Microsoft and Yahoo have finalized the terms of a broad search and advertising agreement intended to help them compete more effectively with Google.

The companies announced the agreement in July, in which Microsoft’s Bing search engine would power Yahoo’s search results, and Yahoo would provide premium search-advertising services for both companies.

They had hoped to finalize the deal in late October but needed more time to work out the details.

“Microsoft and Yahoo believe that this deal will create a sustainable and more compelling alternative in search that can provide consumers, advertisers and publishers real choice, better value, and more innovation,” they said in a statement Friday.

Google has removed the PageRank section in the crawl statistics in Google Webmaster Tools. This has gone mostly unnoticed, with the release of the labs feature, until now. A Google Webmaster Help thread reports the PageRank values shown in Webmaster Tools has now been completely removed.

You can get more information in searchengineland.com and seroundtable.com

Microsoft’s Bing search engine aims to rival Google

Microsoft stepped up its efforts to cut into the search dominance of Google, launching a public preview version of its widely praised Bing search site on Monday.

The site offers several features that are not automatically available on Google such as instant excerpts that allow users to see the contents of a page without actually clicking on it and a sidebar detailing related searches.

The Bing home page is also fancier than Google’s famously spare design and shows a picture of hot air balloons flying over a craggy desert landscape in Cappadocia, Turkey. Like Google, the page offers links to specific search categories like news, video, shopping, maps and travel, and also includes a link to Microsoft’s cash-back search rewards programme.

Microsoft currently trails far behind Google in the search market, which is the most lucrative advertising format on the internet. Google has 64 per cent of the US market, compared to 21 per cent for Yahoo and just eight per cent for Microsoft, according to recent figures from web tracking firm Comscore.

The Microsoft CEO, Steve Ballmer, first unveiled Bing last Thursday at a California technology conference and the early reactions have been very positive.

Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft announced a joint effort to help reduce duplicate content. The three major search engines came together to allow users to point out their preferred version of a url. This format offers users more control.

Duplicate content has been a challenging issue for a long time. Websites containing a lot of content such as a retail site, could end up with several urls for each page making it difficult for search engines to crawl.

Google gives the following example on the Webmaster Central blog:

<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish” />

Simply place this link tag in the head section of the duplicate content urls.

The tag can only be used on pages within a single site. Both absolute and relative links are acceptable, but the search engines recommend absolute links. Also, links to all urls will be directed to the one preferred url.

For more information, each of the search engines have explanations and examples in their own announcements: Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft.

Google has introduced ads to the results of search queries on Google News in a move aimed at turning the news aggregation site into a money-making venture that may raise the hackles of newspapers and other media outlets.

Josh Cohen, a business project manager at Google, announced the change in a post on the official Google News blog on Wednesday.

“What this means is that when you enter a query like iPhone or Kindle into the Google News search box, you’ll see text ads alongside your News search results — similar to what you see on regular Google searches,” Cohen wrote.

A search for Kindle, Amazon’s electronic book reader, for example, returns links to news articles and a list of “sponsored links” such as Amazon’s Kindle page and ads for other readers such as Sony’s eBook device.

“In recent months we’ve been experimenting with a variety of different formats,” Cohen said. “We’ve always said that we’d unveil these changes when we could offer a good experience for our users, publishers and advertisers alike.”

“We’ll continue to look at ways to deliver ads that are relevant for users and good for publishers, too,” Cohen said, adding that the ads would only appear on Google News search-results pages in the United States.

Google News aggregates headlines from more than 4,500 English-language news sources around the world and provides links to articles on their websites.

The articles are selected, according to Google, “by computers that evaluate, among other things, how often and on what sites a story appears online.”

The introduction of ads to Google News search is the latest attempt by the Mountain View, California-based company to monetize its various Web ventures.