Baidu Inc made a forecast for its revenues for the third quarter, outpacing well ahead Wall Street's expectations as large advertisers increased spending. A Chinese top search engine has seen a significant growth of its profits as it has focused on online video and e-commerce over the past time. Seeing large flows of money from big advertising customers in the largest Internet market in the world Baidu posted $252.6 million net profit in the second quarter of 2011.

A Chinese search engine giant Baidu entered into an agreement with Microsoft to offer English-language search results to Baidu’s users. As a part of the partnership users will be able to enter English-language queries into Baidu’s search box to automatically activate Bing and Bing’s search results will be delivered to Baidu's Web pages, Baidu said in an emailed statement on Monday. Analysts said the tie-up would help Bing to gain greater access to China's more than 450 million Internet users and further dent Google's business in the country.

Google added new features to speed up web searches for mobile users. On Tuesday at a briefing in San Francisco Google demonstrated a new feature called Instant Pages which allows certain Web pages to pop-up in a user's Web browser nearly instantaneously, as well as a revamped version of its website for mobile devices. The Mountain View noted that traffic coming from mobile devices such as smartphones has increased by a factor of five during the past two years.

Search engines Bing, Google and Yahoo have partnered over a search optimization initiative in a project to support a common set of schemas for structured data markup on web pages, reports WebProNews. “Over the past two years, Bing has worked to improve the search experience to better reflect both the evolving Web and changing consumer habits,” said Bing representative. ”While this effort has a major ‘geek factor,’ it serves as quite a significant advancement for both the search industry and consumers,” he added.

Tuesday at the D9 conference organized by the blog AllThingsD, Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt told that the company tried unsuccessfully to team up with Facebook in a move to tap into the new market. Schmidt noted that social networking site Facebook had rebuffed its entreaties to do a deal, while acknowledging he had not pushed hard enough to address the rising threat posed by Facebook during his tenure as CEO. "Three years ago I wrote memos talking about this general problem. I knew that I had to do something and I failed to do it," Schmidt said.

A lawsuit has been filed with the US District Court in Manhattan by 8 New York residents. The plaintiffs are suing Baidu Inc and the People's Republic of China accusing the search engine of conspiring with the country's government to censor pro-democracy speech. In their filing plaintiffs claim that the Chinese company violates the U.S. Constitution and name not only Baidu by also the Chinese government as defendants. According to the plaintiffs’ lawyer it is the first case of its type.

Yahoo Inc. and Alibaba Group made a statement on Sunday that they are negotiating to resolve differences over the spin-off of Alibaba’s online payment business Alipay. A Chinese ecommerce giant Alibaba and major stockholders Yahoo and Softbank Corp. are in talks “to resolve the outstanding issues related to online payment system Alipay in a manner that serves the interests of all shareholders as soon as possible,” the statement said.

The US Senate is about to consider a new legislation aimed to decrease copyright piracy on the Internet by allowing copyright owners to get court orders requiring Internet service providers and search engines to stop sending traffic to websites accused of trafficking in infringing goods.

Google is about to announce a new online music service at its annual Google I/O developers conference in San Francisco, according to the Wall Street Journal report. The Journal cited the sources familiar with the situation saying the service will operate in a testing mode initially and not be available to the public at large. The Journal said Google has not sought licenses from the four major recorded-music companies and the new feature is likely to include a system that functions much like a remote hard drive.

Social networking company Facebook and search engine giant Google are considering a joint-venture with Skype after the latter delayed its initial public offering, two sources with direct knowledge of the discussions told Reuters. It was reported that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been involved in internal discussions about buying Skype, according to one of the sources. Meantime, the other source said that Facebook had reached out to the Luxembourg-based company about forming a joint venture.

At RIM's BlackBerry World conference this week Steve Ballmer, a CEO of Microsoft, announced the partnership with Research in Motion. Now Microsoft’s Bing becomes default search engine and maps provider for RIM’s smartphones as well as Playbook tablet. "We're going to invest uniquely into the BlackBerry platform," Ballmer said according to bloggers covering the event. "Bing will become the default search provider in the browser and maps" on BlackBerry devices.

Microsoft has revamped the Shopping section of its Bing search engine having added among other things the ability to link to Facebook accounts. Now with the pairing to Facebook users can stay reminded of friends' birthdays, as well as share their shopping lists with them. Besides, Microsoft also redesigned Shopping home page and now it gives more prominent placement to top search queries, popular products and relevant articles.

According to the reports by Chinese official news agency Xinhua, Culture Ministry of China will punish Baidu for allowing illegal music downloads. An official said that the government will punish 14 websites including Baidu, a top search engine in China, for continued illegal music downloads in spite of many warnings not to do it. Baidu could not be immediately reached for comment.  

While AOL, Apple and Yahoo suffered losses of more than 1.00% in the stocks markets, Baidu’s stock jumped by a significant percentage on news that it is partnering with Facebook. Earlier it was reported that Chinese search engine Baidu entered a partnership with Facebook to create China-specific social network which greatly impacted the trend in the exchanges. Experts in the industry believe that the partnership if successful would bring a significant new stream of revenue for whatever parties share in the profits.

An antitrust investigation into Google’s dominance in the search market is being considered by the Federal Trade Commission, according to the Bloomberg report. However, before the FTC decides whether to launch such an investigation it needs to wait for the decision of the Justice Department that considers whether to challenge Google's planned $700 million purchase of airline ticketing software company, ITA Software Inc, Bloomberg said, citing the sources with the knowledge of the matter.