Declaring the worst of the recession is behind it, Google reported soaring earnings Thursday, with its biggest quarterly profit ever.

The company said its third-quarter profit was up 27 percent over last year on a 7 percent yearly climb in revenues. Its net income of $1.64 billion was higher than any other previous quarter for the 11-year-old Internet titan.

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Today in your Friday Business Break: Google is taking a trike to photograph trails and other locations for its Street View service. Silicon Valley's unemployment rate drops to 11.8 percent. Two valley men are accused of insider trading.

Mountain View Internet juggernaut Google is using a camera-equipped tricycle to photograph off-road locations for its Street View service, and it's asking for nominations of places the Street View trike should visit.

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Google, facing slowing growth amid a slump in advertising spending, is again considering acquisitions, CEO Eric Schmidt said.

"Acquisitions are back on," Schmidt, 54, said in an interview at an event in Pittsburgh this week. His company had more than $19 billion in cash and short-term investments at the end of its most recent quarter.

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With Google's savage and relentless domination of the internet search market continuing at a frightening pace, Yahoo had to do something. First, they joined with Microsoft in a 10 year partnership deal combining technologies, revenue sharing and ad search sales staff between the two tech and ad giants. Now, Yahoo has sought to relaunch itself with a $100 million global marketing campaign, designed to compete with Google even more aggressively, and place themselves at the centre of consumer's online lives.

The company are hoping the same symbols that helped it build an endearing brand around giant exclamation marks and yodeling in the early days, can help propel the company into relevance among today's internet users. Beginning on September 28, Yahoo will run ads on TV, radio, billboards, and the Web in the installment of a new global marketing campaign running through 2010. As the company looks to sell off non-core businesses, Yahoo will launch a global brand campaign over 15 months under the grammatically horrific slogan "It's Y!ou", featuring the familiar Yahoo exclamation mark. Other slogans in the new campaign include "The Internet is under new management: Yours" and "The Internet has a new personality: Yours".

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Partnership with Organic SEO Firm Peak Positions to Provide Client Hospitals More Targeted and Localized Web Traffic via Keyword Searches

TROY, Mich., Sept. 21 /PRNewswire/ -- CareTech Solutions (www.caretech.com), an information technology (IT) and Web products and services provider for hospitals and health systems, announced today it has launched a turn-key organic search engine optimization (SEO) program to improve hospitals' search engine rankings. The offering was launched in partnership with Peak Positions of Traverse City, Mich. (www.peakpositions.com), ranked in August 2009 as one of the top 30 SEO firms in the world by TopSEOs.com.

CareTech's organic SEO program includes keyword research, copywriting, code analysis and other enhancements to help deliver more targeted and localized website traffic via keyword searches, as well as comprehensive keyword ranking and website traffic analysis to enable dynamic adjustment of website elements as needed.

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BOSTON, MA -- (Marketwire) -- 09/02/09 -- WordStream, Inc., a provider of keyword research and organization solutions for continuously optimizing and expanding pay-per-click (PPC) and search engine optimization (SEO) efforts involving large numbers of keywords, has announced the Top SEO College Websites on their Internet marketing blog.

In a recent search query analysis study, WordStream identified 15 university websites that are excelling at SEO and keyword ranking by optimizing their websites organically to rank well in search engine results pages (SERPs). Topping the list of Top SEO College Websites are Drexel University, University of Phoenix and Capella University. Also making the list are Ferris State University, Western Governors University, Pennsylvania State University, Northcentral University, Oregon State University, Fairleigh Dickinson University, University of Texas, Canyon College, Gonzaga University, American Sentinel University, University of Illinois and Grand Canyon University.

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Webmasters and marketers need to take specific steps to prepare their sites for mobile Web users.

Serving a Web page to render fully on a device browser requires unique steps and mobile search engine optimization requires a budget, according to Peak Positions, a company that specializes in SEO for online and mobile.

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Here is the breakdown: Google leads with a 64.8% share (3% increase over June), Yahoo is next with a 17% share (11% increase) and then Bing with a 9% search share (8% increase). Rounding out the top five are AOL (3% share) and Ask.com (1% share).

Googlers conducted 6.8 billion searches while Bingers conducted nearly 10 million. Although that is a very large difference, we must keep repeating that Bing only launched a few weeks prior to June and already it is in the top 3; being a part of Microsoft is part of the rapid growth, but consumers are coming back to the engine.

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Computerworld - Security experts are making progress in their efforts to identify the hackers responsible for the distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks that crippled Twitter for several hours yesterday.

