If you're looking for a microcosm of Microsoft's search problems, look no further than within the company's own walls. An unnamed Microsoft employee tells CNet's Ina Fried that at a company meeting about a year ago, he or she heard that four-fifths of Microsoft's own search traffic was going to Google. "We are still fighting that battle," the worker said. But perhaps this internal battle is one that Microsoft is winning: in February, Fried says that Live Search and Google had a roughly equal share among Microsoft's full-time U.S. workers (around 48% each), with little to no search traffic going …

A Skype buyback by its founders looks increasingly unlikely, The Wall Street Journal's Peter Lattman reports, as the bid put in for the Internet telephony company came in well below the price at which eBay was willing to sell. When founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, who sold out to eBay for $2.6 billion in 2005, approached the online auctioneer about repurchasing Skype, eBay encouraged them to make an offer. Zennstrom and Friis rounded up a group of private equity firms including KKR, Warburg Pincus, Providence and Elevation Partners to back the bid with up to $1 billion. EBay said …

In September, TechCrunch reported that eBay was trying to sell off StumbleUpon, the Web site recommendation service purchased by the online auctioneer for $75 million in 2007. That never happened, but yesterday, a group led by the company's original founders managed to buy back the firm to begin life anew as an independent startup. TechCrunch's MG Siegler has the scoop. StumbleUpon will now be led by co-founder Garrett Camp, who assumes the role of CEO. Geoff Smith, another of its founders, also returns in an unannounced role. Its investors include Sherpalo Ventures, Accel Partners and August Capital. David Hornik …

Google has become the "favorite bogeyman" of newsosaurs around the Web, says TechCrunch's Erick Schonfeld. Over the weekend, New York Times contributor Nicholas Carr called Google the most powerful middleman in news. In a blog post, he said: "When a middleman controls a market, the supplier has no real choice but to work with the middleman - even if the middleman makes it impossible for the supplier to make money." But how powerful is Google, really? If we're talking about Google News, Schonfeld says the search giant isn't as powerful as you might think. According to comScore, both Yahoo …

By combining its search business with that of Microsoft Corp., Yahoo could reap as much as $450 million in profit, analysts said. Last Friday, Kara Swisher reported in D: All Things Digital that Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz began talking about a possible partnership. In an interview with Bloomberg News, Sanford C. Bernstein analyst Jeffrey Lindsay said the partnership was likely to happen. "Yahoo is really the only independent option Microsoft has," he said. "Microsoft has to try to do a deal because it's all they've got left to try to stay in the online area." …

A few consumer packaged goods brands aim to prove that you can measure ROI with social media. These brands participated in a recent study with comScore, MySpace and Dunnhumbly that suggests that even minor spending on social networks by CPGs can result in offline sales. Ad Age notes that CPGs can't detect small five and six figure outlays used on social media sites using current tools for measuring ROI. To overcome this, MySpace teamed with comScore, a Web measurement firm, and Dunnhumbly, which runs loyalty programs for supermarket retailers, and cross-referenced the 60,000 people who overlap both panels, creating a …

Skype founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, who sold the company to eBay in 2005 for around $3 billion, are looking to buy the company back, The New York Times reported. Apparently, Zennstrom and Friis are now looking to raise cash to do so. When eBay initially bought the Internet telephony company, "everyone waited to find out about some ingenious integration of the two companies," says Read Write Web's Marshall Kirkpatrick, but none came. Despite tremendous growth, Skype failed to innovate inside the slower moving eBay, which was ultimately forced to take a write down of over $1 billion on …

This week, a Swedish court will decide the fate of the Pirate Bay, the Web site that provides easy access to copyrighted material like movies and music. Until last year, when it filed criminal charges against the four men who operate the file sharing directory, the Swedish government had taken little interest in regulating online piracy, which is rampant in the country. For their part, the defendants claim that they merely provided an index of content and didn't control what other people did with it. Both sides have now presented their case, and a ruling is due by Friday, The …