web search

Google CEO Eric Schmidt said to the Sunday Telegraph that the company wants to avoid a lengthy legal battle with European Union regulators investigating its market dominance.

"We certainly want to avoid that," Eric Schmidt told the paper in an interview. "I think it is in our interests and I would hope in their interests to do a quick analysis of concerns that have been raised by competitors, hopefully they are minor or they are not correct.

"We'll find out and make sure we are operating well within the law and the spirit of the law."

Ask.com is abandoning further quests to develop search technology and will buy its Web search results from one of its rivals, but it declined to say which one, citing a clause in the contract. Besides, 130 engineers who were engaged with building the search engine will be laid off and thousands of computer servers that stored billions of pages of data will be removed.

Latest report released by Hitwise shows that Microsoft Bing had the most search growth for the month of June, growing 7% on month-over-month basis to 9.85% of the total market share in the US. Meantime, Google took 71.65% of the search market with 1% decline in month-over-month. Yahoo’s growth almost unchanged with 14.37% of the market share.

Google provided interesting statistics on searching trends during the year of 2009. Earlier the company reported the most searched for terms of the year. It showed the top ten fastest rising and fastest falling terms on both a global scale, and in the U.S. Globally, "Michael Jackson" was the fastest rising, while "Beijing 2008" was the fastest falling.

 On Monday top Chinese search engine Baidu reported a 40% increase in its net income. The figures come as the company is further strengthening its competitive position in the face of challenges posed by Google.

"Today more than ever Baidu is the number one search engine in China," said company CEO Robin Li in a call with analysts.