The on-off relationship between Microsoft and Yahoo has been consummated. A new 10-year deal will bind the two companies as they seek to compete with Google.

In January 2008, Microsoft originally offered $47.5 billion to buy Yahoo outright. Despite Yahoo’s ongoing financial difficulties, the deal was rejected because co-founder and then director Jerry Yang demanded more money. Continue »

Yahoo has announced that two of its search engine-powered web services will be officially closed on 31 August 2009:

1. Term Extraction — a service that provides a list of significant words or phrases extracted from a larger document, and
2. Contextual Web Search — a service which allows you to search the Internet for web pages using a context-based query.

The announcement was made by Brian Cantoni of the Yahoo Developer Network in a Yahoo Groups posting. According to the post, both these public-facing sevices share an internal backend data source that is closing down. Continue »

Celebrities get impersonated on the web. They’re famous — everyone is anonymous — it happens. Most celebrities just ignore it; but some get pissed off. Kanye West got mad as hell about Twitter users pretending to be him last week. This week it’s Aerosmith lead singer Steven Tyler who is up in arms — to the point of actually taking anonymous bloggers to court.

Tyler attempted to sue a group of bloggers that he says were impersonating him, sharing private facts, making false statements even using his likeness on the web, NBC Los Angeles reports. The only problem? The whole “anonymous” thing. Seeing as no one really knows who these bloggers are, they naturally didn’t bother showing up to court. Hell, I’m quite certain they didn’t even know they were supposed to be in court. So the judge dismissed the case.

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