Internet, Portal | featured news

Yahoo's inability to snap out of a financial funk may be about to turn the Internet company into a takeover target for the second time in less than three years.

Yahoo is rolling out a new search experience today, making its web search more streamlined and visual, improving its mobile search and adding a list of hot search topics to the Yahoo front page.

AOL has been in talks to acquire technology blog TechCrunch, according to a person familiar with the matter.

AOL's Propeller Team has announced on their website that Propeller.com will be no longer active from October 1 2010.

According to Nielsen data out this morning Microsoft's Bing has passed Yahoo to become the number two search engine in the US. Nielsen says that Google's August share is 65% (and growth is flat) but that Bing and Yahoo have now switched places.

AOL is preparing to introduce a larger, splashier ad format that it hopes will attract more ad dollars from big brands and help revitalize its business.

Yahoo is redesigning its email service to help stem a user decline and counter offerings from longtime rivals Microsoft and Google as well as social-networking services such as Facebook and Twitter.

AOL is adding talk-show host Ellen DeGeneres to its family of Web properties as it looks for ways to draw more people to its sites.

Google Inc. will continue to provide the search results on AOL Inc.'s websites under a new, five-year deal the companies signed this week. The agreement largely reinforces an arrangement that has been in place between the two companies since 2005. But the new contract, announced Thursday, also expands their cooperation onto AOL sites for cell phones and other gadgets. And it will put AOL video content on Google Inc.'s YouTube site for the first time.

As BoomTown reported earlier today, Yahoo Japan confirmed it would switch its search technology and paid search provider to Google from Yahoo.