(Continued)     October 16, 2004 edition
Current prices therefore depend on how often companies update the product listings they submit to Google. Cosmos Nicolaou, Google's Engineering Director told us, 'We have been waiting for the market to mature before launching Froogle.co.uk, driven by the wide use of broadband'.

In unrelated news, another securities analyst downgraded his stock rating on Google from hold to sell early this week. Not surprisingly, he wasn't from one of the investment banks that underwrote the deal. Despite all the reforms intended to separate research from investment banking, it seems Wall Street analysts are still unlikely to slap sell signals on companies their employers take public.

So far, analysts from five of the firms that underwrote the Google IPO have issued "buy" or equivalent ratings on Google and two rate it hold or neutral. None has a sell on the stock. Among non-underwriting firms, the opinions are more widely dispersed: Three rate Google a buy, seven rate it hold/neutral and four recommend selling the stock, according to data from Bloomberg and Thomson Financial via Starmine.

In unrelated developments, during a panel discussion of research lab leaders at the Web 2.0 conference this week, one of Google's top researchers previewed the search company's work in clustering both entities and words as a way to better glean users' intentions and distill information on the Web.

Another space in Google's research net is statistical machine translation for turning Web pages into other languages, said Peter Norvig, director of search quality at Google. "[We're] trying to go just beyond keywords and the linking structure of the Web, the innovation that we brought to search, and get behind the deeper meaning," Norvig said during his presentation.

In clustering, Norvig demonstrated a six-month-old project called "named entities abstraction," where Google is analyzing the company's large Web index to extract entities—such as the name of a company.

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