As expected, Yahoo has announced a search ad agreement with Google, just hours after officially ending its Microsoft talks.
The company will now run Google-supplied AdSense ads next to its search results as well as on some of its other Yahoo sites. Yahoo will retain control over where and how the ads appear.
Yahoo predicts the [...]

Microsoft has released a statement of its own regarding its concluded talks with Yahoo, following Yahoo’s release of the news earlier this afternoon.
“In the weeks since Microsoft withdrew its offer to acquire Yahoo, the two companies have continued to discuss an alternative transaction that Microsoft believes would have delivered in excess of $33 per share [...]

Yahoo says its talks with Microsoft are absolutely over.
The company just released a statement indicating its board members had met with Microsoft execs again this week. They were told, the statement says, “unequivocally that Microsoft is not interested in pursuing an acquisition of all of Yahoo, even at the price range it had previously [...]

Most companies discourage social networking at work, but Microsoft is testing a new product that could make it part of the job.
The Microsoft Office Labs team has developed an internal, business-oriented social networking tool called TownSquare. The utility is set to be revealed at tomorrow’s Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston, according to information obtained [...]

Two new web-related beta releases are on the way for Microsoft. The company announced timelines for Silverlight 2 beta 2 and Internet Explorer 8 beta 2 at its TechEd conference in Orlando this morning.
Silverlight 2 beta 2, seen as Microsoft’s answer to Adobe’s long-standing Flash platform, builds upon the .Net framework introduced in the [...]

Microsoft has signed a new deal with HP that it hopes will boost its search traffic.
The software giant has secured rights to have Internet Explorer pre-installed with Live Search as the default option on all new HP computers in the U.S. and Canada. The IE installation will also include the Live Search toolbar.
Microsoft [...]

Video: Multi-Touch in Windows 7
Vista Team Blog: “Tonight, at this year’s D:All Things Digital conference, Julie Larson-Green showed Walt Mossberg how a few of the multi-touch innovations first previewed in Surface will ultimately enhance the next version of Windows.”
Apple wooed audiences when it first demonstrated multi-touch via a track pad built into Apple laptops, but [...]

Microsoft is jumping into the world of social bookmarking.
The company has revealed plans to release a new tool called, fittingly, Social Bookmarks. A partial preview version is expected to be released next week, according to MS employee John Martin’s blog.
Martin says the program will let MSDN and TechNet users bookmark any URL, [...]

After digitizing 750,000 books and indexing 80 million journal articles, Microsoft announced that scanning libraries and making its contents searchable is not anymore within its company’s plan for search.
The company will take down two separate sites for searching the contents of books and academic journals and will direct web surfers looking for books to non-Microsoft [...]

An interesting announcement from Microsoft today: they’ve decided to close their Live Search Books and Live Search Academic projects. There would be few people who’d actually remember that Microsoft had Google competitors in this space, but the reason given is where the real interest lies:
“Given the evolution of the Web and our strategy, we believe [...]

Google is taking a shot at Microsoft over its new Live Search “Cash Back” program.
The company’s director of business product management, Nicholas Fox, ridiculed the idea of Google following suit.
“We have no plans to pay users to use our product,” he said. “Our fundamental belief is that we should compete by building [...]

Microsoft is launching a new program that’ll actually pay you to use its search site.
“Microsoft Live Search Cash Back” will work with eBay and PayPal to offer users cash for searching for products on Microsoft Live, then making a purchase from a resulting site. It will offer anywhere from two to 30 percent of [...]

The gloves are coming off in the battle between Yahoo and its upset shareholders.
The two sides held a private phone conference with a judge today. They were discussing a lawsuit over how Yahoo’s board handled the Microsoft takeover talks earlier this month.
The shareholders claim the board is trying to keep “embarrassing documents” [...]