Microsoft made headlines late last year when it snatched up just about every domain name variant with “Kumo” in it. Kumo is Microsoft’s weapon against super search engine Google. After dropping off the radar for a few months, recent reports indicate that the software giant may be gearing up to release its new search engine for public testing.

After posting lackluster earnings for the first quarter, Yahoo is laying off 600 employees and shuttering its Columbus office. The surprise is that Flickr was hit especially hard by these cuts, losing a number of its few remaining engineers.

Geocities was one of the first sites to offer you a simple Web page and the tools to edit the text and images to your heart’s content. Now it’s time to put this old dog out of its misery, much the same fate as Google Page Creator and AOL Hometown.

An open source tool designed to power search engines could be reborn as a commercial product for major online databases. New firm Cloudera plans to use the Hadoop system as the basis of its professional service packages.

Carol Bartz has been on the job as Yahoo CEO for about 45 days and has already made a number of changes near the top. How well will those high-level moves translate into transforming the company as a whole?

According to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing by Yahoo, the company spent a staggering $79 million dollars last year fighting off the takeover bid by Microsoft.

Yahoo announced the hiring of CEO Carol Bartz, formerly of Autodesk, in hopes that she can rebuild the floundering online advertiser. Yahoo CFO, Sue Decker, was long thought to be a frontrunner for the spot and has tendered her resignation.

Yahoo is looking for more ways to keep you interacting with friends through email by adding new features to your email Inbox. Last month social networking features started popping up in users’ email, and this month Yahoo started adding casual games.

In a move that could gut Yahoo’s Search Engine business, investors are currently preparing a takeover bid for the embattled Web advertiser. To add insult to injury, financing for the bid is being provided largely by jilted suitor Microsoft.

News in the world economy has been dismal for months, and the technology sector has fared no better than than national averages. Now another industry giant, Microsoft,  may be showing signs of weakness.

Yahoo is slashing the period during which it retains personal data about user searches. It’s also widening the range of data that it anonymizes after this period.

Yahoo has endured a downward spiral for quite a while now and it’s a combination of vacant leadership and a poor economy. Slimming down to survive is the company’s focus right now, and Yahoo has invented a creative severance package that requires recipients to stay in touch in case the people taking over old roles have questions.

Ouch.  This is looking less like the season to be jolly, and more like the season to brace yourself.  The economy is getting worse by the day and embattled Yahoo will be laying off yet more workers on Dec. 10 – two weeks before Christmas.  Not the bonus most Yahoo workers have grown to expect over the years.

Microsoft says it’s willing to abide by a request from European regulators that it limit the data it keeps of search records. But the firm says it will only do so if both Yahoo and Google follow suit.

Yahoo! said late last week that it was considering opening up access to a wider range of corporate technologies than just search, building upon a popular program from last year. The hope was then, and is now, that opening up previously proprietary technologies could lead to innovation from sources outside the company, specifically startups with new ideas built around those technologies.

Sometimes it seems like the Microsoft – Yahoo! deal has been up and down more than the elevators in the Sears Tower. After yet another period of denial that there was a deal in the works, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has been quoted as saying that such a deal would be better done sooner than later, once again fueling speculation that the software giant from Redmond has continuing interest in the purchase of the portal and search company from Sunnyvale.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin is backing a proposal to deliver free Internet service to all Americans on a segment of airwave frequencies to be auctioned off in the near future. The only catch is that participants will be restricted from accessing pornographic or content deemed inappropriate for children … and your internet could quite possibly be slower than your grandmother’s old-school dialup connection.