They have also come up with strong evidence that confirms claims the DDoS rampage that brought down Twitter and hit Facebook, Google's YouTube and LiveJournal, were caused by attacks targeting a pro-Georgian activist and blogger.

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Google announced today that it has been working on a faster search engine that will improve results for web developers and power searchers.

Dubbed Caffeine, the new project focuses on next-generation infrastructure and seeks to improve performance in a host of areas including size, indexing speed, accuracy and comprehensiveness. Could this also be seen as a step towards improving access to the Deep Web?

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Google Inc. is revamping how it develops and prioritizes new products, giving employees a pipeline to the company's top brass amid worries about losing its best people and promising ideas to start-ups.

The Mountain View, Calif., company famously lets its engineers spend one day a week on projects that aren't part of their jobs. But Google has lacked a formal process for senior executives to review those efforts, and some ideas have languished. Others have slipped away when employees left the company.

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Wednesday's opening Keynote here in San Jose sees Guidewire's Carla Thompson joined on stage by senior representatives from many of the more interesting players in the Semantic Search space; Tomasz Imielinski from Ask, Peter Norvig from Google, Riza Berkan of Hakia, Scott Provost from Microsoft, William Tunstall-Pedoe of the UK's True Knowledge, and Andrew Tomkins of Yahoo.

Carla asks each panellist to describe the differentiating aspects of their product in 'one or two sentences;'

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Google shared one of the closely guarded secrets of its success with a roomful of developers this morning, revealing the tricks it uses to get Web pages to load in less than a second.

"We really think that if the Web gets better and the Web gets faster it is good for everyone," Marissa Mayer, a vice president of search products, told attendees of the O'Reilly Velocity Conference. From its launch in 1998, Google distinguished itself from competitors with a focus on speed. While Excite and Yahoo weighed down their home pages by turning them into massive portals, Google's page featured mostly white space.

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Yahoo! (YHOO) will never recover from its botched negotiations with Microsoft (MSFT), in which the larger company offered to buy it in early 2008. The initial offer was for $44.6 billion, or $31 a share. Yahoo! turned the deal down and by November of last year, its stock traded below $9.

Yahoo!'s new CEO, Carol Bartz, has made a series of mistakes early in her tenure, and the company probably cannot recover from them either.

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Following huge introductions of the Palm Pre and new iPhone 3G S, T-Mobile on Monday announces July availability of MyTouch 3G, the second phone on Google's Android operating system.

It's the first of 18 new Google-powered phones coming worldwide by the end of the year, Google says, declining to provide specifics. Tech and telecom analysts expect Sprint to have an Android phone by year's end.

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Microsoft is planning the launch of an ad campaign consisting of print, radio, online and TV ads to promote its new search engine.

The engine is code-named Kumo, but its formal moniker is expected to be Bing.

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At media event in San Francisco on Tuesday, Yahoo Search executives insisted that Internet users don't want to search.

"Nobody really wants to search," declared Prabhakar Raghavan, head of Yahoo Labs and Yahoo Search Strategy. "People want to run their lives."

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Google debuted Rich Snippets this week, a feature that enables webmasters to build on the "snippet" of content that appears for their sites in organic search results.

"Rich Snippets give users convenient summary information about their search results at a glance," writes Google's Webmaster Central Blog. "We are currently supporting data about reviews and people. When searching for a product or service, users can easily see reviews and ratings, and when searching for a person, they'll get help distinguishing between people with the same name."

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Mommy bloggers are an online force to be reckoned with, and their numbers are rising both in the online shopping world and across social media. Nielsen has recently published a list of what it considers to be the top Power Mom bloggers.

Nielsen compiled the list of the 50 most influential mommy bloggers based on statistics captured via Nielsen BuzzMetrics, such as traffic, Twitter followers, blog posts and comments.

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Many things are down during the recession. But there's a boom in click fraud, the tricks used to make online ads seem more effective than they are. And companies that police the practice are seeing fresh business as Internet concerns seek to hold onto advertisers during the downturn.

The latest evidence comes from Anchor Intelligence, a Silicon Valley start-up. Ken Miller, its chief executive, says the company has received five times as many inquiries from potential customers in the past six weeks than during any previous period in its several-year-history. And on Thursday, Anchor announced a deal with Ask.com, designed to help limit the effects of click fraud on that IAC-owned search engine.

