Google’s world domination inches closer, accounting for 6% of all Internet traffic.

A malware network has been discovered siphoning profits from Google, Yahoo, and Bing by spoofing the search engines and their DNS addresses.

Dubbed the “Bahama Botnet,” it hijacks search engine results with doctored links that run a user through a chain of sponsored ad sites. After clicking his or her way through the ads, the user eventually ends up on the requested page.

A traceroute of the connection shows that although the DNS name of the server appears to be legitimate, users are actually connected to 64.86.17.56, an unknown IP address in Canada.

It will be interesting to see how the major search engine corporations respond to this threat.

Update: 29 July, 2009 @ 10:12 AM

Yahoo! and Microsoft have published simultaneous press releases which confirm that a deal between the one time rivals has been finalized.

A full list of the deal’s points are contained in the press releases, but we’ve boiled that list down into a selection of essentials:

• Microsoft will acquire an exclusive 10 year license to Yahoo!’s core search technologies, and Microsoft will have the ability to integrate Yahoo! search technologies into its existing Web search platforms.
• Bing will be the exclusive algorithmic search and paid search platform for Yahoo! sites.
• Yahoo! will become the exclusive worldwide relationship sales force for both companies’ premium search advertisers. Self-serve advertising for both companies will be fulfilled by Microsoft’s AdCenter platform.
• Each company will maintain its own separate display advertising business and sales force.
• Yahoo! will innovate and “own” the user experience on Yahoo! properties even though it will be powered by Microsoft technology.
• Microsoft will compensate Yahoo! through a revenue sharing agreement on traffic generated on Yahoo!’s network of both owned and operated (O&O) and affiliate sites.
• Microsoft will guarantee Yahoo!’s O&O revenue per search (RPS) in each country for the first 18 months following initial implementation in that country.

Original story: 29 July, 2009 @ 1:28 AM
A source close to the renewed negotiations between Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo! Inc. has confirmed that the dot com giants have struck an agreement that will be announced within 24 hours.

The terms of the alleged agreement upholds rumors of a revenue sharing model, while dashing gossip that Microsoft would foot an up-front payment of some $3 billion said the source, who wished to remain anonymous as the deal has not been announced.

Rumors of a renewed effort to unite Yahoo! and Microsoft against Google broke two weeks ago Friday when 24/7 Wall Street revealed that sources inside a major client of the investment firm ThinkEquity said that a deal was “imminent.” Secondary sources supported the rumors with reports that key Microsoft search execs were at the Yahoo! campus in Silicon Valley to hash out the “short strokes” of a deal.

With the short strokes apparently drying, the purported deal is also said to ink a Yahoo! switch to Bing search results and the adoption of Microsoft technology for advertising sales.

But as Reuters notes, a combination of the second and third largest search outfits will certainly trigger scrutiny, if not ire from antitrust regulators. Similarly, regulators may gut a key advantage to the deal by restricting Microsoft’s ability to share search data with its business partner — not acquisition — Yahoo! Inc.

Despite the potential for legal wrangling, shareholders have continued to see value in a Microsoft/Yahoo! agreement. ComScore’s June search statistics suggest that the two companies are merely trading blows for their respective shares, rather than growing the business by eroding Google. The stats reveal that Google held steady at 65 percent while a 0.5 percent drop in Yahoo! search coincides with the $100 million introduction of Bing. A deal that unites Yahoo! and Microsoft’s search divisions could do away with the share-exchanging wheel spinning and unite 30% of the market under one roof.

Both companies have predictably declined comment.

Microsoft’s revamped Bing search engine has harnessed the power of Twitter to enhance the relevancy of the engine’s results.

The Redmond outfit has confirmed that a select number of prolific Twitter users are currently being indexed in the experiment.

“We’re not indexing all of Twitter at this time… just a small set of prominent and prolific Twitterers to start. We picked a few thousand people to start, based primarily on their follower count and volume of tweets,” wrote Microsoft Search Technology Center GM Sean Suchter. “We think this is an interesting first step toward using Twitter’s public API to surface Tweets in people search.”

