The News Corporation has been giving new meaning to the term e-commerce: the company has been on an online buying spree, spending nearly $1.5 billion on three Internet companies in just the last seven weeks.

A design whiz aims to enhance the home page -- without fixing what ain't broke.

Properly optimized web sites can achieve top rankings in web search results. But when search engines change, should you follow suit? Even the experts disagree.

EBay Inc. is in talks to acquire Internet-telephone company Skype Technologies SA for between $2 billion and $3 billion, the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday. Citing people familiar with the matter, the newspaper said the deal would represent a dramatic shift in strategy for the world's largest online auction site.

Google Inc. and auto insurer GEICO have resolved a trademark infringement challenge filed by GEICO against Google over its online advertising practices, the auto insurer said on Wednesday. GEICO, the No. 4 U.S. auto insurer and a unit of investor Warren Buffet's Berkshire Hathaway Inc., said a suit filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia was "resolved to the mutual satisfaction of the parties."

News Corp has bought IGN Entertainment, a website publisher, for $650m, as part of the US media conglomerate's plan to spend up to $2bn on internet acquisitions.

If you are a company that has been banned from Google for allegedly rigging search engine results on behalf of your clients, and people throughout the industry are talking smack about you, what do you do? You retain a lawyer and sue, claiming theft of trade secrets and libel.

About.com is among the many Web properties that traditional media companies have snapped up this year as they scramble to cash in on the second big Internet advertising boom. While Internet ads claim a small slice of the overall ad pie -- generating not quite $10 billion in the United States last year, less than 5 percent of all ad revenue -- the online dollars grew more than 30 percent, much faster than off-line. In response, traditional media companies have been making some startling moves.

The young Google guys have toppled the old-line media moguls. Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page for the first time top the list of Vanity Fair's New Establishment, the magazine's annual powerbroker ranking, which hits newsstands today.

Asian governments have expressed security concerns about easy access to detailed satellite images on the Internet, such as those used by rescuers in New Orleans, saying the technology could endanger sensitive sites. Thailand and South Korea were the most vocal critics of the search tool on Wednesday, rounding on providers like U.S.-based Google Inc, which runs the Web site www.earth.google.com, and demanding action from Washington.