Two months after opening up its search platform to outside developers, Yahoo has taken the next step along its turnaround path in the search market with Yahoo Search BOSS, a Web services platform that invites programmers at companies to create search products powered by Yahoo Search. Through an API, BOSS )Build your Own Search Service( offers programmatic access to the entire Yahoo Search index,

Google takes a moral and ethical beating from people who don't like the search company storing their computer information, user ID, IP address, etc. Now the company has found a way to address privacy concerns by adding a new measure of protection to its popular Gmail Web mail application, which is used by tens of millions of users. Google has begun slowly rolling out a feature that lets users track their recent sessions and sign themselves out remotely.

Back from a week off blogging and it's interesting that in the short time away )well, it felt short, and I believe those in the United States had a pretty big holiday weekend( Google is roasting ever so slowly over that blazing hibachi of privacy concerns and... childcare costs bordering on larceny? Seriously, I have to weigh in on a couple things that came to pass heading into the Independence Day weekend. It was around midnight in Chianti,

Dear Readers: Today I begin a whirlwind two-week vacation that will have me married by the end of the day Saturday, then whisked away Sunday for a sojourn in Florence and Tuscany. I expect to come back with a finer appreciation for authentic Italians cuisine and a more seasoned taste in Italian reds. Accordingly, I'm taking a break from Google Watch and hope to return refreshed, recharged and ready to again deconstruct the complex world of Google as we know it. Ciao!

Nearly 10 months after announcing CFO George Reyes' retirement , Google today tabbed a president of operations at telco Bell Canada as his replacement. Patrick Pichette will begin his position as senior vice president and CFO August 1. I don't know anything about Pichette and little more about Bell Canada, but I love the Google picked a telco guy as the CFO. With 20 years of financial ops and management in telcos,

Yesterday, I'd promised to look into whether or not Nielsen and comScore were concerned about Google's new Ad Planner tool as some in the blogosphere wondered. In short, the answer is a big fat, no. Nielsen Online Chief Marketing Officer Susan Hickey noted that Google, with whom Nielsen signed a strategic agreement last October, is an important client with which it explores way to create tools and data sets that deliver insight to not only Google, but the marketplace.

When Google and Salesforce.com announced Salesforce for Google Apps , the deal was widely covered by press and analysts, with many in the latter group treating the news to little more than a yawn. In that leg of the SAAS providers' relationship, current Salesforce customers were allowed to directly work with the Gmail, Google Talk, Google Calendar, and the Google Docs spreadsheet, presentations and word processing applications from within the Salesforce.com platform.

The Wall Street Journal has digested the telco , analyst and pundit spin for a story on the alleged delay of phones based on Google's mobile Android operating system. Google has said since it unveiled Android Nov. 1 that there would be phones based on the OS in the second half of 2008. The Wall Street Journal, citing Google as a source, is reporting that the Android handsets "won't arrive until the fourth quarter." Did I miss something here,

Driven by user demand, Google has made several enhancements to its Google Sites wiki application, which launched in February to much fanfare and relief that the JotSpot technology did indeed still exist at Google, even as a shadow of its former self. Here are full details and screenshots about the enhancements. First, is a auto-save utility that lets you save while editing,

This goes out to all you conspiracy theorists. Matt Cohler, a vice president of product management at Facebook, is leaving the social network, not for Google, but for Benchmark Capital, which he will join as a general partner. Cohler will be at Facebook full-time until the fall, when he will transition into a formal advisory role to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and the management team. No, Benchmark does not invest in Facebook, so simmer down.

Seeking to make Google look bad and to curry favor with privacy advocates and government regulators, Ask.com has added a link to its privacy policy on its home page and on the landing pages across its verticals. Ask has also added a link to its privacy policy right on its Ask About page, and is developing two separate Ask "Smart Answer" search results pages. When a user goes to Ask.com and types in "Ask Privacy" or "Privacy" in the search box,

An interesting thought occurred to me after, and regrettably not during, a conversation I had with IDC analyst Karsten Weide two days ago. I was asking him about the probability that Microsoft could buy Facebook, AOL or Ask.com as an alternative online ad opportunity to the failed Yahoo deal. He told me, which I used in this piece today , that Facebook users are leaving for services like Twitter and other startups such as FriendFeed etc.

Now that Microsoft has officially whiffed on search in the wake of walking away from the table empty-handed and target Yahoo getting in bed with search king Google , what's next for the software company? Last week Kara Swisher wrote about how Google would likely go on the offensive. The idea is that Microsoft, with its aggressive overtures toward Yahoo, woke the sleeping bear, or at least poked it while it was quietly shambling through the search advertising forest.

The best nugget from Google's conference call about its search outsourcing dea l with Yahoo came last, as in, during the last question. Asked how the deal, which allows Yahoo to run as many or as few Google ads on its U.S. and Canadian properties, came to fruition and what affect Microsoft had on it, Google CEO Eric Schmidt provided the most detailed response on the roughly 17 minute-long chat with financial analysts. First,

Interesting that hours after Yahoo said talks with Microsoft about a deal were dead, Google and Yahoo confirmed details of a search advertising deal to beat the band. In April, the two companies conducted a two-week test in which Google ran ads next Yahoo search results. Both companies proclaimed the test a success and many speculated that a deal was imminent. Now that deal is real, pending approval from DOJ, et al.

Okay, one final post on my meeting with Google Enterprise Product Manager Rishi Chandra at Enterprise 2.0 this week. I asked the obvious question: what's next for Google Apps this year? Usually the answer I get is the stock, we're going to work hard at building out our portfolio, enriching our services and adding new customers. Chandra surprised me by being a bit more specific. He said Google will look to make Gmail,

Google is running into some interesting challenges as it continues to wend its way through the cloud-computing-will-replace-on-premise-software rhetoric. Google will be the first to say that on-premise software is not going away. To overtly suggest otherwise would be to say that Microsoft, SAP, Oracle and the lion's share of old-line software makers are going the way of the dinosaurs.

Earlier today, I'd written about a potential Google data-snatching catastrophe that popped up when Google Product Manager Rishi Chandra said Google Enterprise General Manager Dave Girouard had his laptop stolen from his car at a ballpark. Chandra's tale came here in Boston at Enterprise 2.0, where he regaled the audience with the magic of cloud computing and how innovation for enterprise applications will eclipse innovation in on-premise apps in the next decade.

Despite no news on the pact that would pair Google's paid search terms on Yahoo's search engine , rural and minority groups continue to beat the drum that any such deal would be anticompetitive. Latinos in Information Sciences and Technology Association )LISTA(, the American Corn Growers Association )ACGA( and other leading agricultural groups claimed that the proposed partnership between Google and Yahoo, which is hardly certain at this point,

So, I've stayed away from the new little back and forth between Yahoo and investor-cum-market-manipulator Carl Icahn. You know ... The one where Icahn whines about how Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang is turning Yahoo into high-tech's version of the Titanic. I won't provide a blow-by-blow about what Icahn alleges in his latest screed, which you can read in the Wall Street Journal here , but because this is Google Watch and not Yahoo or Icahn Watch,