Today: Los Altos, Cupertino and Los Gatos were among the state's10 most expensive communities last month by median home price, andSanta Cruz and Gilroy were among the 10 with the biggest pricegains. Plus: Google tries to block "webspam." And: Silicon Valley'sjobless rate falls.
California real estate
The real estate market in the Golden State ended 2010 with a 5.9percent upturn in sales in December from the month before, theCalifornia Association of Realtors reported today. Year over year,though, the number of transactions dropped 6.8 percent.
Statewide, the median price for an existing single-family housewas up 1.7 percent from November to $301,850 -- but that figure wasdown 1.6 percent from December 2009.
"While sales rose in December, the sales pace in the second halfof the year was lower than the first half as the housing marketweaned itself off homebuyer tax credits," Leslie Appleton-Young, thegroup's vice president and chief economist, noted in an e-mail.
The group's data is based on data from regional multiple listingservices. (By contrast, the monthly housing report from MDADataQuick is based on information collected from countygovernments.)
Year over year, the median home price in the Santa Clara Valleywas flat, the group reported. Many regions had declines, includingLos Angeles, Santa Cruz County, Orange County and Sacramento.However, the San Francisco Bay Area and High Desert regions hadmedian price gains.
Three Silicon Valley communities were among the top 10 ranked bymedian sale prices last month: Los Altos was No. 2 at $1.3 million;Cupertino was No. 8 at $904,500; and Los Gatos was No. 10 at$840,000. (Other communities in the top 10 were Beverly Hills,Calabasas, Laguna Beach, Manhattan Beach, Newport Beach, SantaMonica and Rancho Palos Verdes.)
Two nearby communities, meanwhile, were among the top 10 rankedby greatest increase in median prices: Santa Cruz and Gilroy weretied for No. 8 at 14 percent. (Others in the top 10 were BeverlyHills, Calabasas, Poway, Ridgecrest, San Juan Capistrano, Compton,Laguna Hills and La Habra.)
Google spam attack?
Responding to reports that spammy content has been rising to thetop of Google search results, the Mountain View Internet juggernauttoday promised "to improve our search quality."
Among the complaints, Vivek Wadhwa, a visiting scholar at UCBerkeley's School of Information, contended in a TechCrunch postthat Google "has become a jungle: a tropical paradise for spammersand marketers."
"Almost every search takes you to websites that want you to clickon links that make them money, or to sponsored sites that makeGoogle money," Wadhwa wrote.
ReadWriteWeb founder and Editor-In-Chief Richard MacManus,meanwhile, claimed that creators of high-quality information couldbe threatened by "content farms" that produce "a ton of niche,mostly uninspired content targeted to search engines."
Acknowledging threats to the quality of Google's flagship searchengine, principal engineer Matt Cutts wrote in a blog post that thecompany has been reworking its search algorithm to block what itcalls "webspam."
"To respond to that challenge, we recently launched a redesigneddocument-level classifier that makes it harder for spammy on-pagecontent to rank highly," Cutts wrote, singling out, for example,"junky, automated, self-promoting blog comments."
As for content farms, Cutts said Google began working on theproblem last year with two changes to its search algorithm."Nonetheless, we hear the feedback from the Web loud and clear:People are asking for even stronger action on content farms andsites that consist primarily of spammy or low-quality content," hewrote.
Cutts also insisted that the site's search results aren'tinfluenced by whether a site displays or buys ads from Google.
Silicon Valley jobs
Silicon Valley's employment market improved slightly in December,as the jobless rate in the beautiful (if bureaucratically named) SanJose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara metro area dropped to 10.7 percent, thestate Employment Development Department reported today.
By contrast, the unemployment rate in the region -- whichincludes Santa Clara County, the hub of Silicon Valley's techindustry, and mostly agricultural San Benito County -- was a revisedto 10.9 percent in November and 11.5 percent in December 2009.
Employers in the two counties (well, mostly Santa Clara County)added 900 payroll jobs last month, with gains by computer andelectronics manufacturers. Retailers, though, added jobs at just one-third the usual seasonal rate. At 859,500, the total number ofpayroll jobs was up 1 percent from December 2009, with gains in tech-related industries offsetting job cuts by government employers.
Tech headlines
Venture capital: At $5 billion, startup funding in the fourthquarter was down 7 percent from a year earlier, The Associated Pressreported, citing a study by PricewaterhouseCoopers and the NationalVenture Capital Association that used Thomson Reuters data. Twitter -- the San Francisco microblogging upstart -- had the single biggestinvestment at $200 million.
For all of 2010, startup funding jumped 19 percent to $21.8billion. The largest investment was $350 million in electric vehicleinfrastructure upstart Better Place.
HTC: The Taiwanese smartphone maker reported a profit of about$500 million for its fourth quarter, up 160 percent from a yearearlier, according to AP. HTC's results were boosted by thepopularity of its smart new phones running Google's Androidoperating system.
Silicon Valley tech stocks
Up: Oracle, Hewlett-Packard, VMware, Gilead Sciences.
Down: Apple, Google, Intel, Cisco Systems, eBay, Yahoo.
The tech-heavy Nasdaq composite index: Down 14.75, or 0.5percent, to 2,689.54.
The blue chip Dow Jones industrial average: Up 49.04, or 0.4percent, to 11,871.84.
And the widely watched Standard & Poor's 500 index: Up 3.09, or0.2 percent, to 1,283.35.
Check in weekday afternoons for the 60-Second Business Break, asummary of news from Mercury News staff writers, The AssociatedPress, Bloomberg News and other wire services. Contact Frank Russellat 408-920-5876. Follow him at Twitter.com/mercspike.
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