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Yahoo and Microsoft have finalized their agreement to install Microsoft as the exclusive search provider for Yahoo's network of sites, the companies announced Friday.

Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer first approved a search deal in July, but the matter took a little extra time to complete.

(Credit: Yahoo/Microsoft)

The deal, first reached in July, still needs to be approved by the U.S. government before it becomes final. But the companies said in October that they needed more time to complete the deal due to the "complex nature of this transaction," and Friday's announcement is likely the result of hundreds of hours of painstaking review from expensive lawyers.

At least company executives didn't have to rack up the frequent-flier miles to finalize this year; they signed it virtually, with Microsoft's Qi Lu and Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz representing their respective companies on the licensing agreement and Ballmer and Bartz inking the definitive agreement, according to sources familiar with the deal.

Under the terms of the deal, Microsoft will provide search technology to Yahoo for up to 10 years, also gaining access to Yahoo's search technology assets and several hundred employees. It will then pay Yahoo a significant portion of the ad revenue generated alongside those searches.

A Yahoo representative declined to comment on the specifics of what held up the final approval of the deal. Both parties said they still expect the deal to become final in early 2010, although the government is sure to take a long hard look.

Ina Fried contributed to this report.

Google Finance now offers streaming news related to the stock market.

(Credit: Screenshot by Tom Krazit/CNET)

Google has added a few new features in hopes of attracting more users to Google Finance, blending financial stories from Google News right into the mix.

Yahoo owns the online financial information market with Yahoo Finance (rated first in its category by ComScore with 22 million unique visitors in September), but Google is trying to carve out a niche for itself by adding a so-called "real time" stream of news to Google Finance pages. On the main Google Finance page, users can now click on a news tab that brings up what appears to be a constantly updated Google News-powered stream of news stories related to the general market or specific portfolios set up as part of a profile.

The stories seem to update every minute or so, but Google will only turn on the streaming service between 8 a.m. ET and 5:30 p.m. ET, 90 minutes before and after the U.S. stock market trading hours. Google also said it has added a list of the recent quotes users look up on the service, as well as real-time streaming of stock prices on pages dedicated to individual stocks--all services currently available on Yahoo Finance.

Microsoft engineers should get a pat on the back from the suits at Microsoft HQ (shown here): Bing Maps Beta is cool.

(Credit: Screenshot by Tom Krazit/CNET)

SAN FRANCISCO--Microsoft's Bing took a major step forward Wednesday in adding rich mapping and image data to its search engine, but until it assembles more data, pretty pictures aren't enough to beat the Google Maps juggernaut.

Bing Maps Beta was released during a presentation at Microsoft's offices here. It's a Silverlight-based application that runs inside Bing Maps and adds Microsoft's version of Google Street View--called Streetside--to Bing Maps, as well as enhanced "bird's eye" images that let you swoop over cities.

I spent some quality time Wednesday afternoon with the new Bing Maps Beta, zooming through the streets of San Francisco and New York and testing out various searches. The best part about Bing Maps Beta--by far--are the rich transitions between high-resolution street-level or bird's-eye view photos as you move around a city, making it feel like you're actually driving down the road.

Microsoft's Streetside cameras have yet to make it down Amphitheater Parkway to Google's headquarters, and still haven't mapped an awfully large portion of the San Francisco Bay Area, not to mention the heartland.

(Credit: Screenshot by Tom Krazit/CNET)

Unfortunately, that's also the worst part; you'll have to download Microsoft Silverlight to make the rich imagery come alive (although you can still use Bing Maps without it), and 10 minutes of poking around with the application put a noticeable drain on system resources. If I left the window open, but didn't do anything in Bing Maps, my activity monitor dropped back to a moderate pace, only to max out again once I started playing with the Streetside feature or scrolling around a map.

But what Microsoft has assembled is impressive. The images are high-quality, and the location fixes are quite precise. The bird's-eye views have been improved with more perspective on roads hidden by buildings and name prominent buildings right on the map.

