said. "Social networks are a real phenomenon of people living their lives online, and it has … Read more

Advertisers now can use Google TV Ads to, well, place ads on TV, Google said Wednesday. The service is out of its invitation-only beta program that began in June, the company said on its AdWords blog.

No doubt this service will get more interesting when the glorious future of integrated video and Internet access arrives, but for now, it just means Google can feed ads to several dozen TV channels nationwide.

As with Google's AdWords service for placing ads on its Internet search page, advertisers bid for placement. A tool shows estimated costs to run a particular campaign, letting … Read more

Google slowed its hiring because the company couldn't keep track of what everybody was doing, Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said Wednesday.

"We have slowed our head count growth for a couple of reasons, but the biggest reason is it began to feel like we really didn't have a good sense of what people were doing," Schmidt said in an interview with CNBC. "The systems in the company, literally who's doing what, what are they doing, seemed to lag our ability to hire these great people."

Though the company slowed hiring later in 2007, … Read more

Google CEO Eric Schmidt likely surprised few by confirming Wednesday that his company's video-sharing powerhouse YouTube isn't quite throwing off lots of cash.

It was obvious from Google's earnings reports that YouTube has yet to generate material income. Still, it's worth noting, 18 months after Google acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion, the company has acknowledged that it hasn't "figured out the perfect solution of how to make money."

"We're working but have not yet in my view gotten a breakthrough around monetization," Schmidt said during an interview for CNBC. &… Read more

In a broad interview scheduled to run on CNBC at 4 p.m. EST Wednesday, Google CEO Eric Schmidt made it clear he's not pleased with the prospect of a Microsoft-Yahoo combination.

In the interview with CNBC's Maria Bartiromo, Schmidt said that given Microsoft's history of antitrust issues, an acquisition is cause for concern, according to a transcript of the interview. He also said a two-week partnership trial with Yahoo went well, and said he expects it to be one of several options Yahoo's executives are considering for their future.

"Well, the long and short … Read more