As CEO, Yang had the task to turn around the company’s dwindling fortunes. However, the rejection of the Microsoft offer and a failed advertising partnership with Google marred his brief tenure. Here’s tracing the rise and fall of Yang.

The company has been suffering from dropping share prices. However the news of Yang’s resignation caused shares to soar. Yang, co-founder of Yahoo!, will revert back to his previous role, focusing on development. He also will remain on the board.

In my opinion he did the right thing for open source and free software. Microsoft would not like to give anything for free. If you remember Hotmail was planning to make Hotmail paid when our beloved gmail came in and saved our souls. Had I been in Yang’s shoes, I would have done the same. Google was a better option at that time (before recession).

I think, Microsoft is not the answer, it is the question, NO is the answer

1. It is an open source browser project.
2. It has an innovative JavaScript Virtual Machine for better performance.
   
3. It has borrowed Opera’s Speed dial and auto complete feature of Firefox 3.
4. Sports a very cool inverted tabs.
5. It warns in case of a malware and/or a phishing attempt, just like a firewall.
6. But one thing Google forgot in Chrome if the support for XML
   

To know more about its features, please visit Chrome’s Official Homepage

According to Jennifer Liu, Product Manager with Google, “Over the next week we’ll be rolling this out so that more and more of you will start seeing a list of query suggestions when you start typing into the search box.”

According to the blog, Google Suggest will help users in the following ways:

Help formulate queries: Instead of just typing [hotels in Washington] — did you want [hotels in Washington dc] or [hotels in Washington state]? Don’t remember that song title or person’s name? Let Google help you search (and yes, I ended up choosing “From This Moment” as our wedding song).

Reduce spelling errors: Since suggestions are spell-corrected using the same “Did you mean?” feature that offers alternative spellings for your query after you search, misspellings and typos can be corrected ahead of time. Instead of wasting your time with a misspelled query like [new yrok times] or [tomorow never dies], search the first time with the correctly-spelled query.

Saves keystrokes: Who wants to spend their time typing [San Francisco chronicle] when you can just type in San F…” and choose the suggestion right away?

The revelations come as no great surprise – version 0.9 of the SDK was launched last week with the same omissions – but the Android Developers Blog has now confirmed that version 1.0 will be similarly bereft, and provided some explanation of why.

The GTalkService has been scrapped for security reasons. The idea was that incoming alerts would be routed through the same internal system as other notifications, which would make for a great user experience but lousy security, as there would be no way of checking the provenance of a notification.

There were other issues around temporary contacts having access to genuine identity information, the combination of which amounted to more than the development team could address in the time available.

The time problem has also nixed any comprehensive Bluetooth support – Android phones will be able to use a Bluetooth headset, but that’s all. There’ll be no file exchange or keyboard support, making it much like the iPhone in that respect.

These limitations aren’t likely to stop anyone buying an Android-based handset, but they might frustrate users when they do. It seems likely that anyone buying a first-version Android phone will be able to download an update later, though eventually Google will be hoping to appeal to a demographic who won’t want to be concerned with such complexity.

Amazon’s EC2 was likely the brainchild of a mid-level ops director who overbought for a data center and had to come up with a way to save his own ass. Use a free, open source project like Xen for virtualization, give it a sunshine-up-the-ass name like Elastic Compute Cloud, and start pulling in all those venture capital dollars like Cisco and Sun did during the first dotcom catastrophe. Fuck me, give that man a raise.

Unfortunately, Bezos and company are a day late and a buck short. This time around, we’re working with substantially less money and substantially more developer incompetence.

A Cloud Is Easier To Draw On A Whiteboard Than A Grid

EC2 is very popular with the Web 2.0 crowd, which is strange, considering the hurdles that these Javascript all-stars need to overcome. The first, and presumably most difficult, is that Amazon wants money in exchange for their services. That’s a stark realization for a budding young social network developer: Web 2.0 runs on cash, not hugs. Who would have thunk it?

