AllThingsD independently confirmed that this has been discussed at the FTC, but it’s in the earliest of stages. Google and the FTC both declined to comment.

The players are all too familiar, but the game is different, as the FTC largely cleared Google in a separate search and patent antitrust investigation last year.

Google is nowhere near as dominant in advertising as it is in search, but the company has clearly been building up its advertising stack through acquisitions and its own product development — with regulators’ permission, so far.

The cornerstone of those was buying DoubleClick in 2007, which the FTC itself cleared. The commission said at the time, “We want to be clear, however, that we will closely watch these markets and, should Google engage in unlawful tying or other anticompetitive conduct, the Commission intends to act quickly.” Since then, Google added other important buys such as AdMob and Invite Media and built its AdX ad exchange.

The question is whether Google is using anticompetitive tactics to try to force its combined “end-to-end” solution onto advertisers, for instance by taking a loss on some products in order to make the full package more attractive.

IDC reported this week that Google had 24.1 percent of the $3 billion U.S. display advertising market in the first quarter of this year, widening its lead over Yahoo and Facebook.

Ben Ling, a longtime Silicon Valley angel investor and Internet exec, has joined Khosla Ventures as a venture partner.

Ling is the second hire of high-profile operating execs by Khosla. Former Square, Slide and PayPal exec Keith Rabois — who is a close friend of Ling’s — joined the firm in February.

In an interview today, Ling said he has been contemplating his next move, and the idea of becoming a VC after years of operations was appealing.

“I thought a lot about the ability to have impact across a broad set of companies, and was attracted to Khosla’s model of venture assistance,” said Ling, who added that he will focus a lot on the mobile ecosystem. “When I was younger, I thought it would be fascinating to be an investor, and here I can help a lot of companies grow and scale.”

Ling is a former Google and Facebook product exec, as well as an active investor in 80 startups, including such high-profile ones as Fab.com, Square and Quora. He was most recently COO at Badoo, but left the company last fall.

At Google, he worked on search, YouTube and local products, and was closely linked with former Googler Marissa Mayer, whom he followed internally when her responsibilities shifted there. Many thought he might next pop up at Yahoo, where she is now CEO.

Not so, but also not a surprise; Mayer provided Khosla with a lovely statement about Ling: “Ben is an amazing entrepreneurial leader and has a great eye as an investor for both talent and ideas. I’m excited to see him join Khosla Ventures to find and foster the next set of entrepreneurs who will define the technology world.”

After writing a post on Tuesday about being diagnosed with a rare voice condition which has barred him from making many public appearances over the past two years, Google CEO and co-founder Larry Page made a surprise appearance at Google’s I/O developer conference on Wednesday.

The CEO, who has not appeared at the I/O conference in years, took about 10 minutes to deliver a sort of evangelist-like mission statement, thoughts on how he sees Google’s role in the world at large, and how the different parts of his organization — Android, Google X, Maps, Search — help people.

“Technology should do the hard work,” Page said, “so that people can get on with doing the things that make them happiest in life.”

Page’s appearance is noteworthy in that, unlike other technology CEOs — Zuckerberg, Cook, Bezos — Page has not often stepped into the limelight for new product introductions or company updates, aside from his appearances on the company’s earnings calls.

But unlike his quarterly appearances filled with balance-sheet numbers and chats with Wall Street analysts, Page’s talk today aimed to appeal to a more emotional part of his audience, even evoking a memory of a time he went to a technology conference with his father, when Page was a child.

At other moments, Page seemed to wax philosophical. “If I think back to a long time ago, all of humanity was basically farming or hunting all the time,” he said. “If you lived in that time, you probably hoped that you could feed your family. For us, we don’t worry about that … and the reason for that is technology.”

Indeed, a lot of the speech had a very “Kumbaya” feeling to it, with Page calling for an end to the animosity that inhabits much of the tech industry.

“Every story I read about Google is ‘us vs some other company’ or some stupid thing, and I just don’t find that very interesting,” Page said. “We should be building great things that don’t exist. Being negative isn’t how we make progress.”

Yet in the very same address, Page took some potshots at competitors like Microsoft and Oracle, both of which are involved in litigation over certain Google products.

When asked during a Q&A session about the fate of Android in light of Oracle’s court victories, Page seemed eager to snipe: “Money is more important to them than cooperation,” Page said.

Speaking of a lack of cooperation, just today The Verge surfaced a cease-and-desist letter from Google to Microsoft, demanding that Microsoft remove the YouTube app from its Windows Phone devices, citing a lack of in-app advertising. Funny timing.

