Microsoft has announced a new Bing AI bug bounty program for vulnerabilities affecting its services, with lucrative rewards for those who submit concise reports to help secure the product.

Reproducible vulnerabilities that carry a rating of “important” or “critical” will be considered for rewards ranging from $2,000 to $15,000, Microsoft said. 

Examples of vulnerabilities that would be eligible for reward include the use of prompt engineering to make Bing chat reveal confidential information contained in its model weights, bypassing Bing chat’s restrictions relating to behavior or session length, and accessing chat history.

Reports considered of high quality that cover critical vulnerabilities in inference manipulation, model manipulation, or inferential information disclosure carry the top reward.

Any AI-powered Bing integration within Microsoft Edge, on the website bing.com (regardless of browser), within the Microsoft start menu, or on the Skype app will fall under the remit of the program.

The expansion of the scheme to cover Bing AI services comes amid a push to clamp down on malicious attempts to alter the workings or outputs of the Bing AI assistant. 

Microsoft’s AI-powered Bing services form the backbone of its Copilot AI productivity offerings, combining OpenAI’s GPT-4 with Microsoft’s proprietary foundation models for integrated generative AI experiences. 

Vulnerabilities in the tool could be used to expose highly sensitive information, or attackers could undo guardrails put in place to keep Bing AI from the kind of vivid hallucinations the system was reportedly prone to in February 2023.

The use of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, automated tools that drive up traffic, or attempts to use Bing chat to perform phishing against any individual are not valid uses of the service, under the terms of the program.

Bug bounty benefits

Bug bounty programs are a common way for firms to find and address security issues that carry the potential to be actively exploited in the wild. Ethical hackers are permitted to exploit these vulnerabilities in a limited fashion, to produce detailed reports on vulnerability attack chains that can inform mitigation efforts.

Microsoft runs a series of bug bounty programs for products and services including Microsoft Teams, Azure, and Microsoft 365. Reward amounts vary by service and the risk posed by the vulnerabilities reported.

For example, white hat hackers who deliver high-quality reports on critical Microsoft Identity vulnerabilities that involve elevation of privilege issues through multi-factor authentication (MFA) bypass can net $100,000. 

Submissions that pose defense techniques that would strengthen Windows against exploits that currently bypass its security mitigations are eligible for up to $200,000. For some programs, Microsoft reserves the right to pay users more than the maximum stated amount at its own discretion.

Many other firms run bug bounty programs, with OpenAI offering up to $20,000 for “exceptional” vulnerability finds and Google having awarded a record-breaking $605,000 to a researcher known as ‘gzobqq’ for finding a single Android OS flaw in February 2023.

Comments from Microsoft execs during Google’s antitrust case last week have, if nothing else, shone a light on the failings of Bing in recent years. 

The Department of Justice (DoJ) alleges Google has abused its market dominance in the marketplace and created a restrictive environment for other industry players, such as Microsoft, or DuckDuckGo. This has supposedly prevented competitors from reaching their full potential. Microsoft, unsurprisingly, agrees with the DoJ’s view. 

Supporting this argument is the fact Google has been accused of paying roughly $10 billion annually to smartphone manufacturers such as Apple, as well as wireless carriers, to ensure Google Search is the default. 

Jonathan Tinter, a VP at Microsoft, told lawmakers Bing’s efforts to secure default states on smartphones in the US have consistently fallen flat, which has, in turn, resulted in a poorer quality of product for search users. 

Microsoft is willing to take a hit on Bing

It’s natural for Microsoft to be frustrated at its current search engine market position given Google’s long-standing dominance, with Google enjoying a massive 83% market share as of July 2023, according to Statista. 

This marks a decrease from 89% three years ago, however, suggesting promising signs for Bing, which increased its share from 4% to nearly 9% during that period. But, broadly speaking, it's still a minnow nibbling up the scraps while Google cashes in on its dominance. To suggest that Bing’s woes lie solely at Google’s door is wrong, though. The reality is that it’s just not as mature or robust a platform. 

Microsoft throwing its toys out of the pram amid claims of anti-competitive practices is also rather hypocritical given its well-publicized spat with European lawmakers over Microsoft Teams in recent months. 

Microsoft has thrown a lot of money at Bing over the years, so logic would tell us something must’ve budged in that time. But it’s not quite as simple as you’d assume. Tinter told the inquiry Microsoft has gone so far as to offer lucrative revenue-sharing agreements with manufacturers and carriers, all of which were turned down.

