Yahoo Inc. will let its Web visitors decline ads targeted to their browsing habits, becoming the latest Internet company to break from a common industry practice as Congress steps up scrutiny of customized advertising and consumer privacy.

Yahoo has been offering that opt-out choice only to ads the company runs on outside, partner sites. Yahoo said Friday it now would extend that option to ads displayed on its own sites, to boost users’ trust - and in doing so, perhaps draw visitors from its rivals.

The option will likely be available by the end of the month.

Clips and highlights of Olympic events are to be made available on the video-sharing site YouTube, owned by Google, under an agreement with the International Olympic Committee, the IOC said in a statement.

“The IOC’s priority is to ensure that as many people as possible get to experience the magic of the Olympic Games and the inspirational sporting achievements of the Olympic athletes,” says Timo Lumme, IOC director of television and marketing.

“For the first time in Olympic history we will have complete global online coverage, and the IOC will have its own broadcast channel (which) will make fantastic Olympic footage available where young generations of sports fans are already going for online entertainment.” The Games open on Friday.

IOC said it wanted to tap into the youth market that Youtube carries with it. It will be offering three hours per day to viewers which will be a compilation of all the day’s action, as well as Games highlights.

Online pictures and reports of the Games will be available in 77 territories across Africa, Asia and the Middle East, including India, South Korea, Nigeria and Indonesia, the IOC said.

The Video On Demand (VOD) clips start on August 6. The IOC’s channel will be available at www.youtube.com/beijing2008, but will be blocked within each territory served.

The service is meant to bring the Olympics to countries where digital rights have not been sold or have been acquired on a non-exclusive basis.

The financial deal is tiny compared to the traditional TV rights deals and completely different in nature given that essentially it is using the Youtube platform, the IOC said. There will be no promotional rights nor use of logos.

Sports fans around the world have been swindled by an international Internet scam which offered thousands of bogus tickets for the Beijing Games, Olympic officials said on Monday.

The International Olympic Committee IOC announced it was taking action to shut down the fraudsters, but the move came too late to help the victims find replacement seats at the Games.

Among those left out of pocket were the families of Olympic athletes in both Australia and New Zealand, with people in the United States, Japan, Norway, China and Britain also reportedly conned by the sophisticated sting.

We cannot accept people paying money for tickets and not getting them, said Gerhard Heiberg, an IOC executive board member.

Heiberg said the issue was raised last week, with both the IOC and the United States Olympic Committee filing a lawsuit on Friday in a district court in California, accusing at least six websites of selling illegitimate or nonexistent tickets.

However, a U.S. lawyer who said he had lost $12,000 in the fraud, accused the IOC of complacency.

They have known about these sites for months and months and did nothing, said Jim Moriarty, the partner of a Houston-based law firm which is looking to represent fellow victims in any subsequent legal actions.

Internet service providers (ISPs) Comcast Corp and United Online Inc’s NetZero have agreed to block access to child pornography, the New York Attorney General’s office said on Tuesday.

The announcement comes a week after New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo threatened to pursue legal action against Comcast Cable Communications LLC if it did not agree to reforms.

Several other ISPs, such as Verizon Communications Inc and Sprint Nextel Corp agreed in June to block Internet bulletin boards and websites nationwide that disseminate child porn.

A start-up led by former star Google engineers on Sunday unveiled a new Web search service that aims to outdo the Internet search leader in size, but faces an uphill battle changing Web surfing habits.

Cuil Inc pronounced cool is offering a new search service at www.cuil.com that the company claims can index, faster and more cheaply, a far larger portion of the Web than Google, which boasts the largest online index.

The would-be Google rival says its service goes beyond prevailing search techniques that focus on Web links and audience traffic patterns and instead analyzes the context of each page and the concepts behind each user search request.

Our significant breakthroughs in search technology have enabled us to index much more of the Internet, placing nearly the entire Web at the fingertips of every user, Tom Costello, Cuil co-founder and chief executive, said in a statement.

Danny Sullivan, a Web search analyst and editor-in-chief of Search Engine Land, said Cuil can try to exploit complaints consumers may have with Google — namely, that it tries to do too much, that its results favor already popular sites, and that it leans heavily on certain authoritative sites such as Wikipedia.

The time may be right for a challenger, Sullivan says, but adds quickly: Competing with Google is still a very daunting task, as Microsoft will tell you.

Microsoft Corp, the No. 3 U.S. player in Web search has been seeking in vain, so far, to join forces with No. 2 Yahoo Inc to battle Google.

Cuil was founded by a group of search pioneers, including Costello, who built a prototype of Web Fountain, IBM s Web search analytics tool, and his wife, Anna Patterson, the architect of Google Inc s massive TeraGoogle index of Web pages. Patterson also designed the search system for global corporate document storage company Recall, a unit of Australia s Brambles Ltd

The two are joined by two former Google colleagues, Russell Power and Louis Monier. Previously, Monier led the redesign of ecommerce leader eBay Inc s search engine and was the founding chief technology officer of two 1990s Web milestones, AltaVista and BabelFish, the first language translation site.

They do have the talent that is used to building large, industrial-strength search engines, Sullivan says of Cuil.