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Sounding like a restaurateur defending Michelin stars against the whisperings of fickle critics, Google on Tuesday offered assurance that its search is of the highest quality and introduced two new improvements to the way it presents search results.

To most Internet users, if Google (NSDQ: GOOG)'s dominant search market share can be said to represent a yardstick of satisfaction, Google's search service works just fine. But Google nonetheless feels the heat from startups and competitors that claim to have built a better mousetrap. It can't afford to rest on its laurels.

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Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ) on Tuesday said it's studying Google (NSDQ: GOOG)'s Android operating system to determine whether it would be useful in PCs and other products, but didn't commit to using the software in any particular device.

HP's comments to InformationWeek came in response to a Wall Street Journal report that said the computer maker is considering swapping Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) Windows for Android in some HP mini-laptops, which the industry calls netbooks.

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Despite the release of Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) Internet Explorer 8 two weeks ago, Microsoft continues to lose browser market share to Mozilla's Firefox.

According to the latest data from Net Applications, the global market share for all versions of Internet Explorer slipped from 67.44% in February to 66.82% in March.

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Cybercriminals are spreading invisible infections far and wide across the Internet by hammering hundreds of thousands of websites each day with so-called SQL injection attacks.

The trend started last summer and has continued to accelerate. IBM Internet Security Systems says it identified 50% more infected Web pages in the last three months of 2008 than it did in all of 2007.

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Is it just me or does it feel like Microsoft is starting to sound - quite frankly - a bit desperate for a search deal with Yahoo?

The Times (UK) today blasted out the headline: Microsoft reopens door to deal with Yahoo!, citing an interview with Chief Operating Officer Kevin Turner. But we already knew that Microsoft wanted a Yahoo deal. CEO Steve Ballmer said so in January, shortly after new Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz came on board, and then again last month. Shortly after that, Microsoft CFO Chris Liddell said that a search deal would be an "incredibly useful step" but was quick to note that a deal with Yahoo is not a panacea.

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Is it just me or does it feel like Microsoft is starting to sound - quite frankly - a bit desperate for a search deal with Yahoo?

The Times (UK) today blasted out the headline: Microsoft reopens door to deal with Yahoo!, citing an interview with Chief Operating Officer Kevin Turner. But we already knew that Microsoft wanted a Yahoo deal. CEO Steve Ballmer said so in January, shortly after new Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz came on board, and then again last month. Shortly after that, Microsoft CFO Chris Liddell said that a search deal would be an "incredibly useful step" but was quick to note that a deal with Yahoo is not a panacea.

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David Kernell is not having a good week.

The college student who is accused of hacking into the private Yahoo e-mail account of Alaska governor and former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin is now facing three additional charges.

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Google Inc. (GOOG) accounted for 72% of all Internet searches in the U.S. last month, according to data provider Hitwise.

Far behind was Yahoo Inc. (YHOO) at 17%, Microsoft Corp.'s (MSFT) MSN at 6% and IAC/InteractiveCorp.'s (IACI) Ask.com with 4%.

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Google disclosed Saturday that it shared a very small number of online documents with users who weren't authorized to see them.

The privacy glitch, caused by a software bug, affected just a tiny fraction of documents - an estimated less than 0.05 percent - wrote Jennifer Mazzon, Google Docs product manager, on a corporate blog.

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ADOTAS - The chance to get advertising in front of college basketball fanatics online has pulled in millions for CBS.

The network is nearly sold out of inventory and is approaching $30 million in ad revenue for its web video that allows fans to live stream the 60-plus tournament games it televises, with about two weeks to go before the start of the NCAA men's basketball tournament. The revenue will definitely see an increase "well north of 20 percent more" than last year's record $23 million, according to Mediaweek.

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Google is engaged in one of the largest print legal-notice campaigns in history, spending about $7 million of an $8 million campaign on notices in print newspapers and magazines around the world.

The campaign is a move required under a class-action settlement which will have Google paying $125 million to create a system under which customers will be charged for reading a copyrighted book, according to The New York Times. The suit against Google was filed in federal court by a large group of authors and publishers who argued that Google's plan to scan all the books in the world violated their copyrights.

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Google is testing expandable ads for its AdSense and AdWords programs.

When a user clicks on a display ad, it will temporarily expand over the content. According to Google, ads will not not expand to more than double their original width or height, and users may close the ads at any time.

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Onstage at a technology conference yesterday, John Battelle, the brash founder and CEO of advertising network Federated Media Inc. and author of a book on Google Inc., went on a humorous rant about why Google should buy the popular micro-blogging service run by Twitter Inc.

