search site

The Gap company's stores have hardly been the hottest spots at the mall in recent months -- or even years.

In a market where most retailers are posting single-digit monthly losses, its brands -- Gap, Old Navy and Banana Republic -- had a combined double-digit drop in September, and Old Navy's sales that month were down a startlingly bad 24 percent.

A new search-engine platform was unveiled Monday by some former Google engineers to compete with the leading search site. Dubbed Cuil and pronounced "cool," the new company claims to combine the largest Web index with content-based relevance, results organized by ideas, and complete user privacy. Cuil said it has indexed 120 billion Web pages, three times more than any other search engine.

The U.S. Senate opened hearings on a pending Yahoo-Google partnership Tuesday. The Antitrust, Competition and Consumer Rights committee means to put the screws to each party's legal counsel in an attempt to determine whether the deal violates antitrust laws.

Google is the number-one search site, while Yahoo currently hosts the second most popular site. Ad revenues from searches are a multibillion-dollar market. Lawmakers want to ensure that a deal between these giant players won't jeopardize free competition.

Google, with its deep reservoir of data about online behavior, gathered by tracking hundreds of millions of computers, is for the first time testing ways to use some of that information to aim advertising at Web surfers who use its search engine.

Ads that a person sees on one Google search may be influenced by what was searched a few minutes earlier. Searching for "scuba," then something else, and then "vacations" could pull up ads for diving trips, for example.

The executive in charge of Microsoft Corp.'s search efforts acknowledged Tuesday that the company's "Live" brand for search and online services leaves much to be desired.

Now that Microsoft has abandoned its $47.5 billion takeover bid for competitor Yahoo Inc., its marketing team is working on fixing Microsoft's search image to make it more competitive with Google Inc., Kevin Johnson, president of Microsoft's platforms and services division said at a search advertising conference in Seattle hosted by the parent company of news site SearchEngineLand.com.