Remember JotSpot which was recently launched as part of Google Apps for businesses, schools and organizations? Google just opened it up to everyone. No domain required. Group sites will be hosted as a subdomain on Google Site's domain. Nothing biggie here really. It's just your old circa 1990's site creation tool. Think of Geocities resurrected for the social web. That's basically what Google Sites is.

I must admit that I almost cringed when I read about Microsoft Live Search's newest strategy to boost its Live Search standing in the web search market, and possibly to attract more users. Microsoft is about to announce its Live Search Cash Back promo, I mean program. Call it desperate measures or whatever, but no matter how you would look at it, this new program is simply humiliating. Maybe, it's just he old fashioned me who has high regard for the search engine industry,

Russia's no.1 search engine and the country's biggest internet firm Yandex, is now raising funds via a New York-IPO scheduled later this year. Yandex is hoping to raise around $1.5-$2.0 billion funds which is based on a preliminary valuation of Yandex at $5 billion. Yandex had already mandated Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank and Renaissance Capital to organise an IPO on Nasdaq NADq.O.

Everybody's )tech and non-tech bloggers( favorite tech news aggregator, the almighty Techmeme has just added a search button, and everybody is writing about it. Why? Because for quite some time now, we wonder what happens to our links that got lucky to appear on Techmeme's page, after the tech news we're covering has died down? Apparently they get archived. And the only way we could search Techmeme's archives before is by specifying exact date and time. Until now.

Beginning today, Google content network will now accept display ads served from third-party vendors as per request of AdWords advertisers who are using third parties in creating and managing their online ad campaigns. Only English third-party ads will be accepted as of this time, but Google promises to expand this new feature to other languages as well. With its content network now reaching to large brand advertisers,

While Yahoo is facing a proxy battle against Icahn, here comes Microsoft trying to save the day for Yahoo. It issued a rather vague statement suggesting that it wants to renegotiate with Yahoo on the possibility of partnering up on its online advertising businesses.

There you have it, Yahoo Board's Chairman Roy Bostock responding to Icahn's letter to the Yahoo board nominating 10 members of the Icahn's proposed Yahoo Board Members. In the said letter Bostock reiterated Yahoo Board's stand that the current members of the Board remain the best and most qualified group to maximize value for all Yahoo! stockholders. Bostock then recounts the events that transpired the past months between Microsoft and Yahoo,

Three weeks after announcing SearchMonkey and opening it up for a limited preview, Yahoo has finally made the Yahoo search results development platform open to all. To refresh our memories, Yahoo search monkey as an open ecosystem has three components: Site owners share structured data with Yahoo!, using semantic markup )microformats, RDF(, standardized XML feeds, APIs )OpenSearch or other web services(, and page extraction.

If Google is planning on running video ads , there's no better time than now. New data from comScore is showing an ever increasing trend in the viewership of its YouTube property. Running ads on YouTube would certainly give them some good old advertising revenues. Based on comScore data for March Google has emerged as the top U.S. video property, registering more than 4.3 billion videos of the total 11, 476,886 videos viewed online. This is a 2.

As announced last weekend, Google is launching the mother of all data portability features. After Facebook Connect and MySpace Data Portability announcement, here comes Google beating the two social networks with its Google Friend Connect features.

Yahoo is extending its search clout towards Mac users, as it acquired Safari browser plug-in, Inquisitor . This plug-in works similarly to Yahoo's Search Assist which help users with their search by suggesting possible queries and related concepts in real-time. If you're a Safari browser user, you would either find this pretty helpful or annoyingly obtrusive when you conduct your search.

Yahoo has just launched its search portal in India a couple of days ago. And to coincide with the launch, it is being reported that Yahoo India has been displaying a new search result that combines text, image and video results in one search results page. The new search results run alongside the usual search results on search results page. Reports also say that this new search results page is called as Glue Pages Beta,

The good thing when you're into the search engine business and you're up against only two competitors is that you can do away with copying their site's format. And it looks like, that's just what the Live Search team is doing when they redesigned the Live Search site.

Yahoo! Search has teamed up with McAfee to bring a safer way of doing search at Yahoo with a new security feature called, SearchScan. SearcScan uses McAfee's SiteAdvisor technology to warn users if a particular website that appears on Yahoo SERP pose any form of risk to the users. This new feature will be initially rolled out or turned on by default to users from the U.S., Canada, UK, France, Italy, Germany, Australia, New Zealand, and Spain, starting, well today.

Google Reader has just rolled out some new features, which obviously is geared towards making Google's RSS aggregator more social. So, here's a run down of each of the new features. Google Reader now lets us share anything using the handy bookmarklet "Note in Reader". Just drag the bookmarklet into your browser's bookmark bar and you can practically share any content from any web page, even those which don't have RSS feeds.

So, what do we have here? Finally, Balmer and his guys walk off the long-standing acquisition deal after finally not agreeing on the terms. TechCrunch got the scoop on the final meeting held today at Microsoft headquarters in Redmond between Jerry Yang, David Filo, Kevin Johnson and Steve Ballmer, with Ballmer withdrawing the offer. And all four gentleman leaving the board room unscathed. Sorry to disappoint you folks, no blood burst out from any of the gentlemen.

It's time for a little bit of Sunday fun reading. Remember that hotly contested tomcruise.com domain which was later on given to actor Tom Cruise, the site is apparently gearing up for full launch as evidenced by some sponsored ads appearing on Google when you search for the keyword "Tom Cruise". The Holywood Newsroom's got the scoop on the ads that started appearing right after TC guested on Ophra's show. )note: I tried doing the search,

Google Adwords's take on TV advertising is going full blast as Google TV Ads which has been in by invitation-only beta mode becomes available for US-based advertisers. Google TV Ads is a flexible, all-digital system for buying more accountable and measurable TV advertising. Using the familiar AdWords interface, you can launch a TV advertising campaign in minutes. AdWords advertisers will need to have their TV commercial to participate in this program.

When Google acquired Feedburner last year, one of the changes that were announced was the integration of Adsense ad units into Feedburner members' RSS feeds. Nothing much has been heard about this since then, until now. The official Feeburner blog has announced that as part of the full integration of Feedburner into Google applications and services, Adsense units will soon be served on RSS feeds.

Windows Live Search is on th roll the past couple of days. It's latest offering, a convenient mobile application for product search. Product search on mobile phones provide a listings of popular products, user ratings and price comparison from different online stores. It could come in handy when you passed by a gadget store and saw that uber cool gadget and is close to purchasing it, but upon searching for it on Windows Live Search on your mobile phone,