Microsoft left little doubt Friday that it was one of the companies leading the charge against Google worldwide. In a blog post entitled "Competition Authorities and Search," Microsoft Vice President and Deputy General Counsel Dave Heiner said part of the motivation for Microsoft and Yahoo's search deal was "we are concerned about Google business practices that tend to lock in publishers and advertisers and make it harder for Microsoft to gain search volume." The post comes at the end of a week in which European authorities asked Google to explain its search algorithms after complaints from competitors--one of which is owned by Microsoft. "Microsoft would obviously be among the first to say that leading firms should not be punished for their success," Heiner wrote in one of Microsoft's strongest public statements regarding Google to date. "Our concerns relate only to Google practices that tend to lock in business partners and content (like Google Books) and exclude competitors, thereby undermining competition more broadly."

And so it begins: the European Commission has opened an antitrust investigation of Google.

SUNNYVALE, Calif.--The Rodney Dangerfield of search engines is starting to get a little annoyed about its plight. Yahoo hosted a search event at its headquarters Wednesday that seemed designed mainly to remind the Silicon Valley press that it is still working on Internet search. A few new projects were shown off, such as an interesting mobile search feature that lets you draw a circle around an area of a map to narrow search results called Sketch-a-search.

President Barack Obama's budget proposal will call for tripling government loan guarantees for new nuclear reactors, an administration official said on Friday, a move sure to win over some Republican lawmakers who want more nuclear power to be part of climate change legislation.