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My 2 featured articles for the week ending April 1st:

Archived blogs for the week of March 28, 2005

807 - Apr. 1, 2005 - 10.31 AM EST

Google suffers setback in trademark suit

Google suffered another setback Wednesday on a trademark infringement lawsuit. U.S. District Judge Jeremy Fogel dismissed one claim by American Blind & Wallpaper Factory, but denied Google's motion to dismiss the suit, allowing it to go forward for trial.

American Blind sued Google in May 2004 for trademark infringement in a beef over Google's lucrative AdWords search advertising service. Google started the spat by asking the court to rule on whether AdWords infringed on American Blind's trademarks following a series of nasty letters from the home decor retailer. American Blind countersued.

The suit claims Google's practice of selling text ads related to keyword search terms infringes on American Blind's trademarks, because competitors' ads can appear on results pages delivered to users searching for the company. American Blind asked that Google be permanently barred from selling keywords.

Posted on Businessblog™

806 - Mar. 31, 2005 - 8.10 PM EST

Google adds features for Firefox users

Search giant Google just added new features to its search engine, allowing Firefox users to obtain results pages more quickly. Reza Behforooz, a software engineer at Google, announced on Wednesday that the search engine now preloads the top search result into the cache of Mozilla browsers.

"Now Google's faster than ever on Firefox and Mozilla browsers," Behforooz said in a posting on the company's blog. "When you do a search on these browsers, we instruct them to download your top search result in advance, so if you click on it, you'll get to that page even more quickly."

The search engine's preloaded link feature is supported by Mozilla browsers, including Firefox, but because Microsoft's Internet Explorer and other browsers do not provide such functionality, they will not be able to use the feature.

Posted on Businessblog™

805 - Mar. 31, 2005 - 1.22 PM EST

Copernic improves its desktop search feature

This production release, launched after five weeks of extensive beta testing, contains major enhancements to the company's flagship product.

Critically-acclaimed since its introduction, previous versions of CDS have collected prestigious awards such as CNET Editors’ Choice, LAPTOP Magazine's Editors' Choice, and “Best Desktop Search” from Pandia Search Engine Awards 2004.

More recently, the beta version of CDS 1.5 received a perfect five star rating from PC Magazine UK.

The final release of Copernic's CDS 1.5 features smarter CPU resource usage, improved Mozilla Thunderbird support, broader metadata indexing, support for Netscape 8, multiple performance increases, and much more.

Posted on Businessblog™

804 - Mar. 31, 2005 - 10.38 AM EST

Shopping.com launches French comp. shopping site

Shopping.com just started a comparison shopping search engine in French, targeted at online shoppers in Europe.

This move is set to compete directly against Yahoo's Kelkoo property, Europe's largest and most popular comparison-shopping search engine.

Shopping.com France, located at http://fr.shopping.com, helps users shop for items, ranging from cameras and infant car seats. It automatically handles currency and language translations as well as shipping cost calculations, the company said.

Shopping.com, which plans to spend $8 million to $10 million this year on expanding its international business, also said it will open a German language site in the second half of 2005, Daniel Ciporin, said the company's chairman and chief executive officer.

Amid growing European integration, Ciporin said Europeans have become habituated to crossing national borders in search of lower prices on such items as washing machines, cars or wine.

Posted on Businessblog™

803 - Mar. 31, 2005 - 7.42 AM EST

More on Google's acquisition of Urchin

Google is acquiring web analytics company Urchin Software for an undisclosed amount. Urchin develops software that tracks web site traffic and analyzes user interactions. The company supports both hosted and in-house deployment options.

Google, which makes most of its money from advertising links in web search results, has a vested interest in analytics technologies that help site owners get a better return on their advertising dollars by tracking conversion rates.

Urchin's software fits the bill nicely, with tools that track the performance of adverts and understand user experiences.

Amid increased competition for "net eyeballs", all the leading internet search engines continue to add new products and features. Earlier this month Microsoft announced it is testing a service where clients pay to be listed alongside MSN search results, to help ramp-up the company's ad revenue.

Posted on Businessblog™

802 - Mar. 30, 2005 - 3.25 PM EST

Google acquires Urchin

Google is to acquire Urchin Software, a San Diego-based Web analytical firm.

Urchin is a web site analytics solution used by web site owners and marketers to better understand their users' experiences, optimize content and track marketing performance.

Urchin tools are available as a hosted service, a software product and through large web hosting providers. These products are used by thousands of popular sites on the Internet.

Google plans to make these tools available to web site owners and marketers to better enable them to increase their advertising return on investment and make their web sites more effective.

Posted on Businessblog™

801 - Mar. 30, 2005 - 11.12 AM EST

LookSmart launches five vertical search engines

LookSmart announces today the launch of its first five vertical search destinations to provide niche audiences with essential search results.

After analyzing audience and research data from FindArticles, LookSmart has developed five separate vertical content destinations, including homework helpers: the trendy www.teenja.com for teens; the more studious www.gradewinner.com for "tweens;" and www.24hourscholar.com for college students.

Two additional resources are dedicated to parents -- www.parentsurf.com for all family matters, and www.gobelle.com for moms on the go.

Consumers can now depend on highly targeted results from these vertical sites, saving them time and effort as they seek to find quality content that's relevant to their needs.

Posted on Businessblog™

800 - Mar. 29, 2005 - 7.09 PM EST

Search engines more popular than Yellow Pages

A new poll reveals that more consumers are using search engines for local shopping information, rather than the Yellow Pages.

For the last few years, one of the big stories in advertising has been the battle between online search engines and newspapers and phone book publishers for local ad dollars.

At first, it looked like the Internet didn't stand a chance. That is changing. New research from the Kelsey Group and ConStat shows that 70% of US adults use the Internet as an information source when shopping locally for products and services — up from 60% in October 2003.

These figures put the Internet on par with newspapers as a local shopping information resource, and suggest that the Internet is on track to surpass newspapers as a consumer influencer in the very near future.

Posted on Businessblog™

799 - Mar. 29, 2005 - 8.44 AM EST

Internet mergers accelerating

This news story confirms what I just wrote Saturday in my last newsletter:

The past week was busy in Internet acquisitions, led by IAC/InterActiveCorp's agreement to pay $1.85 billion for Ask Jeeves.

Also last week, Yahoo disclosed plans to buy Flickr, a Web site that has won considerable buzz among the digerati as a place to store and share digital photography. Shortly afterward, Hewlett- Packard unveiled a deal to buy a similar company, Snapfish.

The number of acquisitions doesn't compare with the fast-paced wheeling and dealing of the late 1990s, when it seemed as if there was an Internet merger every day. Still, the current activity reflects a significant increase from the relatively slow pace of the past few years, according to industry executives and analysts.

"You have a lot of companies with a lot of cash," said Scott Kessler, an analyst for Standard & Poor's. "At the same time, there's a lot of innovation taking place. You put those together -- capital and ideas -- and that leads to mergers."

Posted on Businessblog™

Copyright © Serge Thibodeau 2005. All rights reserved.

All views and opinions expressed on this blog are those of Serge Thibodeau only and are not representative of any company listed. All slogans, trademarks, text or logo representation used or referred to on this blog are the property of their respective owners.