Morning Tech Wrap: Google, Microsoft, Antisec - Forbes (blog)

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Google's realtime search has disappeared because its agreement with Twitter to carry results has expired, according to Search Engine Land. "Since October of 2009, we have had an agreement with Twitter to include their updates in our search results through a special feed, and that agreement expired on July 2," Google said in an explanation sent to Search Engine Land. "Information of Twitter that's publicly available to our crawlers will still be searchable and discoverable on Google."

While it remains unclear why the deal was allowed to expire like this, it seems that small search engine Topsy becomes the only site with a major Twitter archive available.

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Meanwhile Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is the most followed user of Google+, TechCrunch reports. Outdoing Google CEO Larry Page and co-founder Sergey Brin, Zuckerberg has eased his way to the top of the Google+ leader board, amassing 21,213 followers already, compared with Page and Brin's 14,798 and 11,629 respectively. Google+ Statistics creator Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten offered TechCrunch his opinions on Zuckerberg's unlikely popularity: "He has the most friends in the world, they made a movie about him, and he is more handsome than Larry and Sergey."

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Microsoft has signed a deal with China's biggest search engine Baidu to provide English-language search results, according to the Guardian. The deal could be a boost Microsoft, which has been struggling to reach the heights it had planned for Bing. Baidu will also benefit, bringing it another step closer to its international ambitions.

Baidu has roughly 83% of the Chinese search market, but receives around 10 million English searches per day. English-language searches on Baidu will now be redirected through Microsoft's Bing. Kaiser Kuo, a spokesman for Baidu, is quoted by The Guardian as saying that Bing searches would not be censored any more "than they already do."

Search engine marketing company Greenlight sees the deal as positive for both sides. Chief Operating Officer Andreas Pouros told The Guardian: "Microsoft has entered the Chinese market slowly and has made some friends in a way that the Chinese government will have no issue with. This should leave Baidu and Bing to control the Chinese search ad market without too much difficulty."

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The U.S. Secret Service has said it will investigate the hacking of the Fox News Twitter account yesterday, which falsely announced that President Obama had been assassinated. The LA Times reports that hackers broke into the FoxNewsPolitics account early on Monday, leaving six tweets reporting that President Obama had been shot in Iowa. Fox News called the tweets "malicious" and "false."

In an unrelated incident, the online hacktivist movement Antisec posted a message through Twitter on Sunday that included a link to an apparent post of private date from an Apple server. The text posting on Pastebin includes usernames and passwords for 27 root and admin accounts, according to TechSpot, which adds the breached server is used by Apple to conduct technical support for follow-up surveys. It does not seem that any customer data was compromised.