Steve Bryant

Google Korea will introduce an age-verification system later this year that will restrict adult-themed searches to those 19 years of age and older, according to IDG: “Users will have to enter their name and national resident registration number, which will be checked against a database to verify the user — or at least the person […]

So Google is rolling out its universal search GUI and blending listings from its video, news, local, images and book search engines among those it gathers from crawling Web pages. This is how Google will monetize YouTube. Google understands that video is popular enough that you don’t have to sell advertising in the video, like […]

Google does not have to police its users for evidence of repeat infringement and is not liable if it does not know of the infringement, according to an appeals court ruling (PDF) today in Perfect10 v. Google. The ruling rejected all but one of Perfect10’s appeals in its lawsuit against Google over copyrighted images that […]

This reeks of a powerpoint slide. Back in the day, when I worked for a small enterprise software company, I couldn’t stand the internal dithering about bland corporate message statements. Waste of time. And Jeff Weiner’s post about the vicissitudes of Yahoo’s mission statement is exactly that. You can almost see his Outlook calendar peppered […]

Google Vice President Marissa Mayer told a Stanford University audience last night that the future of journalism may lie in the hands of MySpace and Facebook reporters, who would write first-hand reports that could be edited and aggregated by citizen journalists. “The futuristic idea, which she attributed to Google CEO Eric Schmidt, drew some incredulous […]

Google announced yesterday the launch of the Google developer podcast, a series of interviews with Google engineers and discussions about application building. The podcast will cover: Interviews with Google engineers, discussing areas of their expertise New features, applications and APIs that matter to developers Open-source projects that we work on and/or care about at Google […]

Yahoo is expanding its offer of unlimited e-mail storage worldwide today. The unlimited capacity wll roll out to all users over the next few months. Yahoo announced its unlimited storage plan for U.S. residents back in March. Yahoo Mail originally launched in 1997 with 4MB of storage. The mail app was an outgrowth of Yahoo’s […]

First Global issued a research note today downgrading Google from “market outperform” to “perform.” The note reads like a rehash of the latest headlines: “Of late, “Googlephobia” has increased significantly, which we believe is a cause for concern. Viacom has sued Google for $1 billion, charging Google’s YouTube with wilfully infringing on copyrights. NBC Universal […]

Google’s search algorithms have an odd tendency to promote men over women, says Dave Wischnowsky at the Chicago Trib. A reader wrote in to complain that Google discriminates against women when you use it to search for certain phrases and word combinations: “For example, the reader wrote, if you Google the phrase “she invents,” the […]

Another day, another lawsuit. This one comes from the famous bluegrass mandolin player David Grisman, a friend and erstwhile bandmate of the late Jerry Garcia. Grisman filed a class action lawsuit last week in California against YouTube for copyright infringement. Also party to the complaint is Grisman’s partner, Craig Miller. Both men do business under […]