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Google Co-founder Criticizes Yahoo Search Deal

Posted on: Friday, 23 October 2009, 13:34 CDT

Sergey Brin, one of the co-founders of Google, said he was amazed at the resistance met by the company’s efforts to digitize the world's books and lamented a deal to have Microsoft handle online search at Yahoo, AFP reported.

Brin spoke about several issues during a surprise appearance at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco.

He said it was “a shame” that Yahoo had a number of innovations and he wished the company had continued to innovate in search.

However, he declined to say whether he opposed the pending deal for Microsoft's new Bing search engine to handle queries at Yahoo websites.

He added that he had given Bing “a try.”

"I use all search out there. I think Bing has reminded us that search is a very competitive market. There are probably a few dozen startups doing interesting things," Brin said.

Google focuses on figuring out things to do with technology advances such as smaller, more powerful microprocessors, he said.

He said he believes those efforts are reflected in projects like Google Book search and the Internet search leaders efforts to beef up the amount of Gmail handled for free.

"I've been surprised at the level of controversy there is about digitizing the world's books and making them available (online)," Brin said.

He argued that many of the books Google wanted to archive have great information in them, and they need a way to allow people to access them and to pay authors and publishers for such a service.

Brin said he is optimistic that Google's mission to digitally archive the written works of the world will succeed.

He also defended the company against traditional news industry titans that accuse the Internet firm of cashing in by indexing stories in search results pages featuring online advertising.

"The world is evolving and business models are changing," Brin said.

"They are sort of making a leap that Google is causing that or somehow stealing from them. I don't agree with that conclusion but I agree with the pain."

But he said he believed it was important that newspapers continue to thrive.

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On the Net:

• Google
• Microsoft
• Yahoo

Source: RedOrbit Staff & Wire Reports

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