A Web site in the southern Russian region of Ingushetia blamed local authorities on Thursday of attempting to shut it down after it organized protests and posted details of kidnaps and murders.

Ingushetiya.ru was one of the only sources of information that was critical of authorities from the mostly Muslim region bordering Chechnya. The site promoted and helped organize a protest Saturday where demonstrators carrying gasoline bombs clashed with police and burned a pro-government newspaper office.

He may claim to not have a car, but Dmitry Medvedev, Vladimir Putin’s would-be successor, now has a website.  And the website has lots of pictures.

An Estonian court has fined a man tied to hacking official Web sites during last year’s riots over the moving of a Soviet war memorial.

The court of Harju district, whose jurisdiction includes the capital Tallinn, said it had fined the 20-year-old 17,500 kroons ($1,635) for bringing down the server Web site of the ruling- coalition- leading Reform Party.

Please don’t think we’re pretending this is a drastic change – it isn’t.  It will, however, slightly alter the daily search experience of millions of people worldwide, so we’re here to report that Google.com’s navigational bar has spread to several international versions.

Europe had the largest Internet audience- ever in September with a five percent year over year growth, and 226.7 million unique visitors 15 years or older.

China and India get all the attention from the major Internet players when it comes to growing Internet economies, but search advertising in Russia has a couple of local players dominating the field.

Presidents Bush and Putin may not be on the best of terms, but the Russian government is embracing (or at least nodding to) Google; a changed law has allowed the American search engine giant to release a Russia-specific mapping service.

Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin, a Russian mystic born in the 1800s, supposedly survived being poisoned, shot, and beaten (though a subsequent drowning did him in).  Now Google Answers is also proving hard to kill, and it has resurfaced in the same part of the world.

Earlier this week, former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev sent forth a public plea to Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates concerning the prosecution of a Russian man charged with installing pirated copies of Windows on his classroom’s computers.

Microsoft has declined to drop the charges against the teacher, and the move has the county’s educational system reconsidering its choice of operating systems.

Consequently, it looks like Windows is will lose out to Linux in another market.

Google may be king, but it’s definitely not czar. The dominant U.S. search engine is only the eighth biggest “Internet brand” in Russia, and it’s losing the competition by a very large margin.

MSN Search’s Weblog announces the addition of 1 million new facts you can now get “Instant Answers” to.

The MSN Search blog reports that they’ve added about a million new instant answers, those fact boxes that appear atop search results, giving you quick access to good facts about whatever you’re searching for.

MosNews has discovered that a 19th Century Russian prince predicted that one day we’d all be blogging.

The Russian media has reported that Google may be interested in setting up operations at a new IT park in St. Petersberg.

Yukos owner, Menatep has filed a $28.3 billion suit against the Russian government for damages after it seized and sold Yukos.

After traveling more than 78 million miles in their six months aboard the International Space Station, Expedition 9 Commander Gennady Padalka and Flight Engineer Mike Fincke safely returned to Earth today.