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Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang

“We see this as a good, open, flexible deal and (one that) helps Yahoo be strengthened as a good longer-term competitor,” Chief Executive Jerry Yang said in a conference call Thursday.

Google spoke highly of the deal on Thursday, too, though it didn’t offer any projections of its financial effects.

Yahoo’s search ad engine, Panama, is competitive with Google’s for many popular queries, but Yahoo plans to use Google with less common searches, Decker said. “Yahoo monetizes very competitively with Google for query ads but is not as competitive in the tail,” she said, referring to the long statistical tail consisting of a large number of infrequent searches.

News.com staff writer Ina Fried contributed to this report.

Under the deal, Yahoo will select the search terms for which Google will supply ads, the companies said. The ads will be displayed in the United States and Canada, and Decker took pains to say how Yahoo controls which Google results are displayed and when.

Microsoft quickly raised antitrust concerns when the search ad test began, saying the move would reinforce Google’s dominance in the search ad business. Google has countered that search ads are only a narrow part of the online ad market, and that Yahoo is the strongest company when it comes to the graphical “display” ads.

The partnership is a 10-year deal, a four-year initial period and two options for Yahoo to renew for three years, Decker said.

Google and Yahoo declared a limited two-week search ad deal in April a success, but even the limited partnership raised antitrust hackles at Microsoft.

“They’re using this as a tool to boost short-term cash flow,” said Canaccord Adams analyst Colin Gillis. “They’re trying to keep the wolves at bay.”

(Credit:
Yahoo )

Yahoo announced Thursday that it and Microsoft couldn’t close a deal and that Microsoft wasn’t interested in buying Yahoo outright even at the earlier price of $33 per share. Yahoo’s shares dropped more than 10 percent, or $2.63, to $23.52.

“We believe, given that it’s a commercial agreement, there’s not formal regulatory approval” required, Yang said. “We agreed with the Department of Justice on a voluntary basis to have them review this deal.”

Shareholders looking for a quick payback should be prepared for a wait, though. The companies are voluntarily delaying implementation of the partnership for up to three and a half months to let the Justice Department review the deal, Yahoo said, a nod to antitrust concerns raised about the deal.

Yahoo announced a nonexclusive partnership Thursday under which rival Google will supply it with some search ads, a move that could increase Yahoo search revenue but that also gives Google even more power in the market.

Antitrust scrutiny
One U.S. senator, meanwhile, urged scrutiny.

IM partnership
The partnership also extends beyond advertising. The two companies will make their instant-messaging services interoperable, lowering a barrier that separated two communities of users at the sites.

“We will closely examine the joint venture between Google and Yahoo announced today,” Sen. Herb Kohl, Democratic chairman of the Senate Antitrust Subcommittee, said in a statement. “This collaboration between two technology giants and direct competitors for Internet advertising and search services raises important competition concerns. The consequences for advertisers and consumers could be far-reaching and warrant careful review, and we plan to investigate the competitive and privacy implications of this deal further in the Antitrust Subcommittee.”

Who is the big loser in today’s Yahoo/Microsoft/Google news?
(surveys)

Update 5:14 p.m. PDT: I added more comment on antitrust matters. Update 4:32 p.m. PDT: I added comments from the conference call and more partnership details. Update 3:36 p.m. PDT: I added more detail about the deal, more background, and comment from Google.

Some saw more urgent motives at work, though.

“This agreement provides a source of funds to both deliver financial value to stockholders from search monetization and to invest in our broader strategy to transform display advertising and advance our starting-point objectives with users,” Yahoo President Sue Decker said in a statement. “It enhances competition by promoting our ability to compete in the marketplace where we are especially well-positioned: in the convergence of search and display.”

“This commercial agreement provides Yahoo with the opportunity to deliver more relevant ads to users and provide advertisers and publishers with better advertising technology to help them succeed in their own businesses,” said Google CEO Eric Schmidt in a statement. “This agreement will preserve the competitive and dynamic online advertising space.”

