News Byte
Tricia Duryee in Commerce on January 11 at 4:15 pm PT
Here’s something novel: A new hotel search engine founded by companies that own hotels. The joint venture, called Room Key, is an effort to gain independence from some of the large online aggregators, like Priceline and Expedia or even Google. Room Key was founded by Choice Hotels, Hilton, Hyatt, InterContinental Hotels, Marriott and Wyndham Hotel, and acquired its technology from hotelicopter in an asset deal last year.
Tricia Duryee in Commerce on November 28, 2011 at 5:54 pm PT
EBay has appointed Ken Moss to the position of VP of technology and science, responsible for developing the back-end buyer and seller experience.
Kara Swisher in News on June 16, 2011 at 1:42 am PT
In an interview I did with him at the recent ninth
D: All Things Digital conference, Alibaba Group CEO Jack Ma suggested that Yahoo would be better off splitting itself up into smaller pieces.
Today, he did that for one of the key units of the Chinese Internet giant, splitting its Taobao e-commerce unit into three new companies, which Alibaba made sure to say its fractious board was okay with.
Lynn Cowan, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal in News on May 24, 2011 at 8:26 am PT
Shares of Russian search engine Yandex NV will begin trading Tuesday after its initial public offering was priced Monday night at $25 a share, above its expected range.
Amir Efrati, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal in News on February 23, 2011 at 4:00 pm PT
Google Inc. has penalized Overstock.com Inc. in its search results after the retailer ran afoul of Google policies that prohibit companies from artificially boosting their ranking in the Internet giant’s search engine.
Katherine Boehret in The Digital Solution on February 8, 2011 at 2:54 pm PT
Katie looks at Tello, a new website and mobile app that encourages users to chime in on their customer-service experiences, good or bad.
John Paczkowski in News on February 8, 2011 at 2:10 pm PT
Some encouraging new search metrics for Bing. Experian Hitwise data for January shows Microsoft’s search engine with 12.81 percent of the market, up from 10.6 percent in December–-a 21 percent gain. Add to that the 14.62 percent share claimed by the now-powered-by-Bing Yahoo, and Bing’s got more than a quarter of the U.S. search market.
News Byte
Peter Kafka in Media on January 28, 2011 at 8:40 am PT
Google is going after “scraper” sites that copy and paste other people’s content, via a change in the search engine’s algorithm. Google engineer Matt Cutts made the announcement on his
personal blog today, as a follow-up to a much-discussed post on Google’s official blog about sites with “shallow or low-quality content.” Many observers thought Google’s original note was about Demand Media, but
Demand CEO Richard Rosenblatt says that’s not the case.
Peter Kafka in Media on January 25, 2011 at 3:00 am PT
But what he really wants is a billion-dollar-plus valuation, like the one that competitor Demand Media is going to get.
