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Yahoo is buying a fantasy sports company co-founded by an MIT graduate whose card-counting skills helped him win millions of dollars in blackjack and spawned a film and a best-selling book.

Citizen Sports offers fantasy leagues for sports such as football, soccer and basketball that fans can manage online at social-networking sites and through mobile applications for Apple's iPhone and smart phones running Google Inc.'s Android operating software.

Microsoft Corp.'s Bing search engine gained market share in the U.S. in February, according to research groups.

Microsoft has worked for years to improve its search technology and narrow the gap with Google Inc. After launching its redesigned search site last June, the company waged a major marketing campaign to position Bing as better than Google or No. 2 Yahoo for shopping, booking travel and searching for medical information.

After rolling out its latest operating system on its exclusive Nexus One smartphone in January, Google will now release Android 2.1 for a top competitor: the Motorola Droid, which is distributed by Verizon Wireless.

The over-the-air update will be available in batches of 250,000 beginning Thursday, March 18, Verizon Wireless announced. A blog dedicated to Android posted the official software update notice on Wednesday.

The fast-selling Droid is estimated to make up 15 percent of all Android smartphones sold.

Getting people to pay for news online at this point would be "like trying to force butterflies back into their cocoons," a new consumer survey suggests.

That was one of several bleak headlines in the Project for Excellence in Journalism's annual assessment of the state of the news industry, released Sunday.

The project's report contained an extensive look at habits of the estimated six in 10 Americans who say they get at least some news online during a typical day. On average, each person spends three minutes and four seconds per visit to a news site.

U.S. regulators are reportedly digging deeper into Google's planned AdMob acquisition. The Federal Trade Commission is asking for sworn statements from the search giant's competitors and advertisers in what could signal plans to hold up the merger. The news comes as part of a wave of government scrutiny against the maturing company.

The search-engine wars are alive and well -- and Bing is the beneficiary again. Microsoft's so-called decision engine grabbed 11.5 percent of the U.S. search market in February, according to comScore.

Although that's only a slight increase over January, when Bing boasted 11.3 percent of the search market, it's an incremental improvement Microsoft is glad to see for its less-than-a-year-old engine.

Yahoo Inc. CEO Carol Bartz says she hopes investors growing impatient for her to turn around the slumping Internet company remember how long it took for Steve Jobs to revive Apple Inc.

In a Tuesday meeting to celebrate Yahoo's 15th anniversary, Bartz reminded reporters that Apple still struggled after Jobs became CEO in 1997. That marked his return to a company he had co-founded two decades earlier.

Has Facebook patented the news, or at least the news feed, in social-networking environments? On Tuesday, the United States Patent Office granted Facebook a patent for "Dynamically providing a news feed about a user of a social network." The patent is published and numbered 7,669,123.

What do you get when you combine 600 million searchers with 50 million daily tweets? A new Yahoo-Twitter tie-up. While consumer privacy organizations continue bashing Google about its Google Buzz service, Yahoo and Twitter are partnering on a more benign social-networking play -- content sharing.

A new Zeus botnet has been discovered affecting 75,000 systems in 2,500 organizations around the world. Both corporate and government networks have become victims of the severe cyberattack dubbed the Kneber attack, named after the username linked with the attack.