Google Ditches Print Ad Biz

...To the lucky few in its 'pilot program'

(NEWSER) - Google is giving out free laptops—but good luck getting one. The search giant unveiled its new Chrome OS yesterday, but announced that the public wouldn’t be able to buy netbooks sporting it until the middle of next year, eWeek reports. But in the meantime, Google is running a pilot program to test the OS, giving participants a shiny new ultraportable that Mashable thinks has the potential to “put a serious hurt on devices like the MacBook Air.” More»

Ads will show up as 140-character blurbs in search results

(NEWSER) - Twitter’s finally ready to unveil its ad service, and it’s going to look a heck of a lot like Google’s. Sources tell Peter Kafka of All Things Digital that Twitter intends to allow companies to place ads using a self-serve program, and that they’ll show up in search results, much like Google ads. More»

Search giant breaks into big time with romantic spot

(NEWSER) - After countless rumors and one coy tweet, Google aired its first Super Bowl ad tonight. The spot, "Parisian Love," traces a romance through search queries and results, beginning with "study abroad paris france" and ending with "how to assemble a crib." CEO Eric Schmidt hinted on Twitter yesterday that a spot was in the works; the one that aired has been online for several months and had over a million hits even before its TV debut. More»

Search CEO says his company's not to blame for industry woes

(NEWSER) - Newspapers of the world, Google CEO Eric Schmidt wants you to know that it’s not his fault. The print industry is certainly in crisis—it’s a “traditional technology struggling to adapt to a new, disruptive world”—but the anger at Google is misplaced, he writes in today’s Wall Street Journal. “Google is a great source of promotion. We send online news publishers a billion clicks a month…for free.” More»

(NEWSER) - In the avalanche of reporting and commentary on the collapse of the newspaper business, a number of salient, none-too-flattering facts have been overlooked about how newspapers contributed to their own demise, Bill Wyman writes on Splice. First, there's the misunderstanding that readers pay for news. It's advertisers who pay, and in the boom years, rich profits from that advertising were devoted to pleasing Wall Street, not preparing for inevitable threats to the papers' monopoly in delivering those ads. More»