Amazon has launched its own payment system, which will become a direct competitor to products such as PayPal and Google Checkout.

The system of Amazon consists of two services: the first one is called Checkout by Amazon and provides a complete solution for e-business, allowing the seller to perform not only payments, but also use different tools for calculating taxes, improving logistics. The main functions of the payment system are very similar to the proposed by Google Checkout system two years ago.

Amazon Simple Pay is the second part of the system and focused on customers, allowing to use the Amazon account to pay for purchases on other sites.

Nevertheless, the likelihood of universality and compatibility of Simple Pay with one of the most popular online auction eBay remains very low - as it is known, the owner of PayPal blocked payments from Google Checkout, making PayPal the only accessible payment system.

According to Digital Trends

Yahoo! Inc. company reports that all proposed members of the company have been approved on the annual meeting of stockholders. Jerry Yang remained as CEO of Yahoo, while Carl Ichan became one of the members of the Board of Directors.

Roy Bostock, the head of Yahoo, announced the intention to keep to the established policies to strengthen the company. Last year events showed the need to review the management of the company in favor of its efficiency and development.

Carl Ichan took Robert Kotick's place, whose dismissal takes effect from the date of the annual meeting of the stockholders. In addition, the stockholders agreed to increase the number of members of the Board of Directors from 9 to 11 people. Two missing parties will be named until August 15, 2008.

Yahoo investor T. Boone Pickens sold all his shares after the disappointment in the company policy and termination of negotiations on the merger with Microsoft.

Pickens has invested in shares of Yahoo about 10 million in May of this year and agreed with Carl Icahn in question of acquiring the company for $ 47.5 billion. After Icahn and Yahoo have reached agreement and Icahn was offered a place in the management, the question of deal with Microsoft was finally resolved, which was the basis for the sale of full package.

Yahoo Shares rose in price by 3 cents and amounted to $ 20.15 per share, far below $ 33 per share proposed by Microsoft in May, reports Yahoo Finance.

Microsoft Company is conducting homepage re-design of Live Search. First of all the novelty of design will be addressed to background images, which would create "feeling of surprise" and ensure the best user experience.

Some images will be interactive and when putting cursor over them - additional information about the images will open. Background will be changed chaotically and users will not be bored over the same images doing different queries. In doing so, Microsoft assures that the selection of background will not depend on the user's search activity, writes Search Engine Journal

Google Web Search introduced a new feature, which should make search results more transparent and understandable to the average user.

"More details" link on the search results page will lead to the justification of search results. The first is the location, as determined by user's IP-address. To configure more precise coordinates, the user can enter them in his account which also improves the user's experience in such services as Google Maps and other Google products.

In addition, search results can be changed depending on the recent history of previous searches. History can provide valuable insights of the context to the search engine and provide more relevant results. History is saved for a short time and then erased.

Another function of result customization is Web history. If the user permits to save his web history, the results will be built taking into account the sites visited and previous search in Google. The user has full control over his own history and can suspend or edit it at any time.

The new feature does not change the principles of search, writes the official Google blog: More transparency in customized search results .