Page is hardly the only Google executive — much less Google employee — to shoot down competitors. Google Maps VP Brian McClendon was eager to make a subtle dig at Apple’s less-than-lauded mapping product. And Google+ SVP and long-time I/O emcee Vic Gundotra has thrown quite a few competitive elbows at other tech companies in his time.

Regardless, the Street seemed to eat it up. Shares of Google reached an all-time high on Wednesday afternoon, hitting $916.38 per share, before edging back slightly to close at $915.89.

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“Yes, it’s a provocative title, especially coming from Google, but I believe [it is here] with good reason,” Singhal said, speaking onstage at Google’s I/O conference in San Francisco.

Search needs to answer, converse and anticipate, and Google is working on doing all three, Singhal said.

In a demo, Johanna Wright demonstrated searching by voice for “things to do in Santa Cruz,” getting a page of results.

A follow-up query of “How far is it from here?” generated a result of “an hour and 21 minutes” from her present location. Wright dictated an email from Google’s mobile app and then added a reminder to call a particular friend when she gets to a city.

Google Now is adding support for reminders and public transit, along with info on upcoming TV shows and information on other entertainment types, such as books and videogames.

More statistical answers are coming to Google, as well as a graph comparing to other queries. Search for the population of India, for example, and you will get not only a graph of Indian population over time, but also a comparison to other countries.

Google is also adding Polish, Turkish and simplified and traditional Chinese to the languages where its knowledge graph is active.

“We’re just getting started,” he said. “We know we can do a whole lot better.”

Personalized results are important, such as being able to search for one’s “upcoming trip” or “vacation photos.” (Think Google Now for Google.com.)

You can speak a query like you would ask a friend, rather than typing into a search bar. Conversational search is live on iOS and Android, and is coming now to desktops and laptops.

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• Next Google Maps Update to Include Better Venue Search, Waze-Like Rerouting
• Google Gives Search a Deeper Voice and Adds Reminders and More to Google Now
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• Google+ Gets a Bit More Pinteresting
• Google Chrome: 750 Million Active Users, Synchronized Web and Mobile Browsing
• Coming Soon From Google: A $649 Samsung Galaxy S4 Running Stock Android
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• Google on Android: 900 Million Activations, New Tools for Developers Coming
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• Google Downplays Expectations Ahead of I/O Developer Conference
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• Ahead of I/O, Google Wallet Drops Plans to Introduce a Physical Card
• Google Goes With Unified I/O Keynote (But Will It Unify Its Products?)

At issue here are a pair of cases born out of autocomplete searches that associated individuals with words like “Scientology” and “fraud,” and “prostitute” and “escort.” Google insists it has no control over autocomplete suggestions, which are automatically generated according to the frequency of keyword searches. And while the court agreed, it determined that the company has an obligation to remove defamatory suggestions when they are brought to its attention.

“We are disappointed with the decision from the German Supreme Court,” a Google spokesman said. “We believe that Google should not be held liable for terms that appear in autocomplete as these are predicted by computer algorithms based on searches from previous users, not by Google itself. We are waiting for the written grounds to review the decision in detail.”

Facebook’s top lawyer Ted Ullyot is leaving the social networking giant, apparently to take some time off.

Facebook disclosed the departure today. Ullyot, 45, will be officially gone in July; the search for his replacement will include internal and external candidates.

As general counsel, Ullyot has presided over a myriad of new, unusual and sometimes controversial legal issues, including managing high-stakes and complex litigation that ranged from Facebook’s battle with the Winklevoss twins, to a patent fight with Yahoo to investor disgruntlement around its initial public offering.

And, of course, over privacy issues. In many ways, given the Silicon Valley company’s pioneering role in social networking, Ullyot has had to work in a relatively undiscovered landscape, which has also attracted a great deal of scrutiny from consumers, regulators and investors.

He started in the fall of 2008, and has managed all the legal aspects of the company and built up the team from 10 when Facebook was a startup to more than 70 as a public company. In that time, Facebook has grown from 500 people to 5,000 and from 100 million to over one billion active users.

It has certainly been a ride for him, from beating back the Winklevii over their allegations related to the founding of Facebook to settling the patent dispute with Yahoo to handling the Federal Trade Commission investigation and more.

It is not clear what he will do next, but sources said he does not have another job lined up as of yet.

