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Updated 3:33 p.m. PST with additional details from conference call, and at 4:40 p.m. with additional information.

Yahoo continued to ease its way back to financial respectability in its fourth quarter, beating estimates from both itself and Wall Street despite a decline in revenue.

In a press release Tuesday, Yahoo said it took in $1.73 billion in revenue during its fourth quarter, down 4 percent from the same quarter last year but up 10 percent from the third quarter. That exceeds the high point ($1.7 billion) of the guidance range Yahoo provided after the … Read more

Google on Friday began rolling out an improved version of its search result highlighting and rich-snippet features.

Both improvements bring more visibility to kinds of data that would otherwise require clicking through to the source site. Google now does much of that work for users by bringing relevant, formatted data directly to its search results pages.

Between the two improvements, the highlighting one is the most interesting. It now highlights what Google calls "answers" within page summaries. These are matches to a user's query, so if a user looks up something like a math problem, or a … Read more

Several weeks ago I posted a tip about discovering Spotlight searches on your iPhone or iPod Touch. The tip this week will show you how to customize the arrangement of your search results. You can decide to list application, contact, music, etc., search results in first, last, or anywhere in between order.

1. Launch the Settings app 2. Tap General 3. Tap Home 4. Tap Search Results

Initially your search results will be set up like this:

Now you can customize the order of your search results by performing these tasks while the screen above is displayed:

At the beginning of 2009, we made a whole bunch of predictions about the next year in the technology space. Turns out, we are really bad at predicting things.

Tom Merritt’s 2009 predictions: One mass media company will push out an Internet-only or Internet-primary hit (webisode). GPS will slowly disappear (except in-dash, Standalone GPS merge into phones). Some sort of big, public security breach that will cause the change of fundamental internet protocol. Android will outsell iPhone. Yahoo will finally be … Read more

Happy Harvester allows you to extract data from Web pages for use in other programs. There are two primary views: Source Preview and Browser Preview. Type a URL into the Base URL window, and the Source Preview shows the code for the Web page; the Browser Preview shows how the Web page displays in a browser.

Happy Harvester's interface is basic but functional. There's a useful Help file that explains how to use the program's main features and extras. The documentation touts the program's ability to pull source code from Web pages that you can then … Read more

Twitter-centric photo sharing service Yfrog released its top 10 searches of 2009 on Monday, and the results are not all that shocking; It appears most of its users are hunting for tween-heartthrob vampires, and/or famous singers. Below is the full list. I've linked each query with a search on Yfrog:

1. New Moon / Twilight 2. Jonas Brothers 3. Tiger Woods 4. Michael Jackson 5. Halloween / costume 6. iPhone 7. Adam Lambert 8. Kanye West / RIP Kanye West 9. Iran election 10. Miley Cyrus

To put this in perspective, Yfrog's list shares only the terms "new moon&… Read more

Google's new search results page brings more search options to the fore amid brighter colors that nod at recent changes made by its rivals.

Small groups of Google searchers over the past week or so have seen the new design as the company tests the new user interface, but not everybody was able to gain access to the interface. On Wednesday, Gizmodo published some tips on how to force Google into serving the new pages, and therefore we can bring you some screen shots of the new look and feel for Google search.

The first thing you'll probably … Read more

The next time you search Google for life expectancies or number of Internet users in the U.S., you'll find the specific figures plus an interactive chart letting you compare the U.S. with other countries.

Since Wednesday, Google has been tapping into data from the World Bank to provide key details and interactive charts on specific topics along with its own search results. The goal is to better help you search for and compare certain types of public data.

The World Bank is providing Google with facts and figures on 17 key indicators, including population growth, fertility rate, gross national product, and energy use.

Enter one of the 17 indicators into a Google search. You can phrase it as the specific indicator, for example, "population world," or type it as a natural question: "What is the population of the world?"

At the top of the search results, you'll find a thumbnail chart along with the latest statistics. (According to the World Bank, 72.4 percent of the U.S. population is on the Internet as of 2008.) Click on the chart or accompanying link, and up pops a larger interactive graph where you can visually compare the U.S. with other countries by clicking on their check boxes.

You can embed the chart's HTML in your own blog or Web page and opt for the data to be updated automatically anytime the World Bank's information changes. Finally, a link for more info brings you directly to the World Bank's Web site where you can dig further into the results of your search.

This latest partnership with World Bank is part of Google's effort to offer data beyond that which it can grab from your average Web page. Back in April, the search giant started integrating stats and charts from the U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

But the World Bank is the first source to provide global data for Google. The World Bank's figures come from its World Development Indicators (WDI), a collection of data derived from its own research and that of 30 other sources. The global data includes statistics on social, financial, and environmental areas encompassing more than 100 different countries.… Read more

Updated 1:40 p.m. PDT with additional details from the release, and throughout at 3:45 p.m. PDT following the earnings call.

Yahoo's cost-cutting moves this year are starting to show up in the bottom line, as the company's third-quarter profit exceeded analyst expectations by a wide margin.

Revenue is still declining at Yahoo, which recorded $1.6 billion in revenue, down 12 percent from last year. Excluding traffic acquisition costs paid to partners, revenue was $1.1 billion, in line with analyst estimates.

But following several rounds of layoffs and belt-tightening, Yahoo's net income … Read more