The wait is over. Google Chrome for Mac is now available in beta. It’s still missing a few features that are in the Windows version (like support for extensions), but the browser is lickety-split and more-or-less stable.

Are people who arrive at a Website through an organic search on Bing more click-happy than those who come from Google? Back in July, we reported some numbers from search-advertising network Chitika which showed that people from Bing clicked on ads about 50 percent more than people from Google. Chitika just ran the numbers again, and the clickthrough rate (CTR) from Bing searchers is now about 75 percent higher.

It was bad enough when Bing put ads on Google (GOOG) and in AdSense during its launch to get people to come check it out. (In fact, it’s still the top sponsored results when you search for “bing” on Google, even though Bing.com is also the top organic result at this point). But now the shoe is on the other foot and Google is buying search ads on Bing for its fledgling Google Music Search.

AOL won’t officially become an independently traded company again until December 10 when CEO Tim Armstrong is scheduled to ring the bell on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. When AOL announced the details of the spin-off last month, it was possible to estimate a valuation for AOL at about $3.15 billion, but as I noted then, we wouldn’t really know for sure until the shares start trading. Well, some shares already are trading ahead of the official spin-off, settling at around $24. With 105.7 million shares to be distributed, that gives AOL a market cap of $2.5 billion.

Google’s (GOOG) been taking a beating from the newspaper industry lately, and Rupert Murdoch in particular. But the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal let Google CEO Eric Schmidt respond Thursday in an Op-Ed piece which basically says: Hey, we know the Internet is killing your business, but don’t blame us. Google is here to help.

The magazine business is hurting just like all print publications. And even if their Websites are popular, they generate one tenth the ad revenue of the print side. Since last summer, Time Inc has been working on a “Manhattan Project” to create a digital magazine for the new breed of color tablet computers soon to come to market. (Condé Nast is also working on a similar concept). Wednesday, I got a sneak peak at a demo of the tablet magazine designed for Sports Illustrated.

Wednesday, the FTC held a hearing on the crisis in the (print) news publishing industry, which gave Rupert Murdoch yet another opportunity to publicly call out Google (GOOG) about its supposedly thieving ways. Google’s response: Hey, we send out 4 billion clicks a month to news sites. If you don’t know what to do with all that traffic, it’s not our fault. (I’m paraphrasing).

Cyber Monday might have turned out to be better than expected. Online retailers saw a 13.7 percent increase in sales compared to last year, and 24.1 percent more than on Black Friday 2009. The latest data comes from Coremetrics, a Web analytics service used by more than 500 retailers including Abercrombie & Fitch (ANF), Bath & Body Works, Bloomingdale’s, Macy’s (M), Nordstrom (JWN), Office Depot (ODP), and Williams-Sonoma (WSM).

Online advertising revenues in the U.S. seem to be stabilizing. The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers released third-quarter figures showing that online advertising in the U.S. approached $5.5 billion, up 1.7 percent from the second quarter of 2009, but still down 5.4 percent from the same quarter a year ago (which is in line with the losses during the first half of the year). As you can see in the chart, there was a big drop-off after the fourth quarter of last year, and the first three quarters of this year have been flat.

AOL may be brushing up its brand image in preparation for its spin-off IPO in December, but brushing up its underlying business will take a little longer. Barclays analyst Douglas Anmuth released a report on AOL Tuesday complete with an earnings and revenue model going out to 2014 (see below). He projects absolutely no growth in revenues over the next five years, and only a one-time bump in profits in 2011, due to cutting one third of its current labor costs, before declines set in again.

When it comes to the mobile Web, increasingly there are only two mobile platforms which matter: Apple (AAPL) and Android. According to AdMob’s October, 2009 mobile metrics report, the iPhone/iPod Touch and Android phones accounted for 75 percent of mobile Web traffic in the U.S., as measured by all the mobile ad requests it tracks. That number is up from a combined 65 percent in September, 2009.

Rupert Murdoch is pointing a gun to Google’s head, and Microsoft (MSFT) is helping him pull back the trigger. For the past few weeks, Murdoch and his officers at News Corp. (NWS) have been very vocal about their distaste for Google (GOOG) and their desire to lead other media companies in a boycott of sorts.

Old habits die hard. Rupert Murdoch believes that the future of the newspaper business is subscriptions—electronic subscriptions. He’s done with giving away his news for free on the Web and to search engines like Google (GOOG). Instead he thinks that Kindle-like tablet computers can save the media industry. It’s a notion that’s been floated before: an entire newsstand in a color tablet which delivers electronic versions of any newspaper or magazine you want for a monthly subscription of $15 to $19 a month.

Remember all that talk about Bing starting to fizzle in September? Well it didn’t happen, and now October numbers and Bing gained another half a point to reach 9.9 percent market share of U.S. searches, according to comScore’s qSearch service. Five months after launch, Bing has steadily gained two points of market share.

Once again, News Corp (NWS) is threatening to hide itself from the rest of the Web. Earlier this week, Rupert Murdoch told an Australian interviewer that he might start blocking Google (GOOG) from WSJ.com and his other news sites, even though Google accounts for about 25% of the traffic to WSJ.com.

As AOL prepares to spin off from Time Warner (TWX) in an IPO, it wants to gussy itself up so that it looks as appealing as possible to public investors. Thursday, AOL disclosed that it plans yet another restructuring which could cost as much as $200 million. The biggest cost savings from any restructuring is usually through layoffs, and the latest round has already started at AOL, with 100 let go this week and as many as 1,000 of its 6,000 jobs at risk of being eliminated.

After two straight quarters of annual declines (aka, the Great Ad Recession of 2009), it looks like online advertising revenues stabilized in the third quarter. The combined online advertising revenues of Google (GOOG), Yahoo (YHOO), Microsoft (MSFT), and AOL rose 1.2 percent to $8 billion. While the online advertising industry is not out of the woods yet, it might be stabilizing.

Ever since Microsoft (MSFT) launched its Bing search engine last May, there’s been buzz that it’s been talking with Wolfram Alpha to license some of its search data. In August, I was able to confirm that a deal had indeed been struck between the two. Today, Bing is finally rolling out its first integration with Wolfram Alpha for searches around diet and nutrition.

When Google CEO Eric Schmidt mentioned a few weeks ago that the M&A spigot is now back on at the search giant, he wasn’t talking about a trickle. Monday’s announced deal to by mobile ad startup AdMob for $750 million is Google’s (GOOG) largest acquisition since its $3.1 billion purchase of DoubleClick in March, 2008, and its third-largest ever after the $1.65 billion YouTube acquisition in 2006.

Whenever Rupert Murdoch goes back to his home country of Australia, he loosens up and says things to the press (usually his own outlets) that he might not say in the U.S. Of course, everyone in the U.S. picks up on it and it becomes a big story, as it did Monday after Murdoch told his own Sky News that he might start blocking Google (GOOG) and other search engines from giving searchers full access to articles on the Wall Street Journal’s website, WSJ.com. Asked whether he realized that Google was sending his news site a ton of traffic, Murdoch responded, ”We’d rather have fewer people coming to our Websites, but paying.”