Groupon said it had revenue of $601.4 million, up eight percent, in the first quarter, and earnings of three cents. Those profits were in line with Wall Street expectations, but sales were better than the expected $590 million at the daily deals site.

The stock was up nearly 12 percent in after-hours trading to $6.21. Shares have risen 42.6 percent in the last six months, although that’s down 43.9 percent from a year ago.

There was no news of the search for a new leader for Groupon, which fired its CEO, co-founder Andrew Mason, in the quarter.

On a conference call later, co-CEO Ted Leonsis said that Groupon’s board had formed a search committee, but that it was “not in a hurry” to find a new company head.

But, in a statement, co-CEO Eric Lefkofsky said: “We are encouraged by our results, as our local revenues accelerated and our margins improved over the prior quarter.”

Anything up is good news for the suffering Groupon, which has been pilloried by Wall Street since its late 2011 IPO, although sentiment has improved since Mason’s ouster.

Gross billings, which is the amount consumers buy from Groupon overall, without subtracting payments to merchants, were up four percent, to $1.04 billion, on strong growth in North America. Sales were off internationally, though, by 9 percent.

International business, which has a bigger active customer base than North America, was the cause of much of Groupon’s declines, a problem execs have been trying to address with a new “One Playbook” strategy to consolidate systems.

On the conference call, COO Kal Raman called the situation “a tale of two Groupons.”

On a GAAP basis, Groupon had a loss of one cent, from two cents in the same period a year ago.

Groupon also said North American transactions on mobile devices accounted for 45 percent of the overall number, up from 30 percent last year, while email fell to less than 45 percent of the deals sold.

On a less happy note, Groupon said that its outlook for the second quarter would be below consensus.

Here’s the the Chicago-based Groupon’s official press release, as well as some tasty financial slides, so you can read it all for yourself:

GRPN

GRPN_1Q13_Earnings_Slides

Accel Partners has added longtime tech exec Rob Solomon — who was most recently president and CEO of Groupon — as a venture partner. The high-profile Silicon Valley venture firm said Solomon will focus on early stage and growth equity opportunities and focus on “operational issues like product management, scaling infrastructure, business operations, and mergers and acquisitions.”

Said Accel Partner Andrew Braccia in a statement: “[Solomon] has been at the helm of some of the most high profile consumer internet brands and has demonstrated a unique ability to inspire and lead teams through both rapid growth and challenging times.”

Indeed, Solomon has had a long Silicon Valley career, including as an top exec at Yahoo, running its e-commerce efforts. He was also CEO of SideStep, a real-time vertical search engine in the travel sector that was later sold to Kayak and is also on several boards, including HomeAway.

But Solomon is best known for his stint as the No. 2 exec at the Chicago-based Groupon, the once high-flying daily deals site. But, for a variety of reasons, including wanting to be located in California, he left the company two years ago.

Solomon emailed me last night to explain why he decided to take a job as a VC at Accel and here’s what he wrote:

“I love the tactics and strategies associated with scaling up Internet companies. Nothing is more exciting then digging deep into a space and then figuring out which companies stand the best chance to create new markets and become iconic category defining companies. I was lucky enough to work with some of the world’s best founders, technologists and executives at Yahoo and that experience taught me what is possible in a very short span of time. I’ve joined Accel because they have an incredible global platform to find, nurture, fund and grow the next generation of global iconic Internet companies and nothing could be more exciting to me for my next career adventure.”

Basically, this covers search labeling and scraping, as expected. It’s trying to set a more level playing ground for how Google treats its competitors, and to address some of the ways it may have abused its power in the past — like by including Yelp reviews in its own local search in a way that discouraged people from ever visiting Yelp.

You can see in the illustrations here that Google will include a little lowercase “i” with a circle around it next to results from its own properties, and will also sometimes encase them in a “sponsored” box:

As part of the agreement, Google also conceded some limitations it had put on its advertisers, similar to the deal it made in the U.S. The commitments don’t include anything related to concerns about use of patents.

Competitors now have a month-long “market test” to comment, then Google has to implement the changes for five years throughout Europe.

So why is this different and stronger than the mild hand-slap that Google received in the U.S.? Well, first of all, European laws are stricter, and Google is much more dominant than it is in Europe, with search market shares above 90 percent.

But, second, competitors are already saying that this won’t go far enough.

ICOMP, an organization representing Google’s competitors, immediately fired off a round of comments today about how labeling something as wrong doesn’t fix the fact that it’s wrong.

