Just two days after floating rumors that Microsoft and Yahoo were once again back at the negotiating table, TechCrunch writer Michael Arrington is now saying that this latest Yahoo reorg, announced yesterday, "is clearly aimed at squashing any lingering hopes for a new Microsoft deal to emerge." Arrington's change of tune comes after speaking with Yahoo Chief Technology Officer Ari Balogh, who says, "the signal you should take from this is we believe most of that is over. We need to run this for the long term. While the board was considering the Microsoft deal, it would have been foolish …

"There may have been better times for a handoff," writes Bloomberg News on the day that Bill Gates finally hands Microsoft Corp. over to the sole leadership of CEO Steve Ballmer. Indeed, Microsoft's stock is down 22% this year, Windows is losing power amid the rise of Web-based computing services, and its Yahoo pursuit eventually landed in Google's favor, effectively ending the search wars. As Jane Snorek, analyst at Minneapolis-based First American Funds, says, Ballmer will now be left alone to bear the brunt of the scrutiny over Microsoft's failure to impress Wall Street. "The No. 1 judgment …

Many wonder what's gone so horribly wrong that once-mighty Yahoo's market cap is now languishing near the $29 billion mark. Well, GigaOm's Om Malik sums it up quite wonderfully with this quote from German writer Dietrich Bonhoeffer: "If you get on the wrong train, running down the aisle in the opposite direction really doesn't help." Yahoo, like Microsoft now, got an early case of Google envy. Luckily, Microsoft, unlike Yahoo, had a few established cash cows to fall back on. Instead of focusing on its core content and display advertising businesses, Yahoo invested heavily in search to compete with …

VentureBeat on Thursday reported that Microsoft had agreed to buy Powerset, a so-called "semantic search engine," for slightly more than $100 million. However, the report has yet to be corroborated. VentureBeat says an announcement isn't expected until next month. So what's "semantic search"? According to the VB report, the technology attempts to understand the full meaning of phrases you type in while searching, returning results based on a more comprehensive understanding of what you typed in the search box. By comparison, Google's search results are based on individual words, an approach that does little to understand the meaning of …

BoomTown writer Kara Swisher reports that Carl Icahn and his band of angry Yahoo shareholders are urging Microsoft to buy 33% of Yahoo, including the search unit that Microsoft so dearly covets, for $30-$32 per share. Previously, Microsoft had offered to buy 1/6 of Yahoo and all of search for $35. As Swisher says, such a move would effectively give Microsoft control over Yahoo. Apparently, Yahoo chairman Roy Bostock finally wised up to pressure from Icahn and the angry shareholders, who have seen their stock plummet from $30 per share at the start of the Microsoft …

Editor's note: We've changed the name of the publication cited, which was incorrect. Web audiences are splintering across untold numbers of long-tail sites, from social networks to blogs to obscure services, making it increasingly difficult for marketers to find large, targeted groups of individuals. The long tail has proven to be a tough nut for traffic measurement firms to crack because their audiences-while they may be finely targeted-are too small to count using panel based data. Enter Google, and its new AdPlanner service, which aims to turn the art of finding the right audience into a science. …

According to a new survey, 64% of 18- to 35-year-olds rely on digital communication for their election-related news because the Internet is the easiest way to access and share information. The survey, released by PR firm Waggener Edstrom Worldwide, also finds that 76% prefer online sources of information to traditional ones, because respondents claim that traditional news sources attempt to control and shape the news. The only good news for the traditional sector was that 38% of respondents had more confidence in its content, while 30% had confidence in Internet content. Just how bad were the survey results …