The latest news from the world of search engines and social media navigation.

Microsoft’s $8bn Skype deal shocks analysts
Guardian: Business experts question whether internet phone service Skype could be worth price after recording losses last year.

Google Bullies OEMs Over What Can And Can’t Appear On Android Devices
MobileCrunch: Based on a batch of documents released in the Skyhook/Google lawsuit, it seems that Google’s Andy Rubin is not only the boss of [smart phone operating system] Android, but the boss of just about everyone in the Android ecosystem…

In April of 2010, Motorola chose Skyhook’s location-based services over Google’s for a new line of Android phones. The decision was reversed in less than three months. The same story played out with Samsung, too.

Google launches Music Beta
Pandia: The new service lets you upload your music files to Google and listen to them anywhere.

Google says: “You can get to your personal music collection at home or on the go. Listen from the web or any enabled device with the Music app available from Android Market. Not online? No problem. The songs you’ve recently played will automatically be available offline.” So far it is invitations and US only. See also: techradar.

Google launches Chrome OS for “Chromebook” netbooks.
Pandia: Google has finally launched its Chrome OS for netbooks/small laptops. The idea is that you can use this OS on cheap netbooks for cloud/net/web based services mainly. The problem is, of course, that the tablets — and especially the iPad — has taken over significant parts of this market.

Still: If you really need a second computer with keyboard, this may be the right choice for surfing and web work. See also: Google on Chromebooks and ‘Six Reasons Why Chromebooks Are a Bad Idea’

Google News Goes Local On Mobile: Introduces ‘News Near You’
TechCrunch: Google has just made the quest to find relevant news a little easier by introducing a geolocation-enabled News Near You feature in its U.S. edition on mobile phones. See also Google Mobile Blog.

Google Updates Its Definitions Service, Makes It A Lot More Useful
TNW: Before, if you were to enter the term ‘define:ROFL’, the search engine would list a number of web definitions for that term via an unintuitive web page in list format. However, a recent update to the service now displays a single definition inline with search results for that particular term.

Coming This Summer: Fully Offline Gmail, Google Calendar, And Google Docs
TechCrunch: With the launch of Chromebooks, Google is aiming to strike right at the heart of Microsoft and the Windows stronghold. But they know that one big hold up remains before a browser-based OS can be everywhere: offline access….Google has internally been using offline versions of their three most popular apps for months now: Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Docs.

Blekko Tightens Privacy Options, Will Keep User Data Only 48 Hours
SE Land: Blekko, like other search engines, creates a record of visits that typically includes a searcher’s IP address, location, browser, language, the date and time of the visit and similar information. …

Blekko says it will delete that personal search information within 48 hours.”>Blekko, like other search engines, creates a record of visits that typically includes a searcher’s IP address, location, browser, language, the date and time of the visit and similar information. Beginning today, Blekko says it will delete that personal search information within 48 hours.

Yahoo Is Quietly Looking For Carol Bartz’s Replacement
Business Insider: The transfer of a valuable Alibaba subsidiary, Alipay, to another company is quickly developing into a big scandal, and it’s the type of event that can provide leverage for a shake up at the top of the company. See also BoomTown.

Music labels expect Apple’s ‘iCloud’ to be gold standard ahead of Google, Amazon
AppleInsider: Though Amazon and Google beat Apple to the punch by launching their own cloud-based music streaming services, record labels are reportedly hopeful that Apple’s rumored “iCloud,” backed by licensing deals, will be the better product.

Facebook Loses Much Face In Secret Smear On Google
TechCrunch: Facebook secretly hired a PR firm to plant negative stories about Google, says Dan Lyons in a jaw dropping story at the Daily Beast. See also: BBC.

The Most Complete Twitter Application List Available – 2011 Edition
socialmediatoday: Simple Web Based Clients and Twitter Viewing Tools, Directory And Top User Search Tools, Track The Latest Trends and Tags, Segmentation and List Grouping Tools, Integrate Twitter with Files, Images and Videos and more.

