Citysearch said last week that it would buttress its local paid listings with advertising listings from Yahoo's Overture Services.

Yahoo boosts free e-mail storage to 100MB, while Google makes moves on Yahoo Groups.

Adware firm WhenU has been yanked from Google and Yahoo!'s search results after being accused of trying to artificially raise its ranking by using a prohibited measure known as "cloaking." A Google search for "whenu.com" returned the result, "Sorry, no information is available for the URL whenu.com," early Friday morning. A Yahoo! search returned related sites, but not whenu.com.

Yahoo has raised its target number of paying subscribers, aiming to have 15 million customers, up from a goal of 10 million stated a couple of years ago, Chief Executive Terry Semel said Thursday.

Business.com pulled all display advertising from its Web site as of this month. The Santa Monica, CA, business search engine no longer will sell ads on a CPM basis because that conflicts with its paid search model, CEO Jake Winebaum said. "It also slows down our site," he said, "and we're all about the direct response model."

Banners were a bore. Pop-ups pissed people off. So what's an advertiser to do? Put TV-style commercials on your computer screen, of course. Officially known as rich-media advertising, video ads can appear on a Web page or can briefly take over a user's entire screen before allowing access to a site's content. Many marketers and website owners believe that watching ads is a fair exchange for free content.

Gateway is one of more than 150,000 advertisers that participate in a continuous electronic auction for the right to place an ad on the screen when a computer user types keywords in English and other languages into the Google search engine. The ads appear either above or to the right of Google's free search results.

After years of seeing friends, co-workers and strangers start Web journals on current events and everyday life, I decided it was time to try blogging myself. The Pew Internet and American Life Project finds that blog readers outnumber blog creators by a 7 to 2 ratio. But with blogging software so easy to use, I really had no excuse, except perhaps a lack of time.

Google Inc., which gets most of its revenue from simple text ads linked to key word searches, said on Wednesday it would begin testing richer graphic ads -- such as pictures and logos -- that would appear on the Web sites of its distribution partners.

Google's new e-mail service, Gmail, has triggered a privacy backlash and called attention to an unsettling side effect of digital life -- that electronic traces of our personal histories are being created in places and ways no one dreamed of a few years ago.