The version released for free download is only at the beta - testing - stage, but users and critics have been quick to pass early judgment. The consensus? Google Chrome is attractive, fast and has some impressive new features, but may not - yet - be a threat to its Microsoft rival.

Here is a selection of reviews from some of the most respected technology blogs and writers on the web. Click on the links to read the full reviews, or post your first impressions of Google Chrome in the box at the bottom of the story.

All in all, Google Chrome, after just a little time using it, is superb. It’s not only fast, but it’s useful. It’s not only elegant, but it understands what you really want to do with a browser. And although it suffers from some setbacks that shouldn’t be overlooked, it’s still a highly-capable browser. Download Chrome. You won’t regret it.
TechCrunch

Google has produced an excellent browser that is friendly enough to handle average browsing activities without complicating the tasks, but at the same time it’s powerful enough to meet the needs of more-advanced users. The search functionality of the Omnibar is one of many innovations that caught my attention.
PC World

While Chrome’s performance is a little better than that of Firefox, in practical terms, it is far less useful, because it lacks the broad array of third-party add-ons programs like Flashblock that make Firefox so customizable. With time, it might catch up, but in the meantime, I’d recommend giving the new Internet Explorer a spin.
The Associated Press

The interface in Chrome is very different from other browsers and takes a little getting used to. Instead of the traditional Netscape/IE-style toolbar across the top, Chrome puts tabs across the top. Moreover, the tabs are detachable, so the terms “tabs” and “windows” become interchangeable within Chrome.
CNET

Will Google Chrome shape the way Web browsers are developed and designed? It is too early to tell, but Google has certainly come up with something appealing and unique. Will Chrome replace Internet Explorer or Firefox? Perhaps not in its present form, and not for a very long time. Overall, Chrome is a killer little application to have and offers a nice break from tradition when surfing the Web. While there’s plenty of room to for growth and improvement, the first beta release is impressive.
The Tech Herald

Chrome is a smart, innovative browser that, in many common scenarios, will make using the Web faster, easier and less frustrating. But this first version — which is just a beta, or test, release — is rough around the edges and lacks some common browser features Google plans to add later. These omissions include a way to manage bookmarks, a command for emailing links and pages directly from the browser, and even a progress bar to show how much of a Web page has loaded.
Walter S Mossberg from the Wall Street Journal

It munches through media sites with ease, streaming music and video and handling Flash very smoothly. PDFs open so suddenly that you might not even realise you’re using them. Opening a new tab brings up not your home page (although you can switch to that) but a thumbnail view of your nine most visited sites, plus recent bookmarks and a box to search your history. Overall, my first impression of Chrome is 9/10 for speed, 8/10 for ease of use and 7/10 for stability. And those figures should have Microsoft and Mozilla very, very worried.
TechRadar

What I discovered was a product that has some clear advantages over Microsoft’s, but also some shortcomings that, overall, hardly make it a killer - at least today. To be sure, Chrome is a work in progress. In addition to being a test version, outside developers are invited to make improvements. But it faces a stiff challenge from Microsoft, which also is making improvements with its latest iteration, which includes some of the same features as Chrome, like tabbed browsing.
San Francisco Chronicle

Our first impression of Chrome is that it’s nice and fast. There’s very little lag opening pages and the entire interface feels very streamlined. Dragging tabs in and out of windows is awesome, with a transparent version of the page pulling away with your mouse. The fact that you can pull tabs out of windows as well as combine windows is a great touch. Everything involving the tabs feels very, very smooth.
Gizmodo

Google stated that it considered search-based ads more targeted than content ads, and that they therefore generated more clicks and revenue for advertisers. However, Google did realize that some content ads perform as well as search-based ads. As a result, “Smart Pricing” was born.

Smart Pricing adjusts the value of clicks based on a number of factors such as time of day, type of content, and conversion tracking. The latter, conversion tracking, measures how often a click on an ad produces a desired action for the advertiser, such as a product sale, newsletter signup, etc. It was at this time that Google announced it would be lowering the price of ads (i.e., charging AdWords() clients less) that appear on the sites of Adsense publishers. Susan Woodcock, Director of Product Management for Google, stated that this change came from requests of advertisers who wanted different pricing on clicks from search and content ads. The example Google gave for Smart Pricing was that “a click on an ad for digital cameras on a web page about photography tips may be worth less than a click on the same ad appearing next to a review of digital cameras.