While Yahoo evidently expects a stronger future out of the deal, a tight partnership is a double-edged sword. In the long run, Yahoo likely will find its Google partnership hard to dial back even if it wants to: “The reality is it’s going to be hard to unhook from the Google cash flow,” Gillis said.

Having more searches means more virtual real estate for ads and therefore a more desirable place for advertisers to bid for placement. Google also has worked aggressively to try to deliver only ads that are relevant to particular search queries, a move geared to increase the revenue generated per click.

Yahoo expects the deal, which was expected, to raise revenue by $800 million in its first year and to provide an extra $250 million to $450 million in incremental operating cash flow. That’s a major potential boost, given that Yahoo reported revenue of $1.53 billion in its most recent quarter, after ad commissions are subtracted.

Yahoo expects the revenue to help the company invest in its dual-pronged advertising strategy that’s designed to offer advertisers an easy ability to buy text ads on search results and to buy graphical “display” ads elsewhere on Yahoo’s considerable Internet properties.

Google is the leading search engine by a wide margin. Google increased its share of the U.S. search market to 68.29 percent in May at the expense of Yahoo and Microsoft, according to Hitwise.

Microsoft, adieu
The partnership idea came to light during Microsoft’s attempt to acquire Yahoo, which put more pressure on the Internet company to improve its financial results. Both a full-on acquisition and a narrower partnership appear to be no longer an option, though.

The agreement allows either party to cancel under circumstances such as an acquisition or other “change in control.” However, Yahoo must pay $250 million, minus the revenue Google earned, if it’s terminated within 24 months.

Meetup sits in a space that’s been shaken up a little in the last few years. Newcomers like MyPunchBowl and Facebook’s own events service have given people easy ways to create some of the more simple get-togethers using lists of contacts from other services or their core groups of friends. Competitor Yelp has also thrown its hat in the ring with an events service that’s a smart pickup on user bases and their penchant for leaving the house and spending money. One remedy for this is getting places where competitors aren’t. In the case of Meetup, it’s attempting to spread internationally, starting with the markets where it’s being used the most–like Italy. Others will follow, but will it be enough to crush some of the big boys?

To help people plan where they should have events, the service is also adding a new location finder called “Places” that lists locations where Meetup events have been held in the past, alongside a user-maintained rating system. With enough use, this system could help weed out potentially bad places where newbie event holders might try to book without knowing any better. It’s something that’s made Yelp quite popular with restaurants and hotels, and this is a nice vertical for a community that thrives on where events are being held.

Also new is an updated payment system that will be provided to social organizers who need better ways to manage events with a price tag. Meetup currently has PayPal, but the new tool will integrate Amazon Payments–a PayPal and Google Checkout competitor that launched late last year. What’s smart is that the new system lets event planners set it up so that people who want to RSVP “yes” are required to pay up front. As a host, they can also refund everyone at once if an event is canceled or the funds are no longer required.

(Credit:
Meetup Inc.)

Screenshots have been posted showing a new look, which is possibly a little less important than the announcement of a developer API that’s launching alongside it. Developers will be able to tap into a limited amount of the data found on the site for use in third-party sites and tools. Personal information from members is not making the cut.

Thinking about setting up an event here? Check the scores from other users on how good it is for meetups first.

Meetup, the popular events management service will be undergoing several large changes in the next few weeks. According to an entry posted to the company’s official blog last night, users new and old were watched while using the site to help restructure the design and layout.

(Credit:
Microsoft ResearchA Asia)

There’s no denying PageRank is useful, though, and such algorithms could be added into a larger formula for determining which sites come out on top of search results.

“It is also possible to combine link graph and user behavior data to compute page importance,” the researchers said. “We will not discuss more about this possibility in this paper, and simply leave it as future work.”

