Remember when I mentioned the Wall Street Journal wrote about Yahoo looking into downloadable music? Well, the other shoe dropped today as Yahoo announced they were purchasing Musicmatch, a music software and music download service company, for $160 million. The acquistion, according to Yahoo CEO Terry Semel, will vault the Internet portal further into the the digital music space:

"Yahoo! is committed to being a major player in digital music," said Terry Semel, chairman and chief executive officer, Yahoo! Inc. "This combination bolsters our strategy to capture the largest audience of consumers as they make the shift to digital music and supports Yahoo!'s goal to give consumers the greatest choice, control and flexibility in how they interact with their music. This acquisition is one of several product innovations and new initiatives in which Yahoo! will invest to build our music portfolio this year and in the future."

Musicmatch, as part of its services, has a music download service called Musicmatch on Demand which offers approximately 700,00 songs. This acquistion by Yahoo will immediately thrust them into battle in the digital music downloads space with the likes of Apple, Microsoft and Real.

Taking a page from Google's book, Microsoft rolled out the beta version of MSNBC Newsbot today, according to Internet Week. Newsbot, which uses a similar computer algorithim to Google News to cull news stories from 4,800 sources, goes one step further by allowing you to view recently read stories via a history link. It also suggests stories for reading which are selected based upon your previously read choices.

Microsoft unleashed a double whammy against Yahoo and Google today with the release of their revamped MSN Search as well as the announcement they were doing "preliminary alpha testing of next-generation search service."

According to Microsoft's press release, MSN Search received a face lift which provides easier navigation, a revised look on search results pages which separates regular results from sponsored ones, and direct access to other Microsoft information services like Encarta and MSN Money. MSN claims search results on their new service now have up to a 45 percent increased relevancy.

Despite the changes, MSN Search still has a long way to go to truly be a player. One of the primary reasons is that the back end of the service continues to be effectively powered by Overture, a Yahoo subsidiary.

Separately, Microsoft has temporarily posted a MSN Search Technology Preview of their "raw algorithmic search engine" to give people a chance to play with the company's upcoming search technology. Microsoft is seeking feedback on the relevancy of search results for their homegrown engine.

Web infrastructure company Akamai was hit by a denial-of-service attack this morning, according to News.com. The resulting domain name outage, which lasted sporadically for two hours, cut off access for most to Yahoo, Google, Microsoft and other prominent websites.

An Akamai spokesman said it noticed an attack against four unnamed "customers" that rendered their sites inaccessible. Akamai said that the strike against those customers in turn caused a failure of its own domain name server (DNS) system, which translates word-based URLs into numeric Web addresses to link surfers to company sites.

"We do know that attack was against four sites that happened to be Akamai customers," said company spokesman Jeff Young. "But I don't know if the intent was to go after Akamai or go after Web properties that happened to be customers of ours."

It looks like venerable portal Lycos (anybody still use this site???) may be up on the auction block, according to Cnet's News.com. Parent company Terra Lycos has hired Lehman Brothers, a bank, to explore selling their US based Internet unit. According to a buyer's document circulating,

"An acquisition of Lycos, one of the last available premier Internet search and content properties, represents an outstanding and unique value creation opportunity at a time when advertising budgets are increasing, paid online content is gaining broader acceptance and public markets are favorably rewarding consolidation in the rapidly growing search market," the document reads.

Could potential suitors include Yahoo, Google or MSN? If so, do they need the baggage a Lycos purchase would bring? Or, would this be a "buy and suck dry" purchase - taking any useful tech and website content they could get their hands on as they run for the door, turning off the lights behind them?

If anyone would best be suited to acquire Lycos and their associated network of sites (including MatchMaker, Tripod and Hotbot) it would be Google, in my opinion. It would give them a huge jump into the personalization services market, which they have already moved towards with products like Gmail.

Would love to hear people's thoughts on this one…

Those trying to figure out the multitude of IE toolbars (including Yahoo, MSN and Google) would do well to read a review AP Internet writer Anick Jesdanun did yesterday. In it, he talks about how toolbars offer much more than just searching these days. After reviewing 11 toolbars (Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL, Earthlink, Dogpile, Ask Jeeves, Altavista, Alexa and GuruNet) , he says most people should be fine using Yahoo or Google's because of the general run of features they offer.