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Think about setting aside issues related to results and advertising for a moment; should better privacy standards be enough to make any given search engine your favorite?  Yahoo no doubt wants everyone to consider this question very carefully, as a new move has made it the leader in terms of short data retention policies.

It has been quite the day for connecting. Not only did Facebook unleash Facebook Connect on the world, but Google has also now made Google Friend Connect available (in beta) as well.

Lately, it seems that a high number of Tweets has been causing problems for Twitter, making key features unavailable, and in a post to the Twitter Technology Blog, it was implied that more popular users like say, Robert Scoble, who have a lot of followers are the reason that the service has been failing.

Twitter's been the subject of embarrassing outages, spam concerns, and serious questions about its general usefulness.  None of this seems to matter much, though, as new data from Compete shows that the service is growing at an extremely impressive rate.

If they're evenly spaced, a launch will occur every 15 or so days.  If they're not, well, there's no telling.  But regardless of the specifics, Bill Wilson, AOL's executive vice president of programming, has promised that his company will launch 12 new sites in the next six months.

Google's Global Privacy Counsel Peter Fleischer appears to be a master of textual undercurrents (what the reader understands as "between the lines"), responding to Privacy International's recent condemnation of the company's privacy policies without mentioning the group itself.

After stirring up the search engine world with comments that MSN Search will be more relevant than Google in six months, Microsoft Europe president Neil Holloway backpedaled from his remarks.

New orders for durable goods in the United States went up 5.5% in May, which is the biggest jump since March of last year. Orders only went up 1.4% in April.