But Microsoft lags leader Google and No. 2 Yahoo in search. It’s trying hard to catch up, for example with unsuccessful proposals to acquire Yahoo or its search business that would cost the company billions of dollars. And Microsoft just bought search start-up Powerset.

The top players are a moving target, though. Yahoo is hoping to improve search with three efforts: BOSS (build your own search service), which lets others employ Yahoo search results along with its search ads; SearchMonkey, which lets content publishers build elaborate mini-Web pages into search results; and Glue Pages, which present a smorgasbord of related content alongside search results.

PageRank shortcomings
The Microsoft researchers argue that PageRank has a number of problems. For one thing, people can game the system by building bogus Web sites called link farms. Those sites feature hyperlinks point to a Web page whose importance a person wants to inflate so it appears higher in search results. Another PageRank issue is that the indexing process doesn’t take into account the time a user spends on a particular site.

Search is of tremendous importance to the Internet for many reasons. For one thing, search engines are highly influential middlemen that steer users to Web sites they may not be able to find on their own. For another, queries typed into search engines can be powerful–and in Google’s case highly profitable–indications of what type of advertisement to place next to the search results.

“Experimental results show that BrowseRank can achieve better performance than existing methods, including PageRank…in important page finding, spam page fighting, and relevance ranking.

But user behavior, monitored in anonymous form by Web servers and Web browser plug-ins, can be better, the authors argue.

Google isn’t putting all its eggs in the PageRank basket, though.

A big part of Google’s rise to search engine leadership was an algorithm called PageRank that assesses a specific page’s importance by how many other Web pages link to it and by the importance of those linking pages. Microsoft researchers and academic collaborators, though, detailed an idea this week it calls BrowseRank that seeks to bring more of a human touch to that assessment.

When accused of being dominant, Google representatives often argue the company could lose its search dominance if somebody else builds a better mousetrap and Internet users divert their path to that other door door. “If Microsoft or Yahoo are successful in providing similar or better web search results or more relevant advertisements, or in leveraging their platforms or products to make their Web search or advertising services easier to access, we could experience a significant decline in user traffic or the size of the Google (ad) Network,” it said in its most recent quarterly report.

Though a distant third place to Google, Microsoft thinks it can teach its rival a thing or two about searching the Internet.

“It’s important to keep in mind that PageRank is just one of more than 200 signals we use to determine the ranking of a Web site,” the company said in a statement. “Search remains at the core of everything Google does, and we are always working to improve it.”

Bringing research to fruition
It can be a long time before research comes to fruition, but funding a group of researchers can be much less expensive than acquiring other companies. No doubt Microsoft, especially after years of effort and its thwarted overtures to Yahoo, would like to see its in-house search efforts bring Google to its knees.

“My group at Google has at its disposal many thousands of machines, with storage measured in petabytes,” Udi Manber, head of Google’s search quality, said of Google’s search research infrastructure in a June talk. And, he added, engineers are empowered to try their results, with meetings once or twice a week to see how well they worked: “There is no separation of research and development. Everyone does both.”

Microsoft likes the results BrowseRank, which assigning Web page priority based on how people actually use the site.

“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,” the researchers said in BrowseRank: Letting Web Users Vote for Page Importance, a paper from the SIGIR (Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval) conference this week in Singapore. Authors are Bin Gao, Tie-Yan Liu, and Hang Li from Microsoft Research Asia and Ying Zhang of Nankai University, Zhiming Ma of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Shuyuan He of Peking University.

The researchers gathered their data from “an extremely large group of users under legal agreements with them,” according to the paper.

And Google invests heavily, too. Its biggest research team is devoted to search, and the company updated its search formula more than 100 times in the second quarter. And researchers have huge infrastructure at their disposal to try new ideas.

Essentially, the researchers tested out a system that replaces PageRanks’ link graph–a mathematical model of the hyperlinked connections of the Internet–with what they call a user browsing graph that ranks Web pages by people’s behavior.

