The proposed advertising partnership between Google and Yahoo is no more. Google sites the initial reluctance of federal regulators, as well as the possibility of several high-profile legal battles, as the primary reasons for the collapse. “It’s clear that government regulators and some advertisers continue to have concerns about the agreement,” writes David Drummond in the Official Google Blog. “Pressing ahead risked not only a protracted legal battle but also damage to relationships with valued partners. That wouldn’t have been in the long-term interests of Google or our users.” Under the terms of the deal, Yahoo would have had the option of using Google-based advertising on their various sites. Yahoo officials have yet to speak on the issue.

In other Google news, the search giant has taken steps to upgrade Google Groups. The new and improved Groups search now gives users the option of searching the entire Internet for the content that they are looking for. Previously, users were limited to searching Google Groups. The results will not only contain when a particular thread was started, but how many replies it received. Some industry insiders suggest that the move is the “first step” in embracing social networking functionality, similar to Yahoo and AOL. The new, “forum friendly” Google Groups search is available now.

Finishing the Google trifecta, we have Gmail Backup. This handy little program starts by taking an “image” of your account in order to compile all of the necessary information. The backups are then converted into .eml files, the format of choice for all Microsoft email prorams. While it isn’t exactly a glamorous program — email backup is somewhere between “watching paint dry” and “pumping gas” on the (un)official “tedious things to do list” — it does its chosen duty amazingly well. Gmail Backup is available now for all three major operating systems.

Elsewhere, a potentially dangerous flaw has been found in Adobe Acrobat Reader. According to a report by development house CoreLabs, a hacker can insert malicious Javascript code into a harmless looking PDF file. When the user opens the file, the hacker can easily attack the user’s system. Officials at both Adobe and CoreLabs stress that only the 8.x (especially the 8.1.2 release) of the Acrobat Reader is at risk. Those still using the older 8.0 software are stressed to update their readers as soon as possible.

Finally, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has a few interesting things to say about the state of web 2.0. According to Wales, many social services that inhabit the Internet are, at best, basic and infantile. The biggest culprits, he says, are online video sites such as YouTube. “If you look at almost everything on YouTube, it’s individuals doing videos, either funny cat videos, or drunk girl videos seem to be quite popular there,”Wales told online news organization Breibart.com. “What we haven’t seen yet in video is large-scale collaborative projects. Imagine what we could get if we could get 100,000 people thinking about collaborative video efforts to create documentary films, or comedy, or art, or who knows what?”