Yahoo Inc’s head of North American revenue and market development is leaving the company to join private online content start-up Demand Media, becoming the latest executive to depart the Web giant’s ranks.

Demand Media said Joanne Bradford will join the company as its first chief revenue officer to oversee advertising sales and the company’s recently launched online content services business.

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With shrinking audiences, deep layoffs and two management shake-ups, MySpace, the one-time leader in Internet social networking, has had a rocky year.

Mike Jones, who took over as co-president last month with Jason Hirschhorn, said that even within MySpace some employees have lost the will to keep fighting.

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WASHINGTON – A Google Inc. executive said Tuesday that the company is still considering its next step in China – seven weeks after it pledged to stop censoring search results there and threatened to pull out of the country altogether.

Google Vice President and Deputy General Counsel Nicole Wong told the Senate Judiciary Committee that the company is continuing to investigate a hacking attack that emanated from China and attempts to snoop on dissidents’ e-mail.

Since disclosing the incident in January, Google has called on the Chinese government to stop requiring it to remove links to Web sites that the government deems subversive or offensive. The company is in talks with Chinese officials to try to reach an agreement that would allow it to continue to do business there.

“The attack on our corporate infrastructure and the surveillance it uncovered – as well as attempts over the past year to limit free speech on the Web even further – led us to conclude that we are no longer willing to censor our search results in China and we are currently reviewing our options,” Wong said.

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Xerox Corp has sued Google Inc and Yahoo Inc, accusing them of infringing the document management company’s patents related to Internet search. In a lawsuit filed last Friday in the U.S. District Court in Delaware, Xerox said Google’s Web-based services such as Google Maps, YouTube and AdSense advertising software, as well as Web tools including Yahoo Shopping, infringe patents granted as far back as 2001.

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Yahoo Inc plans to integrate Twitter into its collection of websites, as the company seeks to enhance the appeal of its online properties with popular social networking features.

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Microsoft Corp’s assault on search engine leader Google Inc took a major step forward on Thursday as U.S. and European regulators cleared the software company’s search partnership with Yahoo Inc.

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Microsoft won unconditional European Union approval on Thursday for its planned search deal with Yahoo Inc to challenge market leader Google.

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SUNNYVALE, Calif – Yahoo Inc executives defended the company’s commitment to Internet search on Wednesday, vowing to reverse the erosion of the company’s market share and to fix the “misconception” that the company has given up on the business it helped create.

Speaking at Yahoo’s Sunnyvale, Calif., headquarters on Wednesday, a string of Yahoo executives took the stage to provide a peek at innovations that Yahoo said will distinguish its product after it completes a deal to let Microsoft Corp handle the back-end technology that powers its Internet search service.

“We have not been sitting on our backside doing nothing. We just have not been talking about it,” said Shashi Seth, Yahoo’s new Senior Vice President of Search, who joined the company last month.

“We are doing a lot to continue to invest in that space, continue to maintain our market share and grow the market share,” he said.

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Changes that Google Inc and the Authors Guild made to an ambitious plan to create a massive online library were inadequate because they fail to address antitrust and copyright concerns, the U.S. Justice Department said on Thursday.

Google’s plan to put millions of books online has been praised for expanding access to books but has also been vociferously criticized on antitrust and copyright grounds.

The deal was amended last year after the Justice Department recommended that the original settlement be rejected but more changes were needed, a Justice Department official said on Thursday, on background.

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