(Credit: Sina.com)

The logo looks like something CNN would cook up at the dawn of a new military campaign, but this time the computer-generated bullet holes are in the CNN logo itself.

All this national sentiment is perhaps not unexpected, and this serves in my mind mostly as an example of the potential effectiveness of online peer pressure. Individuals not especially concerned about recent events may just be going along with the campaign. It would be awkward to be the only person on your friends’ buddy lists not displaying the heart.

Sina’s imagery takes it a bit further, however. I think it would have been possible to get across the point that CNN’s reports have not been always the best informed–a claim I can neither confirm nor deny as I haven’t been watching–without seeming to encourage individuals to turn guns on the network.

“Will” at Imagethief noticed this banner on a special page devoted to resisting “Western” media coverage about Tibet and China in general.

The graphic at the head of the anti-CNN page on China's largest Internet portal.

Here’s a good Global Voices post on the general anti-CNN movement, which actually is more generally an anti-foreign-media campaign.

The story of Grace Wang, told in her own words in The Washington Post, should serve as a cautionary tale.

Shanghaiist had perhaps the most visually compelling post on the “Red Heart” campaign. It shows an MSN list full of hearts and a Twitter feed utterly concerned with spreading the word about the pride effort.

On a related note, I have previously reported on the patriotic “Red Heart China” campaign sweeping the Chinese Internet.

The text, according to Will’s translation, which is about as good as I can do as well, reads: “Rise up! Angrily resist the demonization of the Tibet affair! / Chinese netizens roast CNN and other Western media!”

Since when did Billy Baldwin, David Spade, and Seth Rogan form a band?

The concept is pretty simple. For about $100, the iGTR gives you a way to plug in your headphones, iPod, and guitar into one portable box that lets you shred alongside your favorite songs. Of course, you can use the iGTR without an iPod , and simply jam quietly to yourself using the built-in effects and amplifier modeling technology. In fact, if you’re going to use an MP3 player with the iGTR, you’ll probably want one with variable playback speed, such as the Cowon iAudio 7, so you can learn your guitar solos in slow motion. The real question is, “Will it work with my V-Accordion?”

(Credit:
Waves)

(Credit:
Waves)

The Waves iGTR is available now for executives, slackers, and dudes who hate sleeves.

If you’ve been looking for the perfect way to show your
iPod just how bad of a guitar player you really are, the Waves iGTR might be just the thing.

Update: I’m not entirely sure what happened with this, but the price is now $69.99 after rebate. I tried contacting TigerDirect to see why the original price disappeared so quickly, but did not get a reply. All prices that I post are accurate at the time I post them, but unfortunately sales sometimes end without warning, inventories sell out, and so on. My apologies for the confusion over this deal!

In case you’re not familiar with them, the Harmony remotes are renowned for offering (relatively) easy programming via desktop software, which is available for both Windows and
Mac systems. Just choose your home-theater hardware from an extensive database, then set up your desired activities (”Watch a movie,” “Listen to music,” and so on). The remote’s built-in help screens walk you through any problems that may crop up (like the TV turns on but the receiver doesn’t).

I’ve used several Harmony remotes over the years, including this one, and they’ve largely been outstanding. My only gripe with this model is that it doesn’t use rechargeable batteries. But for 40 bucks (plus $8-9 for shipping) it’s absolutely impossible to beat. Don’t take my word: Check out CNET’s favorable review of the Harmony 550, and be sure to browse the user reviews as well for more real-world testimony.

(Credit:
Logitech)

Find more deals, coupon codes, and bargains on CNET’s Shopper.com.

Tired of juggling remotes? Replace them all with the Logitech Harmony 550, which sold for $150 when it debuted a couple years ago, lists for $129.99 now, and is available from TigerDirect for just $39.99 (after a $30 mail-in rebate).

An eBay representative declined to comment, The Journal said. The San Jose, Calif., company announces fourth-quarter earnings Wednesday.

