AT FIRST GLANCE, A HELP-WANTED ad posted on online job boards last week for a New York-based media buyer looks like thousands of others placed by Madison Avenue each year: "Requirements. 3+ years experience in media buying for a large advertiser or agency. Strong negotiation and analytical skills. Proven track record of exceeding goals." What makes it remarkable is its sponsor - Google - and its timing, coming just months into a "test" the Internet search engine has been conducting, in which it buys and re-sells advertising space in offline media. To date, Google executives say it has been just that: a test. They also say it has been confined to print media, though they are evaluating whether to expand into other media as an extension of what they've been doing online all along: using Google's technology to serve relevant, targeted ad messages on behalf of advertisers and agencies. But that doesn't explain the growing sense of angst among some of Madison Avenue's top executives when they allude mysteriously to Google's plans for muscling into the media planning and buying business, fearful that the highly capitalized company plans to muscle into Madison Avenue's turf.

"When Google takes on the print industry, which they are starting to do, it's going to be huge," Peter Gardiner, chief media officer of New York ad agency Deutsch fretted during a recent Advertising Women of New York panel discussion. "They're expanding that to every medium. When they become the search engine for everything the lines really cross over."

Asked to explain his anxiety in detail, Gardiner demurred, alluding to confidential talks Google executives have been holding directly with marketers and some agency executives, as well as some recent hires it has made of people with traditional ad agency experience.

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Ask Jeeves UK has launched several new Smart Answer units, providing direct responses to popular reference-based searches.

Geography, planets, the periodic table, dog breeds and famous quotes are some of the new categories, giving users the most relevant information straight to the top of the page.
Each Smart Answer unit contains hand-picked, relevant links to deliver the information the user is trying to find.

The Smart Answers section includes:

Geography - enter the name of any country and the site responds with essential information such as the capital city and the population, along with links to the CIA's World Factbook and other links such as the local weather and time zone.

Planets - searches for any of the planets in our solar system return in-depth facts along with links to NASA's planetary fact sheets, an Ask Jeeves picture search and historical and scientific information.

Periodic Table and Chemical Elements - searches for the periodic table or any element links to webelements.com and other key facts.

Dog Breeds - searches for breeds link to dog breeders and picture galleries.

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Use custom keywords from the convenience of any Yahoo! Search box to

- Instantly navigate to any URL on the Internet
- Easily recall common searches on Yahoo!
- Quickly search favorite sites
- Jump start frequently used Internet applications

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Google is poised to pay $1 billion for a 5 per cent stake in Time Warner's America Online unit, The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday.

The claim cited "people familiar with the situation." A more detailed story about the advertising partnership negotiations used the same attribution.


AOL has spent months in discussions with several companies over possible tie ups. At one time, Yahoo had been one of those companies, but it then dropped out, and recently AOL has been in discussions with Google and Microsoft.


Google and AOL have a years-long relationship for AOL to carry paid search ads from the Google network, and split the revenue with the search engine giant. AOL's general Web search is powered by Google's search engine.

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Microsoft Corp. may share its online search revenue with consumers, according to a presentation in India last week by Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates.

The potential move may be a way for Microsoft to raise the competition against Google Inc., which makes money from its AdSense advertising program.

Gates says that Microsoft may woo consumers to use MSN Search by offering cash, free content or software.

"The inverse value proposition for advertising -- is it perhaps better than a plan to charge users for each click? The plan would single handedly remove all click fraud while forcing users to really think about searching," says iMedia Search Editor Kevin Ryan.

Microsoft could also entice more advertisers to buy ads on its online services to generate more users on its site.

"We'll actually go to users and say instead of us keeping all that ad revenue, we'll actually share some of it back with the user. Users essentially will get paid, either money or free content or software things that they wouldn't get if they didn't use that search engine," says Gates.

INVESTING FURTHER IN THE COLLECTIVE intelligence of online communities, Yahoo! on Friday said it acquired the bookmark-sharing site Del.icio.us. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. The move comes less than a year after Yahoo! acquired Flickr, an online photo-sharing site that, like Del.icio.us, derives its value from user interaction.