Bloomberg also reported Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella meeting with Apple chief exec Tim Cook to lobby on the matter. This deal would have resulted in a multi-billion-dollar loss for Microsoft, but one it was willing to accept providing it improved its market share. Instead, Apple chose to continue with Google as the default search platform for Safari.

Apple executive Eddy Cue told the inquiry “there wasn’t a valid alternative to Google” at the time of the talks, and Apple is said to have had “concerns about Bing’s ability to compete with Google in quality and capabilities”. It appears the penny just hasn’t dropped for Microsoft after all these years.

Why Bing is caught in a doom spiral

It’s hard not to empathize with Microsoft’s predicament. During recent testimony at the Google antitrust hearings, CEO Satya Nadella painted a grim picture for the firm in its fight to expand its footprint in the search space.

Targeting a lucrative deal with Apple could have been a silver bullet it needed to improve its standing, Nadella hinted. Had this deal gone through, Bing would have experienced a marked improvement in usage, which, in turn, would have prompted an increase in what he described as “query flow”. This refers to the volume of queries made on the search engine.

With the might of Apple’s userbase behind it, Bing would likely have witnessed a rapid surge in activity, meaning the team behind the platform would have a broader pool of data to draw from when improving it. This increase in user traffic would also have had advertisers flocking to Bing more readily. 

Nadella described the lack of traffic as a "vicious cycle” in which the platform has been unable to attract traffic, and thereby unable to generate revenue and improve its capabilities. In this sense, it’s easy to see how Bing has wallowed in relative obscurity compared to its major league competitor for so many years. 

Why we should cut Bing some slack

Bing has many redeeming features and attributes that make it a viable option in the search engine market. Not least of all the fact that alternative search engines such as Yahoo or DuckDuckGo rely on Bing results. For more privacy-conscious users of the latter, Bing is the foundation on which their safety rests. 

Similarly, the advent of generative AI over the last year represents a prime opportunity for Bing to differentiate itself in terms of features and functionalities – and it's something that Microsoft has been keen to emphasize in recent months. Earlier this year, Nadella said its multi-billion-dollar generative AI push could be Microsoft’s ticket to breaking Google dominance in the space. He also told The Verge that ChatGPT would let Microsoft “make Google dance” and up the stakes in the market.

The integration of ChatGPT in Bing Search could, in the long term, give Microsoft an opportunity to provide richer, more detailed answers to user search queries. This is something it’s traditionally lacked when compared to Google Search.

Nadella’s recent testimony appears to have hit the nail on the head, however. Google makes it exceedingly difficult for upstarts or rivals to compete by virtue of the fact it’s the default search engine on billions of devices worldwide.

Breaking that barrier is no easy task, especially when one considers how unlikely users are to change their default settings. Without it, it’s unlikely Bing will make positive strides. Without the influx of users, too, it’s destined to be locked in the “vicious cycle” that Nadella bemoans. Unless, that is, US regulators do something about it.

Developers that implement the Bing Search API could be set for major cost increases after Microsoft unveiled a range of pricing changes.

The changes represent a comprehensive overhaul of pricing tiers for the API. Microsoft told developers the increase will come into effect from 1 May this year and will apply “to all markets”.

“Starting 1 May 2023, you’ll be charged the new price for all Microsoft Bing APIs,” the company said.

“We periodically assess the value and pricing of our services to meet market demands and align the pricing of our products and services with customer consumption trends and preferences.”

This abrupt price hike appears to be directly related to recent tech investments made by the company, namely with the integration of ChatGPT in Bing.

“The new pricing model reflects more accurately the technology investments Bing continues to make to improve Search,” the company said.

Microsoft unveiled its new sharpened focus on Bing search earlier this month, sparking talk of a looming battle between the Redmond firm and Google in the browser, search, and generative AI spaces.

The firm said the inclusion of chatbot technology within the Bing search engine will enable it to deliver “better search, more complete answers, a new chat experience, and the ability to generate content”.

How will the Bing API price changes work?

Pricing changes for Bing search are split into several separate tiers based on the volume of transactions per second (TPS).

In the S1 tier, for example, which is based on an average of 250 TPS, customers are currently charged $7 per 1,000 transactions for Bing Web Search and $7 per 25,000 transactions for Bing Image Search.

Under the new pricing, this will change to $25 per 1,000 web search transactions and $25 per 25,000 image search transactions, marking a significant average increase for customers on this tier.

Customers on this tier opting for the Optional Bing Statistics Add-in will also see prices rising from $1 per 1,000 transactions to $10, pricing data showed.

This statistics add-on gathers usage details based on the volume of user queries and applies to all Bing search services such as web, image, and news search.

