Yahoo, Inc. (YHOO) is trading higher in after hours trading today after posting earnings in line with analyst estimates.

Going into this afternoon's earnings report, Wall Street had been expecting to see the company show earnings of 11 cents per share, which Yahoo was able to match.

A big player in the tech sector is ready to report today. Google (GOOG) will publish Q4 results later this afternoon. Traders and investors alike get super excited when the search behemoth tells the world how it's doing.

I think the company will show that it's doing quite well. According to Earnings.com, expectations peg the per-share profit at $6.43. If that number is hit, then the growth rate will be a solid 26% (last year at this time, Google made $5.10 per share). Of course, most people aren't interested in hitting the projected stat, they want management to rise above it and demonstrate true earnings power.

Have you ever gone to a website and kicked the tires? Well, uTest, a Boston-based startup, pulled 600 software professionals together from 20 countries to do exactly that.

The company, which has a bench of 21,000 professional testers from 159 countries, wanted to see which of the three major retail websites -- those run by Amazon.com (AMZN), Walmart (WMT) and Target (TGT) -- is the least buggy. The winner: Amazon.

It's now official: Microsoft (MSFT) and Yahoo! (YHOO) are in cahoots to take on search engine giant Google (GOOG). The new search partnership inked by the two companies still needs to secure regulatory approval, but the talks that began in late July are merely a step away from reality now.

Microsoft and Yahoo! expect to pass this final step early next year. If this happens, the muscle behind Yahoo! search will be Microsoft's Bing search engine.

The newspaper industry continues to blame Google (GOOG) for its woes, and Google continues to claim its innocence. The search engine giant's CEO, Eric Schmidt, says that his company could actually help the newspaper industry survive the shift from print to digital ... a shift that's been more than a decade in the making, he was kind enough not to note.

According to Schmidt, publishers need to dig into the online environment and find new ways to generate revenue. "With dwindling revenue and diminished resources," he wrote in an op-ed piece published in News Corp's (NWS) Wall Street Journal, "frustrated newspaper executives are looking for someone to blame."

Google (GOOG) just picked up another promising startup in its effort to gain some ground in the online visual advertising market. Teracent, which was formed three years ago, is becoming part of the search engine giant.

Yahoo! (YHOO) currently leads the market in display advertising sales, and Google has been trying push into the space. Last year, this led to its acquisition of online ad service DoubleClick, but that was a first step rather than a total solution to Google's display ad ambitions.

Yahoo! (YHOO) is the latest company that wants to optimize its search results for Twitter. This follows moves by Microsoft (MSFT) and Google (GOOG) to integrate Twitter data into their search results. Unlike its competitors, however, Yahoo! wants to do this without spending a dime (well, without giving a dime to the hot new social media platform).

Twitter's microblogging service has become famous not only for its rapid growth but also because it's found no way to turn it into revenue. Its recent discussions with Microsoft and Google demonstrated that Twitter can indeed bring in some cash -- by licensing its data for use in fine-tuning search engines. With two of the top search engines now optimizing for Twitter, it was only a matter of time before Yahoo! would rush to join the party.

Unless you already have a major foothold in the search engine market – or an amazing, disruptive technology that can make the world take notice – there isn't much point in staying. Competing with Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) is hard enough, even when you're Yahoo (NASDAQ: YHOO) or Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) ... and, apparently, when you're IAC/InterActive Corp (NASDAQ: IACI). Barry Diller is ready to give up Jeeves, but only if asked nicely.

Diller's presence in the search space is Ask.com, ranked #4 behind Google, Yahoo and Microsoft's Bing. With a substantial gap between first and second, fourth barely registers at all. Ask.com has only a 2% U.S. market share, according to Hitwise, more than 60 percentage points behind the industry leader.

Sergey Brin claims that Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) didn't try to buy Twitter. The co-founder of the search engine giant made a surprise appearance at Web 2.0 Thursday, where organizer John Battelle asked point blank if he'd made a move for the popular microblogging website.