While web forums are filled will AdSense publisher complaints about Smart Pricing, it is actually a fair system – publishers get paid based on the quality of the traffic they provide to Google advertisers.

While the switch to Smart Pricing has decreased revenues for many Adsense publishers, there is still a massive opportunity to generate significant revenues via the Adsense program. Smart Pricing adjusts the value of clicks based on a number of factors such as time of day, type of content, and conversion tracking. The latter, conversion tracking, measures how often a click on an ad produces a desired action for the advertiser, such as a product sale, newsletter signup, etc. The example Google gave for Smart Pricing was that “a click on an ad for digital cameras on a web page about photography tips may be worth less than a click on the same ad appearing next to a review of digital cameras. The key is to identify valuable/expensive keywords, attract qualified customers to your site , and provide compelling text that gets visitors really interested in a product or service. This will ensure that the visitors click on the appropriate Adsense ads and buy that advertiser’s product or service. A true win-win-win.

Google partner SMS Management and Technology has emerged as the leading bidder to supply the NSW Department of Education with 1.5 million student email services using a customised version of the search giant’s Gmail service. This will be one of the largest private deployments of Gmail in the world.

The win is Google’s second major victory in the academic sector after Macquarie University signed up for Gmail in September last year. It could have massive implications for the Australian software market, as it places Gmail’s online word processing software, Google Docs, in a strong position to challenge Microsoft’s Office software suite in the education sector.

The education department’s Gmail roll-out will increase current email storage allocated to students by a multiple of 170 times from 35MB to 6GB. Gmail is hosted offshore and the university chose not to extend the service to staff due to concerns that it would generate excessive bandwidth bills retrieving messages.

An exec briefed on the announcement told the New York Times’ Bits blog that the tool will help agencies identify where their target audience is most active on the Web. AdPlanner will harvest data directly from participating Web sites, and combine it with search and third-party data. Bits notes there will be some overlap with Google’s Trends for Websites, a service announced last week, which sounds like it does much of the same work.

The service has been having outages Tuesday, according to a mailing list posting Tuesday. App Engine, launched in April and still in “preview release” mode, is a service that lets people create interactive Web applications written in the Python programming language.

“We’ve experienced several outages during the past 12 hours, the most recent of which started at 6:30 a.m. PDT and is still ongoing. During these outages, a significant percentage of requests resulted in errors. The errors are related to usage of the Datastore,” the note said. “We’re working hard to determine the cause of these outages and will continue updating as we make progress.”

Google didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment about the issue.

Update 5:25 p.m. PDT: Google fixed the problem, according to an update notice Google pointed out…

“At around 1:40 p.m. we were able to isolate the issue, and requests are currently serving normally,” the update said. “This outage was the result of a bug in our datastore servers and was triggered by a particular class of queries. We have isolated the bug and we’re currently working on a fix. Going forward, we’re also working to further isolate queries so that in the future a bug like this won’t affect the stability of the system as a whole.”

(Via TechCrunch)

Quoting from the post:

“…The company has been testing the new sales product with a number of partners, including BlogTalkRadio, BlogCritics, BlogCatalog, BlogTV, Technabob, GPSMagazine, GeekAlerts and NerdApproved. CEO Richard Jalichandra says these blogs reach a combined audience of approximately 17 million unique monthly visitors. Early advertisers on the network include Honda, Acura, Toyota, t-mobile, Adobe, HP, Sandisk, MSFT, Verizon, Sun, Sony, Visa, Nike, Scion, Chevrolet, Paramount, Universal Pictures, 20th Century Fox and Best Buy.

Technorati has explored selling ads for third party sites for some time, but this is the first time they’ve opened the service up to anyone. Unlike Glam and Federated Media, they will take all comers, and say they expect blogs, from the large players on down through the long tail, will find they do a better job monetizing sites than the current options.

