As IAC boss Barry Diller had his day in court yesterday, fighting to split up the various companies under IAC's umbrella, including Ask.com, we thought it might be relevant to highlight a recent experience one of our managing partners, Peter Hershberg , had with actual Ask.com search results. A search by Peter for "anatomy of the eye" on Google yesterday yielded an ad touting "the improved Ask.com.

AOL today announced it is acquiring UK-based Bebo for $850 million. The social network is expected to complement one of AOL's most popular services, the instant messaging system AIM. From the Bits blog : As AOL has search for a growth strategy over the last decade, one of the biggest puzzles has been what to do about the AIM system, which allows anyone on any computer to send instant messages, whether they were paying AOL customers or not.

The Google-DoubleClick merger got the green-light from the EU this week, but Danny Sullivan reminds us - and Google - that as part of the deal, the search giant now also owns Performics, a search engine marketing agency. This presents a conflict of interest, as well as ticking off SEOs. Writes Sullivan: Even if Performics is kept completely separate from the Google search team,

YouTube has just released a new set of APIs that will allow site owners to utilize the video sharing site as a white-label video service. Users will be able to upload content and do everything else they could do on YouTube, like post comments, but from their own sites. This will undoubtedly help YouTube keep its spot as the Internet's top video site and will challenge existing video companies with white-label services that aren't free, like Brightcove.

The European Union today approved Google's $3.1 billion acquisition of display ad tracker DoubleClick. From the EU: The European Commission has cleared under the EU Merger Regulation the proposed acquisition of the online advertising technology company DoubleClick by Google, both of the US. The Commission's in-depth investigation, opened in November 2007 )see IP/07/1688 (, concluded that the transaction would be unlikely to have harmful effects on consumers,

A story published in the New York Times today uses comScore data to describe how companies track Internet users for the purposes of online behavioral ad targeting. ComScore noted the online data-collection potential of 15 media companies like Yahoo and Conde Nast - namely, looking at searches, display ads, videos, and page views along with the number of ads each company can display on its network. According to the Times,

Google has added a secondary search box on its organic search result pages. The search box will appear for sites that Google has noted frequently experience refined searches once a user goes to the site. For instance, Google notes that a user searching for information on NASA's Hubble Telescope might type "NASA" in Google, and then go to NASA's site and type in "Hubble Telescope." From the Google blog : Through experimentation ,

Ask.com has said it will lay off 40 employees, or 8% of its workforce, and it is giving up the fight for Google's market share as a general search engine by repositioning the company to focus on answering question-based queries that come from women. Per Reuters , here is Ask's new audience: The company found that about 65 percent of its user base are women, with a high concentration of users in their late 30s in the U.S. Midwest and Southeast.

Google has just released Google Gears for mobile, which allows users to access online data when offline. From the Google Mobile blog : Ever use a mobile web application and suddenly lose your cell connection? That's happened to me many times. If you've shared my pain, you'll be excited to know that we've launched Google Gears for mobile , which lets users access Gears-enabled mobile web apps offline.

Market research firm TNS yesterday bought web analytics company Compete for $75 million cash and up to another $75 million in earn-outs over the next two years. Compete will still operate mostly as a stand-alone company but their blog post announcing the sale notes Compete will now have a considerable advantage over other digital intelligence firms because of TNS's body of offline marketing research: Why are we excited about becoming part of the TNS family?

Wal-Mart's latest blogging effort may be titled " Check Out " but it looks like the company's finally getting it when it comes to blogs. From the New York Times : Instead of relying on polished high-level executives, it is written by little-known buyers, largely without editing. The result is an intensely personal window into the lives, preferences and quirks of the powerful tastemakers at Wal-Mart, the nation's largest retailer,

Two interesting developments in social networking localization: Facebook today released a German-language version of the site, and LinkedIn has entered the French market in a bigger way by signing a deal with popular job listing site Apec . Facebook's German translation took less than two weeks, thanks to 2,

Opera yesterday picked Google as its new search partner for its mobile browsers, giving the search engine a boost of about 130 million Opera users who browse 1.7 billion pages a month on their phones. The partnership will be effective on March 1 and applies to users outside the former USSR. Google has been the default engine on Opera's desktop browser for the last seven years . Yahoo, Opera's old mobile partner,

Despite Microsoft's recent promise to focus on interoperability, the EU's European Commission today levied a $1.35 billion fine against the company for not complying with the EU's 2004 order to provide interoperability information to its competition. This brings total Microsoft anti-trust fines from the EU to about $2.6 billion.

Google said this week that it will join five other companies in a consortium building a $300 million, trans-Pacific undersea cable to connect the U.S. and Japan. Rumors of the cable named Unity first surfaced in September of last year. Google is the only non-telecom and U.S. company in the venture, but the search giant says it doesn't have telecom ambitions : If you're wondering whether we're going into the undersea cable business, the answer is no .

They've rolled up the red carpet and traffic in Hollywood is back to normal )well, as normal as it gets(, but I wanted to take a quick second to point to a couple of posts about the Oscars and paid search, both of which happen to be published on MediaPost. The first, " And the Paid Search Oscar Goes To' ," is by Peter Hershberg, Managing Partner at Reprise Media. Peter discussed the paid search landscape surrounding the Oscars,

When a report released by comScore revealed that Google's paid search clicks were down 7% in January compared to the previous month, the search giant's stock dropped more than 4% yesterday . Google has been working on reducing click fraud and accidental clicks, but the market's clearly a little jumpy about anything affecting revenue in light of a possible recession, so it's actually not very surprising that this happened.

Google Talk has just introduced " chatback ," a bit of code that Google Talk users can add to their blogs, web pages, etc., to let anyone - with or without a Google account - talk with them. It's like comments, but private and more immediate, and because it works wherever HTML works, it could potentially infiltrate Facebook and other social networks, too. I'm not sure this feature is actually useful, and in fact I think this has potential to be a little creepy,

Moroccan computer engineer Fouad Mortada, pictured here, created a fake Facebook profile for a Moroccan prince. Fake profiles are nothing new to Facebook; do a search for any popular celebrity on the site and you're bound to find a profile or ten. But Moroccan courts have misinterpreted the just-for-fun profile as something malicious - impersonation and identity theft - and thus have ordered Mortada to pay a $1,000 fine and serve three years in prison.

Yahoo yesterday announced a very significant change to its search engine, introducing a project called "SearchMonkey" which allows third parties to annotate their organic search results. Sites will be able to utilize APIs to add images, deep links, reviews and ratings, and other data for their listings in Yahoo's search result pages.