Despite assurance made by sceptics about the rapid death of Ask.com, the financial results of the second quarter show growth in profit of the search engine. Sales of IAC Internet units, which include services such as Ask.com and Match.com, grew by 11% while profits increased by 3%.

The major share of these indicators has been made by Ask and Google. In addition, Ask acquired new users, which is possibly connected with the changing search engine policies.

Indicators of Media & Advertising department, which includes Ask.com, Fun Web Products, Citysearch and Evite, as well as online advertising, paid directories and toolbars, has also significantly increased.

Revenue from these sources is about 75% of total revenue from Media & Advertising department. Improving of positions in this sector is also associated with Google, which is the advertising partner of Ask.

According to Search Engine Watch

Google again became a party to the proceedings over copyright infringement and video clip posting on YouTube website. Mediaset, which accuses YouTube of therf, is under control of Italy's Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. The amount of the claim is 500 million euros.

Accusations against Google are similar to those of Viacom company ; according to representatives of Mediaset, as of 10 July on the site there were illegally posted 4643 videos - a total of more than 325 hours.

Google has bought Omnisio company - social video-mashup service which allows users to share and edit on-line video.

Omnisio technology will allow users of YouTube, Google Video and Blip.TV edit video, adding annotations, pop-up tips and mixing.

Omnisio will become part of units associated with YouTube. Such rich editing tools will allow to bring the on-line video to another level and provide an entirely new user experience.

Google StreetView project has been opened in the UK. Cars with panoramic cameras will capture the streets of the United Kingdom cities and publish them in Google Maps service.

The main problem is inconsistency with the rules of legislation on the protection of privacy in some countries, which prohibits the publication of images of personal transport, property and photographs.

Google has provided sufficient grounds for permission to conduct surveys of Great Britain and will continue to use filters to blur some objects.

According to the company, Google has always adhered to the position not to begin shooting until all legal issues are settled, writes Search Engine Journal

Related links:

Images made by Google Street view cameras

Tour the Tour de France with Street View

Google Street View is now in France.

Google has counted about a trillion unique links on the web. This number of links was determined by the search engine and noted in the Official Google blog as a kind of a record.

"We don't indexed each link of the trillion - most of them are similar to each other or represent auto-generated content, which is not very convenient for users. However, we are proud to have the most complete index of all search engines. Our goal has always been to fully index all the information on the Web ", wrote Google engineers Jesse Alpert and Nissan Hajaj, representing Web Search Infrastructure Team.

Source: We knew the web was big...