A handful of social networking sites including Twitter, Facebook and LiveJournal suffered brief outages early Thursday morning after being hit by a denial-of-service attack, according to the site's operators.

Twitter initially posted on its site blog that the "Site is Down" and that it is "determining the cause and will provide an update shortly".

Organizations can Achieve Breakthrough Performance and Scalability Gains while Saving Millions of Dollars with the World's Most Popular Open Source Database

SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- April 21, 2009 -- Sun Microsystems, Inc. today announced MySQL™ 5.4, a new version of the world's most popular open source database, designed to deliver significant performance and scalability improvements to MySQL applications. A preview version of MySQL 5.4 is available now for download at http://www.mysql.com/5.4.

Today's announcement was made at the seventh annual MySQL Conference & Expo being held this week at the Santa Clara Convention Center. With more than 2,000 attendees, it is the world's largest event for open source database developers, DBAs, vendors and corporate IT managers.

MySQL 5.4 includes performance and scalability improvements enabling the InnoDB storage engine to scale up to 16-way x86 servers and 64

Some words that you might search for at a search engine may have more than one meaning. For example, the word fencing can mean a sport involving swords, a man-made barrier enclosing an area, or activity to make a profit from illegally gained goods. Words or phrases that can have two or more are sometimes referred to as polysemous words.

That can pose challenges for:

• Search engines – trying to identify the intent behind searches.
• Searchers – seeing results unrelated to what they were trying to find.
• Site owners – finding their pages in search results surrounded by sites offering something very different from what they offer
• Advertisers – who may bid on certain words or phrases as sponsored results for searchers who may have absolutely no interest in those ads

Yahoo! and Microsoft announced an agreement that will improve the Web search experience for users and advertisers, and deliver sustained innovation to the industry. In simple terms, Microsoft will now power Yahoo! search while Yahoo! will become the exclusive worldwide relationship sales force for both companies’ premium search advertisers.

For Web users and advertisers, this deal will accelerate the pace and breadth of innovation by combining both companies’ complementary strengths and search platforms into a market competitor with the scale to fuel sustained development in search and search advertising. Users will find what they care about faster and with more personal relevance. Microsoft’s competitive search platforms will lead to more value for advertisers, better results for web publishers, and increased innovation and efficiency across the Internet.