It was the kind of detail that only experts in Web traffic analysis could love, but a technical change Google is making turns out to reveal something a lot more people care about: faster search results. (more…)

Terry Widener has been selling newspaper ads for 35 years. But until last fall, Widener, a 53-year-old saleswoman at The Knoxville News Sentinel in Knoxville, Tenn., had never sold an Internet ad.

Then in a two-week sales “blitz” intended to test an innovative partnership between newspapers and Yahoo, she persuaded advertisers to buy $200,000 in online ads that ran on the paper’s Web site and on Yahoo. That represented about a seventh of the amount she typically sells in an entire year. (more…)

Yahoo, owner of the second-most popular U.S. search engine, reported a fourth-quarter loss yesterday after shrinking demand for online ads led to the company’s first sales decline since 2001.

The loss was $303.4 million, or 22 cents a share, compared to a profit of $205.7 million, or 15 cents, a year earlier, the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company said. Excluding fees passed on to partner sites, sales were $1.38 billion, down 2 percent from $1.4 billion in the year-ago period. Analysts had estimated revenue of $1.37 billion on average, according to a Bloomberg survey. (more…)