Word: firming
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...even a search engine - it's a "decision engine." What that means isn't exactly clear. Bing seems to work the same way Google does: type in some keywords, it gives you some Web results. But the marketing shows signs of gaining traction. According to the media-metrics firm comScore, Bing captured 8.9% of the search-engine queries in July, a tiny increase from 8.4% in June. "All of us in the search industry were surprised by Bing," says Anna Patterson, a former Google engineer who has since gone on to found Cuil (pronounced Cool), one of the many smaller...
Google says it isn't worried, and publicly at least, the company is pretending not to notice Bing. The search engine is Google's cash cow, and the firm constantly pours resources into improving it - hiring the industry's brightest and most experienced engineers, paying them handsomely and letting them work on what is effectively the world's largest data-mining project. Just this month, Google unveiled a project it calls Caffeine, a massive overhaul of its back-end infrastructure that promises to create a faster, more accurate and more comprehensive search engine. "We aren't resting," says Gabriel Stricker...
...moment, Google derives about 97% of its revenue from advertising. Barry Schwartz, CEO of the Web consulting firm RustyBrick and an editor at Search Engine Land, says that some at Google have to be getting a little jittery that the company's entire revenue stream rests on a single product. "They keep downplaying that they're competing with other companies - whenever they pitch something like Android or their new Chrome OS, they say it's just an attempt to get people to use the Web more," Schwartz says. But here's the irony: Google faces a problem very similar...
Lloyd Blankfein, the 54-year-old chairman and CEO of Goldman Sachs, is powerfully perplexed. In the past six months, his investment-banking and securities-trading firm has roared ahead in profitability by taking risks - that other firms would not - for itself and its clients in an edgy market. It has paid back the billions of dollars, and then some, of taxpayer money the government forced it to take last October; raised billions of dollars in capital from private investors, including $5 billion from Warren Buffett; and urged its cadre of well-paid and high-performing executives to show some...
...this, the level of resentment and ire directed at Goldman - from Congress, from competitors, from the media, from the public - has never been higher. Blankfein, only the 11th leader of the 140-year-old firm, is having a tough time understanding...