Scrolling around a city in bird's-eye view also allows you to view geotagged picture galleries created with Microsoft Photosynth. Click the little blue Streetside man (Google's little Street View man is orange) to choose between Streetside or Photosynth views, and if you click on a green icon in a given location, you are presented with photo galleries shot of the location. You can check out exhibits in museums such as New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, for example, zooming into the building from the bird's-eye view.

Clicking on one of the green icons surrounding the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York will bring up Microsoft Photosynth galleries of exhibits and the terrain around the building.

(Credit: Screenshot by Tom Krazit/CNET)

Microsoft is launching Bing Maps Beta with Streetside coverage of about 100 metropolitan areas in the U.S., but it's really only useful for traveling or searching medium-size cities or larger; suburban data is quite light. And even within cities such as San Francisco, Streetside is limited to essentially the downtown areas. Microsoft representatives said Wednesday they plan to add more data as soon as possible, but it could take quite a while.

A more generic search for a city or town such as San Francisco within Bing Maps Beta brings up a Wikipedia article on the city, weather information, and links to Photosynth galleries on the left hand side of the page alongside a map of the area. Clicking on "more details" brings up links to more photos, local news and "popular landmarks," although Microsoft should probably rethink the listing of the Port of Oakland as a popular San Francisco landmark.

Search for a specific address, such as CNET's downtown San Francisco office on 2nd Street, and Bing Maps Beta provides helpful icons to bars, restaurants, gas stations, and other locations within a given radius when you click on the "What's Nearby" icon.

It's pretty easy to get directions between two given locations, such as Microsoft Research's Mountain View, Calif., labs and CNET's downtown San Francisco headquarters. Bing lacks Google Maps' nice addition of Street View photos of each turn--since it doesn't have nearly that much data--but makes up a little bit of the gap with a helpful "if you reach X street, you've gone too far" reminder at the end of the journey and also listing prominent landmarks at certain turns.

Bing Maps Beta had plenty of suggestions for things to do around CNET's downtown San Francisco offices, but I had to zoom in very far to find my favorite bar. Maybe that's a good thing.

(Credit: Screenshot by Tom Krazit/CNET)

Microsoft has an awfully long way to go before it can duplicate the reams of Street View data that Google has assembled, as seen with its directions feature. Its rival certainly noticed Microsoft's announcement Wednesday, putting out a blog post of its own highlighting the fact that it has added Street View images of Sea World and second-rate New England learning institution Boston University. (Go Eagles)

At the moment, Google Maps has Bing beat when it comes to speed and comprehensive data. In addition, Google also surfaces some of the same helpful data, such as photo galleries and even videos.

Bing, however, offers a much richer look at the world. It does this at the expense of performance, but it presents a credible alternative to Google Maps for travelers and residents of major cities.

Google.com won't show any of the links in the image on the right until a home page visitor moves his or her mouse.

(Credit: Google)

After testing a new-look home page for several weeks, Google is ready to roll it out to the masses.

Google announced the new "fade-in" look for its home page Wednesday, combining its goal of minimalism and its desire to promote Google products beyond search. Starting Monday, visitors to Google.com will be greeted by a page totally devoid of anything but the Google logo, the search bar, and the search buttons. Google tends to roll out these types of changes gradually, so you may not see it at first.

That is, until they move their mouse. That will bring up the regular links at the top of the page to image search, news, settings, and the various other links off the home page that Google has added over the years.

Google ran about 10 different versions of the change before settling on this one, said Marissa Mayer, Google's vice president of search products, in a blog post. The company is famously exacting about the changes to what could be considered the Web's most valuable piece of real estate.

The new look doesn't seem to be affiliated with the search user interface changes that Google is also testing, although the company plans to hold a search event on Monday that could reveal more details around that design.

Microsoft's new street-level imagery in Bing Maps takes advantage of Silverlight to do things Web applications can't, according to the company.

(Credit: Tom Krazit/CNET)

Microsoft is kicking Bing Maps into a higher gear, announcing a beta version of Bing Maps that uses Silverlight to display 3D images and its own version of street-level images.

The company announced the new beta Wednesday amid a discussion of other improvements to Bing Thursday at its San Francisco offices in a presentation for the media. Bing Maps Beta is rolling out Thursday along with several other new features in the main Bing search results.

