Search Engines

Acknowledging it can't beat Internet juggernaut Google Inc. on its own, Microsoft Corp. on Friday lashed its online fortunes to another Web also-ran with an unsolicited $44.6-billion bid for Yahoo Inc. Microsoft and Yahoo, two of the world's most powerful technology companies, have each spent billions of dollars over the last half-decade trying to catch up to Google in the lucrative search-engine advertising business but still find themselves as far behind as ever.

Yahoo Inc. co-founder Jerry Yang chose the name of his company in part because it referred to someone who is rude, unsophisticated and uncouth -- not the starchy executive jockeying for splashy deals. The 39-year-old billionaire has relished the title of Chief Yahoo that he picked up after he and friend David Filo started the Internet search company in 1995 as graduate students at Stanford University.

The increased jockeying for Yahoo Inc. complicates the Web portal's takeover fight with Microsoft Corp. But it also simplifies the bigger picture: The five largest draws for the Internet audience are now virtually certain to shrink to four -- maybe even three.

In the now-suspended takeover fight between software titan Microsoft Corp. and Internet poster child Yahoo Inc., the winner was a heckler in the audience. The combined companies could have created a formidable challenger to Google Inc., but the Web search king helped scuttle the deal by complaining about the potential effect on competition and by tossing Yahoo a lifeline in the form of an advertising partnership.

LAST WEEK we dug to the bottom of an online mystery: How did the first line of T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" become one of Google's fastest-rising search terms? As it turned out this was no literary renaissance but rather legions of "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire Viewers" who wanted to know the answer to the show's $25,000 question -- and weren't going to wait for host Meredith Vieira to tell them. This week we have another, more lurid mystery. There's no tidy TV ending this time, but our investigation allowed us a glimpse behind the curtain, where vice and commerce meet in that obscure and lawless way particular to the Internet.

Microsoft Corp.'s Internet search engine will become the default search program on all personal computers sold in the U.S. and Canada by Hewlett-Packard Co., the world's biggest maker of the machines. The Windows Live Search tool bar will be installed on PCs starting in January, Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft said Monday. The software also will direct users to Hewlett-Packard's sites, including its photo service Snapfish. Microsoft's search engine, the third most popular, will replace Yahoo Inc.'s as the default on Hewlett-Packard machines.

Microsoft Corp. turned to Internet pioneer Yahoo Inc. for help in fighting its biggest-ever competitive threat, then only made that threat stronger. Yahoo and Microsoft on Thursday said they had ended nearly five months of merger and partnership talks born of the software giant's frustration with falling far behind Google Inc. in online advertising. Yahoo shares plunged more than 10% to $23.52. But after the stock market closed, the Sunnyvale, Calif.

The search engine wars are heating up again with the public launch tonight of Cuil (pronounced "cool"). The Menlo Park start-up behind the website, at www.cuil.com, isn't trying to be a Google killer -- it's trying to reinvent search, said Anna Patterson, president and co-founder of Cuil. She's an ex-Googler, the architect of the Web giant's TeraGoogle search index that launched in 2006.

Shortly after Google Inc. unveiled Chrome, Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said the new Web browser "represents some of the best Google can do." He encouraged everyone to try it. But not many people are. Chrome gained market share within the first 24 hours of its release Sept. 2, but since then it has given back much of those small gains to the leaders, Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer and Mozilla's Firefox.

Yahoo Inc. handled a larger chunk of U.S. Internet searches last month and Microsoft Corp. lost market share, according to research firm ComScore Inc. Yahoo, based in Sunnyvale, Calif., had about 20.2% of queries in September, up from 19.6% in August, ComScore said. Microsoft, of Redmond, Wash., had 8.5%, down from 8.9%. Google Inc., of Mountain View, Calif., handled 62.9%, compared with 63% in August. The total number of searches in September was 11.8 billion, compared with 11.7 billion in August, ComScore said.