At present, customers that implement Bing search APIs are invoiced “based on number of transactions”, according to Microsoft.

These plans are pay-as-you-go and can incur penalties if the number of TPS is exceeded.

“If you happen to exceed the mentioned number of transactions per second, your usage will be throttled to be within the mentioned limit,” Microsoft says.

With the introduction of the new pricing plan, Microsoft said customers “do not need to take any action” as the changes will take effect “automatically and be reflected in the next billing cycle after the change is activated".

What providers use Bing search APIs?

Several major independent search providers use Bing APIs, including privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo and green search engine Ecosia. How these providers will be impacted by the pricing increase is unclear at present.

IT Pro has approached DuckDuckGo and Ecosia for comment on the matter.

Tightening grip on APIs

Microsoft’s price changes come as several major tech industry players tighten their grip on APIs. Twitter, for example, has been highly vocal about its intentions to overhaul the structuring of its API access.

At the beginning of February, the social media firm revealed it would no longer support free access to the Twitter API and planned to introduce a paid, tier-based system. This move sparked heavy criticism from the developer community.

The implementation of this change has been fraught with delays, however. On 13 February the company said it planned to delay the launch of its new API platform “by a few more days”.

Twitter is yet to reveal additional information on the launch of the new API platform.

One of the jewels in the Windows 10 crown is the new default browser, Microsoft Edge.

Internet Explorer's replacement has a hell of a lot to recommend it, but as a new entrant to the scene, it's going to take many people a while to get to grips with the ins and outs of it.

As a case in point, changing the default search engine is something of a hassle in Edge. That's likely to be a top priority, as Edge default's to Microsoft's own search engine Bing, rather than the much more popular Google.

Not to worry though. Here's a step-by-step guide detailing how to change your default search engine in Microsoft Edge.

How to change your search engine in Microsoft Edge: Step One

Microsoft Edge features a combo search/address bar, but it's set to use Microsoft Bing by default. In order to switch it to something else, you'll need to change it in the settings.

Open Edge's settings via the ellipsis menu, rather than the hamburger menu and navigate to Advanced Settings'. Here, you'll find an option to change the default search engine.

How to change your search engine in Microsoft Edge: Step Two

It's not quite that simple, however. Unlike other browsers, there is no predefined list of alternatives to choose from. The selection is initially bare, and has to be added to manually.

Navigate to your chosen search engine, and reopen the advanced settings. Now, activate the drop-down menu to choose a default provider, and click Add new'.

How to change your search engine in Microsoft Edge: Step Three

Your chosen search provider should now appear as an option. Select Add as default', and you're all set. One caveat, though; only sites that use the OpenSearch standard can be set as an option.

This covers a wide range of engines, including Google and also allows users to set up sites like Wikipedia as their default search engine.

Microsoft has joined Google in allowing users to request so-called 'revenge porn' images be removed from search results.

As is the case with 'right to be forgotten' requests, anyone in photos related to revenge porn can fill in a form and ask for Google or Microsoft to take the picture down from Google search or Bing, respectively.

A dedicated website for reporting such content has been opened by Microsoft, with the company promising to remove links from Bing search results, OneDrive and Xbox Live.

In a blog post, Microsoft's chief online safety officer Jacqueline Beauchere said: "Clearly, this reporting mechanism is but one small step in a growing and much-needed effort across the public and private sectors to address the problem.

"Much needs to be done to address the problem. As a first step, we want to help put victims back in control of their images and their privacy."

It is thought unlikely that Google or Microsoft will reject many of these requests, nor take a long time to resolve them, as goverments are also cracking down on the use of revenge porn as harassment.

In February, posting nude or explicit photos of someone online without their permission became illegal in England and Wales, carrying a maximum penalty of two-years in prison prison. Northern Ireland and Scotland are considering the introduction of similar laws.

This week, the first person to be convicted for such an offence was revealed, and will be sentenced next month.

Amit Singhal, Google's senior vice president of search, said: "Our philosophy has always been that Search should reflect the whole web. But revenge porn images are intensely personal and emotionally damaging, and serve only to degrade the victims - predominantly women.

"So going forward, we'll honor requests from people to remove nude or sexually explicit images shared without their consent from Google Search results. This is a narrow and limited policy, similar to how we treat removal requests for other highly sensitive personal information, such as bank account numbers and signatures, that may surface in our search results."

Twitter has also announced it is stamping out revenge porn images posted to its platform.