Once you’re past that, there’s the matter of reliability. In my experience with it, EC2 is fairly reliable, but you really need to be on your shit with data replication, because when it fails, it fails hard. My pager once went off in the middle of the night, bringing me out of an awesome dream about motorcycles, machine guns, and general ass-kickery, to tell me that one of the production machines stopped responding to ping. Seven or so hours later, I got an e-mail from Amazon that said something to the effect of:

There was a bad hardware failure. Hope you backed up your shit.

Look at it this way: at least you don’t have a tapeworm.

-The Amazon EC2 Team

Datacenter hardware will bend you over your desk every now and then – no matter who owns it. If it’s yours, though, you can send some poor bloke down to the server room in the wee hours of the morning and cattle-prod constant status updates out of him. As a paying EC2 customer, all you’re entitled to is basic support, which amounts to airing your grievances on a message board and hoping that somebody at Amazon is reading. Being the straight-up gangster that I am, I luvz me some phone-screamin’, and I just can’t get that kind of satisfaction from Amazon.

Of course, I could pay more for extended support, but it would be nice if the fucking thing just worked.

What You Looking At, Google? You Want A Piece Of This?

While I’m running my mouth off here, I might as well take a swing at Wonka’s Chocolate Factory.

Google App Engine launched with great fanfare from the Python community. “Finally,” they said, “somebody has figured out how to make Python scale.” The thought is that any developer will be able to run his Twitter-Facebook mashup on the same framework that Google uses to run their apps. Infinite, magical scalability that you don’t have to think about, data storage that you don’t have to manage, and a language that’s easy to program. Sounds great!

That’s all well and good, but something tells me that the Google search engine (you know, the thing that makes money) isn’t written in Python, making this just a proper beat off for the web programming community. I have further evidence. I have yet to see a program more impressive than a task and time manager running on the Engine. Killer app, indeed.

Google App Engine offers a developer all of the things that he would look down his nose at an ops manager to provide: data storage, web hosting and caching. Web developers are too busy to worry about the app to figure out why the database is running slow. No, it couldn’t be a grotesquely complex query anywhere in my code. It’s a database problem. The DBA must have fucked something up in the config. Yeah, that’s it. If those DBAs weren’t always down at the pub, we could get some real work done around here.

I do have to give both Google and Amazon some credit, though. Both noticed that the only ones to make any real money off of the California gold rush were the outfitters who sold mining equipment.

Cloud Computing’s Next Form: Green Tech

As time goes on and venture capitalists get pitched, this technology will continue to change names to mask its stagnation. The next time around, it will be pitched as a “green” technology. Why ruin the environment with your data center? You can run a social media website and still love the earth.

Energy-efficient computers powered by sunshine. This will be an instant hit. There will be greenhouse gas output dashboards with neat little Ajax widgets. You’ll have calculators to figure out how much to pay for carbon offsets each month. Don’t believe me? Follow the money. “Green” technology is the most efficient, modern way to capitalize on liberal guilt. You also get to pass it off as altruism. Combine that with a web development community that runs on self-satisfaction and you’ve got a recipe for profit. Best of all, you can squeeze money out of an investor for this by making him feel ashamed to be a person of means.

What started as a noble cause has finally finished its devolution into a racket.

No matter what the name, you, the developer, will still be dealing reliability and accountability. Using someone else’s infrastructure for your application will forever be a business risk, but it sounds so much less so with a cuddly name. Your CTO will fall for the next cycle pretty easily. The compunction he feels for his latest data center build-out will outweigh the downsides of an external dependency.

Al Gore even said so.

There is a premeditated attempt by these companies to aim at Indian users with advertisements that claim to help in the selection of a child’s sex, said George, the petitioner in the case, in a telephone interview on Thursday.

Indian law prohibits tests that allow people to know the gender of an unborn child — a law designed to tackle widespread abortion of female fetuses.

“These companies are making a lot of money by doing highly targeted and selective advertising of these products,” said George, an activist leading the campaign.

“Our petition seeks to block these advertisements.”

