Yahoo's top search advertising executive said widespread local search adoption by small businesses depends on the creation of simpler pricing models.

A brother and sister who sent unsolicited junk e-mail to millions of America Online customers were convicted Wednesday in America's first felony prosecution of distributors of spam.

Some online publishers have increased their use of paid search listings to draw readers to their Web sites. The online arms of The New York Times, Washington Post, National Public Radio and several other top media outlets are running search campaigns on Google and Yahoo. They hope to lure readers who increasingly turn to search engines as their starting points for navigating the Web.

Internet blogs touting what they said were exit polls showing Democratic challenger John Kerry ahead in early voting in the American presidential election sent U.S. stocks and the dollar lower on Tuesday.

America Online's advertising revenues rose 44 percent to $79 million in the third quarter, driven by search and its acquisition of Advertising.com. Meanwhile, subscriptions revenues declined 3 percent, by $52 million, according to AOL parent Time Warner's earnings report. "We are clearly participating more aggressively in the growing online ad market," said Dick Parsons, chairman and CEO of Time Warner. Parsons credited AOL ad revenues for helping boost growth in ad revenues for the company as a whole.

The blogosphere took center stage in yesterday's election as grass-roots political pundits sent information about exit polls, trends and rumors over the Internet ahead of TV networks and mainstream media - and sometimes the truth.

There's an emerging form of media out there, beamed from Jupiter and called a blog. This Jupiter isn't a planet. It's JupiterMedia, a seller of Internet research and related services. And blogs, short for Web logs, aren't alien e-mails. They're personal online journals where writers comment on just about anything.

In the remaining hours before the polls open Tuesday, partisans on both sides of the aisle are bringing the most charged political documentaries of the year to the internet, despite possible copyright hazards. Fahrenheit 9/11 and Stolen Honor are freely available for downloading in their entirety.

A torrent of negative spam aimed at President Bush and Sen. John Kerry has flooded the Internet the past few weeks in an attempt to influence fence-sitting voters. In many cases, it's working.

AOL has filed two lawsuits, while EarthLink and Yahoo! each filed a single lawsuit. The three Microsoft lawsuits allege that defendants spoofed the domains of all four ISPs and used open proxies to route the emails. The defendants allegedly sent millions of e-mail messages in violation of the Can-Spam law.