“If the proposals don’t clearly set out non-discrimination principles and the means to deal with the restoration of effective competition, plus effective enforcement and compliance, it’s very difficult to see how they can be satisfactory,” ICOMP said in a blog post. “[I]t is clear that mere labelling is not any kind of solution to the competition concerns that have been identified. Google should implement the same ranking policy to all websites.”

Said a Google spokesperson, as usual, “We continue to work cooperatively with the European Commission.”

Embedded below is the text document of Google’s commitments, which contains a bunch of images showing how the proposed labeling will look:

Google’s EU commitments for competition market test

Twitter is giving advertisers the ability to show users ads based on the content of their tweets, using what the service is calling “keyword targeting in timelines.”

It’s a basic idea — if you’re tweeting about “Game of Thrones,” you might see an ad from HBO (or whomever) shortly afterward.

Advertisers will also have the ability to target you based on tweets that you “engage” with — stuff you reply to, retweet or favorite. That’s important, since most Twitter users are reading a lot more than they’re writing.

And Twitter ad executive Kevin Weil says that the company will be able to use “negative sentiment filtering.” So people who writing about how much they hate Virgin America’s website won’t see an ad from Virgin America.

But the big picture here is that Twitter is trying to sell advertisers on the idea that they can now use “signals of intent” when they target users.

“Intent” is the magic word that makes Google a gazillion-dollar company: Advertisers know precisely what a search user is looking for because a search user types that information into a box.

And the lack of “intent” signals is what makes lots of other Web advertising worth so much less to marketers. Some of them try to guess what you’re interested in, based on websites you’ve visited — that’s the “retargeting” technique you hear a lot about — but in general, there’s a whole lot of fumbling around.

If Twitter can prove that it really is serving up intent signals to advertisers, and that its ads perform accordingly, that’s a really big deal. If it works, you’ll hear a lot about it in the coming months — and eventually, in Twitter’s IPO.

Update: Some smart readers note, (on Twitter, of course — remember when people left comments on websites?) that even in the best-case scenario, there are limits to the Twitter/targeting Google/AdWords parallel.

For starters, Digiday’s Brian Morrissey points out, typing into the Google search box and typing something on Twitter aren’t the same thing at all.

@pkafka not all intent is created equally. google’s is v commercial.

— Brian Morrissey (@bmorrissey) April 17, 2013

Sulia’s Jonathan Glick is even more explicit: Some of you may use Twitter to announce your interest in buying something — but most of you won’t.

@pkafka What % of Twitter users tweet about products/services they want to buy?

— Jonathan Glick (@jonathanglick) April 17, 2013

I’ll let Twitter make its own sales pitch here in response. But again: If keyword targeting works — meaning, if it improves advertiser results, even if they don’t come close to Google search results — it’s meaningful for Twitter’s future.

(Image courtesy of Shutterstock/mack2happy)

Imagine being Michael Sippey, Twitter’s VP of product, who spoke at our D: Dive Into Mobile conference on Tuesday. You’re charged with taking a product as stripped-down as Twitter, which started out as a short messaging service, and gradually adding features and enhancements over time without alienating the very user base that grew to enjoy it in the first place.

Tough problem, for sure. And I’d doubt Sippey would want to change the core Twitter experience, a reverse-chronological, never-ending flow of tweets moving through your stream. So what do you do?

I sure can’t tell you the answer, and I’m not even sure Twitter can quite yet. But it’s certainly trying to figure it out.

Take search, for one. “We’ve made a big investment over the past few years in real-time search and archive search,” Sippey said, improving Twitter’s once poor experience of sifting through the billions of tweets that regularly flow through the service. So instead of missing out on all the conversation floating around in the ether, one could search for specific words, phrases or hashtags. (And yes, I can say it has grown better over time.)

More important, I’d argue, is Discover.

“The Discover tab and product on mobile,” as Sippey put it, are “essentially experiments that we’re trying out there.” It’s a way for Twitter to serve up user-suggested content, based on the accounts they follow, their histories of interaction with others — basically the stuff they care about. And ideally, if Discover worked perfectly, it’d be the best place for users to, well, discover all that stuff they’ve missed, the stuff they haven’t searched for — the stuff you didn’t even know you wanted to see.

Problem is, Discover is far from perfect. It launched essentially as a beta product a few years ago; suggested content wasn’t great, the design was lacking, and people just didn’t use it.