AOL is shutting three data-storage services, including one of the Internet’s earliest photo-sharing sites, as it seeks to cut costs and focus resources on its advertising opportunities.

AOL Pictures, the year-old media-sharing site BlueString and the online backup service Xdrive will likely shut down by year’s end, though the company is looking to sell at least Xdrive, which AOL bought in 2005 for an undisclosed fee.

Company officials denied speculation Friday that the closures were meant to prime AOL for a sale. AOL parent Time Warner Inc. has been in continual discussions with both Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft Corp., though the talks have been preliminary.

China’s booming Internet population has surpassed the United States to become the world’s biggest, with 253 million people online despite government controls on Web use, according to government data reported Friday.

The latest figure on Web use at the end of June is a 56 percent increase from a year ago, the China Internet Network Information Center said. It said the share of the Chinese public using the Internet is still just 19.1 percent, leaving more room for rapid growth.

The United States had an estimated 223.1 million Internet users in June, according to Nielsen Online, a research firm. The Pew Internet and American Life Project puts U.S. online penetration at 71 percent.

Google Inc. is taking the wraps off an Internet encyclopedia designed to give people a chance to show off - and profit from - their expertise on any topic.

The service, dubbed “knol” in reference to a unit of knowledge, had been limited to an invitation-only audience of contributors and readers for the past seven months.

Now anyone with a Google login will be able to submit an article and, if they choose, have ads displayed through the Internet search leader’s marketing system. The contributing author and Google will share any revenue generated from the ads, which are supposed to be related to the topic covered in the knol.

The advertising option could encourage people to write more entries about commercial subjects than the more academic topics covered in traditional encyclopedias.

Since Google disclosed its intention to build knol, it has been widely viewed as the company’s answer to Wikipedia, which has emerged as one of the Web’s leading reference tools by drawing upon the collective wisdom of unpaid, anonymous contributors.

But Google views knol more as a supplement to Wikipedia than a competitor, said Cedric Dupont, a Google product manager. Google reasons that Wikipedia’s contributors will be able to use some of the expertise shared on knol to improve Wikipedia’s existing entries.

With a seven-year head start on knol, Wikipedia already has nearly 2.5 million English-language articles and millions more in dozens of other languages.

Knol is starting out with several hundred entries. The initial topics covered include an overview of constipation by a University of San Francisco associate professor of gastroenterology and backpacking advice from one of Google’s own software engineers.

News Corp’s MySpace Internet social network will join the OpenID alliance to begin letting its users take their online identity to other sites and social networks without having to register again.

The move comes after the network decided in May to let its estimated 115 million users globally share their MySpace profile information on some other sites.

OpenID is an open source alliance that, by letting users take one identity to multiple websites, aims to eliminate the need to create multiple user names and profiles.

The popular online hangout Facebook is sporting a new look to reflect changes in how its members communicate with each other and how they share photos and updates about their lives.

Central to the redesign, to be unveiled Monday, is an expanded Wall, the section of a member’s personal profile page where friends can leave comments and photos. People will now be able to add items more easily, and the Wall will incorporate reports on a user’s activities previously found on a user’s “Mini-Feed.”

The development comes as Facebook and rival MySpace from News Corp. vie to become the central hub of online communications. Both sites are reorganizing their layouts this summer to reduce clutter and make information easier to find.

Rogers, a huge cable internet provider in Canada, has decided to hijack all unregistered domains, and replace them with Yahoo! advertisements. This means Rogers users who type in a domain that doesn’t exist, are now getting Yahoo ads instead of the normal “not found” error.

Interestingly, Rogers also decided to do this with subdomains. So for example, example.google.com now takes you to its own ad page.

Delver.com today unveiled an alpha version of the first true social search engine. Delver maps a user’s social connections then delivers comprehensive Web search results ranked according to their social relevance to that user.

Delver, based on the user’s search query, organizes and ranks publicly displayed content, found on social networking profiles, web sites, blogs, bookmarks, and photo and video sharing sites from the user’s online social network. A ‘breadcrumb’ is shown next to each result, showing how that result is related to the user, thus qualifying its relevance.

“Delver is designed to ‘delve’ into your online social graph to generate search results gathered from your friends, your network and your friends’ networks, to help you find information more relevant to you as an individual,” said Liad Agmon, CEO of Delver. “We prioritize results based on your network to make Web search more fun and meaningful, while enabling you to discover others in your extended network who share common interests.”

Delver also gives users the ability to tap into the content and network of people whose opinion they value by adding them as ‘Search Buddies’. Delver prioritizes results from ‘Search Buddies’ and their network as if they were the users’ friends. Furthermore, Delver provides a number of features for organizing and retaining the information found as a result of a search query. When results are yielded, user’s may choose the “keep it” option, which stores the selected links in the appropriate categories for compiling lists or easier reference later on.

Though Delver.com is in an early stage of product development, it demonstrates the great potential and necessity of social search. Delver currently covers Myspace, Blogger, Flickr, LinkedIn, Youtube, Hi5, FriendFeed, Digg and Delicious; other sources, such as Facebook and the top blogging platforms will be added to the service over the next few months.