Ads are sold on a CPM basis. They will not make revenue guarantees, says Jalichandra, but the split between parties is negotiable. He declined to state what rates have been negotiated with beta partners. This is similar to what Six Apart promises, which is also targeting the long tail of blogs.

Jalichandra also says Technorati is uniquely positioned to sell ads at premium rates, even through small blogs, because they will be able to use descriptive tags/keywords, along with their existing blog indexing technology, to better match ads with content…”

It is heartening to read about the inventory that they are expected to carry, and the higher CPM that they will manage to generate, hopefully.

The end of the digitization project

Microsoft will keep the current Live Search Books and Live Search Academics databases, and the data will be included in regular web search results. The databases will not be updated though, as Microsoft is also closing down its “digitization initiatives,” including the library scanning and their in-copyright book programs. This means that Microsoft is, in essence, giving up fighting Google in an area that many has considered an important part of the future of search.

Google is clearly planning to become the one stop portal for all kinds of information, including the printed word, and book scanning and indexing is an important part of that strategy.

Too strong focus on short term profits

Our guess is that Microsoft has come the the conclusion that such an adventure would not be profitable, and that the main focus for search should be the regular web searcher, and not experts, academics and researchers.

The Live blog says:

Given the evolution of the Web and our strategy, we believe the next generation of search is about the development of an underlying, sustainable business model for the search engine, consumer, and content partner. For example, this past Wednesday we announced our strategy to focus on verticals with high commercial intent, such as travel, and offer users cash back on their purchases from our advertisers.

We are not so sure if this is a sensible approach. The scholars and experts belongs to the main opinion makers on the Web, and they were the ones that made Google a success by promoting it for free in their circles.

Moreover, they have a lot of purchasing power and there are bound to be more of them as the educational levels are raising all over the world.

Finally, there will have to be changes in international copyright laws, making written content more easily available, and when that happens “paper-based” high quality content will be a very attractive source of information.

Not all of Microsoft’s work in this area is wasted. They intend to provide publishers with digital copies of their scanned books. They are also removing their contractual restrictions placed on the digitized library content and making the scanning equipment available to their digitization partners and libraries.

The two search services include some 80 million articles and 750,000 scanned books.

The Swedish blog Internetbrus argues that this is a serious setback for academic search, as Live’s product has been much better than Google Scholar.

This is totally pointless, but I wasn’t aware that this was actually possible until today.

Google Trips Over

If it looks normal for you then I guess it didn’t work.

1. Do a search for the term ‘Artflux’

2. Look at the number 3 result (which should be artflux.com)

3. Try clicking the link to Artflux

4. You continue to stay in Google!!!

So a very interesting ploy from Google - Offer the result, but keep the visitor in Google!

We have tried on different systems (Mac and PC), different networks, logged in and logged out and we get the same thing every time.

No traffic is getting through to Artflux, Google is keeping the lot!

Have you seen this before? If so how long will this non-click through state last?

See Google results for Artflux

See Artflux

Excerpt from the google blog

“The heart of the group is the team that works on core ranking. Ranking is hard, much harder than most people realize. One reason for this is that languages are inherently ambiguous, and documents do not follow any set of rules. There are really no standards for how to convey information, so we need to be able to understand all web pages, written by anyone, for any reason. And that’s just half of the problem. We also need to understand the queries people pose, which are on average fewer than three words, and map them to our understanding of all documents. Not to mention that different people have different needs. And we have to do all of that in a few milliseconds.

The most famous part of our ranking algorithm is PageRank, an algorithm developed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who founded Google. PageRank is still in use today, but it is now a part of a much larger system. Other parts include language models (the ability to handle phrases, synonyms, diacritics, spelling mistakes, and so on), query models (it’s not just the language, it’s how people use it today), time models (some queries are best answered with a 30-minutes old page, and some are better answered with a page that stood the test of time), and personalized models (not all people want the same thing).

