Google Inc

Twitter Inc. will make about $25 million from Internet-search deals with Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp. announced in October, enough to push the site into profitability, people familiar with the matter said. A deal that made Twitter's messages searchable on Google's site will generate about $15 million, the sources said, while a similar pact with Microsoft's Bing search engine will earn Twitter about $10 million. As a result, Twitter is expected to make a small profit in 2009 after paying operating costs of about $20 million to $25 million a year.

Search engine giant Google Inc. won a key ruling Wednesday in a case that had put an important chunk of its multibillion-dollar online advertising business in jeopardy. A federal judge in Alexandria, Va., dismissed the heart of a lawsuit brought by auto insurer Geico that had sought to bar Google from selling the ads from rival insurers that appear when Web surfers type "Geico" into the search engine.

A crudely altered photograph of Michelle Obama, which often comes up as the first result on a Google image search of her name, will not be removed from the company's search process despite protests that the depiction is racist and repugnant. "It's offensive to many people, but that alone is not a reason to remove it from our search index," Google Inc. spokesman Scott Rubin said Tuesday. "We have, in general, a bias toward free speech." The image, which depicts the first lady as having monkey-like features, is posted without explanation on a blog called Hot Girls -- which also contains several legitimate photographs of Obama.

In an ambitious bid to expand its reach even to consumers on the go, Google Inc. on Tuesday unveiled the widely anticipated Nexus One smart phone as it launched a bold new business model that could shake up the mobile phone industry. The Internet giant began selling the phone -- manufactured to its specifications by a Taiwanese firm -- directly to consumers through its website rather than through retail outlets and service providers. Although initially available only with T-Mobile service, the phone could eventually be used on other networks, including Verizon Wireless and Vodafone Group in Europe.

Google Inc., owner of the most frequently used Internet search engine, must answer a Wisconsin company's lawsuit over a browser toolbar feature that generates Web links from computer search data, a federal appeals court decided Wednesday. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit revived part of HyperPhrase Technologies' lawsuit, throwing out a lower court ruling that Google's AutoLink feature didn't infringe the company's patents.

The scale and sophistication of the cyber attacks on Google Inc. and other large U.S. corporations by hackers in China is raising national security concerns that the Asian superpower is escalating its industrial espionage efforts on the Internet. While the U.S. focus has been primarily on protecting military and state secrets from cyber spying, a new battle is being waged in which corporate computers and the valuable intellectual property they hold have become as much a target of foreign governments as those run by the Pentagon and the CIA. "This is a watershed moment in the cyber war," James Mulvenon, director of the Center for Intelligence Research and Analysis at Defense Group Inc., a national-security firm, said Thursday.

Google Inc. is reportedly in talks to buy Yelp Inc., whose website enables users to review restaurants and other businesses -- a possible sign that the search giant is ready to train its computing power on the local advertising market. The website TechCrunch, citing anonymous sources, said Friday that the two companies were close to a deal and that the price could be in the neighborhood of $500 million. Both companies declined to comment. Analysts said Google -- which acquired AdMob Inc., a developer of mobile ad technologies, last month for $750 million in stock -- is probably interested in Yelp's sales force, which operates in 30 markets and knows how to sell to local advertisers.

To help keep their videos off YouTube, media companies may need to give their videos to YouTube. YouTube parent Google Inc.'s long-promised method for reducing piracy, unveiled Monday, relies on TV networks, movie studios and other content owners to provide the video-sharing service with master copies of their videos. YouTube won't post those videos. Rather, it plans to use software to find unique characteristics in the clips so it can detect copies posted by YouTube users without permission.

In another sign of Google Inc.'s growth from start-up to corporate behemoth, the company's top executives said Thursday that they had begun telling engineers to stop launching so many new services and instead focus on making existing ones work together better. The shift is a major departure from Google's previous strategy of launching new services rapid-fire and highlights the 8-year-old company's struggle to stay focused during swift growth.

"On or about December, 1910," Virginia Woolf once wrote, "the world changed." Sometime during the early aughts of this century, it changed again. The Internet leveled our cultural landscape. There was an epistemological free-for-all, a paradigm shift. The pyramid of media hierarchy flipped -- top down became bottom up -- and people-powered content started to change the way we think. In 2002, I owned a small independent publisher, Context Books.

