Yahoo has used Bing.com’s search results for some time, but this is about to change in at least one country. Yahoo Japan announced today that it has signed a deal to use Google instead of Bing.

Daniel Alegre, vice president of Google’s Asia Pacific and Japan operations, stated:

Yahoo Japan will use Google search results and Google’s technology for supplying the accompanying search ads. With such partnerships, revenue from the search ads is shared between the Web site and the company that supplies the ads, in this case Yahoo Japan and Google, respectively.

I guess Bing just wasn’t cutting it for Yahoo.

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The incident apparently began with the FBI monitoring certain web blogs for terrorist activity. Al-Qaeda is known to operate and spread their communication through the Internet, but the odd part about this shut down is that it was a community web service with many users.

The blogging service, Blogetery, reportedly hosted over 70,000 blogs, and most of those users had nothing to do with terrorism. Furthermore, the owner of the service is not being accused of terrorist activity either. The hosting company, Burst.net sent a warning to Alexander Yusupov to take down the sites but did not supply any official evidence of the FBI investigation. The FBI says that it did not order the service to be shut down and that Burst.net took that action on its own.

The sad part of all of this is that possibly thousands of blogs have just been erased from the Web with little regard for the innocent people who used them. The lesson to be learned, however, is that any website or service should have backups, even if the content is created by other users. Furthermore, with as many as 70,000 blogs, they also should have had some type of redundancy in place to prevent total data loss, even if it were accidental.

Source: Times Newsline

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According to PC World, social networking site Facebook now has half a billion users. To put in perspective, only China and India have more people than Facebook has users.

Statistics posted by the news site reveal that 35.4% of North Americans and 17% of Europeans log onto Facebook every month. In Oceania, this figure is a whopping 40.3%. Dividing the company’s estimated net value of $25 billion by its user base reveals that each account holder adds roughly $50 USD of value to the site.

Photo | Flickr

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To help keep up with ever-increasing traffic, Twitter is set to open up a new custom-built data center in Utah later this year. Considering 300,000 new Twitter users log on every day, the site desperately needs to expand its capacity.

The data center is being built especially for Twitter’s needs. The site currently leases data center space for third-parties. The new configuration will give the company more control and better performance. Jean-Paul Cozzatti of Twitter stated:

Having dedicated data centers will give us more capacity to accommodate this growth in users and activity on Twitter.Twitter will have full control over network and systems configuration, with a much larger footprint in a building designed specifically around our unique power and cooling needs. The data center will house a mixed-vendor environment for servers running open source OS and applications.

Other social networking sites like Facebook are also in the process of expanding.

Source | Tech Crunch
Photo | Flickr

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According to inside sources, search giant Yahoo is considering purchasing the bit.ly. Although several other companies are also rumoured to be in talks with the URL shortener, Yahoo seems to be the most serious contender.

Purchasing bit.ly would help Yahoo better compete in the social media world. Some Internet marketing experts believe that the service isn’t valuable to Yahoo because it can shorten long URLs, but because of the large amount of data it could collect with it. Information such as which URLs are most popular and user behavior would help give Yahoo a competitive edge.

Source | Giga Om

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Twitter announced yesterday that World Cup Final on July 11 marked the highest period of activity in the site’s history. During the last fifteen minutes of the match, Twitter users sent out more than 2,000 Tweets per second. This number jumped to 3,051 when Spain scored its winning goal.

The Tweets came from 172 countries and were posted in 27 different languages. Twitter received so much traffic that it experienced temporary outages.

Photo | Flickr

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Microsoft has formed an alliance with Dell, HP, and Fujitsu to sell pre-configured Microsoft Azure-powered cloud servers. By pre-configured, they mean that the servers should be ready to go without any further configuration required. As such, they call them “appliances” rather than servers.

These appliances will allow companies to take advantage of the “private cloud”, with which they run their own applications and storing them in their own data centers. This differs from the “public cloud”, in which the applications are on servers in third-party data centers.

Potential customers are expected to be larger businesses with scalable enterprise server needs. The first in line is the auction super site Ebay.com. The Azure software itself, however, will be more widely available. Microsoft is joining numerous other big IT companies that are now offering cloud services, including IBM, Google, and Amazon.

Source: The China Post
Photo: Flickr

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Google announced today that the Chinese government has renewed its license to operate as an Internet content provider, meaning that the search engine will continue to operate in China.

Earlier this year, Google strongly considered leaving the country due to its strict Internet censorship, and began redirecting Chinese users to its uncensored Hong Kong site. Google has since stopped doing this, but still keeps a link to the other site on its homepage.

Google must renew its license annually. The search engine has had trouble attracting users in China as local competitors such as Baidu have limited its market share.

Source | The New York Times
Photo | Flickr

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According to a report by Experian Hitwise, the market share of Microsoft’s Bing search engine increased by 7% in June. Meanwhile, Google saw a drop in market share of -1%.

Bing’s May market share was 9.23%. With the 7% increase, its new market share for June was 9.85%. Google’s market share only decreased from 72.17% to 71.65%. While Bing’s growth sounds enormous, it really isn’t considering how small of a market share the search engine had to begin with.

Most of Bing’s growth is the result of a large number of visitors performing automotive, health, shopping and travel searches. The market shares of Yahoo Search and Ask.com stayed about the same.

Photo | guitargoa

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According to uptime service monitor Pingdom, social networking site Twitter had a June uptime figure of 99.17%. Although this sounds high, it is actually low by industry standards, especially for a large site like Twitter with so many resources at its disposal.

The 0.83% downtime figure equates to 5 hours and 43 minutes of lost Tweeting. Network configuration issues as well as spikes of traffic due to the World Cup and NBA Finals caused the downtime.

Unfortunately, Twitter fanatics will not be able to get the lost time back. Maybe the site will have better uptime this month?

Photo | Flickr

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