Another team in our group is responsible for evaluating how well we’re doing. This is done in many different ways, but the goal is always the same: improve the user experience. This is not the main goal, it is the only goal. There are automated evaluations every minute (to make sure nothing goes wrong), periodic evaluations of our overall quality, and, most importantly, evaluations of specific algorithmic improvements. When an engineer gets a new idea and develops a new algorithm, we test their ideas thoroughly. We have a team of statisticians who look at all the data and determine the value of the new idea. We meet weekly (sometimes twice a week) to go over those new ideas and approve new launches. In 2007, we launched more than 450 new improvements, about 9 per week on the average. Some of these improvements are simple and obvious — for example, we fixed the way Hebrew acronym queries are handled (in Hebrew an acronym is denoted by a (”) next to the last character, so IBM will be IB”M), and some are very complicated — for example, we made significant changes to the PageRank algorithm in January. Most of the time we look for improvements in relevancy, but we also work on projects where the sole purpose is to simplify the algorithms. Simple is good.”

Linux leader Linus Torvalds originally developed the Git source-code management software in 2005. He didn’t like available open-source tools for the chore, but encountered resistance in using a proprietary tool, BitMover’s BitKeeper. Torvalds liked the distributed approach enabled by BitKeeper and Git, in which individuals could maintain their own “trees,” variations of a project that branch off a main trunk. Git also can be used to track and manage software patches sent “upstream” by contributors working on code branches to the programmers responsible for maintaining various open-source projects.

Google currently uses a source-code management tool called Perforce to manage Android, but the company is moving to another code repository technology in preparation for moving Android into an open-source project, said Android leader Andy Rubin.

“We need an open-source repository. Currently we’re on Perforce. That has to be moved to Git,” and there’s an effort now to make the transition, Rubin told me in an interview about Android. That sounded to me like Android had settled on Git, but Rubin wasn’t willing to go that far. “We have no announcements at this time,” he said.

Maybe we’ll hear more at the Google I/O conference next week for programmers interested in Google’s work. One theme of the conference is Android. Benjamin Lynn of Google’s developer programs group offered a basic guide to Git on a Google open-source blog posting this week. And Google uses Git elsewhere, for example, to help Linux kernel programmers with support for Qualcomm mobile phone processors.

Junio C. Hamano currently maintains Git.

One choice Google won’t pick for source code management is the centralized Subversion software. “Subversion we don’t think is enough of a repository to handle 11 million lines of code. If this is adopted, and there are 10,000 people checking out, it’ll die,” Rubin said. (Android today consists of about 8 million lines of Linux code plus 11 million lines of higher-level code; of the latter, about 8.6 million will become open-source software.)

Source of story

Video: Linus Torvalds visits Google to share his thoughts on git, the source control management system he created two years ago (Thanks RadonPL on Digg)

Microsoft has tried almost everything to get more people to pick its search site over Google, without much luck. So maybe a little cash will do the trick.

A screenshot of the Live Search cashback site.

That is the idea behind a new Microsoft program that will return money to online users who find and buy selected products through its Live Search engine. It’s an unusual move that illustrates the lengths to which the Redmond company is willing to go in its struggle to gain ground on the Internet search king.

Microsoft’s “Live Search cashback” site, set to be unveiled Wednesday, promises to pay back a portion of the purchase price — ranging from about 2 percent to more than 30 percent — to people who use it to find designated products and buy them online from participating retailers.

The company has signed up a long list of merchants to participate in the program - including the online sites of large retailers such as Barnes & Noble, Sears, Home Depot, J&R Electronics, Office Depot and others.

The company is expected to unveil the Live Search cashback program at a conference in Redmond where Bill Gates will be speaking to online advertisers. Microsoft last weekend said there would be a major search announcement but declined to provide specifics. A Microsoft spokesman declined to comment Tuesday evening.

However, the Seattle P-I discovered an informational portion of the Live Search cashback online site — spelling out the new program in detail — that was publicly accessible as of Tuesday.

One snippet on the site also makes reference to moving a user’s “cashback and payment service from Jellyfish to Live Search.” Jellyfish Group is a U.K.-based search advertising firm that specializes in a type of payment model for advertisers that is similar to the one the new Microsoft service will use.

The nature of Jellyfish’s involvement in the initiative wasn’t clear as of Tuesday evening. Microsoft has been making a series of acquisitions in an effort to bolster its online efforts.

A list of frequently asked questions on the Microsoft site includes one that many potential users will no doubt ask: “Why are you paying me cashback?”

