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| | | May 16, 2004
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Sunday, May 16, 2004 |
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The titans clash
Internet giants Yahoo! and Google assaulted each other's turf in one of the biggest shows of force and aspirations for the top web portal's crown. Yahoo! stole a key Google customer, CNN.com, the online arm of news leader CNN. On Wednesday, the company began providing CNN.com with algorithmic and paid search results across its pages. In addition, Yahoo! announced an upcoming overhaul of the portal's e-mail service that is also set to include a face-lift. The company will be increasing the storage space available for free to its users 25 times, from 4 MB to 100 MB. Yahoo! also said its paid e-mail customers will be getting "virtually unlimited storage" for their messages. The policy shift came a month after Google began testing its Gmail service that provides a gigabyte of free storage space.
As Yahoo! was announcing the upgrade, Google quietly launched a beta test of Google Groups 2, a service building on top of Google's Usenet Groups which is set to directly compete with Yahoo! Groups. Google Groups 2 allows users to subscribe to a group and monitor a particular discussion. The search leader also announced a major shift in its non-obtrusive ads policy, saying it will begin accepting banner advertising for its AdWords program which provides relevant contextual ads to both Google and third-party web sites. This marks the end of an era for the search company which has amassed its fortunes from highly-targeted text-only sponsored messages. It appears, as the company moves towards the highly-anticipated initial public offering (IPO), Google's management is trying to devise ways to squeeze as much financial resources as possible. The Mountain View, Calif.-based company is also developing an upgrade to its advertising program which will allow Google to automatically display ads with relevance based on the content of advertiser's web sites.
Yahoo! and Google are clashing along wide-ranging battle lines. But some are prone to forgetting about a major competing force on the horizon, software behemoth Microsoft. The giant is known to be preparing for its own debut on the search market and given its ubiquity in a number of critical markets Microsoft may eat a big piece of the pie both Yahoo! and Google are vying for.
More from: CIO Today | CNET News.com 1 2 3 4 5 6 | E-Commerce Times | eWeek 1 2 | InternetNews.com | The Register 1 2 | Reuters 1 2 | SearchEngineWatch 1 2 3 | TechWeb | The Washington Post 1 2
Longhorn stumbles... again
Microsoft executives revealed this week that yet another pivotal Longhorn feature, WinFS, is not going to be included in the first release of the long-awaited overhaul of the Windows operating system. WinFS, a file system said to enable users to easily find locally stored documents and files in any format, is going to be cut off from the development of the Longhorn client, currently set to debut in 2006. Bob Muglia, Microsoft's senior vice president in charge of Windows development, revealed that WinFS will probably be available when the server version of Longhorn ships, but some of its search functionality will not be introduced at least until 2009.
The news came as further evidence that the software giant had set too high goals for the next major Windows version. But the company announced that some of Longhorn's innovative components could come before Longhorn ships. Indigo, a communications platform based on the .NET model for web services, may be available with the next update of Windows Server. Previously, the product was scheduled to be unveiled within the Longhorn platform, but Microsoft's revised development map for the operating system could have affected Indigo's launch date.
More from: CNET News.com | CRN | eWeek | InternetNews.com | The Register
In Other News...
 Software maker Oracle lowered its hostile takeover bid for PeopleSoft by $1.7 billion, or close to 20 percent, citing a 24 percent drop in PeopleSoft's stock since the beginning of the year. Oracle reduced its offer from $26 to $21 per share in a bid that has seen widespread opposition ranging from PeopleSoft management, PeopleSoft shareholders, the U.S. Justice Department, the European Commission and others.
A slew of U.S. federal agencies and the FBI announced 65 people were apprehended in an Internet child pornography crackdown across the United States. The operation, codenamed "Operation Peer Pressure," was aimed at users of popular file-swapping products who allegedly shared illegal pornography on peer-to-peer (P2P) networks.
Yahoo! and Google have deleted a controversial advertising company from their databases after they were alerted that the company was trying to artificially boost its search engine rankings. Harvard student and spyware opponent Ben Edelman discovered that WhenU used a technique called "cloaking" to trick search bots into raising WhenU.com's ranking.
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