Silicon Alley Insider - Nicholas Carlson | October 23, 2008 12:27 PM
Google from acquiring contextual advertising firm Begun.
Google would have paid Russian portal Rambler $140 million for its subsidiary, but Russian authorities say Google failed to provide “documented information about individuals that may influence the business group Google.”
Fortune - October 10, 2008, 8:05 am
courtesy of UPPA Photoshot
With Roger Parloff
Google and Yahoo had hoped to have it all up and running by now. As you may recall, the two Internet giants announced an alliance last June in which Google would supply Yahoo with search ads to supplement Yahoo’s own. Google would get a big new customer for its ad-delivery service, while Yahoo would get a new source of revenue - and best of all, they’d keep Microsoft from swallowing Yahoo.
Then Washington got in the way. Due to pushback from antitrust regulators, in early October, Google (GOOG) and Yahoo (YHOO) put off the launch to give the Justice Department more time to chew on it. In September, Justice reportedly hired veteran antitrust litigator (and former Walt Disney vice chairman) Sandy Litvack to help review the deal, and soon thereafter Canadian authorities hired an outside lawyer too. The European Union is also taking a hard look.
Silicon Alley Insider - Peter Kafka | October 3, 2008 5:53 PM
Earlier this fall, Google’s Eric Schmidt insisted he was going ahead with the Yahoo search deal with or without approval from the Feds. That pose seemed less convincing when both Google and Yahoo launched PR campaigns aimed at convincing the Feds that they really shouldn’t worry about the search deal. And it seems even less convincing now. Kara Swisher:
Yahoo and Google have agreed to delay their online search ad partnership to give the Justice Department more time to evaluate the deal.
Silicon Alley Insider - Vasanth Sridharan | September 18, 2008 5:41 PM
First Google trotted out economist Hal Varian to try to make its “of course we’re not a monopoly” case. Now comes chief salesman Tim Armstrong, who tries making the same argument, via a Q&A 
on the company’s public policy blog.
This will get even harder after today’s comScore report, which pegs Google’s search share at 63% and climbing. And we notice that Tim, like Google economist Hal Varian said earlier this week, doesn’t say that prices won’t go up. From the post (emphasis added):
Question: Will the Google-Yahoo! agreement raise ad prices?
Sillicon Alley Insider - Vasanth Sridharan | September 10, 2008 7:30 AM
Google runs on two linked products: Search and search advertising. A handful of Google’s other products, like YouTube and Gmail, are well-known but don’t make the search company any money. And then there’s everything else: The dozens of projects Google has dabbled in, to seemingly little effect.
In the last ten years, Google (GOOG) has launched around 100 products, from shopping helpers to spreadsheets. And it’s acquired about 50 companies — some to run as standalone sites, like YouTube, and some to work into other projects. For instance, security software firm GreenBorder Technologies
was purchased last May, and is now showing up as part of Google’s new Chrome Web browser.
InformationWeek - August 22, 2008 04:00 PM
By Thomas Claburn
Google (NSDQ: GOOG) continues to gain search market share in the United States at the expense of its rivals.In July, according to Internet metrics firm ComScore, Americans conducted 11.8 billion searches at core search engines, a 2% increase from June.
Google sites accounted for 61.9% of July searches, an increase of 0.4 percentage points from the previous month. Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) sites accounted for 20.5%, a decrease of 0.4 percentage points. And Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) sites accounted for 8.9%, a decrease of 0.3 percentage points.In numerical terms, Google handled almost 7.3 billion core searches (a 2% increase). Yahoo processed 2.4 billion, and Microsoft fielded 1 billion.