Answer: “We want to earn your loyalty and reward it with cashback savings for your everyday online shopping. We are ‘The Search That Pays You Back’!”

Cashback programs have been tried by smaller search engines, with mixed results. Because of Microsoft’s big online presence, its new initiative could get lots of attention in the industry and among consumers.

“Assuming that the rebate amounts are enough to be appealing to people, which it sounds like they are, that definitely could attract a fair number of consumers,” said industry analyst Van Baker, a Gartner Inc. research vice president, when the site was described to him. “But what they may do is just go to that site when they’re thinking about buying something, and use Google the rest of the time.”

It’s not clear how much money Microsoft has allocated to the cashback program, or how long it is scheduled to last.

Read full story

NEW YORK - Microsoft Corp., the software maker that scrapped a $47.5 billion bid for Yahoo! Inc. this month, may forge a partnership with the Internet company in the search-advertising market to challenge Google Inc. Microsoft, which abandoned its takeover attempts May 3, said Sunday that it’s exploring a transaction with Yahoo and may renew attempts to buy the entire company. The two may combine units that sell ads that run next to Internet search results, said Morningstar Inc. analyst Toan Tran. Billionaire investor Carl Icahn is pressuring Yahoo to ally itself with Microsoft to compete with Google, which dominates the Internet search market. Icahn, backed by investors such as hedge-fund manager John Paulson, plans to oust Yahoo’s board if Chief Executive Officer Jerry Yang fails to sell to Microsoft. ‘Carl Icahn is in this to make a quick buck, so whatever helps him make money he’ll be happy with,’ said Tran, who is based in Chicago and doesn’t own shares of either company. ‘What Carl Icahn definitely wants is an outright sale of Yahoo to Microsoft at some price higher than what it is now.’ Microsoft has offered to buy Yahoo’s search unit and take a minority stake in the company after Yahoo gets rid of its holdings in Asia, Reuters reported Monday, citing a person familiar with the talks. Microsoft spokesman Frank Shaw declined to confirm or deny the report, while Yahoo spokeswoman Diana Wong declined to comment. Microsoft, based in Redmond, Washington, fell 53 cents to close at $29.46 in Nasdaq Stock Market trading. Sunnyvale, California-based Yahoo rose 2 cents to $27.68, while Google dropped $2.55 to $577.52. The new talks may bring Microsoft closer to a full acquisition of Yahoo, said Mark May, an analyst at Needham & Co. in New York. On Monday, he changed his recommendation on Yahoo’s stock to buy. He had advised clients to hold on to the shares since April 2007. ‘Microsoft sees an opportunity where their negotiating position has improved,’ May said. ‘They clearly have some very large shareholders on their side now and they realize that they can make some moves.’ Icahn, 72, owns 10 million shares and options to purchase 49 million more. He proposed a slate of board nominees last week including Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban and former Viacom Inc. CEO Frank Biondi Jr. Icahn didn’t return phone messages. Paulson said last week that he would back Icahn’s slate and that he was disappointed Yahoo didn’t reach a deal with Microsoft. Paulson & Co. owned 50 million shares of Yahoo as of March. All 10 of Yahoo’s directors are up for re-election at the annual meeting July 3. Yahoo and Microsoft trail Mountain View, Calif.-based Google in Internet search traffic. Together they account for about a third of total Internet searches in the U.S., or about half of the share Google has, according to research firm ComScore Inc. Google CEO Eric Schmidt and co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin are meeting in Britain to discuss Google’s response to the Microsoft talks with Yahoo, according to a British Broadcasting Corp. report. They were traveling to attend an event for the company’s European operations, the BBC said. Google didn’t respond to an e-mail. With reporting by Crayton Harrison in Dallas.

The site is a personal portal that can be used to upload, store, and view personal information, retrieve records from partners, investigate health matters, set alerts such as a reminder to take medication, and run applications that can help your well being.

Google has been talking about the health initiative for a year. Now, “we actually have the product,” said Marissa Mayer, vice president of search products and user experience.