Bing Maps Beta requires Microsoft Silverlight to deliver very smooth three-dimensional transitions between satellite and street-view imagery. Like Google Street View, Microsoft has driven the streets of major cities such as San Francisco and assembled its own library of map-related images.

The new beta service can also find images of items inside popular destinations, such as art exhibits inside museums and other geotagged images available on the Internet through Microsoft Photosynth. Developers can also create Web applications to run inside the Bing Maps Beta, such as an application that works with Newseum to index local papers inside maps and let Bing users see the front pages of newspapers across the country.

In addition, Bing Maps Beta users will be able to see local tweets through a partnership with Twitter demonstrated during the event. Twitter recently rolled out a geolocation service.

Updated 11:29 a.m. PST: Microsoft has street-level imagery for around 100 U.S. cities, it said, and is adding more imagery on a constant basis.

Updated 12:28 p.m. PST: Microsoft also talked about new enhancements to Bing called "entity cards," which are sections on the top of a search results page that contain a mix of structured and crawled data on a given topic. For example, searching on "Coldplay" will bring up an official photo of the band with a link to their Web page, tour dates, additional photos, and other information all displayed before your eyes scroll down to the search results themselves.

Similar enhancements will appear on searches for specific cities, with photos and weather information, as well as searches for companies, where financial information and news will appear. At some point in the future, Microsoft also plans to let searches hook up with their Facebook accounts to search for photos, upcoming birthdays, and status updates.

Yahoo is bringing Facebook into just about all of its Web sites, allowing users to update their Facebook status and share news items with friends right from the Yahoo page.

The company announced the integration of Facebook Connect across several key Yahoo Web sites including Mail, News, Sports, and Finance. The idea is to drive even more readers to Yahoo's network of sites--the second largest in the U.S.--by making it easier for them to share things they like with their Facebook friends, some of whom may not have seen the Yahoo item otherwise.

Yahoo already offers a few hooks into Facebook, but this partnership strengthens the relationship between the two sites. The integration will take awhile, however; Yahoo said not to expect the process to begin until the first half of next year.

It foreshadowed the Facebook Connect integration at an event in August, when Yahoo announced social-networking features within properties such as Mail and Messenger. Those updates were restricted to friends within the Yahoo network, however. Facebook and Twitter are where the social-networking junkies congregate.

Many challenges will have to be solved before Google is ready to release Chrome OS, its browser-based operating system for Netbooks. One of the biggest ones could be something as far offline as it gets.

Driver support has derailed many an operating system release, perhaps most recently causing headaches for Microsoft and Windows Vista. As a result, Google is paying close attention to the thorny problem of making sure Chrome OS will work with the myriad devices consumers can be expected to connect to those Netbooks, said Linus Upson, engineering director for the Chrome browser and Chrome OS.

"The good news is that for most input devices today, there are basic standards that allow them to operate without needing a specific drive for each device," Upson said. For instance, manufacturers of USB storage drives and cameras have all pretty much settled on standards that make it easy to ensure those devices will work with your software.

Google is looking at unique ways of solving the problems posed by the lack of standards among printer drivers.

(Credit: Brother)

But printers are another story. Printer drivers are generally unique to the device and pose problems for computer makers.

"We want to get out of the business of printer drivers. All the problems related to drivers we want to go away," Upson said.

That means Google is going to have to come up with a "wonderful printing solution" that it has yet to discuss in public, although talks are ongoing with printer manufacturers, Upson said. Expect to see something from Google along those lines prior to the expected launch of Chrome OS in late 2010.

As for the other driver problem--the so-called "long-tail" of USB devices--don't hold your breath waiting for Chrome OS support for your Wacom tablet. "If that's important, Chrome OS is not the OS for you in 2010," Upson said.

Google does want to figure out a solution to this problem, but it's not something that will be ready in time for launch. Google wants to "get to a model where (Chrome OS Netbooks) can communicate with the OS without a driver."

CNET's Stephen Shankland contributed to this report.

Reading The Wall Street Journal articles for free through Google News will get harder if the paper decides to embrace Google's new changes to its "First Click Free" policy.

