Facebook has raided Google to hire a new chief operating officer, providing the popular online social network with more seasoned management and advertising savvy as it strives to make more money without alienating its audience. Sheryl Sandberg’s defection from Google, announced this week, represents a coup for Facebook.
In a dramatic about-face, Ask.com is abandoning its effort to outshine internet search leader Google and will instead focus on a narrower market consisting of married women looking for help managing their lives. As part of the new direction outlined on Tuesday, Ask will lay off about 40 employees.
Google, already the world’s most popular spot for finding websites, is aiming to become the go-to place for creating websites too. It is taking its first step toward that goal with the debut of a free service designed for high-tech neophytes looking for a simple way to share information with other people working in the same company.
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/ 28 February 2008
Google will begin storing the medical records of a few thousand people as it tests a long-awaited health service that is likely to raise more concerns about the volume of sensitive information entrusted to the internet search leader. The pilot project will involve 1 500 to 10 000 patients at the Cleveland Clinic in the United States.
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/ 14 January 2008
Girding for a potential threat from Apple, online DVD rental service Netflix is lifting its limits on how long most subscribers can watch movies and television shows over high-speed internet connections. The change will become effective on Monday, on the eve of Apple’s widely anticipated move into the movie rental industry.
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/ 15 December 2007
Google is working on a new internet encyclopedia that will consist of material submitted by people who want to be identified as experts and possibly profit from their knowledge. The concept, outlined in a posting on Google’s website, poses a potential challenge to the non-profit Wikipedia, which has drawn upon the collective wisdom of unpaid, anonymous contributors.
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/ 30 November 2007
Seeking to keep the peace in its popular online hangout, Facebook has overhauled a new advertising system that sparked privacy complaints by turning its users into marketing tools for other companies. Users will have greater control over whether they want to participate in a programme that circulates information about their online purchases.
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/ 17 October 2007
Like a gourmet chef who rarely eats out, Google feeds advertising services to hordes of other businesses while skimping on its own marketing. The recipe has been extremely fruitful. While the internet search leader has sold more than -billion in advertising since 2001, Google has become a household name without buying expensive ad campaigns.
Yahoo! has retooled its online search engine to make it more helpful and engaging, joining an industrywide wave of improvements that so far haven’t dented Google’s dominance. It regards the upgrade announced on Tuesday as the most significant change to its search engine since it reclaimed control of the underlying technology.
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/ 21 September 2007
The dozens of entrepreneurs gathered for an exclusive high-tech conference in San Francisco this week all hoped to dazzle the crowd with their ingenuity. But one start-up, Powerset, is pursuing a particularly challenging goal: it is aiming to outshine the internet’s brightest star with a new search engine built to outsmart Google.