The service will never sell a patient’s information and will only share it with the patient’s permission, Zeiger said. And a user can revoke rights to share at any time. “No Google Health user will ever find their Google Health information as search results anywhere on Google. That information is yours,” Zeiger said. To join, users must agree to various terms of use, including this: “When you provide your information through Google Health, you give Google a license to use and distribute it in connection with Google Health and other Google services.”

A small issue: the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) doesn’t govern what Google does, and after that, the only recourse is trying to get the Federal Trade Commission to enforce companies’ privacy policies. From the ToS:

When you provide your information through Google Health, you give Google a license to use and distribute it in connection with Google Health and other Google services. However, Google may only use health information you provide as permitted by the Google Health Privacy Policy, your Sharing Authorization, and applicable law. Google is not a “covered entity” under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 and the regulations promulgated thereunder (”HIPAA”). As a result, HIPAA does not apply to the transmission of health information by Google to any third party.

I don’t understand all the legal jargon. I don’t understand the implications of sharing data with Google. And if for some reason Google screws up, what are my options?

Till now, I have been comfortable sharing my emails with Google (I use Gmail) as there is nothing too confidential, can sharing my search preferences and patterns with Big G, etc. etc. But my health data? Unless the reasons and motivations are too compelling, I am not going to do that. And today, it is far from compelling.

Google addresses the HIPAA concerns in a blog post and features a chart (shown below) outlining the differences between HIPAA and its privacy policy. Anyone sharing health data with Google should read both the post and the explainer on the differences.

Thanks Google for putting up the portal with information on health 101. But I prefer to play it safe - and am not sharing any medical records. Not in foreseeable future.

From Google Health and HIPAA

Which is YOUR favorite? Leave a comment and let us know…

Source: Google

You may also want to see these links:

Rejected Google Holiday Logos

Fake Google Logos

How Google Got Its Colorful Logo

Dennis Hwang - Google’s unknown artist has huge following

Superpages.com Network and CareerBuilder both jumped eight spots in the ranking to positions 18 and 30, respectively.

Content categories showing gains in April included job search, career resources, and television sites.

The top-gaining categories in April were Pharmacies and Retail-Food, both up 8 per cent from March.

According to comScore, Google’s unique U.S. audience in April was up 18 percent from the same month in 2007, while Yahoo’s audience grew 7 percent.

However, according to the Associated Press, Yahoo still leads in page views, meaning visitors spend more time there or return more often. Many Google users make a simple search request and quickly go elsewhere based on the results. Yahoo had 33.6 billion page views to Google’s 28.7 billion.

Google is seeking new sources of revenue as growth slows for the four-line text ads that generate almost all of its sales. We haven’t found a proper way to monetize image search to date,” said Mayer, who oversees search products. “You may see us roll out an ads-image search in the future, but when we do you’ll know that’s because we found a way that ultimately enhances user happiness with the product.”

Google calculated in 2006 that it was giving up as much as $200 million a year by not including text advertisements with its image search results, and that figure has probably increased since, Mayer said. Trials showed that text ads drove people away from conducting image searches, and Google dropped that idea.

Display ads may work better with image searches because they seem more natural to people looking for pictures, Mayer said. While the company has done mock-ups of how it might present the ads, it hasn’t tested them on users, she said.

News Source Bloomberg

My question: Can they do that without violating copyright and ownership rights of image owners?

Why this flurry of activity in opening up APIs for 3rd party apps? All these initiatives will allow securely sending personal profile data, including friend lists, presence/status information, etc., to third party applications. The primary benefit of these services is to allow users to maintain a single friends list and to coordinate social activities across different sites that perform different services.

“The reason these companies are are rushing to get products out the door is because whoever is a player in this space is likely to control user data over the long run. If users don’t have to put profile and friend information into multiple sites, they will gravitate towards one site that they identify with, and then allow other sites to access that data. The desire to own user identities over the long run is also causing the big Internet companies, in my opinion, to rush to become OpenID issuers (but not relying parties).”

While the motivations are good (I don’t need to sign up everytime I visit a new website), there are bound to be privacy issues. Wait for one 3rd party to mess it up, willingly or unwillingly.

And the biggest gain for Google? They would now be able to target ads on individual profile level. Is that good? I am not too sure how much info I’d like to share with anyone, be it Google, Facebook, Myspace, Yahoo, Twitter…

Let’s wait and see.

