Microsoft Corp might now look for a mixture of deals after moving away from Yahoo Inc, but some would be complete enough to let it confront Google Inc’s power of online advertising. When Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer called off talks with Yahoo on Saturday soon after the Web Company discarded his $47.5 billion offer, he gave up what he and his investors saw as the best method to grow rapidly in marketing and online services to take on market head Google.

“Ultimately, our goal is to build the industry-leading business in search, online advertising, media, and social networking,” Ballmer wrote in a Saturday letter to employees, obtained by Reuters. “Although the acquisition of Yahoo would have accelerated our ability to deliver on our strategy in advertising and online services, I remain confident that we can achieve our goals without Yahoo,” Ballmer wrote.

Ballmer said Microsoft might go it unaided, but a likelier situation would be to use some of the hard cash it hanged in front of Yahoo to make lesser acquisitions or strike up partnerships.

Yahoo! exposed many Viet Nam-centric plans as part of its business plans in the country last week. Yahoo! 360plus, a blogging tool, and Yahoo!Music, a home music service, are two of the fresh features.

The 360plus is a fresh blogging stage, which offers users more options in customizing their profiles and comprising exterior feeds, in addition to providing simple navigation. Yahoo!Music, accessible from the Yahoo! Vietnam home page, lets users attach to their favorite Vietnamese singers and contact the current music news. At launch, its library comprises 14,000 songs from 2,000 artists.

“Websites should enlist the help of search engine optimization (SEO) companies in their spam drop strategies”, a Google expert in the subject matter has claimed. Speaking at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco last week, Matt Cutts stated that SEO firms must be seen as friends rather than foes by website operators, reports CNET News.

According to the news provider, Mr. Cutts said: “SEO is not spam. Google does not hate SEO. “There is plenty of white-hat SEO [companies] who could help you out.” Mr. Cutts, who heads of Google’s Webspam team, was once known as “porn cookie guy” after he offered cookies baked by his partner to anyone who found lewd content they did not want in their search results. At the San Francisco event, he suggested that site operators use captcha systems to differentiate between genuine users and bots. He as well suggested reconfiguring software settings after setting up in order to discourage bots.

Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) recently announced that additional proxy materials are now accessible for its stockholders in association with the 2008 Annual Meeting of Stockholders to be held next Thursday that would be May 8, 2008. The additional proxy materials could be obtained at the following websites: www.sec.gov, http://investor.google.com/proxy.html, http://www.proxyvote.com/ (beneficial stockholders) and http://www.envisionreports.com/goog (only for registered stockholders). About Google Inc. Google’s ground-breaking search technologies thrive hard to connect millions of people across the globe with information every day. Google’s targeted advertising program offers businesses of all sizes with assessable results, while improving the on the whole web experience for users.

Yahoo failed to agree to an acquirement pact with Microsoft last Saturday, the deadline Microsoft had set for taking up such negotiations. Now Microsoft should decide whether to follow a hostile conquest via a proxy fight or to drop the bid and look for other acquirement alternatives.

All along, Microsoft’s management had stated strongly that they would follow Yahoo via all obtainable options, comprising the hostile route of expelling the present board by suggested its own schedule of director candidates at the proceeding Yahoo shareholders’ meeting. But Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and CFO Chris Liddell softened that stand in public comments last week, saying that giving up on the acquirement would also be an option.

Lawyers representing an American private detective now claim hundreds of thousands of companies, which registered to advertise on Google, may have been hoodwinked into paying for unwanted ads. The private detective has further opened a legal action against the search engine giant, and his attorneys desires the proceedings to become a class action that could price the company millions of dollars if he becomes successful.

David Almeida said he signed up his firm, Bay State Detective Agency, as an advertiser on Google in 2006 – one of millions of small businesses, which have found a cheap means of aiming advertising at people who are authentically searching for their services (ads). However, he wanted the ads to come only on Google’s own site, not the thousands of other websites, from MySpace to personal blogs, on which Google serves up the ads.