Back in April, I became one of the rare people to run out of Gmail space. Due to a glitch with Google, I was also unable to purchase more space for several weeks. As a result, I became hyperaware of how much email space gets eaten up each day routinely. Newsletters, product offers, Facebook and Twitter notifications, that person you don’t know who emails you a 7MB file. It adds up. And Gmail’s supposedly “endless” space might not be keeping pace.

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A week and a half after Chinese search engine Baidu (BIDU) beat Q2 sales and profit estimates, and forecast above consensus, UBS Securities analyst Wenlin Li today raised the stock’s rating to “Neutral” from “Sell” and more than doubled its price target on the stock to $380 from $150.

Li’s upgrade follows numerous price target increases, with the highest I’ve seen being Asia-based brokerage CLSA Asia-Pacific Markets’s $430 price target.

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The answer to almost any question is available within seconds, courtesy of the invention that has altered how we discover knowledge–the search engine. Materializing answers from the air turns out to be the easy part–the part a machine can do.

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Yahoo (YHOO) CEO Carol Bartz has been talking a lot over the past two weeks about Yahoo and how it competes against Google (GOOG) and Microsoft (MSFT). Each time she does, I feel like she’s digging the hole even deeper for Yahoo’s prospects in search.

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Three times in the last month, government agencies have targeted Google (GOOG) for antitrust reviews. An outstanding private lawsuit alleges that Google tried to kill a business-to-business search engine with predatory pricing.

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In theory, getting users to ditch one Internet search engine for another should be an easy sell. But doing so is likely to cost Microsoft (MSFT) every penny of the roughly $100 million it plans to spend on an advertising campaign that starts Wednesday for its new Bing search engine.

In economist speak, there are virtually no “switching costs” for a consumer that wants to change from one search engine to another, other than the burden of typing Bing.com into a Web browser instead of Google.com (GOOG). That’s nothing compared to the switching costs of a company changing a complex piece of enterprise software, which may require employee retraining, or a consumer who switches to a new operating system, requiring the purchase of new application programs.

In reality, of course, habit and inertia make it very challenging for a company like Microsoft to improve its 8 percent share of the search market against rivals like Google and Yahoo (YHOO). There’s also the problem that most people say they’re happy with their experience on Internet search engines today, though some of their online behavior–for example, the large amount of time they spend on typical searches–suggests otherwise, according to Microsoft’s research.

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How distorted is Twitter’s view of the world? That question is neatly answered by Topsy, a new search engine that’s like Google (GOOG), except sorted by the attention-deficit-disorder sufferers who live on Twitter.

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Google and Wolfram|Alpha are providing utterly different services, and as you might expect, that means the terms of use are also utterly different.

Wolfram’s Terms of Use are not at all what I would expect from a search engine, probably because that isn’t exactly what Wolfram|Alpha is providing.

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Microsoft’s (MSFT) challenge to grow its share of the search business isn’t just a global issue. It’s also a challenge within its own walls.

Despite investing five years and hundreds of millions of dollars on its search product, Microsoft has struggled to get people to use its service, even those whom it employs.

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Wikia Search, Jimmy Wales’s project that was supposed to put the social into search, is getting closed down today, CNET reports.

The project, while interesting as an idea, was pretty much doomed from the beginning.

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I have mentioned Google’s (GOOG) music-related activities in China a few times during the past two years; and just yesterday this topic seems to have heated up considerably. I think these developments are crucial and need further exploration.

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I will never forget that quote, from Alta Vista founder Louis Monier, as he bemoaned the devolution of his creation into Yet Another Portal. He was devoted to the idea that Alta Vista would do one thing–search–and do it well. But Alta Vista was instead turned into a bawdy image of Yahoo (YHOO), AOL, Lycos, Excite, and all the other portals of the late 90s.

And along came Google (GOOG), which by 2000 had gained a reputation as the Best Search on the Web. And Yahoo, eager to appropriate all things Best on the Web, was more than happy to give Google what Netscape had given Yahoo in the mid ’90s: a front row seat to Becoming the Next Big Thing.

Oops.

This is all a throat-clearing to Think Out Loud about Twitter and Facebook. (Like I’ve been doing anything else lately.)

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A headline that kicked around the blogosphere this weekend made no sense to me: “Wolfram Alpha Is Coming–and It Could Be as Important as Google.” (GOOG)

The post–written by Nova Spivack, the chief executive of Radar Networks–took a look at a new sort of search engine being cooked up in secret by Stephen Wolfram, a British mathematician.

Wolfram’s search engine, called Wolfram Alpha, is meant to be able to answer specific factual questions in a far more precise way than any search engine before it. For example, it will parse questions like “What is the location of Timbuktu?” or “How many protons are in a hydrogen atom?” to answer the questions rather than simply pull up sites that have the answer on them.

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The Web has repeatedly demonstrated its ability to evolve and leave embedded franchises struggling or in the dirt. Prodigy, AOL were early candidates. Today Yahoo (YHOO) and eBay (EBAY) are struggling, and I think Google (GOOG) is tipping down the same path. This cycle of creative destruction–more recently framed as the innovators dilemma–is both fascinating and hugely dislocating for businesses. To see this immense franchises melt before your very eyes–is hard to say the least.

I saw it up close at AOL. I remember back in 2000, just after the new organizational structure for AOL / Time Warner (TWX) was announced there was a three-day HBS training program for 80 or so of us at AOL. I loathe these HR programs–but this one was amazing. I remember Kotter as great (fascinating set of videos on leadership, wish I had them recorded), Colin Powell was amazing and then on the second morning Clay Christensen spoke to the group.

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If Yahoo’s search engine made it easier to organize a ski trip or research a new cellphone, would you use it more frequently?

The search engine–a distant second to Google (GOOG) in usage–is hoping so. Yahoo (YHOO) announced plans Wednesday to start testing a new research tool that tries to detect when someone is doing a research-related search and offers to save Web pages and notes in a separate document for future recall.

The service, Search Pad, is similar to Google’s new SearchWiki, which allows users to promote and take notes on search results they find useful and view them later.

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