Processing gateway to be combined with PayPal’s merchant services eBay Inc. and VeriSign Inc. said they had agreed to a strategic alliance that calls for the two companies to collaborate on payment services and security for e-commerce. eBay said it is buying VeriSign’s payment gateway business, which allows sellers to authorize and manage online payments, […]

Search king Google has unveiled Google Reader, its entrance into the news feed reading business. The program, called Google Reader, aggregates news and updates from selected sites. It lets users subscribe to material from the sites and create a reading list that they can sort and organize. Users can post news items to their blogs […]

It’s off on the buyout trail again. Database heavyweight Oracle has acquired Innobase Oy, a privately held Finnish company with close ties to open-source database company MySQL. In buying Innobase, Oracle intends to continue developing Innobase’s technology, InnoDB. Oracle, the database-software giant, has already developed and contributed an open-source clustered file system to Linux. Financial […]

Google has been in touch with Taiwanese representatives in San Francisco to work on resolving a dispute over the island’s listing in Google Maps, which refers to it as Taiwan, Province of China. Taiwanese officials have said they first contacted Google last month, and then instructed a Taiwanese representative office in San Francisco a few […]

Google, Microsoft Look to Square Off on Net and Desktop For years, Microsoft has been able to use its money and size to muscle aside its competitors. Now it is facing a competitor it cannot push around so easily — Google. The popular search engine is mounting what may be the most serious challenge yet […]

Video search engine Blinkx has unveiled its first attempts at monetizing the service, signing a deal with Miva to supply contextual ads for its new Smart Ads platform. Up and coming pay-per-click search engine MIVA announced that they were going to be teaming up with video search engine Blinkx in a deal that would see […]

Yahoo Inc. has acquired online event-planning and social networking site Upcoming.org, which is expected to provide Yahoo with more content about local communities and bolster its local search capabilities. The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company confirmed the acquisition deal without disclosing financial terms of the acquisition. The site provides tools for sharing observations about local events and […]

America Online Inc. will inherit Engadget, Autoblog and other popular Web journals as part of a $25 million deal announced recently that expands AOL’s presence in the blogging community and the company’s potential to attract advertising dollars. Although Santa Monica, Calif.-based Weblogs will operate with full editorial control and independence as a wholly owned subsidiary, […]

Three search engines promise to serve up direct answers to so-called natural-language queries: natural-language veteran AskJeeves; GuruNet’s Answers.com, a relative newcomer to Web search; and MSN Search, which recently beefed up its search results with information culled from Microsoft’s Encarta encyclopedia. In our sample searches, however, the three services did much better at answering our […]

Google Inc. www.google.com announced the official launch of Google Local, merging the technologies behind Google Local and Google Maps. No longer in beta in the U.S. and Canada, users can visit http://local.google.com or http://maps.google.com to find local search and mapping information in one place. With the launch of Google Local, users will be able to […]