The initial roster of Tweeple is designed to appeal to a broad range of unique interest groups; provided examples include Danny Sullivan, Kara Swisher, Al Gore and Ryan Seacrest. We can infer that Microsoft hopes to interest the critical Digg regurgitator, chatty Cathy, washed up politician and squealing fangirl demographics with these selections.

Suchter also encouraged users to follow Bing on Twitter.

Stances taken in several recent interviews suggest that Microsoft chief exec Steve Ballmer is remaining soft on his firm’s revamped search engine called “Bing.”

Despite intentions to shovel billions into the search furnace over the next five years, Ballmer has been wary to appear excited, much less exuberant as usual. In an interview conducted by Reuters, the exec demonstrated that he was even a little bearish about Bing’s hype.

“I don’t want to over-set expectations. We are going to have to be tenacious and keep up the pace of innovation over a long period of time,” he said.

“We may be successful, we may not, but we can’t be successful without being committed to changing things, changing the approach, changing the business model and you can’t give up in six months, or a year or two years,” he continued in an AFP interview.

While Bing briefly overtook Yahoo! for the number two spot in search shortly after its launch, Live’s replacement has once again fallen to its regular third place position. During the same period, arch rival Google picked up nearly one percent additional share of the search market.

Where’s that good ol’ Ballmer Rage we’ve come to love?

Academics across the globe have begun debating the relative merits of Wolfram|Alpha’s ability to crunch complex equations at the touch of a button. Some embrace it as a sign of the time, while the Luddites that banned your TI-92+ are taking up arms against Skynot.

Apparently this is such serious business that it’s worthy of phrases like “Pandora’s box,” “Scared” and “math war.”

Google CEO Eric Schmidt confirmed in an interview yesterday that the search giant remains unthreatened by the introduction of Microsoft’s revamped Bing search engine.

Schmidt said in an interview with Fox Business Network that Bing’s arrival is already passé.

“It’s not the first entry for Microsoft. They do this about once a year,” Schmidt said.

“And from Bing’s perspective, they’ve got a bunch of new ideas but some things are missing,” he said. “And we think that search is really about comprehensive and freshness. The scale and size of what we do, it’s just difficult for them to copy that.”

Research group ComScore Inc confirms that Bing.com’s search market share grew from 9.1 to 11.1 percent between June 2 and June 6 but remains mum on long-term growth potential.

On the upshot, Microsoft’s new search venture offers keen insight into the unspoken realities of the humand mind.

Wolfram Alpha LLC announced today that its new Wolfram|Alpha search engine has received an update to improve its robustness.

Enhancements to the company’s body of compiled data includes planetary distances, stock prices, geopolitical names, facts and events, and additional currencies. The search outfit also promises that their engine will be more receptive to natural language questions and exhibit greater self-awareness.

“Today, as one step in our ongoing, long-term development process, we’ve just made live the first broad updates to the core code and data of Wolfram|Alpha” the Wolfram team said in a press release.

The firm also indicated it that it is working to prepare a preview of the next update which could be ready as early as tomorrow. It is expected that the computational search engine still won’t know what to do with your input once this update goes live.

Wolfram Alpha is an interesting experiment in compiling, crunching and displaying the world’s data. While many are obtusely selling it as a competitor to Google, it’s really nothing of the sort. While Google excels at returning pages, Wolfram Alpha narrowly excels at returning data. Did we mention that it errs on the painful side of erudition?

Therefore, to determine whether or not Wolfram Alpha would be useful to you as a user, we have designed the Wolfram Alpha Litmus Test found below:

If you answered no, you’re joined by the global community of laypersons who aren’t statisticians or engineers. While us simple folk dink around in our Google garden, we can still have a crack at Wolfram Alpha’s ivory tower with a neat addon that embeds Alpha’s results straight into Google queries.

In the interim, you can amuse yourself with approachable Wolfram searches like this, this & this.