Yahoo reaffirms commitment to search

" Yahoo is still very much committed to search, the company said in response to a media report claiming that the company had conceded the search battle to Google.

Two company executives emphasised in a posting on the Yahoo Search Blog that they considered the battle far from over. "We are still in the early days of search. We're in it for the long haul, and we're in it to win," they wrote.

The posting was signed by Qi Lu, vice president for search engineering at Yahoo, and Eckart Walther, vice president for search products.

Yahoo was forced to respond after the Bloomberg press agency published a news story that quoted Yahoo chief financial officer Susan Decker as saying: "We don't think it's reasonable to assume we're going to gain a lot of share from Google.

"It's not our goal to be the number one in internet search. We would be very happy to maintain our market share."

The article was quickly picked up by bloggers under headlines suggesting that Yahoo has stopped trying to compete with Google.

The executives insisted that this was "speculation and confusion" and pointed out that it is directly contradicted by recent Yahoo actions.

The internet portal launched its own search engine in February 2004, swapping out search technology provided by Google, and keeps investing in the technology. "

http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2149190/yahoo-reaffirms-commitment

Google caches aren't copyright infringement

" A Nevada federal court has ruled that the cached versions of Web pages that Google stores and offers as a part of many search results are not copyright infringement.

The case rose when an author sued the company for providing a version of a story that he had written, posted on his own Web site, and then removed. However, the court said that the author had not used an available Web setting on his page that would have prevented it from being archived.

The court also said that Google's cache amounts to fair use of the works being copied and transmitted, and the company's database qualifies for a "safe harbor" provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which protects databases, ISPs, and other online service providers that don't exert direct control over what content is posted against copyright liability ..."

http://news.com.com/2061-10812_3-6031266.html