I don’t always have time to dig as deeply as I like into some of the patent filings that I uncover each week, and end up not writing about some interesting things that the search engines come out with.

Microsoft has just announced that it has reached an agreement with HP for the installation of a Live Search-enabled toolbar on all HP consumer PCs that will be launched starting 2009. Part of the said agreement involves setting the default search engine in the preloaded browser of the new HP PCs  into Microsoft Live Search.