Launched in 2003 by Joshua Schachter, Del.icio.us uses a non-hierarchical keyword grouping system whereby users "tag" each of their Web bookmarks with a set of chosen keywords. For Yahoo!, Del.icio.us and Flickr represent an alternative approach to traditional Web search and its reliance on computer algorithms to determine relevance, said Eckhart Walther, vice president of product management at Yahoo! Search.

"We now see search and online communities at the heart of our mission," Walther said.

As with Flickr, Yahoo! will support the growth of Del.icio.us as an independent entity--helping to scale the site's infrastructure to meet demand--while using Del.icio.us' resources to enhance new and existing Yahoo! products. "Don't be surprised if you see My Web and Del.icio.us borrow a few ideas from each other in the future," wrote Jeremy Zawodny on the Yahoo! Search blog on Friday.

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Froogle has a problem, and I assume Google Base will have the same problem. Because there are no setup fees and no per click fees, the results on Froogle are often made up of spammy results which make for a horrible user experience. Google might be great at general search and maps, but shopping search (in beta now for how many years?) needs serious attention.

I hate to pick on Froogle after Forbes.com panned the site a couple weeks ago and BusinessWeek’s Silicon Valley Chief gave the site a less than glowing review this weekend, but I just performed a search for ‘iPod Nano‘ which is one of the most popular products this holiday season…and the results made me laugh…then cry.
Initial results are deceptively encouraging: 225 prices for the first iPod Nano, 37 prices for the next, 64 prices for next, etc. Basically, it looks like I will get a great choice of merchants selling at a wide range of prices.

It's nice to see Microsoft and Google's respective technologies working in tandem - but not so nice to see it used to expose data on your own hard disk to a malicious website operator. Security researcher Matan Gillon has published a proof-of-concept flaw that exploits Google Desktop, the search software that runs on a local PC, and Internet Explorer 6.

The principal culprit, once again, is Microsoft's lax and inconsistent implementation of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) in Internet Explorer. A web site can inject code into a page which allows it to execute on a remote machine.

"All an attacker has to do is lure a user to a malicious web page. Thousands of web sites can be exploited and there isn't a simple solution against this attack at least until IE is fixed. That means millions of IE users are affected by this design flaw," writes Gillon.
Opera and FireFox users are safe.

However this particular flaw wouldn't have been possible without careless programming by Google, which amazingly, fails to obey the Google Desktop security model on its own site.

Gillon discovered that on certain pages, such as Google News, it was easy to extract the security key that the local copy of Google Desktop needs to permit queries to be executed.
"This feature has been in IE at least since IE 6 came out," writes a sarcastic Slashdot member.

"That means Microsoft is again leading the field when it comes to AJAX and Web2.0 products."
The weight of responsibility for this flaw falls on Microsoft. But Google shares some blame too, for failing to take the integrity of your personal data seriously. ®

Thanksgiving: We each have different reasons for feeling gratitude. And at November's end, 14 Google executives and directors had excellent reasons of their own--they raked in a combined $4.3 billion, by selling 18.6 million of their shares so far this year.

According to an Associated Press report, which quoted a Thomson Financial study, the ones who took in the most were the search engine firm's co-founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page. The duo have each gleaned nearly $1.3 billion by selling 5.3 million of their individual shares via an automated trading program, according to the AP.

So does this mean the cyber-billionaires are losing faith in their firm? Hardly. The report noted that U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission records show Page and Brin still held another 33 million Google (nasdaq: GOOG - news - people ) shares--valued at more than $13 billion apiece. Some other big sellers and the amounts they made from their Google stock deals: Omid Kordestani, senior vice president of sales, got $559.6 million; Ram Shiriram, a Google director who was among the company's earliest investors, made $442.5 million; Chief Executive Eric Schmidt, a sweet $344.7 million; and David Drummond, Google's vice president of corporate development, saw $118.7 million.

Wonder if their stock-sale gains went straight to Yahoo! (nasdaq: YHOO - news - people ) Shopping or eBay (nasdaq: EBAY - news - people ) on Cyber Monday?