Google’s stock might be finally hitting a sunny patch, having risen $70 in the last six weeks and reaching a new all-time high. The stock, which used to be talked about as a high-flying stock, has suffered since January of last year, having trouble rising as recently as mid-April, but is now going up in value. The stock hit a new all-time high of $534.99 around 1 pm on Monday, currently enjoying a market cap higher than $164 billion.
Could Google be recovering? Is GOOG finally a good buy? Is it too early to be talking about $600, as this guy is? Seems like the Wall Street consensus is $600 in the next twelve months, which would mean 2007 could actually be an up year for Google’s stock, unlike 2006.
Google is teaming with Universal Pictures to run a contest relating to the Matt Damon movie “The Bourne Ultimatum” called The Ultimate Search For Bourne. The contest, like the Da Vinci Code contest of last year, will require fans to use a variety of Google tools to “track” Jason Bourne, Damon’s character, across three continents. The contest starts July 16 and is a partnership with Volkswagen and MasterCard. If past experience is any indication, the contest will be run from an iGoogle Gadget.
Come back here on July 16. If the game seems exciting, expect full coverage, hints and tips.
(via Philipp)
UPDATE: Here are links to our coverage of the game, including help on solving the daily missions:
Andy Beal has done a study of the 2008 U.S. presidential election in search engines, seeing how 18 announced candidates appear to searchers on Yahoo and Google. Andy examined the top 20 results for each name and tabulated the number of positive, negative, and neutral websites listed in the search engines.
Of all candidates, Ron Paul had the highest percentage of positive pages, no doubt due to a rabid internet fanbase that has been skewing internet polls for months. Of all mainstream candidates (those receiving 10% of the vote in any recent major poll), only Hillary Clinton has over 50% positive results. The most positive, in order, are:
Clinton’s strong internet presence has significantly helped her campaign rank well in the search engines, while McCain and Edwards have their work cut out for them. While no candidate has a significant number of negative results, a lack of positive results indicates poor online outreach that will hurt that candidate in the long and short term.
Curiously, Andy left out Fred Thompson, who figures high in Republican polls. I’ve taken the liberty of tabulating the top 20 for “Fred Thompson”
Wall Street Journal tech columnist Walt Mossberg has a review of Ask.com’s new Ask3D search engine interface, and he seems to be a fan. Mossberg, who wields a lot of influence with his Personal Technology column, says Ask3D is a “bolder and better advance” and “more effective” than Google’s universal search. He likes how Ask differentiates different types of results on a single page, better than Google’s approach of mixing different types together.
Google deserves credit for universal search, which I’m sure will get better. But Ask’s new design is much more compelling and well worth a try.
Google’s universal search is executed in a way that might confuse users, whereas Ask’s, while more complicated, is clearer and easier for users to grasp. I feel like Ask’s approach is likely to grab anyone no longer satisfied with their search engine, while Google’s approach doesn’t increase its appeal, and only hurts Google’s ability to grab users from more traditional search engines. While Google is doing fine, even more than fine, they could do better on the interface side of things.
Yahoo’s partnership with PayPal deepens, with Yahoo Publisher Network (their contextual advertising program) publishers receiving their monthly check, if they choose, deposited right into their PayPal account. The best part about the new system: PayPal isn’t taking its usual commission off your earnings (almost certainly part of Yahoo’s deal with them), so you get to keep 100% of what you make, and put it in a useful place.
I wonder, is there a way to receive PayPal payments via credit card without being subject to commissions? I have a friend who he and his wife are looking to adopt, and would like to help them raise money to pay for it, but I don’t want 3.2% of every donation being wasted on PayPal fees. Got any ideas?
eBay ended its Google boycott earlier this week after just under two weeks of deciding not to buy AdWords ads. The boycott, which was started as a protest to a Google party designed to steal eBay’s customers from under their noses, taught eBay an important lesson: They didn’t need those ads as much as they thought they did. eBay resumed their ad buys, but at a lower rate, after seeing that the millions of dollars they were giving Google could be better spent elsewhere.
Hani Durzy, a spokesman for San Jose, California-based eBay, said his company later on Friday would begin advertising on Google, but at reduced levels than previously. eBay had been buying tens of millions of keyword ads on Google each year.