Now, Sippey said, people are using Discover (sadly, he wouldn’t disclose just how many). And, to be fair, I’d say Discover certainly has grown better over time. But I’d argue that it’s still not compelling enough to take users out of their main streams and into the Discover tab on a regular basis. (TBD if Sippey and pals ever figure that problem out.)

But! There’s a curious light at the end of this tunnel. Twitter’s answer to simplicity seems to be less in worrying specifically about major changes to its core product, but rather focusing on building separate standalone apps built entirely for different purposes.

Put another way: “There are times when you need a single purpose-driven knife when you’re in the kitchen, and there are times when you need a Swiss Army knife,” Sippey said. “We want to build the best Twitter we can build. But we also know that we want to build other things that can use the Twitter infrastructure to basically serve different purposes and different needs.”

Hence, the Vine acquisition last year, and the forthcoming Twitter Music app to drop soon (which Sippey was pretty mum about). Create these sort of satellite apps, and perhaps you don’t freak out your core base of users. In the meantime, perhaps you’ve also found a new on-boarding mechanism to capture and convert non-Twitter users into living, breathing tweeting machines; neither Vine nor Twitter Music (from what we’ve heard) require you to have a Twitter account in order to use the service, but sure make it easy to sign up for Twitter if you want to!

So, in Twitter’s perfect world, we’re able to find stuff — video, music, whatever — using these other services without screwing up Twitter’s proper app. Great, right?

Maybe. Maybe not. People actually have to download and continue using all the apps to make it a successful strategy, and Twitter isn’t exactly keen to break out its engagement stats for us. Guess we’ll see if Vine can maintain its download success, and if Twitter Music is a hit when it launches.

If not — good luck with that whole simplicity thing, tweeps.

Yahoo turned in a first-quarter report that showed continued flat revenue, although earnings were up.

Here’s the liveblog of the conference call following the report, which starred Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, who tried to explain how she planned to remake the Silicon Valley Internet giant to increase that weak revenue in its key display advertising and search units:

2:00 pm: I like that Mayer started on time, which many a Yahoo CEO did not in the past.

Still, there is no way she could easily explain away the revenue miss at the company in the quarter, which is due in large part to its ever-declining display advertising sales.

Thus, she used the metaphor of running to clarify the situation.

“Getting the company going at the rate we would like will take several years,” she said, describing turning Yahoo around as a “series of sprints,” including making it a great place to work.

The next sprint will be to create “beautiful products.” After that, the next one will be to improve user engagement. And then, presumably, “ultimately growth.”

2:08 pm: Mayer touted better employee collaboration, which she said has made Yahoo a more attractive place to work than ever before.

She also noted that Yahoo has gotten a lot of ex-Yahoos — which she called “boomerangs” — to return to the fold.

Mayer deftly did not mention the better earnings — largely due to cost and tax savings, as well as other financial manipulations and not sales efforts — since managing the business well is not the same as growing it.

But, let it be said: She and CFO Ken Goldman seem to be managing Yahoo very well, although Wall Street and others are expecting them to goose revenues.

2:13 pm: It is on to Goldman, who goes through the numbers, which Yahoo has already released.

Here’s a quick synopsis: Yahoo’s display advertising business is down 11 percent in the first quarter to $455 million, with the number of ads sold declining seven percent and the price per ad falling two percent.

As it did last quarter, search revenue did not save the day. It also declined 10 percent to $425 million, although it was up six percent when traffic acquisition costs were not counted in. While paid clicks were up 16 percent, price per click was down seven percent.

Employee count was down 19 percent, another expense savings.

Goldman is clearly a smart cookie, but there is a long road here from this to true revenue growth.

2:26 pm: Mayer underscored that immediately, noting that Yahoo has to meet the growth rates of competitors, such as Google and Facebook, behind which Yahoo badly lags.

“Make no mistake,” she said about that need, noting that improvements in its core properties, as well as mobile products, are key focuses for her to improve sales.

She said there was a respectable mobile growth in users in the quarter, although she declined to say just how much revenue Yahoo makes in mobile. (It’s not much yet, so that explains that.)

Partnering is also important to her, she said, working with companies all over the Internet space.

All will lead to better user engagement, and “with user engagement comes monetization,” she added.

We are on course, she concluded — presumably on what will likely be an exhausting sprint.

2:30 pm: Then, it was onto questions from analysts.

The first was about why there were declines in ad sales — via a plan to de-load pages of them or just not selling enough and declining page views.

It is a complex issue, due to various elements, from the move to mobile to waiting for product improvements to kick in with users.

