Portals

Yahoo! has a checkered history with original entertainment content. The Web giant famously tried and failed to make a splash in Hollywood when it hired television programmer Lloyd Braun.

Eric Schmidt CEO is not too impressed with Microsoft’s new Bing search engine, dismissing it as another search engine effort that Microsoft makes “every year.”  This in a Fox Business Network video just posted.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA — Google has been making progress with its Google Book Search project, having scanned and indexed 7 million volumes, but it will vastly expand if a settlement with authors and publishers is approved by a U.S. Federal court in Manhattan. 

Out  in Mountain View today, RJ Pittman and his crew unveiled the latest developments in image search. Michael Arrington has been live blogging about it.

AUSTIN — Earlier this week at SXSW we caught up with Irene Au, who heads up Google's user interface design and user research operations.

Google has scanned and indexed the entire archives of New York magazine.  Issues spanning 40 years have been organized as part of Google Book Search.

Google’s Marissa Mayer is profiled by Laura Holson in Sunday’s New York Times.  The senior exec, who is in charge of look, feel and usability of the world’s biggest search engine, tells the Times she is not leaving the company and says, “people don’t understand me.”

Google News has just released a widget which allows webmasters to create a customized news feeds in two sizes, 728×90 and 300×250. The company refers to it as a “Google News–based element for webmasters and developers.”  Details were just published on the Official Google Blog. The company said in a blog post: “This makes it […]

Google’s web browser Chrome left beta last month, but Google isn’t done improving it yet. Jonathan Skillings at CNET News.com reports today that it has introduced the following new features:

We read with interest this weekend’s big interview in TechRadar with Google Sr. VP Marissa on the future of Google.  Good story about her role at Google and how she sees the future of  the company. In September, we interviewed Marissa at the TechCrunch 50 event in San Francisco.  I’ve republished the interview in which […]

Playable search engine SeeqPod will introduce a Windows mobile application tomorrow that will bring all the free music on the Internet to mobile phones. Users simply have to search for a song, and if it exists anywhere on the web–legally or illegally–SeeqPod will find it with its crawling and indexing technology.

Google web browser Chrome is leaving beta, Marissa Mayer told Michael Arrington today at the Le Web conference in Paris. I republished my interview with Marissa at TechCrunch50 this summer about Chrome. You can check out TechCrunch’s story here. —Kelsey Blodget, Associate Producer

The search solution Kosmix has raised $20 million in a funding round led by TimeWarner, the company announced today–an impressive feat in today’s economic climate. Andy interviewed Kosmix Co-founder Anand Rajaraman in New York earlier this year, and I republished the interview here.

Stephen Shankland has done a little research on adoption of Chrome, the recently introduced Web browser from Google. He finds that 3.6 percent of visitors to CNET used Chrome in October, up from just one percent in September. While CNET users are earlier adopters, the general population uses Chrome less one percent, he finds. In […]

Late yesterday, Google announced that it is putting text advertising onto Google Finance, the financial news and portfolio/stock tracking site. Google is putting considerable resources into the site and plans to expand it globally, according to an interview with Google’s R.J. Pittman we did in July.  R.J. indicated in the interview that Google will likely […]

Video streams on Yahoo! dramatically increased in September to 265 million, up 56 percent from August’s 169 million.  The new traffic puts Yahoo! ahead of *Fox Interactive, which had been number two to YouTube.  Monthly video streams on YouTube have broken the astounding five billion mark with 5.3 billion streams, up 12 percent, according to […]

YouTube has premiered its first full-length studio film, “The Princess of Nebraska,” by Wayne Wang and has garnered some 160,000 views since Friday night and a positive review in today’s New York Times by movie critic A.O. Scott.

NEW YORK — YouTube and PBS have put in place a joint program to solicit, organize, stream and broadcast user-generated video from polling places around the nation on election day, November 4.  The program is called “Video Your Vote.”

Nearly 2 million visitors downloaded Chrome, the new web browser from Google, during its first week, Nielsen has just reported.

MySpace will allow users to upload video files of up to 512 MB from the 100 MB limit it has had in place.  It also will allow users to upload files directly from video camera to the site.