Chief Executive Steve Ballmer told employees in a company assembly Thursday that he knows how much he’d spend to buy Yahoo and accelerate his company’s Internet play.

“We’re willing to pay for that at some level, and beyond that level we’re not willing to pay for it. I know exactly what I think Yahoo is worth to me,” the executive said. “I won’t go a dime above, and I will go to what I think it’s worth if that gets the deal done.”

But he didn’t offer a figure, and he didn’t say whether Microsoft is considering raising its unsolicited bid, worth $44.6 billion at the time it was made in early February.

The offer is currently worth about $42.4 billion, or $29.48 per share, based on Microsoft Corp.’s closing stock price Thursday. Yahoo Inc. has rejected the offer, saying it undervalues the company. Microsoft’s board has been considering whether to raise the bid to as much as $33 per share, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Ballmer didn’t provide any new insight into the company’s efforts to buy the Silicon Valley pioneer during the meeting at Microsoft’s Redmond, Wash., headquarters, but he did indicate that an end to months of speculation was near.

“We ought to announce something in relatively short order,” Ballmer told employees.

His comments were first reported by Silicon Alley Insider, an online technology news site, and confirmed by a Microsoft spokesman.

Ballmer added that buying Yahoo is just one of many moving parts in the software maker’s strategy to compete with Google Inc. in search and Web advertising, and that if neither a friendly nor a hostile deal “look good,” he’s willing to walk away.

Microsoft’s board met Wednesday but reached no decision on a next step, the Journal reported. The software maker had given Yahoo until last weekend to agree to a deal or face the prospect of an ugly proxy fight.

Meanwhile, Yahoo is exploring a possible advertising partnership with Internet search leader Google Inc. or a merger with the online operations of Time Warner Inc.’s AOL as possible defenses if Microsoft tries a hostile takeover.

Impressed by a two-week test completed last month, Yahoo could firm up a long-term deal within a week, according to the Journal. Any alliance between Yahoo and Google would face intense antitrust scrutiny, however, because the two companies control more than 80 percent of the U.S. market for search advertising.

Yahoo and Google hope to allay those concerns by structuring their deal so their rivals, including Microsoft, could participate in an auction-based system, the Journal said.

The search engines have become an integrated part of our lives. Each and every day billions of searches are made all over the world, reflecting stories of work and leisure, strife and passion, and the interests of millions of Internet searchers.

If you could tap into this enormous amount of data, you could draw maps of fashion, cultural trends, political shifts and anything people are concerned about right now.

The search engine databases are kept under lock and key. The search engine companies hate the thought of loosing the trust of their users. Nevertheless, some aggregate data are available, and on this page your find links to some of the search trend sources found on the Web.

Google Zeitgeist and beyond

Google has a service called Google Zeitgeist that brings up weekly top 10 lists of the most popular searches in several countries and world wide.

With Google Trends, you can compare the world’s interest in your favorite topics. Enter up to five topics and see how often they’ve been searched for on Google over time.

Lycos has a weekly top 50 list, while Yahoo presents various search trends at Yahoo Buzz.

Blogs, bookmarks and folksonomies

Note also that the growth of social networking and bookmarking sites has given as a new wealth of search trend data.

There are actually companies out there that monitoring and analyzing fashion and trends on the basis of social media such as blogs and discussion forums

Some statistics are free, though. The blog search engine Technorati will, for instance, give you a list of the most talked about topics in the blogosphere right now.

Site popularity

There are actually no trustworthy numbers on what sites are the most popular at any given time. Alexa, which bases its data on the habits of its Alexa toolbar users, may give you a certain indication though.

For these and other web trend sources, see the categories on this page.

Popular search terms in search engine marketing

Reading lists of the most popular search queries is entertaining. Social scientists ought to love the stuff. So far, however, it is the marketing people who has made the best use of this search information.

The search trends tell them what people find interesting right now, making it possible to adapt product and service development to what’s fashionable or upcoming.

This certainly applies to search engine marketing experts as well. Do you want to know what kind of affiliate program to go for and what product to sell? Look at what people search for and make sites and web pages covering these topics.