The Google-Yahoo hack

Google and Yahoo are back together again, but not by their own design. Premshree Pillai, a 22-year-old self-described hacker from India, has written a script to insert a Yahoo tab on the Google home page with the use of dynamic HTML. That way, he can easily click to Yahoo search results (without retyping the query) when Google's listings fall short. Clever, but it won't bring smiles in the corporate camps of Yahoo and Google.

The two former partners went separate ways roughly 15 months ago, but in spirit, the split started three years ago when Google began to outshine its early mentor. (And when the search-marketing dollars started rolling in.) Now, as their respective search techologies reach parity, people have more choice and choice is good. Other applications to mesh services, such as Butler, have cropped up, too.