In a blog post entitled "Competition Authorities and Search," Microsoft Vice President and Deputy General Counsel Dave Heiner said part of the motivation for Microsoft and Yahoo's search deal was "we are concerned about Google business practices that tend to lock in publishers and advertisers and make it harder for Microsoft to gain search volume."

The web is still waiting for the worldwide roll-out of Google's next-generation search infrastructure, the mysterious indexing system overhaul known as "Caffeine." A recent Wired profile of Google's search team indicates that Caffeine has already been deployed. But it seems the technology is still limited to a single data center, and though Google had planned to roll it out to other facilities after the New Year, this has yet to happen.

Google has added a pair of "experimental" APIs to its Chrome browser, including one for querying and modifying the user's browser history and one for accessing info involving Google's new-age process model.