Waiting for Google to crush Microsoft to powder? You might be waiting a long time, as The Wall Street Journal’s Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. suggests in a compelling but surprising argument. Maybe Google and Microsoft don’t really want to beat each other up. Sure, Google has Google Apps to wave in front of Microsoft’s face when it gets too serious with Bing, and Microsoft keeps pressing on its online-ad business to keep Google from thinking too hard about Chrome OS. But is Jenkins right? Do these two rivals really want to upset their cozy corners of dominance in order to take on profit...

By SAUL HANSELL Shortly after Tim Armstrong took over as chief executive of AOL, he asked to see the list of business deals that were being negotiated. He saw 900 of them. It was too many by far. “If you looked through the deal sheet, would you have been able to see the strategy of the company?” he asked. “I had a hard time.” The deals were small and incremental. At best, he said, “you would have thought it was a small- to medium-size Internet company.” Mr. Armstrong wants AOL to think big again. Three months after leaving a senior job as Google’s president of advertising sales,...

By Marta Wohrle The other day, I was at the paidContent EconAffinity conference fighting the urge to fiddle with my BlackBerry when an entertaining spat broke out among the panelists. The session was called “Online Advertising: Is Turning to Behavioral Targeting and Bigger Ads the Answer?” and was ably moderated by the exuberant Wenda Harris Millard. She was, like the rest of us, rather enjoying the ruckus, which was sparked when Mike Keriakos of Waterfront Media told Andy Monfried of Lotame where he could stick his ads, and Andy addressed the audience with a dramatic (although not terribly...

by Greg Sterling Of the big three search engines, one could argue that Google is directing the most focused, ongoing effort toward mobile. Clearly Yahoo and Microsoft see mobile as a critical part of their business but Google is more or less continually doing things that seek to improve the mobile user experience. First, of course, there’s Android itself. And then there are Android apps like Places Directory (a local search app minus the search part). There’s also the effort to improve and expand Voice Search and Latitude. There are the recent upgrades to GMail and iGoogle that make the mobile...

by Tom Krazit Bing took a baby step up the search engine ladder in its first month on the Internet. Microsoft’s share of the search market increased from 7.81 percent prior to the launch of Bing to 8.23 percent for the month of June, according to data from Statcounter picked up by Reuters. Bing got a noticeable bounce during the first few weeks of June, but settled back after the novelty wore off. Google’s share dropped ever so slightly, from a dominant 78.72 percent of the search market in May to a perilously shaky 78.48 percent of the market in June, a drop attributed by more than...

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PPN Staff Google has been working on more eye-catching ads to replace its text ads for awhile now and the emergence of Bing as an e-commerce site is hastening the search engine’s pace. Reports claim that Google will be testing product ads for its users whenever they browse through Google.com. In an e-mail sent to advertisers, the number one search engine described the new features for the Google product ads. The new ads “will feature product specific information directly in the ad such as price and product image,” the company said in the e-mail. “During the beta program, Google will be...

Jefferies & Co. says Google, Amazon and eBay will benefit the most. WHILE FOREIGN-EXCHANGE rates (F/X) remain a headwind for year-over-year comparisons, a quarter-over-quarter decline in the dollar should translate into sequential revenue gains and profits for the major Internet software and services companies in the second quarter, with Google (ticker: GOOG), Amazon.com (AMZN) and eBay (EBAY) benefiting the most. Among small-caps, VistaPrint (VPRT) stands to see a positive impact on sales but negative impact on gross margin given its Canadian dollar exposure. With the dollar posting a 3.9%...