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The Federal Trade Commission announced Thursday that Google's controversial $3.1 billion merger proposal with DoubleClick can proceed, despite earlier complaints raised by competitors and privacy advocates. See full News.com story.

Federal Trade Commission regulators said Thursday that Google's controversial $3.1 billion merger proposal with DoubleClick can proceed, despite earlier complaints raised by competitors and privacy advocates.

FTC regulators have been reviewing the proposed merger for months for possible antitrust violations, after Google announced plans in April to acquire the online ad serving company.

"After carefully reviewing the evidence, we have concluded that Google's proposed acquisition of DoubleClick is unlikely to substantially lessen competition" in the online advertising space, the commissioners wrote in their majority statement.

The vote was 4-1, with Commissioner Pamela Jones Harbour issuing … Read more

Nobody wants to spend time scrolling through thousands of search results to find the page that contains the information they're looking for. In fact, few people bother looking beyond the first page of 10 results, choosing instead to recraft their search phrase and try again. But with the help of a few search operators, you can increase substantially the chances that you'll find what you're looking for on your first search try. (Note: not all of these work in every search engine.)

Restating the Obvious Operators I'll wager you know all about using the plus sign (+) … Read more

Jason Shellen, who was the founding product manager for Google Reader, is joining social network and blogging platform LiveJournal as vice president of product development.

Shellen will be based in San Francisco in new offices LiveJournal will be opening in 2008, according to the company. He arrived at Google in 2003 as part of the acquisition of Pyra Labs, the creators of Blogger, and left Google in August.

Update Dec. 20 with Google comment

A computer worm has been spreading on Google's big-in-Brazil Orkut social network, according to a report on the Sounds from the Dungeon blog.

The relatively harmless worm appears to use JavaScript and Flash code to create new scrapbook entries on profiles with a New Year's message in Portuguese before propagating to the victim's friends.

It may have infected as many as 400,000 users, according to a post on a blog called "c0d3w12."

According to the Packet Storm security site, a vulnerability affecting Orkut was discovered November 8 and … Read more

Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google will pay a combined $31.5 million to settle allegations they accepted money for illegal gambling ads, according to the Associated Press.

All three companies said they stopped accepting ads for gambling years ago. The agreement settles an investigation launched in 2000 and conducted by the U.S. Attorney's office, the IRS, and the FBI.

Microsoft is paying out the most at $21 million, Yahoo is paying $7.5 million, and Google's share is $3 million. Part of the payment will go to the International Center for Missing and Exploited Children and for public … Read more

At a Capitol Hill hearing in September, Microsoft's top lawyer skewered the proposed merger of Google and DoubleClick as a sure path to an online advertising monopoly.

"One company will become the overwhelming dominant gateway that connects the universe of online advertisers to the millions of websites that display ads," general counsel Brad Smith told a U.S. Senate antitrust panel in his prepared remarks.

Now Google is pointing to a new, $500 million ad deal between Redmond and Viacom on Wednesday as proof positive that there's plenty of competition in the online ad market--a not-so-thinly-veiled … Read more

Any jokes about Google becoming a self-aware, humanity-destroying robot got a little closer to fruition yesterday. Google Talk (download the desktop widget), Google's homemade Jabber-based chat client, is now host to 24 (and counting) new translation bots that will take whatever text you throw at it and convert it to the appropriate language. Each of the bots was built with an open protocol called XMPP that lets anyone build their own bots and share them on the Google Talk network--as long as you've got some place to host them.

The new bots become particularly useful if you invite … Read more

As part of a wide-ranging deal announced Wednesday, Microsoft has licensed TV and movie content from Viacom, which in turn will let Redmond serve up ads on its U.S. Web sites.

The arrangement means that Viacom will use Microsoft's Atlas technology to deliver ads to those sites. Microsoft acquired Atlas as part of its $6 billion Aquantive purchase. Additionally, Microsoft will have the exclusive right to market Viacom's unsold display advertising space.

Microsoft, meanwhile, will be able to put shows from MTV and Comedy Central and movies from Paramount Pictures onto various products, such as MSN and … Read more