According to the newspaper’s sources, the decision about her retirement could happen within a matter of weeks, but “the situation remains fluid.” The report named John Donahoe, president of eBay’s auction business unit, as the most likely person to succeed her. Donahoe, 47, has been with the company since 2005.

Meg Whitman, chief executive of auction giant eBay, is planning to retire, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.

Whitman, 51, recently has been entrusting more of the day-to-day responsibilities to others and “is completing her succession planning, say people familiar with the matter,” The Journal said. She has held the top post since 1998.

Obviously, Chinese officials read this blog and care very much about my opinions. (Blogspot’s available too, but I didn’ t ask for that. So whatever.)

I can’t say I discovered this on my own. Danwei’s “Net Nanny” post tipped me off.

Kevan Gosper, vice chairman of the IOC coordinating commission, said blocking the Internet during the games “would reflect very poorly” on the host nation.

Danwei calls this an “explanation,” but I think it’s more ambiguous. This change is similar to the unblocking of the English BBC News site in recent days: the Chinese counterpart is still blocked. The strategy of allowing open access in English and other non-Chinese languages while restricting Chinese-language sites feels like a P.R. move. Journalists from other countries will stop complaining so much about not being able to screw around online and comment on their friends’ blogs, and the Chinese authorities still get to control content for the majority of Chinese Net users.

“Even this morning we discussed and insisted again,” Gosper said. “Our concern is that the press is able to operate as it has at previous games–at games time.”

I can confirm that both Wikipedia and Blogspot work from my connection and that this will make my life easier.

The iconic Olympic sites in Beijing

“There was some criticism that the Internet closed down during events relating to Tibet in previous weeks, but this is not games time,” Gosper said.

Gosper said the Chinese had an obligation under the so-called “host city agreement” to open Internet access to 30,000 accredited and non-accredited journalists expected to attend.

I just got done mentioning how hard it is for me to fully participate in Wikipedia from China. But English-language Wikipedia is suddenly accessible tonight from Beijing.

(Credit:
Graham Webster)

The two changes may also reflect a technical similarity, and possibly new infrastructure. The Chinese and English Wikipedia sites are differentiated using subdomains: cn.wikipedia.org vs. en.wikipedia.org. Similarly, the URLs for English and Chinese news on BBC are easily differentiable. This may mean a shift from IP filtering to URL filtering. Either way, offending requests still appear to be met with “connection resets.”

But as Danwei, the Chinese media and culture site, reports, Wikipedia’s Chinese-language site is still blocked. Thus unfortunately, the argument that I made previously–that Wikipedia still lacks very important participation from this part of the world–will continue to stand.

An Associated Press article coinciding with the change notes that Olympic officials are grappling with how to keep up appearances with foreigners as they arrive in Beijing. The usual estimate is that 500,000 people will come for the games. In the article, an official was quoted as saying he hoped the Internet would be open for media during the games:

Twitter spam accounts are known for adding thousands of followers and then hoping that some of the unwitting Twitter users will follow the spam account in return–most don’t, meaning that spam accounts tend to have a disproportionately low number of followers in contrast to the number of people they’ve added. But extremely popular Twitter accounts, from Web celebs like Jason Calacanis to the Twitter feeds for news outlets like CNN and political campaigns like Barack Obama’s, Twitter still allows the adding of more than 2,000 followers. The rationale is that if people are willing to add them back, they probably aren’t spam.

Risley suggested that Twitter could offer paid accounts to raise the limit, which could be a viable first step for a service that still has not put a business model in place.

This was one of the measures that the microblogging service formally announced Thursday as part of a new system to cut down on spam. The company acknowledged it only obliquely, but bloggers like David Risley picked up on the news and spread the word.

Did you know that you can only follow 2,000 people on Twitter–unless there are at least 2,000 people who have opted to follow you?