Of course, Brin revealed his fluency in corporate speak, continuing, "But if companies approach us we definitely consider any opportunities to buy," according to Reuters. A denial doesn't always mean a denial, especially if there were agreements to keep negotiations confidential.

It's tough to take on Google (NASDAQ: GOOG). The search engine behemoth owns 65% of the U.S. search market and has a commanding brand presence. Yet, the software maker up the coast isn't known to give up easily. Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) has cut a deal with microblogging site Twitter that should give it an edge in the battle to harness data and make it easier to find. A new deal will feed all those tweets into Bing, the Microsoft search engine.

Twitter is giving Microsoft full access to its data, in a deal announced Wednesday. Bing will provide search functionality for Twitter that you won't find in Google, which seems to have been outbid for the rights to the "tweet-stream." Under the deal, Bing will be able to index and display the tweets almost immediately as they are posted.

The number two search engine in the United States turned in a fantastic third quarter, far ahead of expectations. Cost-cutting, layoffs and business divestitures led to a surge in Yahoo's (NASDAQ: YHOO) profits and a 4.8% increase in share price in extended trading on Tuesday evening. Net income more than tripled to $186.1 million (13 cents per share) from the third quarter of 2008's result of $54.3 million (4 cents a share). Sales (exclusive of fees passed to partner sites) reached $1.13 billion, slightly above the $1.12 billion expected by analysts, according to a Bloomberg survey.

With the advertising market in rough shape and competition from Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) continually rising, Yahoo refocused on its core properties: the home page, messaging and mobile services. The company trimmed what it didn't need, which is why it was able to boost its earnings even with a decline in revenue. Increased ad revenue from auto manufacturers, travel companies and consumer product manufacturers also helped.

Yahoo's chief financial officer, Timothy Morse, says that the company's markets are "starting to stabilize." Of course, Yahoo itself must be doing something right: its share price is up 41% this year.

Modest goals don't seem to be on the agenda for Facebook. Sheryl Sandberg, the company's chief operating officer, is shooting for Google (NASDAQ: GOOG). The social networking company seeks its ad market as rivaling (or even surpassing) Google's search ad market in size. Facebook says it's on target to bring in $500 million in revenue this year (Sandberg didn't confirm it, though).

With its 300 million users, Sandberg has been trying to convince the world that her company has a solid business model in place. The perception that eyeballs don't necessarily equal dollars, born of the internet boom a decade ago, isn't necessarily true any more, as demonstrated by Google's ability to monetize search (and hit record profits) has demonstrated. For the third quarter of 2009, the search engine giant raked in net revenue of $4.38 billion.

Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) isn't planning to acquire its way into the search engine market. The company's CEO, Steve Ballmer, told Reuters that the company would invest in marketing and hopefully complete a partnership with Yahoo! (NASDAQ: YHOO) that is currently involved in a regulatory review. The goal, of course, is to provide at least meaningful competition to search giant and dominant market player Google (NASDAQ: GOOG).

Expect growth to slow a bit for Microsoft, Ballmer says, as a result of global economic developments. In order to cope with this -- and gear up for a potential battle with Google -- the company has frozen its R&D budget of $9.5 billion, the largest in the industry. With that and a $31.4 billion cash and cash equivalent position, Microsoft certainly has the resources to do battle.

Some people join wine-of-the-month clubs. There are plenty of other programs out there, too, where your credit card is hit every month, and your purchase is sent to you directly. If only such programs were available for Google (NASDAQ: GOOG). . . .

The company's CEO, Eric Schmidt, said Wednesday that Google plans to pick up a small company a month as a way to get its acquisition head back in the game. With the worst of the recession behind us, Google believes, this is a great way to get moving.

When it come to search engines, Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) still rules the roost, but Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) is hoping to capture as much of the pis as possible with its newly launched engine Bing.

Bing, which was launched in June of this year increased its share of online searches by 4.5% in August, capturing 9.3% of online search traffic. While this is good news for Microsoft, I doubt Google is too concerned right now, as it still holds a massive 64.6% share of the search market.