|
Ahead of an upcoming trial in April over claims that Google’s Android operating system has infringed on Java patents, Google has offered to pay Oracle $3 million plus a portion of its Android platform revenue in an attempt to reach a settlement without the need for a jury verdict. The web giant had offered Oracle less than [...]
A man named Tom Kreft (if that is his real name) played an early April Fool’s joke on the press and the Internet at large, by claiming to have won the Mega Millions lottery jackpot that everyone’s been talking about all week. Wall Street Journal reporter Lauren Schuker tweeted: @lschuker Lauren SchukerAccording to sources, Tom [...]
Windows Phone owners who have downloaded the new Google Search App from the Windows Phone Marketplace are giving it an overwhelming thumbs down thus far, because it strays from the Metro-style theme, image search is broken, and it’s slow and buggy. Google announced the native search app’s arrival Wednesday, touting the inclusion of Google Autocomplete, Voice Search, [...]
A recent search engine user study shares insight into current search trends and user desires, revealing just how people feel about targeted advertising, personal data collection, and the quality of search results. However, it also highlights an apparent disconnect between what users say they want and what they actually expect. Fully 91 percent of respondents [...]
Is Google’s decision to charge sites or apps using Google Maps API for high volume usage beginning to backfire? Apple and Foursquare have both severed ties with Google Maps, instead opting to use a free alternative, OpenStreetMap. When Apple’s launched the new iPhoto for iPhone and iPad, it became apparent that Google Maps was history. In its [...]
In December 2011 Google announced that it now has a smartphone Googlebot-Mobile. Historically, Googlebot-Mobile has concerned itself only with mobile sites designed for feature phones, so this is a pretty significant development. Today’s column is going to discuss how to think about Googlebot, Googlebot-Mobile and your mobile web site. As noted in this recent mobile SEO podcast [...]
Google is upping its game with improvements to ad sitelinks. The new sitelink option gives users more options while delivering more clicks for advertisers. On average, Google said the click through rate (CTR) is 30 percent higher for ads with sitelinks than those without. Ad sitelinks launched in 2009. Sitelinks offer AdWords advertisers the ability to display [...]
Myspace seemed to be coasting toward oblivion when it sold for peanuts last year, but it looks like its new buyers knew exactly what they wanted to do with the site and have been able to execute their plans. Myspace’s renewed popularity is due to a number of factors, all of which came to a [...]
A startup from Australia has built a social network around live video–and it’s already in 137 countries. The key challenge, of course, is to get more users. Kondoot co-founders Mark Cracknell (L) and Nathan Hoad A new social network–yes, I know, I know–is on the scene, this one coming from Australia. And it’s worth keeping an [...]
Twitter’s giving itself all kinds of new powers in 2012. Aside from revising their privacy policy wherein they enabled themselves to censor tweets on a country-by-country basis, they’ve now assumed the power to arbitrate the definition of satire. First up: Twitter apparently doesn’t like the way satire sounds in French so they’ve suspended a parody account [...]