Silicon Valley was abuzz Wednesday with news that the Justice Department had begun an antitrust investigation into the hiring practices of some of the best-known companies in the technology and biotech industries, including Google, Apple, Yahoo and Genentech.

The question being asked most frequently was how the word “anticompetitive” could possibly be applied to the industry’s perpetual fight over talent.

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Susan Boyle, the latest overnight YouTube sensation, may well end up the recipient of a bonanza from her new status as unlikely heroine.

But for now, her dizzying YouTube success has been a missed opportunity to cash in.

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When Google released its Flu Trends service earlier this week, the Drudge Report flashed a headline that read: “SICK SURVEILLANCE: GOOGLE REPORTS FLU SEARCHES, LOCATIONS TO FEDS.”

Google sought to avoid this kind of reaction by talking about how Google Flu Trends protects the privacy of its users. The service relies “on anonymized, aggregated counts of how often certain search queries occur each week,” Google said.

Still, the worries persist. On Wednesday, two advocacy groups, the Electronic Privacy Information Center and Patient Privacy Rights, sent a letter to Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, raising privacy concerns: “The question is how to ensure that Google Flu Trends and similar techniques will only produce aggregate data and will not open the door to user-specific investigations, which could be compelled, even over Google’s objection, by court order or Presidential authority.”

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Google (GOOG), the Internet search and advertising giant, is increasingly looking to the energy sector as a potential business opportunity.

From its beginning, the company has invested millions of dollars in making its own power-hungry data centers more efficient. Its philanthropic arm has made small investments in clean energy technologies.

But in recent weeks, Eric E. Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, has hinted at the company’s broad interest in the energy business. He also joined Jeffrey R. Immelt, General Electric’s chief executive, to announce that they would collaborate on policies and technologies aimed at improving the electricity grid. The effort could include offering tools for consumers.

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A few weeks ago, Yahoo (YHOO) began what may be its biggest overhaul of its home page. But if you are among the roughly 100 million Americans who stop by Yahoo.com every month, the odds are that you haven’t noticed any changes.

That’s because the job of revamping the Web’s most visited portal page is fraught with risk. If even a small fraction of Yahoo’s audience doesn’t like the changes, the company could lose millions of users and millions of dollars in advertising. So Yahoo is introducing changes in small stages and to small segments of its audience at a time, all while soliciting feedback from its users.

You could call it stealth innovation. The company’s goal is to end up several months from now with a completely different, and presumably better, front page–with its audience intact.

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In the next week, the two biggest sellers of online ads, Google and Yahoo, will disclose their third-quarter financial results. They are expected to report widely different results which mirror the increasingly diverging fortunes of two forms of online advertising: search ads and display ads like banners and video clips. Most analysts believe that the search advertising market — Google’s bread and butter and a business that the company overwhelmingly dominates — is holding up relatively well despite the economic downturn and the financial crisis. On the other hand, the display advertising market, which accounts for roughly half of Yahoo’s revenue, is suffering both from the deepening crisis and from a glut of Web pages, or inventory, that advertisers can choose from.

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LeapFrog Enterprises needs a knockout hit. The company’s LeapPad became an instant sensation after it was introduced in 1999 and helped turn the small educational toy maker into one of the fastest-growing toy companies in history. But as the LeapPad aged, LeapFrog’s fortunes sagged. This week, LeapFrog pulls the wraps off the LeapPad’s successor, the Tag, a thick, white-and-green plastic stylus that turns paper books into interactive playthings.

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