How Can You Miss Us if We Won’t Go Away? Paczkowski and Swisher Highlights From AllThingsD.

And so it goes in Silicon Valley.

Voices

For Google, Shopping Searches Are Looking Up

Fighting a battle with Amazon.com Inc. to be the preferred entry point for Internet shopping, Google Inc. last year retooled its lucrative search page. Its strategy is showing signs of progress.

Viki Strikes Deal With Baidu to Bring Crowd-Translated Programming to China

“Hulu for the rest of the world” enters a big market.

Noogler Poach — Google Nabs Top Maps and AR Engineer From Microsoft (Video)

A big talent leaves Microsoft.

Will Microsoft Name Its CEO Before the New Year? Weary Employees Hope for Even Sooner. (Poll)

All I want for Christmas is my two front teeth — and a new leader.

Twitter Considered Buying Topsy, Too — Here’s Why It Didn’t Happen

The data mining startup had more than one big tech company interested in buying it.

News Byte

Yahoo Snags SkyPhrase for Natural-Language Processing

Yahoo has gone and bought another company, pushing its acquisition tally for the year up to 23. The Internet giant today said it has purchased natural-language outfit SkyPhrase for an undisclosed sum. SkyPhrase and its small team of four will become part of the Yahoo Labs team in New York, where they will presumably bring their natural-language-processing acumen to bear on Yahoo’s search and mail products.

News Byte

Google Paid Mozilla Nearly $300M Last Year (a.k.a. Almost All of Its Revenue)

Mozilla had $304.5 million in revenue from royalties in 2012, it reported yesterday in an annual release of financials (PDF), with 90 percent of the money coming from Google. We’d broken the news in late 2011 that Google had renewed its search deal with Mozilla, committing to pay almost $300 million per year. So, yup, that was right.

You Google Yourself, and That’s Okay