Search Engines

Yahoo Inc. is trying to engineer a comeback in Santa Monica, the hub of its media and entertainment operations. The Internet giant has consolidated virtually all of its Southern California-based projects under Scott Moore, a senior vice president, in a move to streamline Yahoo's business and increase collaboration. Moore is the de facto successor to Lloyd Braun, the former ABC executive and Hollywood heavyweight who left Yahoo a year ago.

Diners often plunge their chopsticks into shared entrees at even the most upscale restaurants here. This mouth-to-plate maneuver might be considered a faux pas in the germ-phobic West, akin to George double-dipping a chip in "Seinfeld." But appreciating such cultural differences is what Baidu.com Inc.'s chief financial officer, Shawn Wang, says gives the Chinese search giant unique insight into the country's 1.3 billion people as it competes with American rivals such as Google Inc.

Ask.com on Monday became the first major search engine to let users decide whether it can keep records of their queries in a move hailed by privacy watchdogs. The new Ask.com function could protect people as technology that tracks digital footprints becomes increasingly sophisticated, allowing marketers to mine a wealth of information to tailor advertising and promotions with ever-greater precision, privacy advocates said. They said they hoped the effort by Ask.com -- the fifth-largest U.S.

More Americans are Googling themselves -- and many are checking out their friends, co-workers and romantic interests too. In a report Sunday, the Pew Internet and American Life Project said 47% of U.S. adult Internet users surveyed last year had looked for information about themselves through Google or another search engine. That is more than twice the 22% of users who did in 2002, but Pew senior research specialist Mary Madden was surprised the growth wasn't higher.

The images are so detailed you can tell whether a neighbor's hedge was recently trimmed or whether the car parked in front of a favorite local eatery might belong to a friend. Such views are available online for anyone to see from some of the biggest names on the Internet, including Amazon.com Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Google Inc.

Federal investigators have obtained potentially billions of Internet search requests made by users of major websites run by Yahoo Inc., Microsoft Corp. and America Online Inc., raising concerns about how the massive data trove will be used. The information turned over to Justice Department lawyers reveals a week's worth of online queries from millions of Americans -- the Internet Age equivalent of eavesdropping on their inner monologues.

Online search engine leader Google Inc. has agreed to censor its results in China, adhering to the country's free-speech restrictions in return for better access to the Internet's fastest-growing market. The Mountain View, Calif.-based company planned to roll out a version of its search engine bearing China's Web suffix, .cn, today. A Chinese-language version of Google's search engine has previously been available through the company's dot-com address in the United States.

The Justice Department should explain why it needs information on customer Internet searches from Google Inc. and other companies, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee said. In a letter to Atty. Gen. Alberto R. Gonzales, Sen. Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont asked the agency to specify how it intended to use the data and what it was doing to protect the privacy of "millions of American people who conduct searches on the Internet."

Google Inc. is offering a new tool that will automatically transfer information from one personal computer to another, but anyone wanting that convenience must authorize the Internet search leader to store the material for up to 30 days. The ability to search a computer remotely is included in Google's latest upgrade to its desktop searching software. Despite the privacy concerns likely to be raised, executives of Mountain View, Calif.

Google Inc. is discovering the trouble with life at the top on Wall Street: Slight stumbles can turn into serious falls. The Internet search giant's shares dropped 4.7% on Monday, deepening a decline that has slashed more than a quarter from the company's market value since mid-January. Quite apart from the monolithic image it projected in 2005, Mountain View, Calif.-based Google increasingly is being viewed as a company vulnerable to competition.