At first glance it seemed peculiar to local political observers that Democrat Tom Gallagher of Las Vegas would bother plastering banner ads touting his bid for a local congressional seat all over huge international websites such as Yahoo and CNN.com.

Microsoft on Tuesday began testing a new online news aggregation service, as part of its growing search rivalry with Google.

The latest version of a computer worm known as MyDoom disrupted the Google search site yesterday, the same day that the giant search engine announced a range for its share price in the much-anticipated public auction of its stock.

A fast-spreading computer worm that uses Web search sites to find victims made a broad assault on computers worldwide on Monday, causing problems for Google on the day it offered new details about its initial public offering, security experts said. The spread of the worm, a variant of an Internet attack called MyDoom, was blamed for sporadic outages and slowdowns on Google -- the most popular search engine -- as well as the search sites of Yahoo and AltaVista.

Question: When I try to print from a Web page, the ads also print, even in printer-friendly versions made available by some sites. This is most annoying and a great waste of time and paper. Is there a way to prevent this?

Microsoft is expected to take the wraps off the U.S. version of its MSN Newsbot today, marking the first time the company has used its own technology for a search site in its home country. The personalized news search, which launches as a beta test, will carry the MSNBC co-brand.

Google has set the long-awaited pricing range for its initial public offering, putting itself in line to raise as much as $3.3 billion, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday.

The promise of blogs, wikis and social networks to upend business as usual was on display at a high-powered conference Friday, when blogging software company Six Apart and evangelists from Microsoft co-chaired a panel detailing how these tools lead to better customer relationships.

Jeralyn Merritt had expected the news to come by e-mail rather than by snail mail, otherwise known as the United States Postal Service. But she had to rip, rather than click, to open the message informing her that she had received press credentials to cover the Democratic National Convention in Boston for her Internet Web log, or blog, at TalkLeft.com, where she offers a running commentary on political and criminal justice issues.

Tiny Tuvalu says a California company marketing the Pacific atoll's Internet domain name should pay the nation more.