The Act intends to forbid “the misuse of [pre-natal diagnostic] techniques for the purpose of pre-natal sex determination leading to female feticide.” In India, as in other countries, female children are often valued less than male children, a tradition that prompts some parents to terminate pregnancies that would result in the birth of a female infant.

According to a 2006 report in British medical journal Lancet, 10 million female fetuses have been aborted in the past two decades in India. The Guardian in the U.K. reports that Indian parents abort half a million female fetuses a year. The site Maps of India shows the sex ratios in different regions of India as of 2001, based on census data.

Most Indians prefer sons because they can earn more money in the workplace, while girls are seen as a financial burden because of the matrimonial dowry demanded by a groom’s family.

“The court has issued a notice to Google, Microsoft and Yahoo asking them to reply to our petition,” Sanjay Parikh, a lawyer who lodged the complaint, said in a statement.

Google said various elements go into managing ad program policy, including local legal requirements and user experience. “We review our policies regularly and make changes to keep them current and effective. We have not yet received the petition from the Supreme Court, but we take local laws extremely seriously and will review the petition carefully.”

A search for “sex selection” on Google India returns no text ads, in contrast to 63 sponsored links for the same keywords at Google.com. Yahoo India likewise returns no sponsored results for those keywords. A Microsoft Live Search conducted through MSN India returned two search ads offering information about gender selection.

Yahoo and Microsoft were unavailable for comment.

As social reformers were effectively able to stop sex selection advertising in the print medium, Indian and foreign advertisers have moved to the Internet, George said. Unlike the print medium, Internet search engines allow for highly targeted advertising, he added.

“These companies are making money by breaking Indian laws,” George said.

The country’s Ministry of Health and Family Welfare and Ministry of Communications and IT have also been made respondents in this case, as they did not take any action against the three companies, although the offenses were brought to their notice, George said.

In India, search engines, video sharing sites and social networking sites, including Google’s Orkut and YouTube have been sued for objectionable content or copyright violations.

“We do not hold the telephone company liable when two callers use the phone lines to plan a crime,” Rishi Jaitly, a policy analyst at Google India said in a Google blog post in October.

“For the same reasons, it is a fundamental principle of the Internet that you do not blame the neutral intermediaries for the actions of their customers,” Jaitly added.

Parikh said the petition had been submitted along with letters from the government in which it agrees that the Internet advertisements are illegal.

The Internet companies did not immediately respond to media queries about the case.

There is a deliberate attempt by these companies to target Indian users with advertisements that claim to help in the selection of a child’s sex, said Sabu Mathew George, the petitioner in the case, in a telephone interview on Thursday.

The three companies were unavailable for comment, despite repeated phone calls to Yahoo in Bangalore, Google in Hyderabad and Microsoft in Delhi.

The advertisement of products and techniques to aid in the selection of an unborn child’s sex is an offense under India’s “The Pre-conception and Pre-natal Diagnostic Techniques (Prohibition of Sex Selection) Act”.

In India, at least 900,000 unborn girls die each year through feticide, said George who is a social activist associated with organizations fighting for the rights of young girls in India.

As activists were able to effectively stop sex selection advertising in the print medium, Indian and foreign advertisers have moved to the Internet, George said. Unlike the print medium, Internet search engines allow for very targeted advertising, he added.

“These companies are making money by breaking Indian laws,” George said.

The country’s Ministry of Health and Family Welfare and Ministry of Communications and IT have also been made respondents in this case, as they did not take any action against the three companies, although the offenses were brought to their notice, George said.

In India, search engines, video sharing sites and social networking sites, including Google’s Orkut and YouTube have been sued for objectionable content or copyright violations.

Google has in the past objected to provisions in India’s Information Technology Act 2000 which make intermediaries like ISPs (Internet service providers), website hosting companies, search engines, email services, and social networks, liable for their users’ content.

Section 79 of the Act holds network service providers liable unless they can prove that the offense or contravention was committed without their knowledge or that they had exercised all due diligence to prevent the commission of such offense or contravention.

