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SAN FRANCISCO - Yahoo Inc. is surrendering some of its advertising space to Internet search leader Google Inc. in an unusual test that appears designed to frustrate Yahoo’s unsolicited suitor, Microsoft Corp.

The two-week experiment announced Wednesday will allow Google to show ads tied to about 3 percent of the queries made in the United States through Yahoo’s search engine — the Internet’s second largest after Google’s.

Yahoo will still use its own technology — acquired and developed at cost of more than $2 billion — to place ads next to the other search results on its Web site. The Sunnyvale-based company also will continue to distribute search ads to its own partners.

Together, Google and Yahoo control more than 80 percent of the U.S. search market, making it highly unlikely that antitrust regulators would allow the Silicon Valley rivals to form a long-term advertising alliance, analysts said.

A broader relationship between Yahoo and Google also would face intense political scrutiny, said Sen. Herb Kohl, D-Wisconsin, who chairs a committee overseeing antitrust issues.

By flirting with Google, Yahoo is trying to signal it has other options besides succumbing to Microsoft, said Standard and Poor’s equity analyst Scott Kessler. But Kessler doubts most investors will take the Google alternative seriously, given the antitrust obstacles.

“It doesn’t make a lot of sense for Yahoo to make an announcement like this when everyone knows a long-term relationship (with Google) can’t happen,” Kessler said. “It strikes me as somewhat desperate.”

Investors weren’t impressed with Yahoo’s latest maneuver. Yahoo shares dipped three cents in extended trading after gaining seven cents to finish the regular session at $27.77.

Yahoo’s dalliance with Google makes a friendly deal with Microsoft less likely and raises the odds that Microsoft will lower its bid, Kessler said.

Microsoft has said that if things can’t be worked out amicably, it is prepared to oust Yahoo’s 10-member board in a proxy contest that could prolong the drama into the summer.

If the Google tests were to begin immediately, they would be completed shortly before the April 26 deadline Microsoft has set for accepting its bid.

Yahoo didn’t specify when the trial run would begin, but said the test doesn’t mean it will join the thousands of other Web sites that rely on Google to place text-based advertising links next to search requests or their other content.

Google’s partnerships generated $5.8 billion in ad spending last year, with nearly $5 billion of that going to the Web sites participating in the network.

Drawing upon Google’s moneymaking prowess theoretically would help Yahoo bounce back from a two-year streak of declining profits that opened the door for Microsoft’s takeover bid, which was initially valued at $44.6 billion, or $31 per share.

Google reportedly approached Yahoo about a possible business relationship shortly after Microsoft announced its bid Feb. 1. Since then, Yahoo also has discussed deals with News Corp.’s popular online hangout, MySpace.Com, and with Time Warner Inc.’s fallen Internet star, AOL. Those talks so far haven’t panned out.

Yahoo maintains it is worth more than $45 billion, a point that it reinforced in a letter sent to Microsoft Chief ExecutiveSteve Ballmer early this week. Before the Microsoft bid, Yahoo’s market value had sunk to roughly $27 billion, or $19.18 per share.

Microsoft recently threatened to lower the bid unless Yahoo capitulates by April 26. As it stands, the value of Microsoft’s offer has declined to about $42 billion because it wants to pay for half the purchase with its own stock, which has tumbled in the past two months.

In a statement Wednesday, Microsoft reiterated its bid is fair and pointed out the antitrust problems likely to prevent Google and Yahoo from working together.

Google and Yahoo together control about 81 percent of the U.S. search market, according to the most recent data from comScore Media Metrix.

“This would make the market far less competitive, in sharp contrast to our own proposal to acquire Yahoo,” said Brad Smith, Microsoft’s general counsel. “We will assess closely all of our options.”

A combination between Microsoft and Yahoo also would likely face an extensive regulatory review that could last anywhere from six months to a year, predicted Nate Eimer, a Chicago attorney specializing in antitrust law.