There was then a question about partnering — which Yahoo has indeed been good at. That said, I sometimes wonder if the company were a bit less cooperative and more selfish, as its rivals always are, that it might be more successful.

Mayer still said she thinks partnering is a good thing.

The next question was whether Microsoft will continue to pay its revenue per search guarantees to Yahoo, as it has in the past when their search deal did not meet expectations.

From a “conservative point of view, there will be no renewal,” said Goldman, although he notes that Yahoo talks to Microsoft daily.

I’d like to hear that conversation!

2:38 pm: An obvious question then came about when the heck Yahoo will get its display business moving.

“It’s a sprint and it’s a chain reaction,” said Mayer, not precisely answering the question and using comparative metaphorical terms that were perhaps more awkward to hear today given the tragedy in Boston.

The next question was about adding more of a Google advertising relationship, a deal which would certainly up Yahoo’s revenue, although there have always been potential regulatory issues related to it.

Mayer pointed to a recent smaller ad partnership with the search giant, and “we occasionally explore new opportunities.”

What ho? (Hey, Nikesh, that’ll be me calling, so pick up!)

2:42 pm: Another question came about whether Yahoo could improve its search share, which has been declining.

Mayer, who is an expert in this area, said that search interface improvements will matter, although there are other ways of adding share too, such as closer relationships with browsers.

She was animated here, which was probably a good idea, given her COO Henrique De Castro seems to be swinging and missing in the display advertising arena.

Thus, the follow-up question was perfect, about the sales realignment that De Castro initiated that has caused a lot of internal distress at Yahoo.

Mayer said she thought that “this is the right thing to do,” although it’s not as clear if she really knows how jarring the change has been for the sales troops. Display ad sales are not her area of expertise, so she probably needs to get more up to speed on this critical issue.

2:48 pm: The usually tepid analysts kept pounding away on that issue, which Mayer answered by saying the decline is less of a decline than is had been previously. It’s faint praise, of course, but it’s a fair point.

Also of interest is whether Yahoo could create a mobile layer on top of Google’s Android as Facebook just did with its innovative Home software.

If you have been around as long as I have, you know that Yahoo once had an immersive app called Yahoo Go that came too soon and was ultimately executed badly, despite being a great concept.

Mayer did compliment Facebook on the good idea of Home, though, which was classy, since it is.

2:51 pm: There was then a question about Yahoo’s golden ticket of an asset — its large share of China’s Alibaba, which is kicking it in all aspects, especially related to revenue.

Would that Yahoo could inject some of that energy into its own core business.

Then came another important question: Does Yahoo have the assets to keep up in ad sales and technology?

“This will be an area of continued focus for us,” said Mayer.

The questions continued about mobile and pricing issues in search.

Mayer noted that although the company has no “direct monetization” from its weather and stock quote defaults on the Apple iPhone, it does provide leads to other parts of Yahoo’s offerings and is valuable for that.

As to increasing cost per clicks, she said that the gap has still not been closed with Microsoft on improving search monetization.

Which has to happen, obviously.

2:59 pm: Mayer was asked about the “next sprint,” which she said will be the fun part.

There will be version updates and more of a “cadence” that is presumably not glacial. She has certainly got to run faster, given how quickly Facebook, Google and many others are moving in comparison.

It would be fun if Yahoo could keep up the pace.

The last question was about Mayer’s strategy in search, including how to grow Web and mobile search.

Again, the search expert has a lot of good ideas.

Then, cleverly, Mayer summarized her Q1 earnings report in 140 words, via the engine it acquired from its recent $30 million purchase of Summly, versus her prepared script of 2,000 words.

I’m pleased with the continued execution I see every day — our teams have been working very hard, especially in Q1. As a result of these initiatives and many others, the talent is undeniable — today, more applicants want to work at Yahoo, and more employees are staying. These teams bring an incredible mix of engineering and technical talent, which will help us accelerate our efforts in mobile development and content personalization.

The teams are already moving quickly to amplify the entrepreneurial spirit that’s so prevalent at Yahoo right now. Designed to be more intuitive and personal, the new Yahoo experience is all about users’ interests and preferences. Yahoo is a consumer Internet company, and the consumer Internet is a growth industry. We’re on course to do what we said we would do — stabilize, and grow with the market.

But to summarize in even fewer words, using only my limited, non-$30 million, Twitter-schooled mental faculties: Yahoo is trying to race as fast as it can to keep up, but the results are still not in.