Baidu currently dominates the search market in China, but has run a gauntlet of lawsuits alleging that Baidu assists users in copyright infringement by providing access to downloads of unlicensed music.

An estimated 99 percent of all music downloads distributed in China are pirated, according to the International Federation of Phonographic Industry.

In China, Baidu has about a 63 percent Internet search market share, while Google only holds 26 percent, despite the fact Google dominates global search market share, according to data from iResearch, Reuters reported.

Google's new music search will let Web users search Chinese songs by artist and title and download the songs from Top100.cn. Top100.cn is a Chinese music Website that was co-founded by Chinese basketball player Yao Ming. The music search will share revenue among Top100.cn and the company's music partners.

"The Internet industry should by no means stand in the opposite camp against the music industry," Google China President Kai-fu Lee said in a statement, Reuters reported. "Google always believes profoundly that mutual interest, rather than monopoly, is the key to sustainable growth."

Other new features include a personalized search experience that allows administrators to adjust search results for different user groups, based on department or function; e-mail alerts for topics and documents of interest that employees can subscribe to; and a spellchecker for French, Italian, German, Spanish, Portuguese and Dutch.

"Taking Google's core search technology and optimizing it for business use, the Google Search Appliance provides universal search across a variety of internal and external sources—including file shares, intranets, databases, applications, hosted services and content management systems," according to a release on Google's Web site.

Other new security and control features include native support for Kerberos, which enables silent authentication; metadata biasing; and advanced reporting features such as exportable daily and hourly result sets, top queries, special feature usage, and more.

The Search Appliance, still available in its familiar bright yellow, also now offers localized administration in 27 different languages, according to Google.

Solution providers can purchase the Search Appliance through Ingram Micro. The appliance contains Google software running a Dell server platform.

Google now has 20,000 enterprise search customers, including more than 10,000 Search Appliance customers, according to TechCrunch.org. The remainder use the company's hosted search and other enterprise products.

"Friendster is growing at an enormous rate in Asia Pacific and is clearly leading the competition," said Kimber in a statement. "With more than 75 million users, it is clear that Friendster has already made a dramatic impact. I look forward to growing our business further as we continue our global growth and strong focus on Asia."

Today Friendster also announced that it has closed a $20 million funding deal with new investor IDG Ventures. As part of the venture capital deal, IDG general partner Butch Reddy is also joining Friendster's board of directors.

Both Kimber's appointment and Friendster's new funds are part of a Friendster initiative to greatly expand in the Asia Pacific market.

"With the addition of Richard, Butch and the new funding, Friendster will continue to expand its worldwide footprint and take advantage of its leadership position in Asia Pacific," said Russ Siegelman, partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and chairman of the board for Friendster, in a statement.

Kimber is not the only Google executive to leave in recent months. Earlier this year, former Google vice president for global sales and operations Sheryl Sandberg took the COO position at Facebook, and former Google CIO Douglas Merrill jumped ship to go to EMI Music as president of digital business.

Any developer should get kudos for creating a search engine, arguably one of the most daunting of technology tasks to undertake. The fact that the developers are striving to garner search results by content rather than popularity is admirable too. Yet, trying to cull information based on content when you are dealing with such a vast amount of information is bound to have its hiccups.

Let's take issue with many bloggers and commentators regarding Cuil's homepage. There seems to be a collective "nay" on the design. In this era of ocular overstimulation and search engines jam-packed with graphics, links, and images of people dancing to reduced mortgage rates, the simplicity is a welcome change. Besides, the color scheme and font kind of gives the home page the look of a 1960's Fellini movie poster.

However, you will find no disagreement here about the accuracy of search results and performance. The first thing "cuil-ed" over here was the word "cuil." The first ten pages of hits were all on an area of Ireland. It's a lovely area, I might add, based on the sites -- not to mention that "cuil" is taken the Gaelic, "knowledge." But nothing on Cuil as a search engine. Google lists news reports on Cuil and Cuil's home page as the first five hits.

Now, I understand that Cuil does not report based on popularity, but wouldn't the designers take pains to ensure that "cuil.com" is the number one hit within their own search engine? If you Google "Google" better believe google.com is number one.

Next, an insipid search test using "washington d.c." The search resulted in over 2 million hits on Google and over 700 million for Yahoo. Astonishingly, the same search text copied and pasted from Yahoo to Cuil resulted in the message, "We didn't find any results for "washington d.c."" As a matter of fact a search for "n.y." and "George W. Bush" came up empty, until the periods were removed.

Can the engine not recognize punctuation marks? Also puzzling are the images that come up with the results. A search on my name resulted in hits, but the images that were associated with the links are a mystery. The performance leads much to be desired. Navigating through results pages showed noticeable latency.

Is this search engine some kind of joke?

Understandably, search engines are complex and go through a weaning period before they are completely bug-free. Yet, for this to be launched as a non-beta release is mind-boggling, especially given the talent behind the project.

Cuil left us cold.

"The web contains vast amounts of information, but not everything worth knowing is on the web. An enormous amount of information resides in people's heads: Millions of people know useful things and billions more could benefit from that knowledge," said Cedric Dupont, product manager, and Michael McNally, software engineer, in a statement on Google's official blog.

Articles, known as "knols," will be authored by individuals, but the revision process will be collaborative. Any reader may suggest changes to any knol, and edits will pass through a moderation process that Google calls "moderated collaboration" before the edits will be applied to the knol in question. Readers can also rate, write reviews of, and submit comments to knols.

Authors can choose to include Google AdSense ads in their knolls, and receive a share of the revenue. Google also has an agreement with the New Yorker to include one New Yorker cartoon in each knol, if the knol author chooses.

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales seemed unconcerned by any potential competition from Google's Knol, despite obvious similarities between Knol and Wikipedia.