If Yahoo were sold to Microsoft, those two companies would have a combined 31 percent market share in the United States_ far behind Google’s 59 percent, comScore said.

San Francisco - Sun will discuss on Thursday a research and development project intended to provide a hosting platform for delivering Internet-based services.

Called Project Caroline, the technology is on the agenda of a Sun Labs Open House taking place at Sun offices in Menlo Park, Calif. The platform comprises a programmatically configurable pool of virtualized compute, storage, and networking resources, according to Sun.

The Project Caroline Web page states that the project is designed to serve an emerging market of small and medium-sized SaaS providers.

“Anticipating needs driven by new SaaS business models and processes, Project Caroline helps SaaS providers develop services rapidly using high-level programming languages like the Java programming language, Ruby, Python, and Perl to update in-production services frequently and to automatically flex their use of platform resources to match changing runtime demands,” the Web page states.

Services can programmatically allocate, monitor, and control virtualized compute, storage, and networking resources via Project Caroline. Interfaces are featured for managing platform resources.

Developers can build services that update and flex platform resources usage. Project Caroline resources are exposed via high-level abstractions, including virtual machines, networks, and network-accessible file systems and databases. A horizontally scaled pool of distributed resources is presented as a single system to provide developers with a unified platform for allocating and controlling resources.

Also on the Open House agenda are OMS, pertaining to a royalty-free media system; Project Live*, approaching software distribution and configuration by combining the firmware model with customization; and the Lively Kernel project for Web programming.

Other agenda items include: Project Wonderland, an open-source toolkit for building 3D virtual worlds for business and education collaboration; Project Darkstar, which is a gaming server; and Project MiRTLE (Mixed Reality Teaching and Learning Environment).

WASHINGTON - Sen. Joe Lieberman’s re-election campaign caused its own Web site to crash on the eve of the August 2006 Connecticut primary, federal investigators have found — not supporters of Democratic challenger Ned Lamont, whom Lieberman implied were responsible.

“In short, the server that hosted the joe2006.com Web site failed because it was overutilized and misconfigured,” according to an Oct. 25, 2006, e-mail included in FBI documents obtained Wednesday by The Associated Press. “There was no evidence of (an) attack.”

Once reported by the media, the accusations by Lieberman’s campaign helped overwhelm the Web site on primary day, too, the investigators said.

The Advocate of Stamford, Conn., first reported the results of the investigation.

Lamont said Wednesday that Lieberman, a Democratic-leaning independent, should apologize.

“Senator Lieberman’s campaign team accused an awful lot of good people of breaking the law on the eve of the primary, and they did it for political purposes,” Lamont told the AP in a telephone interview. “If he does the right thing, he’ll stand up and say, ‘I was wrong.”

Lieberman had implied that Lamont supporters had hacked the site, saying on primary day: “I’m concerned that our Web site is knocked out on the day of the primary, you’d assume it wasn’t any casual observer.”

His campaign asked the Justice Department to investigate; Lamont’s campaign denied involvement.

A Lieberman spokesman said Wednesday that the senator considered the case closed.

“We were told by our Web site administrator that there was clear evidence of an outside effort to disrupt our site, and that the administrator was so certain that the site had been attacked that he was willing to swear to it in a legal affidavit,” Dan Gerstein said.

After a surprising loss to Lamont, a political newcomer, in the primary, Lieberman defied Democratic leaders and ran as an independent in the general election. Top Democrats backed Lamont. Lieberman won re-election with support from the GOP, including praise from the White House and fundraising help from prominent Republicans such as New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

Lieberman was Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore’s running mate in 2000, and he unsuccessfully sought the Democratic presidential nomination in 2004.

Lieberman, who caucuses with Senate Democrats, has emerged as one of Republican presidential candidate John McCain’s strongest supporters.

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Associated Press writer Lara Jakes Jordan contributed to this report.

