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MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--For a bunch of search engineers, Google employees care an awful lot about energy and the environment.

Google hosted an event for employees Monday featuring Steven Chu, the U.S. secretary of energy under President Obama and a man Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said "may become one of the most influential scientists of our generation, if he isn't already." Chu took about an hour to speak to a packed room of Google employees following his announcement of $151 million in funding for new energy-related projects as part of the ARPA-E program.

Chu found a … Read more

Google is ready to show off its concept for social search while it figures out what to do with Twitter's fire hose of data.

Last week at the Web 2.0 conference Google's Marissa Mayer demonstrated the service, which will go live as a Google Labs project on Monday. Google Social Search links the concepts of so-called "real-time" search with Google Profiles and custom search results, allowing searchers to find content created by friends or contacts with Google Profiles.

Google Social Search was developed separately without the Twitter deal in mind, said Amit Singal, a Google … Read more

Yahoo Mail users reported problems Monday morning, with the service inaccessible for some and spotty for others.

TechCrunch noticed a Twitter spike in reports of problems with Yahoo Mail, and another company called Downrightnow also reported problems accessing the service over the last several hours. Several CNET employees reported that they could access their in-boxes, but mine is unavailable. Yahoo Messenger and Yahoo's home page appeared to be working fine.

Please let us know if you're having trouble in the comments below, and we'll update this post with more information as we go.

Yahoo Mail is the most widely used Web e-mail service … Read more

Carl Icahn, who launched a shareholder insurrection at Yahoo last year over its handling of a takeover offer from Microsoft, is leaving Yahoo's board of directors.

MarketWatch reported Friday that Icahn has informed the company he's moving on to other interests. It's been a over a year since he forced his way onto the board after expressing his displeasure at Yahoo's rejection of Microsoft's offer to acquire the company, which at one point was valued at $33 a share. Yahoo's stock closed at $17.22 on Friday.

Yahoo confirmed Icahn's departure, and said … Read more

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--As Google closes in on a November 9 deadline to submit a revised settlement in the Google Books case, it continues to pull out all the stops to reassure the world it has the best of intentions.

The controversy over Google's settlement with groups representing book authors and publishers rages on, almost a year after it was first reached. After Google was sued in 2005 for digitizing books without explicit permission, it reached a proposed settlement in October 2008 that would give it unique rights to scan out-of-print yet copyright-protected books, exciting some librarians but raising the ire of many … Read more

Google and the wireless industry have been at each other's throats all year over Net neutrality, but the search giant found room for compromise with new friend Verizon Wireless Wednesday.

Two weeks after announcing joint plans to release a series of phones and devices running Google's Android software on Verizon Wireless' network, the companies have authored a joint position piece on Net neutrality, highlighting their agreement in several broad areas.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Verizon Wireless CEO Lowell McAdam attached their names to the piece, which was posted on their respective public-policy blogs Wednesday evening:

Verizon and … Read more

Updated 4:30 p.m. PDT with additional details from Google.

It was indeed a nonexclusive deal: Google is going to be indexing real-time Twitter messages in search results, in a deal announced just hours after Microsoft debuted integration of "tweets" into its own search engine, Bing.

A post on the official Google blog by Vice President of Search Marissa Mayer explained it: "We believe that our search results and user experience will greatly benefit from the inclusion of this up-to-the-minute data, and we look forward to having a product that showcases how tweets can make search … Read more

Yahoo's bid to expand the amount of original content it produces is about to get some help from an advertising agency.

CNBC reported Wednesday that Yahoo has signed an agreement with WPP's GroupM digital entertainment studio to co-produce original content that will likely highlight WPP's advertising clients in a significant way. Yahoo confirmed the deal has been signed, and it hopes to have the new shows ready to go by the end of this year or the beginning of 2010.

One of Yahoo's main priorities this year is building out its Media group, which is slated … Read more

Updated 1:40 p.m. PDT with additional details from the release, and throughout at 3:45 p.m. PDT following the earnings call.

Yahoo's cost-cutting moves this year are starting to show up in the bottom line, as the company's third-quarter profit exceeded analyst expectations by a wide margin.

Revenue is still declining at Yahoo, which recorded $1.6 billion in revenue, down 12 percent from last year. Excluding traffic acquisition costs paid to partners, revenue was $1.1 billion, in line with analyst estimates.

But following several rounds of layoffs and belt-tightening, Yahoo's net income … Read more