"We know this won't solve the problem of revenge porn we aren't able, of course, to remove these images from the websites themselves but we hope that honoring people's requests to remove such imagery from our search results can help," Singhal concluded.

This article was originally published on 21/06/15 and has been updated multiple times (most recently on 23/07/15)

Microsoft has announced all traffic going through Bing will be encrypted by default, meaning that although marketers and others tracking activity will be able to see the traffic originated from its search engine, they will not be able to see which specific terms the searcher used to resolve the query.

However, all is not lost for those who want to see how people arrive at their site. Through Microsoft's webmaster and advertiser tools, marketers will be able to see which keywords triggered specific ads, alongside clicks, impressions and conversions.

Universal event tracking will provide advanced analytics including bounce rates, duration per visit, pages per visit and total visits resulting from the keywords and Bing Webmaster tools will continue to list keyword and ranking data, but it won't compromise customer info in doing so.

Duane Forrester, senior product manager at Bing said: "Microsoft has a long-history and deep commitment to helping protect our customers' data and the security of their systems. While this change may impact marketers and webmasters, we believe that providing a more secure search experience for our users is important.

"With this change, you will still be able to see Bing as the origin (referrer) of the encrypted traffic, though analytics tools you are using to analyze your traffic generally have their own, proprietary way of including this information in their search reports."

Although Microsoft did previously allow customers to opt in or out of having their data encrypted, it was still behind Google and Yahoo who encrypted the data as default in their search engines.

The EU's controversial "right to be forgotten" ruling against Google search results will now extend to Bing and Yahoo, The Wall Street Journal reports.

The ruling allows people living within the EU to request that certain "inadequate, irrelevant, or no longer relevant" information be removed from search results, though the web pages in question would remain online, but the rule had previously been restricted to Google results.

But that is about to change, as both Bing and Yahoo told the publication that they too would be abiding by the right to be forgotten ruling.

A spokesperson for Yahoo said: "We will carefully evaluate each request with the goal of balancing the individual's right to privacy with considerations of the public's right to information."

Similarly vague words came from Microsoft, with a spokesperson saying in a statement: "While we're still refining that process, our goal is to strike a satisfactory balance between individual privacy interests and the public's interest in free expression."

EU privacy regulators recently expressed their desire for requests to be removed from global sites, rather than just from European domains, after new guidelines were agreed to.

They said: "Limiting de-listing to EU domains on the grounds that users tend to access search engines via their national domains cannot be considered a sufficient means to satisfactorily guarantee the rights [of people]."

Though Google has been inundated with requests since the ruling was put in place, it has reportedly removed just 40 per cent of the 175,000 requests it has received to date. A third of these come from UK sources.

Microsoft's Bing search engine now displays information from a wide range of academic sources to assist researchers.

While other search engines, such as Google and Yahoo display academic sources in separate services, Bing will include results related to a search term in the same place as generic search results.

The company made it clear it was adding the feature to get ahead of its competitors who treat scholarly information as a separate search engine.

Microsoft said it "will be able to point the way to a wealth of information from the academic community...with academic data tightly integrated and prominently featured on its search pages."

As part of Microsoft's Academic Search service, which has been a testing ground for a number of studies including data mining, named-entity disambiguation, and visualisation for some years, it is hoped the search engine will be a key destination for researchers.

Kuansan Wang, director of the Internet Services Research Center, said: "Microsoft Academic Search is evolving from a research project to a production effort that will leverage the full capability of Microsoft's flagship search engine, Bing. Since the academic audience is an important user segment and a source of innovative suggestions and feedback, we are announcing the new development during the Faculty Summit to broaden our engagements with this community."

Microsoft's Cortana personal assistant will also get access to these academic sources, as it draws in information from the search engine. When the Cortana Notebook is activated, users can select the Academic Theme to find and alert users to academic events such as conference agendas and paper due dates, all of which will be tailored to a user's preferences.

"By growing Microsoft Academic Search from a research effort to production," Wang says, "our goal is to make Bing-powered Cortana the best personal research assistant for our users while augmenting the previous site as Microsoft Research's social and outreach portal for the research community."

Microsoft has launched Windows 8.1 with Bing for installation on budget devices.

The platform was released on Friday 23 May to manufacturers to help "OEMs add Windows to low-cost devices while driving end user usage of Microsoft Services such as Bing and OneDrive," according to Microsoft.

The big difference between Windows 8.1 standard and Windows 8.1 with Bing is that the default Internet Explorer browser has been programmed to launch with Bing as the search engine.

End users of a Windows 8.1 with Bing device are able to change the default search engine within the Internet Explorer settings menu if they, for example, want to use Google or Yahoo as their default search engine.

