Google buying Postini

Dynamoo: Google to Acquire Postini:

Big business, this spam thing. Google has just announced a $625m plan to buy Postini. The deal is an outright cash purchase to be completed by end Q3 2007.

Google is making strides in improving their suite of applications (GMail/Google Docs & Spreadsheets) and the Postini acquisition puts them in an even better position relative to Microsoft.

Why the Yahoo home page was inaccessible for several hours last friday

WHIRNews:

Web analytics firm Netcraft (netcraft.com) announced last week that search engine giant Yahoo’s (yahoo.com) Web sites experienced brief performance problems early Friday.

The problems ranged in varying degrees, depending on the location of the user. Since Yahoo is one of the world’s busiest Web sites, the outages were noted by Internet Storm Center and news outlets.

The yahoo.com home page was inaccessible for several hours from Netcraft’s London, England monitoring station, responding more slowly than usual from several locations in the US.

Google Patent Applications on Online Advertising Effectiveness

Bill Slawski notes new Google patent applications related to algorithims built to determine how effective an online advertisement, using methods much more complicated than a simple click-through rate. Hurray to Bill for finding this one.

A trio of patent applications from Google look at estimating the likelihood that an advertisement is a good one, in a method that goes beyond counting click-through-rates (CTR).They provide an extremely detailed list of factors that might go into a quality score, as well as details of different statistical models that might be generated from gathering information about those different factors.