He believes Twitter should not be prized simply for its rapid viral growth or the simplicity of its platform, but for its search capabilities. He likened Twitter to YouTube, which he says in hindsight Google purchased for its powerful search engine, not to get into the video business.

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So this is stability? Yahoo's latest management revamp, spearheaded by new Chief Executive Carol Bartz, "is designed to last two to four years," said a spokesman. Admittedly, the Internet is a fast-changing medium. But to put such a definite life span on the new organizational structure underlines the uncertainty that lingers over the company's longer-term direction.

That said, compared with the turmoil under Jerry Yang, two years seems like an eternity. As a spokesman noted, Yahoo had been reorganizing once or twice a year, "which has been disruptive."

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Microsoft Corp. has begun testing a revamped version of its Internet search service, dubbed Kumo.com, as the software giant tries to improve its third-place position in the online search market.

In an email sent Monday afternoon to all Microsoft employees, Satya Nadella, senior vice president of research and development for Microsoft's online services division, invited company staffers to begin testing the Kumo search engine, currently only available on the company's internal network. For now, Microsoft's Live Search, at live.com, remains the company's search engine for the public.

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When Google Inc.'s online-email service shut off for over two hours earlier this week, it brought to light concerns about whether businesses can safely rely on software that their employees access over the Internet.

Online software services like Google's Gmail -- which run on vast computer farms managed by companies like Google and Salesforce.com Inc., rather than businesses installing and operating the software themselves -- are a bright spot for the technology sector: Sales grew 27% in 2008 to $6.4 billion, according to research company Gartner. Such services are also often cheaper to operate and easier to get started on, making them attractive options during a recession.

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Dial-up Internet access was supposed to be dead by now, replaced by Wi-Fi, DSL and other high-speed services.

But dial-up is proving to be more resilient than expected, at least partly due to the recession, which has helped to prolong, or in some cases rekindle, demand for a slower but cheaper way to surf the Web.

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As marketers scale back their ad budgets, some new technologies that make it easier for marketers to track the impact of their online advertising are gaining ground.

Products based on these technologies -- such as customized ads that show different products to different users, Web ads hidden inside links in text, and online coupons -- are part of what is called "performance-driven advertising." That's because the products aim to improve and more precisely measure how a particular ad performs.

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Google Inc., moving to improve its online health-record service, is teaming with International Business Machines Corp. to allow patients to add data generated from home-health monitoring products, such as blood-pressure cuffs and glucose meters.

The companies said software developed by IBM, with consumers' permission, can shift the data into a personal health record in Google Health, the search giant's service for helping consumers manage and store their health information online. Other software lets the patient transfer the information from there to an electronic medical record kept by providers like health-care companies and primary-care physicians.

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Yahoo is offering select Y! Search Marketing users the opportunity to integrate images and video into their pay-per-click listings.

Sponsored search remains one of the top-performing tools available to online marketers today. Yahoo's new service, Rich Ads in Search, would incorporate characteristics of banner advertising into sponsored search ad placements, reports MarketingVOX. Marketers could include videos and images, for example, making the experience "more engaging [.] for advertisers," said VP-Search Monetization/Distribution Tim Mayer of Yahoo.

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Google is testing a feature that enables users to hide unwanted ads in search results.

The service - an X icon in the upper right-hand corner of sponsored search results, indicating they can be hidden - is part of Google SearchWiki, which lets users customize search results: boosting organic listings most relevant to their query, for example, and burying or removing those they deem less fit, writes MarketingVOX.

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Google will stop selling ads on radio in May 2009. This retreat from radio sales is the latest example of how the recession is forcing Google to more quickly reassess its ambitions to move beyond AdWords and online advertising by entering in traditional forms of media.

The closing of Google Radio could lead to at least 40 layoffs among Google's 20,000 plus workforce. The decision to stop selling radio ads comes less than one month after Google scrapped its efforts to sell newspaper advertising.

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Video Optimization is having a huge impact in the organic search results of Google, Yahoo and the major search engines.

Video SEO services that result in optimizing videos of products and services is quickly becoming one of the fastest methods of securing a top ten organic ranking in the Google search results.

Google, Yahoo, and MSN have all confirmed that blended search the mechanism that compiles videos, images, news stories, maps, and other types of search results alongside their traditional search results, is one mechanism that 'dresses up' and 'fills out' their results pages.

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Time Warner Inc.'s AOL unit is laying off around 700 employees, or 10% of its work force, as a sharp decline in ad spending continues to pressure its transition from an Internet-service provider to an advertising business.

