Many financial analysts have greeted Yahoo’s ad deal with Google as the first real sign of life to come from the beleaguered Web pioneer since it spurned Microsoft’s takeover bid.

In Washington, however, government regulators and lawmakers are expected to take a hard look at the anticompetitive implications of the partnership.

On paper, it looks great. In a side-by-side comparison, Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) makes a lot more money than Yahoo (NASDAQ: YHOO) placing an ad next to a page of search results, so pairing Google’s ads next to some of its search results seems a good way for Yahoo to boost revenue at a time when it’s desperate to prove to shareholders that it can make it as an independent company. “Free money,” quipped former Ask.com CEO Jim Lanzone.

The strategic upsides for Yahoo — and certainly Google — are easy enough to see. But beyond the short-term value the deal might deliver, there is a real concern that as the partnership develops, Yahoo will gradually cede more of its search advertising to Google, effectively nullifying what competition there is in the market today.

Full Story at InternetNews.com

Newsflash: Google isn’t your typical enterprise software company.

The search giant that’s made billions off its consumer online services has some unique ideas for attracting enterprise customers. Selling to corporations is usually a long, deliberate process, but Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) thrives on speed and thinks it can apply some of its consumer strategy to speed up the process.

“I was on the enterprise software side for 10 years, and traditionally that’s a big bang, long release cycle,” Cyrus Mistry, Google’s product manager, enterprise search, told InternetNews.com. “Google’s on a much quicker pace than that, we’re known to innovate daily.”

Full Story at InternetNews.com

So as a brief interlude, we bring you this short film, produced back in 2000 for internal Yahoo use only. It’s an 11 minute spoof on the late Steve Irwin’s show The Crocodile Hunter. Holt Lyda plays the lead role - he was at Yahoo until 2003. The script was written by Cynthia Maller, who left the company in 2006.

Full Story at Techcrunch

According to Mozilla Foundation CEO John Lilly, that gives Firefox 3 a four percent market share of browsers worldwide straight out of the gate. Mozilla’s servers sent out 83 terabytes of data during that time, and at the peak there were 17,000 downloads per second (with an average of 4,000 per second). That explains why I had to wait so long to download my copy. The browser was downloaded in 200 different countries, with the top ten being

U.S.
Germany
Japan
Spain
UK
France
Iran
Italy
Canada
Poland

Yes, Firefox 3 is big in Iran and Poland. IE doesn’t stand a chance.

Source: Techcrunch

Click image above for a larger view. Comscore has released its May search market share numbers (prior data through April is here).

Key points: Google and Yahoo edged higher in search share to 61.8% and 20.4%, respectively. That’s the first up month for Yahoo this year.

Microsoft dropped from 9.1% to 8.5% for the month. It’s important to note that Microsoft’s new Cash Back search program didn’t go live until May 22, so it will be interesting to see how they do next month.

Full Story At Techcrunch

Out of pure curiosity we started tracking Yahoo execs who’ve left the company since January 2007. It’s hard to believe, but at least fifty of them have bailed out in the last year and a half.

Some went to work for Google. Others went to startups. Many just left without saying what’s next.

We aren’t able to track the thousands of non-execs who’ve quit or were laid off, there are just too many of them. Many of these ex Yahoo’ers have congregated on this Yahoo Alumni Page on Facebook, with over 1,500 members. This picture above was taken from the group photos in that group.

Want to create your own semantic search engine, but just don’t have the PhDs? Semantic search engine Hakia is opening up APIs to let anyone build their own semantic search application on top of its technology. Hakia looks at the meaning of Web pages and matches search queries using its own quality index of trusted, relevant sites.

Hakia, which competes with PowerSet and TextWise in semantic search, hopes to spread its technology by enticing developers to adopt it. The first partner is mobile app provider Berggi, which created a semantic mobile search app for AT&T and Sprint phones. I downloaded it to my AT&T Blackberry, but the application froze up when I tried to enter a search term. Maybe it’s my phone.

Google hasn’t responded yet to a request for comment, although they did post a brief message on the Google Groups site for App Engine:

Full Story At Techcrunch

Photo sharing site Flickr is one of the leading lights of Yahoo - but cofounders (and husband/wife team) Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield won’t be around to keep driving the product forward. They are both joining the mass exodus of executives from the company.

Fake officially left last Friday. Butterfield (who still officially runs Flickr) will leave on July 12. Kakul Srivastava, the director of product management for Flickr, will take over Stewart’s role as general manager of Flickr. Sara Wood will take over Kakul’s previous position.

From what we hear, neither has imminent plans to work on any new projects, but I suspect we haven’t heard the last from either of them.

Butterfield and Fake created Flickr in 2004. It began as a photo-sharing feature of a gaming project, has since blossomed into one of the premier photo sharing sites on the web. Yahoo purchased Flickr for $35 million in March of 2005. In June 2007 Yahoo shutdown Yahoo Photos, making Flickr their exclusive photo sharing website. Today Flickr hosts over 2 billion images.