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The European Union's antitrust ax is about to fall on Google, but the company can still avoid the worst repercussions. That is the essence of the message from EU antitrust chief Joaquin Almunia. After a year-and-a-half investigation into Google's activities in the market, there are four areas of con...

Yahoo will sell half its stake in Chinese e-commerce heavyweight Alibaba back to the company for about $7.1 billion, setting in motion a deal that will send cash toward Yahoo shareholders. The deal will take place in multiple stages. First, Alibaba will purchase about 20 percent of Yahoo's stake in ...

A fresh blight has struck Yahoo, which continues to flounder as management slashes its workforce in a bid to put the ailing company back on its feet. The resume of recently hired CEO Scott Thompson claims he holds a college degree that he never actually earned. The news erupted on Thursday in the mi...

Interest in the United States Federal Trade Commission's antitrust probe into Google was given a jolt with the commission's decision to enlist seasoned white-collar crime litigator Beth Wilkinson to head the investigation. "When we have the opportunity to augment our team by bringing on a lawyer wit...

Google CEO Larry Page issued a public dispatch on the state of the company Thursday, enthusiastically promoting the Android platform and next-generation search techniques. Page took over as CEO of the company about a year ago. His open letter Thursday, a "2012 Update From the CEO," revealed few surp...

Facebook accused Yahoo of violating 10 of its patents Tuesday, a response to a similar suit Yahoo filed just under a month ago. The two Internet competitors are embroiled in a patent duel that started last month, when Yahoo sued Facebook for 10 counts of patent infringement. The litigation came at a...

It appears that Yahoo and shareholder Third Point are digging in for a contentious proxy fight. The companies have been tussling over who will fill four seats on the board of directors, with the two sides clashing on several points, including whether Third Point CEO Daniel Loeb should get one of th...

One of Yahoo's major investors, hedge fund Third Point, is calling upon shareholders to elect four of its nominees to the company's board. This is just the latest round in what could become a very nasty fight. "There are a couple of things happening," said Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT....

Today we would say that the first implementation of PageRank was a form of crowdsourcing. The crowd was early webmasters, and they helped determine the relevancy of Web pages by linking to them. It didn't take long for "search engine specialists" to figure out how to game the system for fun and pr...

Google is rumored to be at work on new technologies and methodologies that could significantly alter the way consumers search on the Internet, as well as how brands can expect to see their ads displayed. More emphasis will be placed on semantic search, a process that takes into account the meaning o...

Even before Google launched its new privacy policy earlier this month, consolidating separate privacy policies for more than 60 applications, legal issues had surfaced. Now, attorneys general from more than 31 States have accused Google of violating privacy laws because of complaints from users that...

Yahoo filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Facebook on Monday, ensnaring the social network heavyweight in a legal entanglement weeks before it's scheduled to go public. The suit regards 10 patents related to instant messaging, advertising systems, privacy settings and methods for customizing...

There is no question that Google is the dominant player in the search engine arena, and a new survey released Friday by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that 83 percent of U.S. search engine users rated Google as their preferred search engine, despite concerns about the company's d...

Google on Tuesday rebuffed a request by a European Union privacy body to delay implementation of changes in the search giant's privacy policies set to take effect on March 1. "[W]e have notified over 350 million authenticated Google users and provided highly visible notifications on our homepage and...

A deal worth billions to Yahoo has reportedly hit a snag. The deal between Yahoo and two of its Asian partners, China's Alibaba Group and Japan's SoftBank, has reached an impasse, according to a recent report. The accord would, among other things, save Yahoo $4 billion in U.S. taxes. Yahoo's investm...