Microsoft and Yahoo today announced that, after months of courting and coyness, the two companies will join forces in the Web search arena to challenge Google's dominance.

Now comes the hard part—ensuring that the two veteran information-technology companies can make good on a deal that should deliver Microsoft's new Bing search engine a much larger audience while restoring relevance to Yahoo's fading star. The 10-year deal, which the companies hope to finalize early next year, calls for Yahoo to replace its own search engine technology with Bing, introduced early last month, and make its search sales force available to Microsoft to attract large advertisers.

In the market for yet another way to navigate cyberspace? Just days after physicist Stephan Wolfram took his Wolfram|Alpha "computational knowledge engine" live, word is that Microsoft next week will debut a revamped version of its flagging Live.com search engine, the No. 3 Web navigator behind Google and Yahoo.

Microsoft will take the wraps off of "Kumo"—the codename of its new, improved search engine—at the D: All Things Digital technology conference next week in Carlsbad, Calif., the Wall Street Journal reports. (Here's a low-res image of the new search engine, that CNET ran and reports was captured by someone who stumbled across it online while using Microsoft Live Search in the Internet Explorer 8 browser. It looks very different than the Live.com search results page pictured to the left.)

Rivals Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! have joined forces with other companies and academics to stop governments (most notably China) from suppressing freedom of expression and ordering them to betray their customers' privacy. The three software giants today announced creation of the Global Network Initiative designed to persuade oppressive governments to allow their citizens to freely express opinions, via the Web in particular, without fear of retribution.

Google announced on its blog yesterday that it's halving the amount of time it retains data on user searches. The move comes a year after the company said it would keep this info on file for 18 months before stripping out any identifying information about Google users (something they called "anonymizing" the server log data they collect). Under the new plan, Google will keep such data for nine months. It was "a difficult decision," the blog states, "because the routine server log data we collect has always been a critical ingredient" in efforts to enhance Google's search engine, secure data, fight fraud and reduce spam (Google says it analyzes log data for trends and anomalies that might suggest its software has been infected with viruses or to uncover new security threats).

Do you have an affinity for technology? Did you do well in civics class? Are you free on November 4? If you meet all of these criteria, then you might feel compelled to take a temporary job on Election Day this year as a volunteer election site worker or an electronic voting machine technician.

That's the message being sent out by groups concerned about the integrity of the upcoming presidential election as well as the e-voting technology some states will rely on to cast votes. Election watchdog Black Box Voting, based in Renton, Wash., this week issued a press release pointing out that voting machine vendors—including Election Systems & Software, Premier Election Solutions, Sequoia Voting Systems and Hart Intercivic—will hire and train thousands of technicians staffed around the country.