Google's CIO joins EMI

Google's de facto CIO, engineering VP Douglas Merrill, resigned from Google this week to become the president of digital business for EMI Music, reports Information Week.

Merrill's resignation marks the second high-profile departure of a Google executive in the past month. In March, Sheryl Sandberg left her position as VP of global online sales and operations at Google to become the new COO of Facebook.

In a statement, Guy Hands, CEO of Terra Firma and chairman of EMI Group, praised Merrill's business intellect and his deep engineering background. "His experience, talents, and his ability to drive innovation will be enormously valuable to EMI and to its artists," said Hands.

The European Commission will fund a three-year project to investigate Web-based economic threats, says Computing.co.uk.

Security firm Symantec will receive EU money as part of the Worldwide Observatory of Malicious Behaviours and Attack Threats (Wombat) initiative, which will use collaborative research to explore existing and emerging threats to the online economy.

The project will search for new ways to monitor and characterise malware, in addition to developing appropriate counter-measures. Members of the Wombat group will work alongside staff at Symantec's European Lab in Sophia Antipolis, France.

IDG News Service on Monday queried Yahoo's search engine with obvious keywords clearly intended to trigger ads for products and services that violate the company's search ad editorial guidelines. The experiment produced multiple ads that Yahoo apparently should have rejected, reports IT World.

It wasn't only outside advertisers that managed to place inappropriate ads: Yahoo itself appeared to violate its own guidelines with at least one questionable ad from a company unit.

Upon reviewing the examples of possibly inappropriate ads submitted by IDG News Service, Yahoo said not all violated its editorial guidelines. It declined to identify the infringing ones, but said it had removed them, as it does whenever it sees noncompliant ads.

Yahoo stepped up its mobile search war with Google on 2 April with the addition of voice-enabled search, says eWeek.

Besides adding voice to its OneSearch service, Yahoo also said it was opening up its mobile search platform to other developers.

Available 2 April for select BlackBerry devices, voice-enabled OneSearch was developed by Yahoo and vlingo, a search recognition firm. Yahoo also announced it had led a $20 million second-round financing of vlingo, giving Yahoo exclusivity to the company's technology.