“I will tell you it will be in a much more limited way than it was before,” Durzy told Reuters. “What we found is that we were not as dependent on AdWords as some people thought.”
Chalk this up to more money Google Checkout has cost Google. Google loses money on Checkout every day, since it has to process credit cards and collects zero fees, and also gives away free money in many promotions. Now, it has cost Google a good portion of one of its biggest advertiser accounts. How much money does Google need to lose in the pursuit of Checkout before it gives up and tries to find a better business to get into?
I had no idea, but apparently Facebook’s walled garden has a public directory. I had just assumed that everything in Facebook was behind a login prompt, but I found out via a FaceReviews post that a large number of Facebook users, depending on their privacy settings, have public profile pages, and have had so for the last six months. Here’s what one looks like:
(apologies to Rachel for using her page, but it was the first one listed in Google, which I guess is some sort of honor)
Search engine visitors get to see your profile pic, five of your friends (and a convenient link to see five more at a time), and whether you post a lot of pictures, notes, join a lot of groups, and have a lot of people posting on your wall. Clicking anything on the page (except to refresh friends) results in a registration prompt, so that’s all there is to it.
So, really, this is a message to everyone on Facebook that you need to understand how important it is that you know your profile might be in Google. If you don’t like it, you can go into your settings and change who can find you in search engines to something more limiting. If you don’t take yourself out of the search engines, then you might want to change that picture of you and the beer bong at that wild party from being your profile picture.
In the meantime, we can be happy to know that Steve Rubel’s got a public profile, as does Robert Scoble. If you’d like to add me as a friend on Facebook, click here (but you’ll need to be signed in).
Eager to grow the Google Gadget ecosystem, Google has announced a Google Gadget Ventures program aimed at funding Gadget developers. Google says it will issue grants of $5000 to developers who have build Gadgets with at least 250,000 pageviews per week.
On the larger end, Google is offering $100,000 seed investment to Gadget developers with good proposals to build a business around their Gadgets (and have already received the grant). Google will take equity in developers who are given seed investments. You do not need to be a U.S. citizen to apply, but you must be able to start a U.S. company.
Google intends to make 20 to 40 grants per year, and 2 to 5 seed investments per year.
This is a smart move by Google, helping along the development of the Gadget ecosystem, since Facebook’s applications have stolen a lot of the thunder in this segment. Google may not have the explosive growth of Facebook applications, but at least it can claim that it’s developers make actual money.
Not an authorized product from the Google Store, this Google Onesie (technically, a Goo Goo onesie) is perfect for stuffing your toddler into. While it is based on an older version of the Google interface (ugh, only a Google geek would say that), it does seem to have a button that reads “I’m Feeling Silly”. Currently out of stock (I bet it’s real popular, having been featured in Parents Magazine), you’ll be able to get it for $26 once they get a few more.
(via Donna)
Google has handed over production of the Google Search Appliance, its only real hardware product, to Dell. The Search Appliance, which attaches to corporate networks to enable Google-powered internal search, has been a pretty good product for Google, but didn’t fit with the fact that the company had little experience with hardware, and was too expensive compared with similar products (including free software from Yahoo).
Dell’s advertising this move as a partnership with Google, saying “If we could help Google, we can help your business”:
With Dell taking over, a company with more expertise in manufacturing can handle that end, while Google does what it does best, and handle the software side of things. Dell can market the search appliance along with its server products, which probably makes it a better sale than from Google’s own website. Google could use the help, since by its own admission, its only sold 9,000 of them.
Yahoo has hoped for a while to buy popular social networking site Facebook, making several offers, but never offering enough as the price kept going up. Facebook would be a perfect fit for Yahoo in several ways, tying together many of Yahoo’s community sites and making everything more popular by association, as well as giving Yahoo some cred with a younger generation that seems to be moving past its services.
Well, it might be time to give up hope on that one. A report at Valleywag says that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who has complete ownership of the site, has no interest in selling. The new comany line is that Facebook has decided to remain independent, because Zuckerberg wants to remain faithful to the community to keep things going as well as they have.
That doesn’t mean necessarilly that Facebook won’t sell, but rather that it is sending a message that it doesn’t want to sell. Not only will that force potential suitors to think about offering even more money for the site, but it sends a strict message to Yahoo: Leave us alone, we’re not interested.
Eager to grow the Google Gadget ecosystem, 
