Today's search engines news bullets:


- Kaiser Permanente announced today a new program to link patient data to Microsoft consumer health platform in an effort to allow people to better maintain their health records, the Wall Street Journal reported.

"The effort will involve securely transferring data maintained in Kaiser's personal-health record -- an online repository of data such as test results, prescriptions and immunizations -- to Microsoft's HealthVault, a Web-based service that allows patients to store, manage and selectively share medical data from a variety of Web sites.

The effort is part of a push by technology companies, hospitals, insurers and the government to give patients more control of their medical information. The movement is expected to help lower health-care costs by allowing consumers to make better, more-informed choices. Similar efforts are under way at companies such as Revolution Health Group LLC and Google Inc., which launched its online health-care service, Google Health, in February."

- AOL launched an updated radio services adding streams from 150 CBS Radio stations, custom channels and 200 AOL Radio channels, Computerworld reported.

The new player, which is powe
red by CBS radio, lets users "lets users skip songs, access the last 30 songs they listened to, add unlimited preset stations, share streams with AOL Instant Messenger users and listen to AOL Radio through the mini AOL Radio player that is built into the Buddy List for users of AIM Version 6.0 or higher, according to a statement."

"The deal is designed to increase revenue for AOL as well as increase the online audience for CBS. Under the deal, CBS Radio will also sell ads across AOL's radio service."

- Google and Microsoft employees help China's earthquake relief effort. China-bases Google team built a search engine to help people locate missing ones. The search engine will search for names posted on online bulletin boards or chat rooms. The search engine was up an running three days after the May 12 earthquake and a day later, more than 500,000 search queries were conducted.
 

On the other hand, Microsoft employees helped develop a web site for the local government to build a database of survivors and victims publicly available.

"The Google and Microsoft initiatives, meanwhile, appear to have been largely employee-driven and not the work of corporate strategists. Indeed, Microsoft's name doesn't seem to be mentioned on the site it helped to design for the Aba County government."