Yahoo has released its Fire Eagle service out-of-beta which means that anyone who has an existing Yahoo account can now take their locations to various web services with full control on how and where their location data is shared.

New data from Hitwise showed that Google is still leading the major search engine pack gaining 2% increase in July's share of US searches from previous month. Comparing the current data with that of last year, Google has posted a 10% in share of US searches in the same month last year. Overall Google has accounted for 70.77% share of all the searches conducted by Americans in July.

Those who have been watching closely while Google and Yahoo iron out some kinks in their search ad deal would be glad to know that the two search engines have partially disclosed some information about it. In a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, Google and Yahoo have made publicly available the contract governing their advertising agreement,

With both Google and Yahoo offering Olympics-related search services, it's but natural that Microsoft will come with its own offering. For their part, Microsoft is featuring some ways by which sports fan can find the most up-to-date 2008 Summer Olympics coverage, using of course the Live Search .

It maybe a bit late for Microsoft, but still for those who have been trying to master a work around into getting their sites to the top of the Live Search results pages will be glad to know that Microsoft's Webmaster Tools is finally out of beta. And with it comes several new features that would surely be of big help to SEO workers optimizing their sites on Live Search.

Fans of Google Trends who are also Adwords advertisers and marketers would be glad to know about Google's new tool which is very similar to Google Trends - the Google Insights for Search . This new tool provides more flexibility and functionality in understanding search behavior and the facility to create world heat map that graphically display search volume and regional interest. Just by typing in a search term,

Google has enhanced its enterprise search solution, Google Search Appliance by increasing its search capacity to up to 10 million from its previous 3 million limit for enterprise wide document searching.

Google owns DoubleClick, a digital marketing technology and services provider while Silverlight 2 is a Microsoft product. What would you call an agreement sealed by both entities which happens to be the properties of competing major internet players? Nothing really, it's just your plain business agreement which is aimed to be both beneficial for both parties.

So, there you go, amidst some tongue-lashing and verbal beating more particulary thrown at Roy Bostock, Yahoo's nominees to the Board of Directors, all of them were re-elected by the stockholders. The stockholders also approve the appointment of PricewaterhouseCoopers as Yahoo's independent registered public accounting firm but rejected the proposed pay-for-superior performance principle for executive compensation,

So while Microsoft is redefining its Live Search portal with interactive background images, and a search engine startup is hitting on Google's user privacy policy, Google is the meantime is introducing a new search feature which is aimed at helping users understand how it customized search results.

If you think the Live Search Cashback was a silly program to promote its search engine, Microsoft might be doing unusual again with the redesign of the Live Search portal. Guess what the redesign is all about?- Background images , which according to the Live Search Team was made to "to find the best way to enhance users' sense of discovery, surprise, and delight while balancing engineering realities for a great user experience.

It's been awhile since we last heard of a media company banging on YouTube's doors for some copyright infringement violations. For the past couple of months, YouTube's seems to be operating silently with most of its publicity hype centered on its quest to generate ample revenue visa-vis its huge daily page views. Now, here comes an Italian media company, Mediaset,

Adding to the list of Yahoo shareholders who are " furious " about the failed Microsoft-Yahoo deal is billionaire investor T. Boone Pickens who has to sell his Yahoo shares at a loss  because he was tired of waiting for the deal to materialize. Interestingly, Mr. Pickens bought his share last May with the hopes that he would gain from the stock purchase once Microsoft acquires Yahoo at the original price of as much as $41.

Just a few days before the Yahoo Annual Shareholders' Meeting where the fate of the current Yahoo Board is no longer at stake, here comes its second biggest investor planning on withdrawing their support for the Board. Gordon Crawford of Capital Research and Management was said to be not happy with how both Jerry Yang and Roy Bostock have failed to come to agreement with Microsoft. Unfortunately for Crawford, who owns a 6.5% stake in Yahoo,

Here comes another challenger who wants to take on Google search and the way it indexes and organizes the web. From some ex-Googlers come, Cuil - being touted as an innovative search engine that brags of indexing 120 billion pages. That's three times the number of pages indexed and crawled by Google folks. What else? Cuil is also going against the traditional way of presenting web search results page through its magazine style SERPs.

A few days ago rumors abound that Google is close to acquiring Digg for a whooping sum of $200 million. This even prompted Loren to ask why Google would buy Digg for such an amount. Well, Loren can rest easy now as TechCrunch reported that the rumored buy-out deal has been buried - cancelled!

Yahoo has introduced a minor change in the way it treats its search engine results page. This change has something to do with queries relating to breaking news. To give users the most fresh and recent search result, Yahoo Search is now displaying News Direct Display on the more relevant position on the SERPs of the keywords search related to the news articles. Likewise,

"The more visits of the page made by the users and the longer time periods spent by the users on the page, the more likely the page is important. We can leverage hundreds of millions of users' implicit voting on page importance." And so claims the findings of some Microsoft researchers in partnership with some Asian academic fellows in a research report on  BrowseRank: Letting Web Users Vote for Page Importance.

For now, Microsoft may have gave up on acquiring Yahoo and lost its only hope of catching up with Google in the search and online ad department. But it wouldn't just rest that easy and so it has to turn to a new ally in its quest to boost its search and online ad business - Facebook. Although Microsoft and Facebook already has an existing agreement with Microsoft serving graphic display ads on Facebook pages,

As Microsoft announced a major reorganization , more particularly the splitting up of its Platforms and Services Division )PSD( into the Windows/Windows Live and Online Services, it also announced the departure of Kevin Johnson as the Division's President. This might mean just your usual senior management shake-up but for those who have been following the Microsoft-Yahoo merger saga, Mr. Johnson's exit is a direct casualty of the said failed deal.