Google has now made one big step forward in its initiative to have out-of-print books online. Tuesday, Judge John Sprizzo approved a lawsuit settlement between Google and numerous authors and publishers to the tune of $125 million. This money will be placed in a fund to go to copyright holders and will allow Google the rights to placing out-of-print material online. Read more…

Last night in a blog post at the Official Google Blog, Google announced that one of its Google Labs projects, Lively.com, will see its doors closed forever.

After only a few short months, Google has decided to pull the plug on this popular chat platform in order to direct resources to more important areas such as core search, ads, and apps.

While I have never used Lively, it seems to me that if this site is popular, there must be a way to make some money off of it, and I am somewhat surprised to see them choosing to shut it down so quickly. Would it not make sense to try and sell? Surely a company out there could make use of this to earn a living and keep the current user base happy. Maybe they should approach Facebook and turn it into yet another app?

It sounds more and more like Yahoo should have taken the Microsoft buy-out offer at $31 a share back in February. Since then Yahoo shares have been up and down, but as of today, they are hovering around the $10 mark, a small fraction of what they once were.

Yesterday Yahoo shares dropped to below $10 – the first time their value has dipped into the single digits in more than 5 years. One thing’s for sure, if Microsoft does step up and give Yahoo another offer it will be substantially less than the previous $44.6 Billion.

Yahoo is not the only major player in the search game to see significant value declines on their stock. Around this time last year Google shares were over $700 and as of today are at less than half that with the value at $310.31 at the time of this post. 2008 has also brought significant declines to Microsoft shares as well – at just under $20 today MS has seen shares drop by almost half with their 52 week high of 36.72 from back in December of 07.

Last week Google began turning PDF files of scanned printed documents into digital text, and as a result their searchable index has expanded once again.

Previously, only rarely would a scanned document appear in the organic search results. With the technology of optical character-recognition (OCR) implemented now these scanned PDFs will find their way into the results. Read more…

According to Bloomberg.com the FCC has approved a proposal by Google to utilize unused television airwaves for wireless internet access. Approved by a vote of 5-0 yesterday, this will ultimately allow for free Wi-Fi web access, especially in rural areas.

Any devices built to access the free wireless web will be required to utilize anti-interference technology, and makers of such devices will need to obtain FCC certification for each product. Read more…

The entire “Microsoft seeks Yahoo, Yahoo turns down Microsoft, Yahoo & Google hook up, and then break up, now Microsoft may be back with Yahoo” thing seems like an ongoing plot in a bad soap opera.

Back in June Google announced an advertising agreement that would allow Yahoo to use Google Ads on its websites. Many search marketers were left speculating the impact this would have on campaign effectiveness, however, this was all for nothing now that the Department of Justice has ended the deal. Read more…

In a world where more and more households are connected to the internet, bandwidth is becoming an issue and brownouts have been predicted to occur in the next few years. With the strain on the infrastructure of the internet this makes having an efficient, fast loading website all that much more important.

The bottom line for most site owners though, is not the efficiency of the internet as a whole, but rather the financial sustainability of their websites. While there are many ways to make a site perform better in terms of converting visitors, one of the simplest, and probably most important aspects is simply to reduce the load time of your website. Read more…

Google, in their Webmaster Central Blog, has introduced a nice little feature to the webmaster tools interface recently. The new feature identifies source URL’s for various errors that they detect.

For instance, when they display a 404 (not found) error for your site with a link to the missing page, now they will also tell you where they found the link to this error. This added feature can save a webmaster a ton of time in some cases. Read more…

I wrote about Google’s third quarter results last week, and yesterday Yahoo released theirs. While their revenues are up as compared to the third quarter of 2007, Yahoo will be moving forward with layoffs.

In Q3 of 2007 revenues at Yahoo were a reported $1.768 billion. In the same quarter for 2008 they are seeing a figure of $1.786 billion – up about $22 million. As a percentage, this is very small, but growth none the less. Read more…

With the stock market crashing and Google’s shares at the lowest point they have seen in a few years, Revenues for the third quarter of 2008 remain high. The quarter ending Sept 30 saw total revenues reaching $5.54 billion.

After paying out commissions and crunching the figures, the end result comes in at $4.04 billion, $10 million less than the expected $4.05 billion. Read more…