search queries

One of Yahoo Inc.'s largest shareholders, Ivory Investment Management LP, is urging the Internet company to pursue a sale of its search unit to Microsoft.

In a letter to the company's board, the investment firm proposed a deal Wednesday in which Microsoft would acquire Yahoo's search engine and Yahoo would retain 80 percent of revenue generated by search queries on its own site.

Microsoft offered Monday to observe a European privacy panel's request to reduce the length of time it kept search queries made by individuals to six months if its rivals, Yahoo and Google, did the same.

Google and Yahoo, in separate statements, said they were unwilling for now to change their policies.

She did it again: Britney Spears was the most popular search term on Yahoo for the fourth year in a row -- her seventh time topping the list.

Spears bested World Wrestling Entertainment, Barack Obama, Miley Cyrus and the online game "RuneScape" as the five most-searched terms of 2008, the Web portal and search company announced Monday, a day before the singer released her new album "Circus."

Perhaps the biggest threat to Google Inc.'s increasing dominance of Internet search and advertising is the rising fear, justified or not, that Google's broadening reach is giving it unchecked power.

This scrutiny goes deeper than the skeptical eye that lawmakers and the Justice Department have given to Google's proposed ad partnership with Yahoo Inc. Many objections to that deal are financial, and surround whether Google and Yahoo could unfairly drive up online ad prices.

Google has rarely included scanned documents in its search results because it had no way to determine the nature of the content, but that's about to change. The search engine giant says it will use optical character recognition (OCR) software to make it possible for Web surfers to search any Web-hosted document stored in the PDF file format developed by Adobe Systems.

Google is using the technology to convert scanned documents into equivalent text files that can be searched, indexed and returned as responses to Google search queries, noted Evin Levey, a Google product manager.

Google continues to move quickly to monetize YouTube. In the latest effort for one of the most popular video sites on the Web, Google-owned YouTube has launched Google-style search ads.

YouTube's new paid-search results show up on the right side of YouTube's search-results pages. They are thumbnails that look much like non-sponsored YouTube videos, but they fall under the heading of "Promoted Videos" much as Google search results offer "Sponsored Links." The videos have a couple of lines of promotional text beneath the still video image.

Google's Chrome browser has run into more privacy complaints and the search giant is moving to ease complaints about its Google Suggest feature used in Chrome and other products.

Launched in late August, Google Suggest helps users formulate more precise queries that yield more accurate results. So instead of just "hotels in Florida," the technology will ask a "Did you mean?" question that encourages you to select a more specific query, such as "hotels in Miami, Florida" or "hotels in the Florida Keys."

Anyone perusing porn sites at home will appreciate Microsoft's latest efforts at browser privacy, but it's not clear it will do much for the enterprise. Internet Explorer product manager Andrew Ziegler discussed the new privacy features of IE8, currently in its second beta, in an extensive blog post Monday. Users of the new software will be able to turn on Microsoft's InPrivate Browsing and Blocking features.

When what many observers are calling "porn mode" is turned on, IE8 doesn't store history, cookies, form data, passwords, URLs, search queries or visited links.

Google is seeking to draw clear distinctions between the methods it uses to target ad placements based on search queries and a controversial data-mining practice known as deep-packet inspection. The deep-packet technique gathers and stores information on an individual's Web-site visits and Internet usage without first obtaining the user's consent.

Microsoft Corp. on Wednesday said Kevin Johnson, the executive in charge of its Windows and Web operations and an instrumental player in the company's failed $47.5 billion bid to buy Yahoo Inc., is leaving the company.

After a short transition, Johnson will step into the role of chief executive officer at Juniper Networks Inc., a networking hardware maker, according to a person familiar with the situation.

The person asked not to be named because Juniper had not yet announced Johnson's appointment.