The Google Insider

AOL and Google recently announced that they were going to stay partners. Google is going to provide AOL a sum cash of $1 billion and Google will take home 5% of AOL. In turn, AOL will stay with Google as their powered search company and advertiser. Google was fighting Microsoft on this bid to see who would win the position. Google came out on top. Google is extending the deal with AOL from when they first started in 2002 with AOL as the search and advertising provider.

Even on top of all this, now that Google is staying with AOL, AOL is making a bigger push to have busier ads. They are going to be looking for ads with flash, ads with more logos, ads with a busier look to them and make them more attractive.

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There has been talk around the table that Google might buy Opera, but I find that very doubtful. Google has much invested into Firefox and a lot of Firefox developers have a large say in what happens around Google. While yes, Google does partially sponsor the browse Opera acting as it’s default search engine, it does not mean that Google will invest the capital into buying the browser out. There has been much talk about this, but I don’t think it will happen. We will have yet to see what Google turns up and what will happen with gBrowser in the future.

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Google is going to be appearing in the NASDAQ’s top 100 listing now, but not under the symbol GOOG. Google will be represented as the symbol QQQQ. They will be officially joining the list on Dec. 19th. This list is updated annually, so they wanted to include Google as part of the update.

The list, adjusted annually, is often used as a benchmark for the market’s overall performance as well as determining the companies included in an exchange-traded fund that is traded under the ticker symbol QQQQ.

In addition to Google, Nasdaq added 11 other companies to its 100 index including Nvidia Corp., the Santa Clara chipmaker; and Cadence Design Systems, a San Jose software company.
SF Gate

Google is officially worth over $121 billion right now. Nasdaq added 11 other companies including Nvidia Corp.

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Speculations have been made and things have been said. Google stock was able to show off it’s stuff at a peak performance of $431.24, but maybe this was just a bit too high for the public to actually want. It’s likely the stock went so high people started to doubt it’s actual worth and value. But just to make matters worse, MSN has plans to take over Google’s operations as AOL’s primary search and media provider. This would leave Google in the dark and lose a lot of business from AOL search from the tens of millions of AOL users. This talk between MSN and AOL is not new, but something that was brewing and now can be confirmed that it will most likely happen. This change of media providers for AOL will directly effect the value of Google’s stock and will most likely boost MSN’s stock in the process. There is still a chance that AOL will continue it’s service with Google and make it even stronger at the expense of Microsoft, but analysts still expect there to be a change somewhere. AOL plans on making the change before the end of the year, so expect an update within 3 weeks.

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You heard right. It seems that unusual species names aren’t limited to scientists’ favorite rock stars or Star Wars figures - now Internet search engines are in the game. Entomologist Brian Fisher named a new species of ant, Proceratium google, in honor of the mapping program Google Earth. Fisher, who chairs the entomology department at the California Academy of Sciences, was impressed with the support he got from the Google Earth team when he was integrating the online warehouse of ant data, AntWeb, with the search functions of Google Earth. Now scientists can plot ant habitats in three dimensions or search for ant species by location. For the record, P. google lives in Madagascar and feasts exclusively on spider eggs. Get more ant facts at antweb.org.

Courtesy California Academy of Sciences

Not much else can be said. Google is becoming more and more global every day. When you think they have reached their limit of getting across to people and customers, they go ahead and do it again. Not specifically Google themselves doing the job this time, but Google’s name is mentioned and written down in the history books once again. Google seems to be writing history day in and day out. Every moment I get a chance to read up in the news, Google appears somewhere on the page without a doubt. In my experience, I haven’t seen a company with this much publicity for quite some time.

Popsci.com

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The Google China Code Jam is an offshoot of the company’s annual Google Code Jam competition. The final event of the 2005 competition, held in September, was won by Marek Cygan, a university student from Poland, who won $10,000 in cash. Two other university students, Erik-Jan Krijgsman of the Netherlands and Petr Mitrichev of Russia, each won $5,000 in cash for finishing second and third, respectively.