SAN FRANCISCO (AFP) - Yahoo, after years of battling Internet rival Google for online advertising, said Wednesday it would launch a limited test of Google's AdSense for Search service.

The announcement drew a sharp response from Microsoft, which warned that a Yahoo-Google partnership would cover some 90 percent of online advertising.

The test is expected to last up to two weeks and will be limited to no more than three percent of Yahoo search queries, Yahoo said in a statement. The program will deliver Google ads alongside Yahoo's own search results.

The Sunnyvale, California-based company said the test will apply only to traffic from yahoo.com in the US and will not include Yahoo's network of affiliate or premium publisher partners.

Yahoo said the testing does not necessarily mean it will “join the AdSense for Search program or that any further commercial relationship with Google will result.”

Yahoo is also fighting off a takeover bid from software giant Microsoft, arguing the offer undervalues the Internet firm.

Brad Smith, Microsoft's general counsel, said in a statement: “Any definitive agreement between Yahoo and Google would consolidate over 90 percent of the search advertising market in Google's hands.”

He added: “This would make the market far less competitive, in sharp contrast to our own proposal to acquire Yahoo. We will assess closely all of our options.”

Smith said Microsoft remains committed to a 44.6 billion dollar takeover offer for Yahoo.

“Our proposal remains the only alternative put forward that offers Yahoo shareholders full and fair value for their shares, gives every shareholder a vote on the future of the company, and enhances choice for content creators, advertisers, and consumers,” he said.

SAN FRANCISCO - Yahoo Inc. is turning over some of its advertising space to Internet search leader Google Inc. as part of a two-week test that could lead to a broader partnership.

The experiment the companies announced Wednesday will allow Google to place ads alongside about 3 percent of the queries made in the United States through Yahoo’s search engine — the Internet’s second largest after Google’s.

Sunnyvale-based Yahoo said it hasn’t decided to join the thousands of other Web sites that rely on Google to handle most of the text-based advertising that is tied to search requests or other online content.

Just the prospect of Yahoo working with the Internet’s most profitable company throws a new dynamic into its effort to extract a higher takeover bid from its unsolicited suitor, Microsoft Corp.

Yahoo insists it’s worth more than the initial bid of $44.6 billion, or $31 per share, that Microsoft made more than two months ago.

But Microsoft has held firm and threatened to lower the bid unless Yahoo accepts it by April 26.

SAN FRANCISCO - One of the latest sports watches from the Finnish company Suunto looks to remove a few variables from your golf game, or at least limit variables to things you can control.

While many golf electronics can keep score and estimate the distance to the pin, the Suunto G6 ($399) goes a step further by measuring the speed, tempo and rhythm of your swing.

This is vital information when you’re trying to hit the ball in the general direction of the hole, ostensibly the goal of golf. Now that I’ve tried out the G6, I have all the data I need to explain why I rarely break 90.

The silver-faced, black leather-strapped watch is easy on the eyes, though I felt it was bulky. I don’t normally wear a watch at all when I play, so it felt weird at first. It wasn’t so bad after a few early holes out on the course, however.

I choose traditional stroke play scoring over the match play and Stableford options, but it was nice to know the others were available.

Before heading to the course, I went online and downloaded its scorecard yardage and pars and then transferred that information into the watch using the Golf Manager software it comes with. That was a 15-minute task from beginning to end.

I began my golf day with a bogey on a 554-yard par 5, not a bad start for someone of my humble talents. I recorded that score into my watch and trudged on. A double-bogey on No. 2, another double on No. 3 and so on. I faithfully recorded each hole’s performance by depressing shiny silver buttons along the side of the watch. I recorded greens in regulation (4), putts per hole (averaged 2.06), everything except the total candy bar count.

When I got home I connected the watch to my laptop with the provided USB cable. The end that clips to the watch had three metal contacts to draw my data from it into the PC, a task that only took a few seconds. Then, in the “contents” pane of the Golf Manager application, my round of golf — all 95 strokes, including one lonely birdie — popped up.

