MediaFile

The last time the world had a look at Twitter’s financial books, the company was targeting a meager $400,000 in revenue for the third quarter of 2009 and $4 million in the fourth quarter.

But that information was based on documents stolen from Twitter by a hacker and republished by the blog TechCrunch.

And it was before Twitter, the popular microblogging service that allows users to broadcast short, 140-character text messages across the Internet, had inked monumental deals with search giants Google and Microsoft.

The companies have kept mum about the financial terms of the deals, which will allow Tweets to appear in Google and Microsoft’s search results. But people familiar with the situation have told Reuters that money did change hands as a result of the deals and the blog AllThingsDigital previously reported that the search deals could be worth several million dollars apiece.

It turns out the search deals were worth $25 million, according to a report in Business Week on Monday. Google coughed up $15 million and Microsoft paid $10 million, the report said, citing two anonymous sources.

Google has yet to outline a gameplan to respond to the search world’s latest phenomenon: real time search.

But the Internet company clearly recognizes the importance of fresh search results.

On Thursday Google announced a new feature that lets Web surfers view only search results that have been indexed by its Web crawlers within the past hour.

It’s been a whirlwind couple of weeks at Yahoo, following the announcement to outsource Internet search technology to Microsoft and Yahoo stock’s subsequent 15 percent sell-off.

But the scene in Sunnyvale, California took a really odd turn on Friday when a staff memo left some Yahooligans wondering if the company planned to ditch the whole Internet thing altogether and get into the hospitality business.

In an 800-plus word memo, new Customer Advocacy EVP Jeff Russakow (pinch-hitting on the weekly memo for vacationing CEO Carol Bartz) held forth on the merits of all the hotels he’s stayed at.

By now, reporters and analysts who cover Yahoo have come to expect (and dare I say, delight in) CEO Carol Bartz’s colorful figures of speech and the occasional f-bomb drop during conference calls.

So Bartz’s tame delivery of Yahoo’s second-quarter earnings on Tuesday was a bit of a surprise. We know the 60-year-old is recovering from knee surgery, but was this even the same Bartz? The one who threatened to “dropkick to f–king Mars” employees who leak information to reporters? Or the one who asked the press to give Yahoo some “friggin’ breathing room” as the company figured out its next move? (Here’s a list of Bartz’s greatest hits).

By comparison, Tuesday afternoon was a bore, as Bartz stuck to a straight script. What’s more, she actually went so far as to compliment Bing, Microsoft’s new search engine that’s been pulling market share from competitors.

The battle to build the best Internet search engine gets plenty of press.

But with the economy in the doldrums, the Internet giants are also engaged in a heated race to improve their advertising offerings.

Yahoo and Google, the top two search sites in the US, are rolling out new features and services designed to grab a bigger slice of the advertising dollars that businesses spend to hawk their wares.

On Monday, Yahoo unveiled a self-serve display advertising service which allows companies to create their own online ads.

A minor panic spread across the Internet on Thursday after Google suffered what appeared to be a temporary service outage.

Reports cropped up throughout the Web that Google’s search engine, as well as popular services like Gmail and Google Analytics were running slowly or not at all in various parts of the world on Thursday morning.

And the incident caused ripples that slowed down other Web sites.

Because many online firms have woven javascript applications like Google Analytics – which provides analysis of a site’s traffic – into their Web sites, the Google outage impacted their own sites. Imad Mouline, the CTO of Web performance monitoring firm Gomez said his company noticed that certain sites took between two times and four times longer to load because of links to Google applications on Thursday morning.

Steve Ballmer knows how to pack a house.

Stanford University’s Memorial Hall was filled to its almost 2,000 capacity on Wednesday, as the voluble Microsoft CEO took the stage.

For the MBAs and engineering students who showed up, the event was a chance to get inspiration from the chief of one of the world’s most powerful corporations (and from someone who dropped out of Stanford Business School to join Microsoft). The press in attendance was mainly interested in comments Ballmer might make about Yahoo.

Indeed, with Microsoft and Yahoo reportedly in talks about a search partnership, speculation has risen in the blogosphere that Ballmer and Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz would have a sit-down during his swing through the Bay Area.

Yahoo’s island of strength in Japan looks as impregnable as ever.

In January, Yahoo increased the number of searches performed on its Japanese sites by 13 percent year-over-year, and continued to hold the top spot with a 51.3 percent share of searches conducted in Japan, according to market research firm comScore.

Google, which is the No.1 search firm in the U.S. by a long shot, saw its search share in Japan slip to 38.2 percent, from 39 percent in September. Total searches on Google sites in Japan increased 5 percent year-over-year in January.

Yahoo’s star property in the land of the rising sun is actually a 34 percent stake in a joint venture with Softbank. The Japanese partnership is one of several that Yahoo has forged overseas, such as its deal with China’s Alibaba Group.