The software giant Microsoft has finally dropped the three month bid it held to buy the search giant and internet company Yahoo – in what has essentially comes down to the cost of the sale. The current chief executive of Microsoft (a certain Mr Steve Ballmer) rejected the offer with a formal letter to Yahoo CE Jerry Yang.

Apparently, Microsoft had raised the original share price offer from $44.6 billion US to $47.5 billion, about $33 per share and certainly enough to give the company the controlling stake required. However, this was not enough for Yahoo who were looking for more – perhaps it was a case of Microsoft trying to play given that the US is almost in recession, but Yahoo’s shares remain boyant and so they didn’t choose to sell.

Microsoft was hoping to cut a deal to be able to compete with Google, who currently holds the dominant position both for search and market share revenue from advertising (that naturally comes with the increased number of users) along with their exceptional Google Adword and Adsense programs, something that Yahoo has actually been recently experimenting with. This led some to believe that there may even be more integration of technologies in the future, for a market that is currently worth more than $42 billion.

For those of us who are regular web users, we’re no doubt sure of what Yahoo and Google’s technologies offer both in terms of benefits and limitations. Whether the features of Yahoo would have changed if Microsoft had of succeeded in the purchase remains to be seen, but I’m sure that Yahoo is going to continue to offer a viable alternative to Google without becoming a Microsoft company.

Yahoo has recently announced that it is adopting some of the key standards of ‘semantic web’ search functionality. This technology is seen as the next step for the world wide web as it involved a much greater understanding of the data placed online by the search engines and thus providing end-users more of what they want – relevant content.

Yahoo has stated that it will start now to include some semantic web identifiers when indexing the web for their search engine users. This could well mean that there’s a big boost (and an uptake) for the technology that has previously been slow on the uptake. Of course, if Yahoo were to suddenly do much better, perhaps Google would refine its’ own semantic technologies.

Google (for instance) at the moment identifies relevance of sites based on the links on a site as much as the text and content. Semantic web search and indexing on the other hand helps to apparently ‘capture the meaning of data on a page’ so that indexers and spiders can work out relevance to a particular topic rather than just guessing.

Of course, as mentioned, semantic web is new. Luckily however there are those who are taking it up – which means that tags are starting to appear that helps search engines work out exactly what they should be doing with the content and how it relates to other sites.

I’ve no doubt that this will be, along with a range of other technologies, part of the search engine and web technologies of the future. It does get me thinking though. If technology keeps advancing in this way, will it be the end user who is in fact the weak link in the chain?

I wonder this already when people ask ‘how can I find a telephone number’ for instance – there are so many sites that you can do this with they have a wealth of options. What it does show though is that along with the technology evolving, people’s understanding must develop hand in glove with it to make the most of the new abilities it provides.

If you live in the UK and you have an iPhone, you’re about to have a nice little treat added to the usual software functionality of your (probably) latest little gadget. The BBC is launching a version of their iPlayer software on the handheld as well as the iPod touch.

Both the iPhone and the iPod touch are able to stream shows from the normal iPlayer website (http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/) over wi-fi (or from a computer sending the signal). At the moment, the iPhone can’t stream BBC video over the cell network however.

Apparently, the reasoning behind choosing the iPhone was that it is a device that most readily supports high quality video programming – something that the BBC was concerned about in terms of output from the player.

The software itself is available in two versions – one that allows users to download and store to their PC, whilst the other is made for streaming. A version (sorely waited for by me as well as many others) will be hitting Virgin Media customers soon.

As always, this serves to highlight how much of a monopoly that Apple has on the market – as well as the quality of the product that they produce. It isn’t that often, after all, that the BBC jumps into bed with any other company.

A new proposal put forward by the government here in the UK could see people who log on then illegally download music and film may have their internet access cut. This would mean that ISP’s (Internet Service Providers) would be required to monitor actions by users and of course take action when a P2P style software operation is detected.

Currently, around six million of the UK population are estimated to be downloading software illegally, via a number of different means (which I won’t name here for obvious reasons). One of the reasons put forward by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport is that it is aimed to reduce piracy to bolster the UK’s creative industries.

Various Internet service providers such as Tiscali, Virgin and BT have already been in talks with the entertainment industry to voluntarily police online activity for acts of piracy but so far no agreement has been reached on the best way forward.

Of course, there are various difficulties in ensuring that someone is being prosecuted for the crime they have committed. In the case of piracy, if there is more than one computer in the household, or if someone has ‘piggybacked’ a connection, how can the authorities be sure that they have got the right person?

Of course, as ISP’s don’t actually host the content, one has to wonder how responsible they actually are for the activity that is taking place. That might seem like somewhat of a cop-out for the music industry et al, but that’s the way it is. Perhaps if download costs were lower (or more attractive in other ways) then less people would feel the need to download.