The layoffs will occur during the next several quarters, with most of the U.S. layoffs finished by March, AOL Chief Executive Randy Falco wrote in a memo to staff Wednesday. AOL also is scrapping merit pay increases this year, consolidating facilities and reviewing its services and international operations.

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Microsoft Corp. posted an unexpected 11% drop in quarterly profit and disclosed plans to slash 5,000 jobs, the latest sign that companies dependent on commodity-style businesses such as personal computers are suffering the most in the global slowdown.

Microsoft stunned investors and employees with the news early Thursday, hours earlier than it was scheduled to report results and while its Redmond, Wash., headquarters was largely asleep. Microsoft shares tumbled 12% to their lowest level in a decade, leading a selloff in the broader stock market.

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Investors have had a euphoric reaction to Yahoo's earnings in trading Wednesday - after the company surpassed analyst expectations with its report, despite the poor outlook for display advertising in the weak economic environment.

But the company's losses and coming challenges put the analyst community in a Missouri mood. Multiple Wall Street researchers, in commentary said they were taking a wait-and-see approach as the company's new CEO, Carol Bartz, sets the company's direction and after the company declined to provide annual guidance for the first time.

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Google Inc. posted a 68% drop in fourth-quarter profit, dragged down in part by its investment in AOL, but sales were strong despite the worsening economy.

Results suggested that Google's search-advertising business and cost-cutting campaign are helping it weather the recession better than other Internet companies.

The Mountain View, Calif., company posted net income of $382 million, or $1.21 a share, down from $1.21 billion, or $3.79 a share, a year earlier. Revenue rose at an 18% annual rate, down from 31% in the third quarter, to $5.7 billion, from $4.83 billion. Profit was hurt by a $1.1 billion impairment charge on its investments in Time Warner Inc.'s AOL unit and wireless company Clearwire Corp. Google acquired both stakes over the past several years.

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Google Inc. posted a 68% drop in fourth-quarter profit, dragged down in part by its investment in AOL, but sales were strong despite the worsening economy.

Results suggested that Google's search-advertising business and cost-cutting campaign are helping it weather the recession better than other Internet companies.

The Mountain View, Calif., company posted net income of $382 million, or $1.21 a share, down from $1.21 billion, or $3.79 a share, a year earlier. Revenue rose at an 18% annual rate, down from 31% in the third quarter, to $5.7 billion, from $4.83 billion. Profit was hurt by a $1.1 billion impairment charge on its investments in Time Warner Inc.'s AOL unit and wireless company Clearwire Corp. Google acquired both stakes over the past several years.

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SAN FRANCISCO - Will Carol A. Bartz sell Yahoo's search business to Microsoft?

Analysts asked the question time and again after Ms. Bartz delivered Yahoo's financial results to Wall Street for the first time since becoming chief executive earlier this month.

Time and again, Ms. Bartz said she had not yet made up her mind. If anything, Ms. Bartz suggested that breaking off the search business would not be easy and that any decision would not come soon.

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SAN FRANCISCO - Yahoo Inc. named technology veteran Carol Bartz as its new chief executive Tuesday, bringing in a no-nonsense leader known for developing a clear focus - something that has eluded the struggling Internet company during a three-year slump.

The decision to lure Bartz, 60, from software maker Autodesk Inc. ends Yahoo's two-month search to replace co-founder Jerry Yang, who surrendered the CEO reins after potentially lucrative deals with rivals Microsoft Corp. and Google Inc. both collapsed.

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After more than a decade of disappointment, the goal of marrying television and the Internet seems finally to be picking up steam.

A key factor in the push are new TV sets that have networking connections built directly into them, requiring no additional set-top boxes for getting online. Meanwhile, many consumers are finding more attractive entertainment and information choices on the Internet -- and have already set up data networks for their PCs and laptops that can also help move that content to their TV sets.

On Monday, Netflix Inc. is expected to announce a deal with Korea's LG Electronics Inc. that will make a Netflix online-video service available on a new line of high-definition TV sets from LG due out this spring. The online service offers 12,000 movie and television titles.

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More than half of U.S. consumers plan to cut back on purchases of high-tech products this year, according to a survey that adds to clouds hanging over two big trade shows this week.

The findings by Forrester Research, scheduled for release Monday, aren't surprising, given the litany of bad economic news since September. But the online survey of more than 5,000 American adults, conducted in November, provides some of the first specifics about spending choices that consumers are likely to make.

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