Respectively, Google is making a good move with this only because they can easily attract a lot of talent and for a low price. $30,000 is a drop in the bucket for them while they can easily bring in hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of code in and talent. I expect that they will be hiring the top finalists and possibly the runner-ups in the contest as full time employees. Google is trying to gather a lot of the world’s best talent, including management from Microsoft. (more…)

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According to reports, Time Warner’s board of directors is hunkering down Thursday for discussions on the future of AOL, and is expected to choose between partnering with Microsoft’s MSN division or Google. However, a final decision is not expected for a few weeks, says the Financial Times.

AOL currently utilizes Google for its Web search service, bringing a moderate percentage of revenue to the world’s biggest search engine. But MSN has reportedly come to the table trying to unseat Google in order to grow its own share of the search market, which it has struggled to do organically.

Google is in the running next to Microsoft for selection of future corporate needs from AOL. As quoted, Google is currently being utilized for the web search that powers AOL.com, but AOL may look at Microsoft’s MSN division as a supplier of media for the future needs of AOL. If AOL were to choose Microsoft over Google, it would probably mean that AOL Search would move away from Google and move to MSN Search instead. While Google remains a very strong partner of AOL, Google dismisses any thoughts of being pushed away right now and AOL/Time Warner are not available for commenting right now. Expect a decision regarding this case within the next few weeks.

BetaNews.com

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Google becomes the single largest contributor tot he new online digital library that the U.S. Library of Congress is putting on. Google donated $3 million to help fund the project of scanning in more and more documents. Google actually is not only the single largest contributor, they are the first business to contribute towards the concept of the new ‘digital library’ that was started about five months ago. The “World Digital Library” is backed by roughly $50 million in privately and publicly donated funds that will help with the process of scanning in these documents.

“Much of this will be one-of-a-kind material that you won’t be able to find anywhere else,” Billington said during a Monday interview. “Getting the material out there (online) is really important. “We have already preserved a lot of material that might have perished in other hands.”

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Google and CBS have been talking about doing a joint venture together about broadcasting video over the web. CBS was looking for an online media to be provided and Google felt it has the resources to do so. Yahoo! also has a hand in this meeting about being able to provide online content for the TV network. CBS is looking for a provider of TV shows and other like footage to simply be available on the Internet. They want to be available and searchable so people can easily find what they are looking for in a timely manner.

So what does this mean for the rest of the community? It means that advertising could be cut down and that TV could possibly be making its way out the door. They might throw in advertising to the online content that they want to make available, but it’s very early to be able to say for sure which direction they are going in. CBS is not the only company that is wanting to go this route; but Viacom, NBC Universal and Disney have all taken a stance on this online content. A lot of this has to do with the recent showcase of Apple’s online content of TV episodes for their iPod Video.

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If anyone has been watching Google stock over the past year, you have seen quite a bit of change. Quite a bit of growth, quite a bit of diversity, and quite of bit of surprising rise.

Looking at the graph, we can tell that Google has been one of the fastest growing companies in possibly all of our history. Above is a graph of the 1 year period starting in Jan. 2005. If you look at the graph of 2 year period, you will see that as of September 2004, it has quadrupled in valued. The stock went from a little below $100 per share to what it is today, over $400 per share. It currently is at $409.36 per share. In all of our history, I do not believe we have ever seen a stock grow this quickly and this faithfully. Google has proven themselves through their actions, products, and services that they are here to stay and are not giving up. Google has shown that they are willing to compete and easily can with the resources they have. Being the fastest growing Search company on the Internet, Google has been able to provide invaluable services such as GMail, Froogle, Suggest, Images, News, Analytics (new!), AdSense, AdWords, Print (new!), and in the near future I am sure they will release new products and services. Google recently, back in September 2005, ended the ‘Google Summer of Code’, which was a large sponsorship for Open Source projects to help push them ahead of schedule.
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