A New Era Of Search
P Bradley: Is About The Answers, Not Just The Links. This is the title of, and link to a blog posting written by Shashi Seth, Senior VP of Search products at Yahoo!

To be honest, I think it’s really a teensy bit of an advertorial for the new Yahoo! Infinite Browse news option which is being launched in limited fashion at the moment.

Find Images with GazoPa
Beyond Search: I recently was introduced to GazoPa, an interesting new Web site and venture project from Hitachi, the inspire the next company. (I think I know what that means.) GazoPa is self-described as:a next generation similar image search engine that uses image features such as a color and a shape that are extracted from an image.

Microsoft confirms takeover of Skype
BBC: The deal will see Microsoft pay $8.5bn (£5.2bn) for Skype, making it Microsoft’s largest acquisition.

Google Images: What Is in Focus? Images or Security? Neither? Both?
Beyond Search: This weekend (May 7 and 8, 2011), I wanted a US government picture of earth taken from space… I bopped over to Google.com, clicked on Images… One caught my eye and I clicked it. The Google iFrame thing popped up. I clicked the image, saved a copy to a USB, hit the button on my KVM control, and worked some Photoshop / Gimp distortions. When I clicked back to the machine I use to look at Web sites, malware had taken over the machine.

Getting to Know Google Music Beta
Google Tutor: It is basically your music player in the cloud i.e completely online. You can upload songs and play them from anywhere in the world as long as you can connect to the internet. Up to 20,000 songs can be uploaded and there’s an app for Android available too. And that’s not it. There are goodies like playlist creator, instant mixes and much more to enhance your music listening experience.

Getting to Know a Few New Yahoos
Yodel: We recently posed a few questions to five of our newest faces who are representative of the amazing new people who join us here at Yahoo! every day. Here’s what they had to say.

Google is Testing New Search Result Pages, Opinions on Twitter differ
State of Search: The biggest change we can see from the screenshots going around Twitter (I haven’t spotted this in the wild myself yet) are the not-underlined results which we talked about earlier this week, much more “white” on the page and in some cases a dotted line between the results.

Rumor: Microsoft and Baidu to reach a search deal in China
liveside: Microsoft is close to announcing a partnership with Chinese search company Baidu, according to rumors in the Chinese press [...] It looks like Baidu is taking over the paid ads on Bing China, and Bing will provide the English language results for Baidu.

Google Animated Doodle Crashes Microsoft Browser
SE Watch: The Martha Graham tribute Doodle had problems… Seems Internet Explorer browsers had trouble rendering the script that created the animation and crashed or froze the browser.

4 Easy Image Optimization Tips for Google’s New Sort by Subject Option
SE Watch: If you’re looking for a picture of a certain bird, for example, and perhaps can’t remember the exact name, rather than scrolling through a combination of every type of bird and hoping you’ll find the one you’re looking for, Google has come up with an algorithm to sort birds into groups, whether it’s a parrot, eagle, duck, cardinal, and so on.

How Facebook Enables The Google Social Scraping It’s Upset About
Danny Sullivan: Facebook is recommending that its users make their status information, photos, posts, bios, favorite quotations, family and relationships public to the world. That includes…getting gobbled up by Google…In the end, it’s really kind of a stunning counterplay by Facebook.

Facebook has encouraged its users to share information with ‘everyone’ and actively published that information out onto the open internet. But because Google doesn’t want to play by Facebook’s rules to harvest this publicly published information, Facebook seems to want to cry foul. If Facebook were really concerned about this, at the very least, it would close down all the public search pages that it published into Google.

Zanran: New Search Engine That Unearths Data In Charts, Graphs & Tables
SE Land: For some queries, yes, Zanran is quite good. Almost scarily so, actually. But for other queries, it doesn’t yet measure up.

Google Threatens To Pull Street View From Switzerland; Will Launch In Poland
SE Land: Google has appealed a recent Swiss court decision that requires the company to guarantee 100% anonymity of faces and license plates in its Street View imagery, and says it may cut the service altogether in Switzerland if the ruling isn’t changed.