3D design software company Dassault Systèmes has acquired Netvibes, a website that allows the creation of personalized dashboards combining social network updates, news alerts and RSS feeds, the companies announced Thursday.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center has filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, asking a court to force the agency to take action against Google over planned changes in the company's collection of personal data.

Amid widespread concern about its new privacy policies, Google is now facing criticism over an offer to give users Amazon gift certificates if they open their Web movements to the company in a program called Screenwise.

As part of an ongoing effort to recover from a downward spiral, Yahoo said on Tuesday that four board members, including its chairman, will step down.

The U.S. Congress should scrap two controversial copyright enforcement bills and start over with attempts to target foreign websites accused of infringement and counterfeiting, more than 70 groups have said.

Google has agreed before a court in Delhi to remove religious and other content considered objectionable, though some other Internet firms are likely to appeal the court's decision, plaintiff Mufti Ajiaz Arshad Qasmi said on Monday.

Some critics have blamed Silicon Valley tech firms for the massive online protests last month against two controversial copyright bills. Other groups have trumpeted the grassroots nature of the protests.

The U.S. White House has declined to respond to a petition calling for authorities to investigate the head of the Motion Picture Association of America for bribery related to comments he made following successful online protests against two controversial copyright enforcement bills.

Google shook the search market last week with the launch of Instant, a new feature that lets the company's search engine refresh results on the fly as people type their queries.

Last month, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said during the company's earnings call that Google had implemented about 120 search quality improvements during the third quarter as it moves toward its ultimate goal: "We want to get to the perfect search engine."

Google very publicly called out Microsoft's Bing search engine -- claiming that it copies its search results from Google. The initial charge has been followed by a back and forth exchange of insults and accusations, but one thing that is sort of lost in the melodrama is that Google apparently considers Bing to be a serious threat.

Today's announcement that Google co-founder Larry Page would replace Eric Schmidt as the company's CEO was a surprise, but maybe it shouldn't have been. While the company's earnings are still stellar, Schmidt has made a series of embarrassing statements and the company has had some very public failures.

Searching for status updates is not Twitter's forte, so leave it to Google to make its own Realtime Search engine more powerful instead.

Google's decision to stop censoring search engine results in China, announced in a blog posting Monday, flies in the face of common wisdom when it comes to doing business in the country.

Microsoft's Bing search engine may still be a bit player in the lucrative online search business dominated by Google, but it's slowly and steadily gaining users.

Given undistinguished history of Microsoft's late and unlamented Live Search engine, the predecessor to Bing, it's easy to dismiss Redmond as a hapless also-ran in the search market. But given the vast sums of money and resources that Microsoft is investing in its fledging Google challenger, this could change in a hurry.

Google has unveiled Caffeine, a "next-generation architecture" for its Web search platform. The retooled search engine is said to be faster, more accurate, and more comprehensive than the current Google search setup.

Yahoo started out in 1994 as a ragtag site called "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web," named after founders Jerry Yang and David Filo who were at the time students at Stanford University.