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.

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

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.

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.

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.

In an explanation on its blog, the company blamed the mistake on human error. It apologised for any inconvenience caused to users and site owners whose pages were incorrectly labelled.

“This was clearly an error, and we are very sorry for the inconvenience caused to our users,” it said.

The company said it routinely flags any search results with that message if the site is known to install malicious software in the background or otherwise surreptitiously.

Google maintains a list of suspicious sites based on criteria developed with StopBadware.org, a nonprofit project headed by legal scholars at Harvard and Oxford universities who research consumer complaints.

The company periodically updates this list. And the error happened when it erroneously applied one of its periodic list updates in such a way that the warning would apply to all URLs.

“Fortunately, our on-call site reliability team found the problem quickly and reverted the file,” it said.

The new rival to Explorer and Firefox, now available for testing in Windows, makes up in exceptional speed for any minor shortcomings. And it’s got a nice array of features.

Google’s much-anticipated new Web browser, Chrome, arrived today. It’s streamlined, has some great new features and is very, very fast.

Chrome, the most talked-about new tech product is ready for download as a free download is officially called a beta test version.

Visit Google’s Chrome Browser site for more information.

Cuil (pronounced COOL) provides organized and relevant results based on Web page content analysis. The search engine goes beyond today’s search techniques of link analysis and traffic ranking to analyze the context of each page and the concepts behind each query. It then organizes similar search results into groups and sorts them by category.

Cuil gives users a richer display of results and offers organizing features, such as tabs to clarify subjects, images to identify topics and search refining suggestions to help guide users to the results they seek.

Summary of Cuil’s features:

• Biggest Internet search engine—Cuil has indexed 120 billion Web pages, 3x more than any other search engine
• Organized results—Cuil’s magazine-style layout separates results by subject and allows further search by concept or category
• Different results—Unlike other search engines, Cuil ranks results by the content on each page, not its popularity
• Complete privacy protection—Cuil does not keep any personally identifiable information on users or their search histories