Google knows best
Without a manual check, Chrome will update itself automatically, Google said. “Google Chrome will automatically checks for updates approximately every five hours. If an update is available, it will be downloaded and applied at the next browser restart,” Google said.

(Credit:
Josh Lowensohn/CNET News)

Automatic updates can cause indigestion in corporations where internal administrators often want control over what software is running or not for compatibility, security, and other reasons. But browser browser vulnerabilities loom larger as more applications move to the Web and more people rely on those services, and automatic updates can help nip attacks in the bud.

To check if an update is available, click the wrench icon in Chrome's upper-right corner, then select 'about Google Chrome.'

However, Google isn’t revealing details yet about what security issues it’s fixed.

Google has quietly begun releasing a hastily prepared update to its Chrome browser to fix some security problems.

Updated 1:44 p.m. PDT with details that Chrome automatically updates itself with no notification or choice for the user.

“We use this updater and the server architecture it interfaces with to update across many of our products, some of which are not open source,” Google said. “It’s not that we are trying to hide anything; rather, it’s just that this update infrastructure is not intended to be used by others who may distribute their own versions of the browser based on Chromium code.”

“Most of the changes are visible, aside from security changes, which we must keep private in order to keep users safe,” Google said of the changelog.

The new version, 0.2.149.29, replaces the 0.2.149.27 that was released when Google launched the Chrome beta version last week. Google started releasing the update Friday, initially to a small number of users, but didn’t make much of an announcement about the change.

Another reported issue in Chrome 0.2.149.27 is a buffer overrun that could allow an attacker to run arbitrary code on a user’s computer and thereby take control of it, according to Bach Khoa Internet Security.

Open-source redactions
Don’t look for clues about the vulnerabilities in the Chrome source code. The open-source Chromium project has publicly available mailing lists and source code, but many recent changes to the code base are redacted to show only a blank page rather than the detailed changelog notes of other changes.

Google believes it’s best if Chrome applies security updates not only without a description of what’s changing, but also without an opportunity for users to decide whether to accept the patch.

“149.29 is a security update and we released it as fast as we could,” said Mark Larson, Google Chrome program manager, in a mailing list posting on Sunday. “We would’ve liked more time to prepare things, but some of the vulnerabilities were made public without giving us a chance to respond, update, and protect our users first. Thanks for being patient as we work out the kinks in all of our processes.”

The company was willing to discuss some other details about the update, though. For one thing, the company updated a JavaScript problem that could cause problems using Facebook. For another, it fixed a problem that would crash the entire browser if a person typed “about:%” into the address bar. Google called the problem “non-exploitable, but very annoying,” reflecting the removal of the “security” label from the bug report.

Reported vulnerabilities
One security problem found in Chrome version 0.2.149.27 is a carpet-bombing vulnerability that could help an attacker install malicious software on a user’s computer without giving the user a chance to accept or reject the download. Google assigned the problem a top priority.

“Users do not get a notification when they are updated…When there are security fixes, it’s crucial that we update our users as quickly as possible in order to keep them safe. Thus, it’s important for us to not require user intervention,” the company said in a statement.”There are some security fixes that we’ll keep quiet because we don’t want to disclose security vulnerabilities to attackers.”

Microsoft and Mozilla encourage users to download and apply updates automatically to Internet Explorer and
Firefox, respectively, but users can chose not to do so.

Programming fans also won’t be able to glean any insights from the Chrome update plug-in, which is proprietary.

The automatic update policy applies to security and bug fixes. “For major version updates, when feature changes are involved, we’ll explore options for providing users with more details about the changes,” Google said.

“All users have not received the update yet, so we cannot discuss the details of the security issues that were addressed, but we plan to disclose more information once the update has reached all of our user,” the company said in a statement Monday.

To check if an update is available, Chrome users can click the wrench icon in Chrome’s upper-right corner, then select “about Google Chrome.” That will show both the version number and a message indicating whether an update is available.