Ever wonder how popular Ubuntu is starting to become? Take a look at some interesting statistics when looking at search popularity. If one looks at the trend of the search volume associated with the keyword "linux" and compares it to the trend associated with the search for keyword "ubuntu" we start to see some interesting results.

In what looks like a last ditch effort to fend of Microsoft's bid Yahoo is close to announcing a deal that with Google that would carry search advertising from Google Inc. as part of a test that could lead to a broader partnership.

According to the WSJ Online it will be a two week test limited to no more than 3% of US traffic of Yahoo's Web search results. The test will allow the two sides to evaluate the revenue potential of a broader search ad outsourcing arrangement.

Does your business want to use gmail, or other google hosted web services but don't want the @gmail.com or google.com domain suffix. Well a useful service from google allows you to use your business domain for google hosted services.

Yahoo! has become the first big search portal to allow users to search the web with their mobile phone using only their voice. The service is called Yahoo! oneSearch. It is currently available for BlackBerry Curves, Pearls and 8800 series phones. No mention of the iPhone yet, but they do plan on supporting other vendors soon.

Some high profile employees seem to be itching to get out of Google. The image of Google being "a utopian place to work" as Craig Silverstein, director of technology, (and Employee #1 at the company) said in an interview with CNBC, seems to be waning.

Some recent announcements make it clear that the utopian atmosphere may be fading. Just within the last few months we've seen their vice president of engineering, Douglas Merrill, VP for global sales and operations, Sheryl Sandberg, and their CFO George Reyes step down. (see a more comprehensive list in Appendix A)

Anybody catch this yesterday? Gmail announced a new tool on March 31st that went live today.

If you login to your gmail account today you'll see "New Feature; GMail Custom Time".

The new feature allow you to to adjust the time of any email you send to the past. The email appears in the proper chronological order in your recipient's inbox.

According to google it works by "utilizing an e-flux capacitor" to resolve issues of causality (see Grandfather Paradox).

EyeOS is trying to redefine the operating system. It is an open source initiative that aims to create an operating system that is accessible over over the web from anywhere around the world. OuterVillage in its top five strategic technologies for 2008 suggested the need for "enhanced web platforms that deliver applications over the web reducing the need for stand-alone OS's". That is what EyeOS seems to want to deliver on.

Google seems to be impressing Linux users with some recent improvements to Wine it has sponsored last year. An email posted on a Wine mailing list by Dan Kegel, a software engineer at Google, went on to describe recent efforts and improvements Wine has made.

For those not familiar with Wine, it is an open source initiative that tries to enable Windows binary runtime support on different OS's. In short this will enable a user to run some native Windows applications on Linux (or other OS's).

Ever wonder how Google and Yahoo!