Whenever we write a glowing story aboutFirefox or Mozilla, the ExtremeTech postbag has a tendency to fill up with letters and missives from concerned readers who are worried about Mozilla’s close ties with Google. Almost the entirety of Mozilla’s income — 97% of $104 million — arrives in the form of royalties from the Firefox search box, and the lion’s share (86%, $85 million) of those royalties are paid by the default search engine: Google.

In November 2011...

Google has announced that it will buy Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion. It has been approved by the directors of both companies and should pass regulatory approval by the end of the year. With some 19,000 employees, revenue of $11 billion, and assets of $6 billion, Motorola Mobility is certainly not the biggest manufacturer of its kind — both Samsung and Nokia are many times larger, both in terms of revenue and market share — but this doesn’t make Google’s purchase any less signifi...

In their July 2011 U.S. Search Engine Rankings, the company revealed that Google finished first place with 65.1%, down 0.4% from June. Second-place Yahoo! gained ground, increasing 0.2% from June to July and finishing last month with a 16.1% share.

Microsoft's Bing search engine held steady in third place with a 14.4% share,...

Google will start to populate individual users' search results with posts that have been shared publicly by their connections on Google+, the company said Friday.

The new feature, which works only when users are signed in to their Google accounts, aims to tailor results to individual tastes. The idea is if a user posts a note on Google+ about a link--be it to a restaurant's Web site, a news story, or a retail store's site--their Google+ connections are going to be more likely to want to see th...

Microsoft and Google, never the best of friends, are starting to get nasty in their fight over whether enterprises should use Microsoft Exchange and Office, or move to Google Apps. Microsoft this week claimed that enterprises who move to Google Apps pay a hefty "Google Tax," while Google claims that businesses can save money and be more innovative by using Google Docs. Who's right?

Tom Rizzo, senior director of Microsoft Online Services, claims in his blog that enterprises pay a big Google Tax...