(Credit: Screenshot by Tom Krazit/CNET)

As the journalism industry gathers once again to wring its hands about the future, Google has thrown it a bone with new limitations on its "First Click Free" policy for news stories shown on Google News.

Companies that operate subscription-based Web sites--such as The Wall Street Journal--don't want to expose the full text of their articles to Google. But despite what WSJ owner Rupert Murdoch says, most of them also want their articles and sites discoverable through Google and Google News. As a compromise, Google has allowed those publishers to participate in what it calls a "First Click Free" program, where articles accessed through Google News links can be seen in their entirety, but if the user attempts to click anywhere else on that story page, they are directed to a sign-up page.

The problem is that Web users quickly figured out that you can access almost any Wall Street Journal article for free simply by cutting and pasting the headline into Google News, which generates a "free" link that isn't available if a publisher such as CNET links to a Wall Street Journal article. "While we're happy to see that a number of publishers are already using First Click Free, we've found that some who might try it are worried about people abusing the spirit of First Click Free to access almost all of their content," wrote John Mueller, Webmaster trends analyst for Google, in a blog post.

As a result, Google is now putting limits on the First Click Free usage. Web publishers can now decide to limit use of the First Click Free rule to five times per person per day through both Google News and regular Google search results. It's not clear whether readers could get around this issue by clearing cookies from their browser or enabling private browsing, but a Google representative said it will be up to Web publishers to decide how they want to track visitors through some combination of cookies or IP addresses.

Google is one of many companies and organizations participating in a day-long discussion about the future of journalism at the Federal Trade Commission in Washington. The topic has pitted Google against the publishing industry all year, with Google insisting it's a friend of journalism by sending traffic toward media companies, and media companies accusing Google of siphoning their potential traffic by showing headlines and snippets on Google News.

Google's Dan Reicher (at podium) was joined by Stanford's Lynn Orr (left), Nth Power's Tim Woodward, and Under Secretary of Energy Kristina Johnson (onscreen) at an event Monday on innovation in green energy.

(Credit: Tom Krazit/CNET)

SAN FRANCISCO--Ahead of a key international summit on climate change, Google hosted a panel discussion at its offices here Monday on the need for the U.S. to play a key role in the development of the next generation of energy.

Energy experts from Stanford University, the University of California at Berkeley, and MIT joined Google's Dan Reicher, director of climate and energy initiatives and energy venture capitalist Tim Woodward of Nth Power in a wide-ranging discussion on a very timely topic: how to transition the world toward a more sustainable form of energy consumption and production. They were later joined via video conference by Kristina Johnson, undersecretary of energy at the U.S. Department of Energy.

The panelists sought not only to emphasize that such a move is essential, but one that presents enormous economic opportunity for countries that get ahead of the technology and innovation curve. "If we really do pull off changing the world's energy system, then a whole lot of money is going to be spent on putting the equipment in place to do that," said Lynn Orr, director of the Precourt Institute for Energy at Stanford University.

The discussion was held a week before the beginning of the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference, which will be held in Copenhagen with representatives from 192 countries. The conference is expected to produce some sort of global agreement on reducing carbon emissions and embracing alternative forms of energy, although the scope of any such agreement is very much up in the air.

Several panelists agreed with the assertion of Dan Kammen, director of the Renewable & Appropriate Energy Laboratory at the University of California at Berkeley, that no matter what happens in Copenhagen, substantial progress has already been made this year with climate-change talks between the U.S. and China.

"China wants to be seen as a modern country," said Ernie Moniz, director of MIT's Energy Initiative. That means that not only do they want in on the gold rush toward green energy, they recognize that their citizens could be greatly affected by climate change.

Copenhagen aside, much of Google's interest in fostering debate in this area is designed around getting the federal government to play a larger role in helping technology research make it out of the labs and into the market, Reicher said. "We don't do a very good job in this country of moving technologies through this pipeline," he said.

Google is throwing its considerable resources behind green technologies such as wind, solar thermal, and advanced geothermal, Reicher said. In 2007, Google announced plans to generate 1 gigawatt of clean electricity through investments in companies that are researching and developing clean-energy technology.