The company said it expects to continue to do well this year.

Really? They expect to do well? That’s like me saying I expect my kids will bug for a new Bratz doll this week.

Seriously, Google continues to amaze with their continuous revenue and profit growth. At some point you have to expect that the day will come when they actually regress a bit, but that day seems to be a very long way off.

A few skeptics on Wall Street keep saying the day will come when Google can’t keep it up and the stock collapses, but the true test for the prescience of these Chicken Littles is for them to actually tell us when Google will stumble.

Despite those skeptics, I don’t know if you follow the stock market, but I’m pretty sure no one is shorting the stock right now.

PermaLink

 Microsoft is doing some saber-rattling again.

 Microsoft executives said Thursday that they intended to respond to the growing threat to its software posed by rivals like Google that offer Web-based versions of its applications. The executives said Microsoft would add similar Internet services to its own well-known desktop applications like Office or Excel.

During a meeting with financial analysts, Microsoft executives laid out the clearest description to date of Microsoft’s plan to compete with companies offering free or lower-cost “software as a service.”

You can read all about it in this New York Times article.

.

Meanwhile, Wikia, Inc., the for-profit company developing the open source search engine Search Wikia, has acquired Grub, a distributed crawler platform, from LookSmart.

Distributed crawlers are software programs used by search engines to roam the web to discover pages that are then downloaded and indexed for searching.

 The crawlers operated by the major search engines are highly centralized, operating out of massive data centers, and are capable of finding and downloading millions of pages per minute. Wikia acquired Grub as part of its plan to build a "transparent and open platform for search," according to Jimmy Wales, co-founder and chairman, Wikia, Inc.

Wales is currently on a mission to enter the search engine market,  with an eye toward toppling Google’s pre-eminence as the number one search engine.

Well, good luck with all that, Jimmy.

It seems everybody’s got Google in their gun sites, although Google just kind of nonchalantly goes about it business, cranking out new products and services (admittedly, some of which crash and burn pretty quickly).

And it’s interesting that Microsoft finds itself playing catch-up in offering office suite products on-line. Could it be that they’ll see their dominance slip away, ala their experience in the search engine market? This is a market still in it's infancy, but given the way the Net works, online office products for word processing and spread sheets could sudden;y becoem the rage in as a little as a few months. 

It’s too bad these companies can’t get into a "Texas Cage Match." You know, lock all three in a cage and let them wrestle one another for dominance. A kind of “Smackdown” Web match.

PermaLink

My dream job would probably be to be employed as a combination movie critic/book critic. And I do write reviews on Amazon.com, although not nearly as many as I once did.

Moreover, ever since an incident I had in thrid grade, I've been fascinated by ghosts, off-and-on.

With the above in mind, I recently watched the movie "An American Haunting." My wife thought it was good, not great. I couldn't bring myself to fully enjoy it because...well...it is based on historical events related to "The Bell Witch" and a lot of it was inaccurate (including their reason for the incidents which led to the haunting that was the subject of the film).

So who's the Bell Witch? Actually, there's not a witch named Bell. Bell was the name of the family that was reputed to have been cursed by a witch. According to accounts of what occurred, an invisible entity, which came to be known as the "Bell Witch" by many, literally tortured the Bell family between 1817 and 1821.

What makes this story so famous is that the events were witnessed by numerous people, including Andrew Jackson, who would one day become the seventh president of the United States.

Making the incident all the more interesting is the fact that when John Bell, Sr. died, the entity claimed credit for poisoning him (yes, this ghost would actually talk to people). It's the only recorded incident of an alleged ghost actually killing someone.

I can't go into the details of all that happened to the Bells, there's no where near enough space here. But you can learn more about the Bell Witch at the Bell Witch Website and the Bell Witch Fan Site. Do a search for "the Bell Witch" and you'll find plenty of other sites with info on it.

If you do get interested, I suggest you watch the movie before reading about the Bell Witch. Standing alone, the movie is actually rather good. It's just when you've read soemmof the historical accounts of what happened, you really have to question a lot of things in the film, including its resolution as to what the basis of the haunting was.

Let's just say, whether you believe in ghosts or not, the Bell Witch is a fascinating subject.

PermaLink

  Google's share of the search engine market actually slipped slightly in June 2007, but it still gained in overall number of searches.

 Confused? Don’ t be.

 comScore, the marketing research company that tracks search engine data, tells us that over 8 billion searches were conducted on the Web in June, up from 3.6 billion in May.

 The number of searches conducted on Google actually went up, but as a percentage of overall searches, Google was down a bit.

 Here are the latest percentage of searches for the top five search engines in the United States for June 2007, as reported by comScore:

•   Google Network: 49.5%, down from 50.7% in May 2007
•  Yahoo Network: 25.1%, down from 26.4%
•  Microsoft Network: 13.2%, up from 10.3%
•  Ask.com Network: 5.0%, no change
•  AOL (Time Warner) Network: 4.2%, down from 4.6%

Here are the raw numbers:

•  Google Network: 4 billion searches, up from 3.6 in May 2007
•  Yahoo Network: 2 billion searches, no change
•  Microsoft Network: 1.1 billion searches, up from 757 million in May 2007
•  Ask.com Network: 403 million searches, up from 376 million in May 2007
•  AOL (Time Warner) Network: 341 million searches, down from 364 million in May 2007

 Microsoft  and Ask must be doing something right. Microsoft  had a huge gain, breaking the 1 billion mark for the first time. Ask broke 400 million for the first time, perhaps reflecting their new look and new services that have drawn raves from numerous corners. Take a look at Ask to see what i'm talking about.

PermaLink