This was a lot better than simple scoring stats. The watch recorded all of my swing tempo deviations and something called BSL, or backswing length.

The tempo deviation measured the duration of my swing, from club takeaway to ball contact. I averaged 1.25 seconds for all of my woods and irons, which is fairly smooth but I got a little quick when I was trying to chop out of the tall grass.

On the software chart, my good shots were represented by green squares and bad shots by red. The BSL turned out to be the important statistic for me to monitor and work on, as I would later find out.

At the driving range, my backswing length averaged 137 degrees on my good shots and 135 degrees on my bad ones. The key was that my average swing speed on those bad shots was two miles per hour slower than on the good shots.

The moral? When I get tired, I get bad. When I’m out of energy, I’m out of straight shots. I always had a feeling this was true, but the Suunto G6 confirmed it.

Thanks, I think.

A teaching pro could analyze your swing as well as the Suunto G6 in about 10 shots at the range and two holes on the course. You also could have your swing analyzed electronically at a pro shop.

But there’s something nice about the faceless feedback of Suunto’s golf watch. It doesn’t smirk or roll its eyes. It doesn’t sigh when you’re hungry and you shank a drive into the parking lot — into your own car door.

It just tells you why. Which is all you can hope for in a sport that can’t be conquered.

Yahoo will test displaying Google search ads in a small number of its search engine queries, a move likely to be interpreted as the latest in a series of Yahoo maneuvers to resist Microsoft's acquisition attempt.

The test, expected to last up to two weeks and be limited to up to 3 percent of Yahoo search queries in the U.S., is specifically for Google's AdSense for Search service. In other words, Yahoo would be acting as one of the Web publishers that carry pay-per-click text ads from Google. The ads will appear only in Yahoo.com.

Yahoo noted that “the testing does not necessarily mean that Yahoo will join the AdSense for Search program or that any further commercial relationship with Google will result.” Yahoo will not comment on the nature or timing of any potential relationship with Google.

Microsoft, whose acquisition offer was rejected by Yahoo's board in February, on Saturday said it will launch a proxy fight to attempt a hostile takeover if Yahoo doesn't agree to the acquisition in the next three weeks.

On Wednesday, Microsoft blasted the Google-Yahoo announcement, saying that a broad outsourcing deal would inevitably run into regulatory trouble because it would give Google more than 90 percent of the search advertising market.

“This would make the market far less competitive, in sharp contrast to our own proposal to acquire Yahoo. We will assess closely all of our options,” said Brad Smith, Microsoft's general counsel, in a statement.

“Our proposal remains the only alternative put forward that offers Yahoo shareholders full and fair value for their shares, gives every shareholder a vote on the future of the company, and enhances choice for content creators, advertisers, and consumers,” Smith said.

The announcement was first reported Wednesday afternoon by The Wall Street Journal, quoting anonymous sources. A broader agreement to outsource its search ads to Google could let Yahoo increase its cash flow, because Google ads generate more revenue per search, the Journal reported, referring to a consensus belief among financial analysts and Yahoo investors.

Since Feb. 1, when Microsoft made its US$44.6 billion offer, Yahoo's CEO Jerry Yang and the members of Yahoo's board have been reportedly trying to come up with an alternative deal. In addition to this Google plan, Yahoo has also held discussions with AOL, News Corp. and Disney, according to various reports in the past two months.

Should Yahoo enter into this deal with Google, it would be an acknowledgement that it has failed to attain its goals in search advertising, despite numerous efforts, including a significant upgrade of its system called Panama.

It's not clear what would happen to Yahoo's search marketing division, which runs the company's search advertising, in the event that Yahoo outsourced this business to Google. For Microsoft, it clearly wouldn't be palatable to have an agreement of this sort bundled in with its acquisition of Yahoo.

Google reiterated Yahoo's announcement, saying the deal is a limited test and doesn't necessarily mean that Yahoo will join the AdSense for Search service.