Pip is an award-winning editor, researcher, author and journalist of more than three decades' standing. He's wielded his pen on countless periodicals such as Good Weekend, Simply Living, The Bulletin with Newsweek, and The Sydney Morning Herald. He was PR manager of Sydney Children's Hospital. Clients have included Reader's Digest Books, Telecom, and dozens of advertising agencies. Pip is editor of the printing trade web-journal, http://www.proprint.com.au.
When Google, Inc., announced Project Virgle, a joint collaboration with Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Group for a human colony on Mars, it showed that the Big G still has a sense of humour.
When Google, Inc., announced Project Virgle, a joint collaboration with Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Group for a human colony on Mars, it showed that the Big G still has a sense of humour, coming as it did on April Fools’ Day, 2008. But this is not to say that the world’s largest search engine company has been just fooling around lately.
Indeed, the 20,000 employees of the giant of Mountain View, California, have been as busy and innovative as ever – especially the lawyers and bean counters. On May 6, Reuters reported that Microsoft’s withdrawal of its US$47.5 billion offer for Yahoo – which itself has large search engine assets – gave Google extra leverage in the lucrative Web advertising market.
Yahoo's shares tumbled 22 per cent in premarket trading in the wake of Microsoft’s offer withdrawal, while the Big G’s shares rose 3.8 per cent to US$603.50 in premarket trading and MS shares leaped 5.9 per cent to US$30.96.
This comes at a time in which it seems Google can’t put a foot wrong. The company reported revenues of US$5.19 billion for the quarter ended March 31, 2008, an increase of 42 per cent compared to the first quarter of 2007.
Jane Snorek, senior technology analyst at First American Funds, said it’s all good news for the Big G. “They will continue to grow their dominant share," she said. "In the long run, I just think the Yahoo customer would go directly to Google."
Google, which can probably only benefit as its two biggest rivals continue to struggle, helped put the kibosh on the MS/Yahoo deal by complaining about the potential effect on competition, and by giving Yahoo an out in the form of an advertising partnership.
“Could a combination of the two take advantage of a PC software monopoly to unfairly limit the ability of consumers to freely access competitors' email, IM, and Web-based services?” David Drummond, Google Senior VP, had asked on Google’s official blog on March 2.
Now, reports say, Google is hammering out a deal to place ads on Yahoo's search engine, Number 2 on the Net.
The Register (May 6) reports that in a new petition to the US Federal Communications Commission, Google has questioned whether Verizon is planning to sidestep the commission's new open access rules, urging the commission to put an extra clamp on the gigantic telco’s ‘700-MHz C Block’, a US$4.7bn prime portion of the US airwaves auctioned off earlier this year.
However, life as the world’s Number 1 search engine is not without setbacks, as China is investigating the Big G for allegedly breaching state secrecy laws and showing “illegal” maps of the country.
Meanwhile, back at the Googleplex, the world’s biggest search engine is now supporting Unicode 5.1 in search, so people speaking languages such as Malayalam can now hunt for words without hindrance, and Google has also released its first English to Hindi translation service.
In boardroom news, Google has lost another employee to Facebook: Eliot Schrage, the company's VP of global communications and public affairs.
On a lighter note, Sify News reports that London householder Rachel McGarie's garden became so overgrown that her weeds and brambles could be seen from space on Google Earth, and the messy yard has resulted in her removal from house and home. Not a lighter note for Ms McGarie.