Matthew Hicks

Four competitors are officially vying to wrest the management of the .net domain away from VeriSign Inc. ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, confirmed Wednesday that it had received five applications from companies wanting to run .net, the Internets third most-popular domain. The submissions had been due by the end of Tuesday. […]

The Internets leading search engines and a major Weblog tool vendor are joining together to fight the onslaught of spam in the comment sections of blogs. Google Inc., Microsoft Corp.s MSN division, Yahoo Inc. and Six Apart Ltd. announced late Tuesday that they are supporting a tag called “nofollow” to exclude links in blog comments […]

Google Inc. is stepping further into the management of digital photos as it launches an update to its Picasa software. The new version, called Picasa 2 and available on Tuesday, will be the first release of the software since Google acquired Picasa Inc. six months ago. Picasa, of Pasadena, Calif., introduced its namesake application for […]

Paid search provider LookSmart Ltd. is continuing to battle the fallout from losing MSN as its major customer more than a year ago. The San Francisco-based company warned late Thursday that it would not meet its earlier earnings guidance for year-end 2004 and announced a series of executive moves as it attempts to restructure its […]

Google Inc. continues to lead the search-engine market, but competitors Yahoo Inc., MSN and Ask Jeeves Inc. are making inroads into its dominance, according to a research report released Thursday. Yahoo, MSN and Ask Jeeves have made significant gains in the perceptions of their search experiences and in their likelihood to become a users primary […]

Google Inc. took two more steps Thursday toward becoming as well-known in enterprise search as it is for finding information on the Web. The Mountain View, Calif., company launched a search appliance aimed at smaller organizations while expanding the types of enterprise data it supports on its higher-end appliances. Googles moves follow promises from its […]

Syndication feeds are gaining more mainstream support from portals and search engines as Microsoft Corp. ramps up a set of new RSS features. The companys MSN unit is planning to release a beta of a Really Simple Syndication aggregation feature for users of its My MSN personalized home-page service, an MSN spokeswoman confirmed Wednesday. The […]

Fulfilling a New Years promise, Yahoo Inc. on Tuesday will release a beta test of its desktop search application to compete with similar offerings from its top search competitors. Yahoo Desktop Search, which will be available as a free download, is built on technology licensed from X1 Technologies Inc., a desktop-search startup. The beta will […]

SAN FRANCISCO—On the same day that Apple introduced a new productivity suite, Microsoft Corp. promised continued enhancements to its Office suite for the Mac. One major improvement coming in the second half of the year is greater support in the Entourage 2004 e-mail client for Microsofts widely used Exchange messaging server, Microsoft announced Tuesday during […]

SAN FRANCISCO—Apple CEO Steve Jobs is taking the concept of “mini” to the Mac computer and a flash-based iPod. During his keynote Tuesday at the Macworld conference and expo here, Jobs introduced a Mac computer that almost fit into the palms of his hands and that is Apple Computer Inc.s latest answer for Windows users […]