Microsoft has just announced that it has reached an agreement with HP for the installation of a Live Search-enabled toolbar on all HP consumer PCs that will be launched starting 2009. Part of the said agreement involves setting the default search engine in the preloaded browser of the new HP PCs into Microsoft Live Search. Kevin Johnson,

Nothing fancy here really. Just a little observation which I find rather amusing. While I was trying to Google the keywords - "myspace advertising", I clicked on the first search result which is a sponsored link with a heading "myspace advertising". I didn't notice the url first, so I was wondering how come the results brought me to the Facebook Advertising page? I checked again,

Feedburner is announcing that Adsense for feeds will finally be rolled out next week for a few selected publishers, before a full launch soon. For publishers with existing Feedburner Ad Network account, premium CPM ads will now appear alongside contextually targeted ads to fill up the rest of their ad inventory. That means you get the best of both worlds: a dedicated Google sales force that knows how and why to sell onto your content,

After being in stealth mode for a year now, Yahoo suddenly offered the public a chance to take a "sneak peak" at its new software, Yahoo!BrowserPlus. From what we can gather, BrowserPlus is being touted as a tool for "extending the web" via a simple-to-execute web applications development processes. If released for public use and abuse,

In the Google I/O developer conference today, Google is set to announce that the door to its App Engine will now be open to developers. This would be a welcome development for the more than 150,000 developers who were wait listed for six months can now start using the platform now. For those not in the loop Google App Engine allows developers to create their own web applications using the same infrastructure that Google use for its own apps. Now,

A lawsuit filed in Los Angeles Superior Court by law firm alleged that IAC's directory site Citysearch has been defrauding its advertising customers by encouraging click fraud. The lawsuit was filed by Kabateck, a law firm which previously won a click fraud case against Yahoo and was also part of a similar case filed against Google. Kabateck Managing Partner Brian S. Kabatech said that most click fraud cases involve companies that simply turn a blind eye to it,

Here you go folks, comScore has just released its search engine report for April. As expected, Google toppled its competition again, getting 61.6% of all U.S. core searches. It's not really a big leap from previous month's 59.8%, but what is noteable is the fact that Google's search stat went up by 1.8%. And if you will add up all the percent change in the search stats of the other search engines, it simply adds up to Google's gain.

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.