“We don’t hold the telephone company liable when two callers use the phone lines to plan a crime,” Rishi Jaitly, a policy analyst at Google India said in a Google blog post in October.

“For the same reasons, it’s a fundamental principle of the Internet that you don’t blame the neutral intermediaries for the actions of their customers,” Jaitly added.

Even though the website, which Google brought for a whopping USD1.65 bn in 2006, gets record number of visitors it has not yet contributed in any significant way to Google’s profits. “Revenues realized through the Google Print Ads Program, Google Audio Ads, Google TV Ads, Google Checkout, YouTube and Postini were not material in any of the periods presented,” the company said.

And that not where the surprising disclosure ends, Google also lists YouTube as one of its significant risks. “[The] anticipated benefit of may of our acquisitions may not materialize. For example, we have yet to realize significant revenue benefits from our acquisitions of dMarc Broadcasting (Audio Ads) and YouTube.”

Rest easy, Google … The much-hyped new search engine Cuil (pronounced “cool”), purports to index more Web pages than any of its rivals. But based on its Monday debut, the new site poses little immediate threat to industry leader Google, or even its nearest competitors, Yahoo and Microsoft, in either relevance or breadth of results it delivers.

“Anybody who thought [Cuil] was this Google killer can really see now that no, that’s not going to happen today — and the likelihood is that’s not going to happen a year from now,” says Danny Sullivan, internet search guru and editor-in-chief of SearchEngineLand.
Despite its lackluster performance, Cuil (which means wisdom or knowledge in Gaelic) got so many visitors on Monday, that its servers crashed around 3 p.m. E.T. “Due to excessive load, our servers didn’t return results. Please try your search again,” the site read intermittently throughout the afternoon. But even when it was working, the results were fair, at best. Enter a keyword such as “mint” and the first result that comes up isn’t the herb or flavor but the U.S. Mint. Type in “Obama,” and one of the sub-categories Cuil suggests is “Hispanic-American Politicians”. And Cuil lacks the special tabs for news, video, local and image results used by the leading sites.

The hype over Cuil, in fact, may be testament to the power of a great back story. Cuil is the brainchild of ex-Google staffer Anna Patterson — who developed the TeraGoogle indexing system that Google still uses today — and her husband Tom Costello, who developed search engines at Stanford and IBM. Cuil indexes some 120 billion Web pages. (Google, on the other hand, claims to scan more than a trillion pages, but only indexes those that are useful, according to the company.) The Cuil team generated so much buzz for its venture that it managed to raise some $33 million in financing. But the acid test of any search site is the results it generates, and for now, anyway, Cuil falls way short of the industry’s leaders, and even for that matter, of many startups.

Cuil’s distinctive design, in which results appear in three columns across the page, also allows for longer previews of each site’s content. But other search sites make better use of page real estate. SearchMe, which launched earlier this year, offers full-page snapshots in its results, through which you can flip like the album covers on iTunes. And the number 4-ranked search engine, Ask, also uses a wider layout to display both images and sub-categories for refining one’s search.
Cuil has a distinctive, if old-fashioned, approach to indexing websites. Instead of ranking them based on popularity, as Google does, it focuses on the content of each page. That may make sense in theory — after all, the most popular restaurants, for example, rarely serve the best food — but it is precisely the model that Google broke away from in order to give users more relevant results. That could explain why a Cuil search on “insomnia” directs the user to the American Insomnia Association rather than to the Wikipedia entry on the subject pulled up first by most other search engines.

The one area where Cuil excels, however, is user privacy. Whereas Google stores user-specific searches for up to 18 months, Cuil never stores personally identifiable information or search histories. Privacy has become a growing concern among users of search sites ever since America Online inadvertently released the searches of 658,000 of its users in 2006. But that’s unlikely to be enough to persuade most users to switch from their search engine of choice. “Anybody who thinks the next Google killer is going to come along is banking on something that’s unlikely,” says SearchEngineLand’s Sullivan. But if the Cuil story is any indication, that won’t stop people spending fortunes on beating the odds.