WASHINGTON -- Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton Thursday urged China to investigate cyber intrusions that led Google to threaten to pull out of that country -- and challenged Beijing to openly publish its findings. "Countries that restrict free access to information or violate the basic rights of Internet users risk walling themselves off from the progress of the next century," she said. Clinton said the U.S. and China "have different views on this issue, and we intend to address those differences candidly and consistently" as part of a cooperative relationship.

Google Inc. said Tuesday that the launch of two new mobile phones in China has been delayed, a move that showed the company's clash with Beijing is crimping more than just its search business. Google-powered handsets from Motorola Corp. and Samsung were scheduled to be unveiled today from China Unicom, one of the Asian nation's largest telecommunications providers. Google said last week that it might shut down its search engine in China in the wake of a sophisticated cyber attack originating in China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property from the company's servers, as well as the targeting of human rights activists' e-mail accounts.

Google Inc.'s new cellphone has gotten a winning endorsement from Apple Inc. co-founder Steve Wozniak. Wozniak, a self-proclaimed "gadget freak" who left Apple in 1987, remains one of the biggest fans of its products. He stood in line in 2007 to buy the first iPhone because he couldn't wait for Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs to send him one. He didn't have to wait for the Nexus One. Google Inc. executive Andy Rubin gave one to him. Wozniak first praised the phone this month at an NBC station in the Bay Area.

The decision by Google Inc. to stand up to censorship in China is a marked turnaround from just a few years ago, when the Internet giant agreed to gag parts of its search engine to enter the lucrative China market. Google's threat to bolt from the Asian nation has brought praise from politicians and Silicon Valley business leaders, along with many of the human-rights activists who had condemned the company for going along with China's restrictions on Internet access. Whether Google's reversal sprang from political idealism or corporate realism, the Mountain View, Calif.

The scale and sophistication of the cyber attacks on Google Inc. and other large U.S. corporations by hackers in China is raising national security concerns that the Asian superpower is escalating its industrial espionage efforts on the Internet. While the U.S. focus has been primarily on protecting military and state secrets from cyber spying, a new battle is being waged in which corporate computers and the valuable intellectual property they hold have become as much a target of foreign governments as those run by the Pentagon and the CIA. "This is a watershed moment in the cyber war," James Mulvenon, director of the Center for Intelligence Research and Analysis at Defense Group Inc., a national-security firm, said Thursday.

Bouquets were laid in front of Google Inc.'s headquarters in China on Wednesday, a show of support for a company whose threat to exit the country rather than be party to more censorship is a dramatic shot across the bow of the Chinese Communist Party. But while Chinese cyberspace was awash with chatter about Google's gambit, state-controlled media downplayed the story, reporting that Google had been a victim of cyber attacks in China but making no mention of the company's allegations that human rights activists' e-mail accounts had been hacked.

In a rare corporate rebuke of Asia's economic superpower, Google Inc. on Tuesday said it might leave China and the country's 350 million Internet users after it was the victim of a series of cyber attacks that originated from that nation. According to Google, a "highly sophisticated" December attack on its main corporate computers resulted in "the theft of intellectual property." The company said it believed that a key goal of the attackers was to access the e-mail accounts of Chinese human rights activists, raising the possibility that China's government not only may have hacked in to Google but also may have been using the company's network to conduct political espionage.

In an ambitious bid to expand its reach even to consumers on the go, Google Inc. on Tuesday unveiled the widely anticipated Nexus One smart phone as it launched a bold new business model that could shake up the mobile phone industry. The Internet giant began selling the phone -- manufactured to its specifications by a Taiwanese firm -- directly to consumers through its website rather than through retail outlets and service providers. Although initially available only with T-Mobile service, the phone could eventually be used on other networks, including Verizon Wireless and Vodafone Group in Europe.

Twitter Inc. will make about $25 million from Internet-search deals with Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp. announced in October, enough to push the site into profitability, people familiar with the matter said. A deal that made Twitter's messages searchable on Google's site will generate about $15 million, the sources said, while a similar pact with Microsoft's Bing search engine will earn Twitter about $10 million. As a result, Twitter is expected to make a small profit in 2009 after paying operating costs of about $20 million to $25 million a year.

Google's ambitious plan to haul large swathes of the world's library onto the Internet suffered a blow Friday when a French court ordered the world's most powerful search engine to stop digitizing copyrighted French books. The Paris court ruled that the Google Books project violates the country's copyright laws. The decision came after a three-year battle between Google and a group of powerful French publishers, including the prestigious Le Seuil publishing house. Google France will appeal the ruling, the first major court loss for the books project.