Windows 8.1 with Bing will only be available on devices from Microsoft's hardware partners including HP, LG, and Lenovo.

To make the tablets more affordable, Microsoft will also be shipping them with a free version of Office or a year's subscription to Office 365 for extra affordability.

Microsoft said: "The end result is that more peopleacross consumer and commercialwill have access to an even broader selection of new devices with all the awesomeness that Windows 8.1 provides, and get Office too, all at a really affordable price."

Microsoft has already taken steps to make Windows 8.1 accessible to more people at a lower cost, with the most recent update allowing hardware partners to build lower cost devices with only 1GB of memory and 16GB of storage that "provide customers with the fast and fluid experience they expect from a Windows device."

Windows 8.1 is also available for Microsoft's hardware partners to use for free on devices with a screen measuring nine-inches or less.

Microsoft has set out plans to offer schools access to an ad-free version of its Bing search engine that will automatically filter out adult content too.

The Bing for Schools initiative is being piloted in the US, and is designed to allow students to take advantage of its search technology in a safer and more secure way.

The vendor announced the move in a Bing blog post. In it Microsoft revealed that several US schools have already signed up to the service, before going on to encourage others to follow suit.

Those that do will be offered access to a reworked version of the Microsoft search engine, which will be free of adverts, feature enhanced privacy controls and will boast filters to help block adult content.

In the past, the firm has criticised rival search giant Google for including adverts in the online services it provides to schools, and has backed legislation to ban the use of Google Apps in schools for this reason.

Matt Wallaert, a Bing behavioral scientist at Microsoft, said the programme is being introduced because of how reliant children are on the internet to complete their school work.

"Bing for Schools isn't just about giving schools the choice to have an ad-free, safer, privacy-enhanced search experience," Wallaert wrote in a blog post.

"The internet has become a vital part of our society and...91 per cent of educators believe that content focusing on digital literacy should be incorporated into every school's curriculum," he added.

Participating schools may also be able to take advantage of the Microsoft Bing Rewards programme to acquire a Surface RT for every 30,000 credits they accrue.

The programme was set up by Microsoft to reward users with points every time they use Bing to search the web and for trying out new features the firm rolls out.

"Any schools can receive Bing Rewards credits they don't have to be enrolled in the official Bing for Schools ad-free search programme," Wallaert advised.

"We'll aggregate the credits for everyone supporting each school and when they reach 30,000 credits, we'll convert those into a Microsoft Surface RT tablet with Touch Cover that will be sent directly to the school."

The company said only a limited number of schools will be admitted to the pilot programme, but the firm said it intends to expand the initiative as time goes on.

Microsoft-owned search engine Bing has become the first in the UK to introduce pop-up notifications for people who try to use the service to find child abuse images.

The notifications are designed to alert users to the fact the content they are trying to view is illegal, and are triggered when users enter search terms that have been blacklisted by the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP).

The pop-ups only apply to UK searches, and are designed to stop people "drifting towards" trying to find illegal content on the internet using search engines, a Microsoft spokesperson told the BBC.

"This is in addition to Microsoft's existing and longstanding policy of removing any verified links to illegal content of this sort from Bing as quickly as possible," the spokesperson continued.

"Microsoft has been, and remains, a strong proponent of proactive action in reasonable and scalable ways by the technology industry in the fight against technology-facilitated child exploitation.

"We have teams dedicated globally to abuse reporting on our services and the development of new innovations to combat child exploitation more broadly."

The introduction of the pop-ups follows on from an announcement made last week by the Prime Minister David Cameron about a series of anti-online pornography measures the Government is planning to introduce.

They include the rollout of online pornography blocks to every internet connected household in the UK, which will be automatically switched on unless users ask for them not to be.

In a separate measure, search engines will also be asked to block access to illegal content by October, as well as introduce similar pop-up notifications to the ones Microsoft has now rolled out.

IT Pro contacted Google to find out if it plans to follow Microsoft's lead on pop-up notifications, and received a statement reiterating the firm's "zero-tolerance" stance on child abuse imagery.

"We use purpose built technology and work with child safety organisations like the Internet Watch Foundation to find, remove and report it, because we never want this material to appear in our search results. We are working with experts on effective ways to deter anyone tempted to look for this sickening material," the statement concluded.

*This story was published on the morning of 29 July, before being updated later in the afternoon with a statement from Google.*

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer claims the firm's search deal with Microsoft has not delivered the market share gains it expected.

Speaking at the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference in San Francisco, Mayer claimed the 10-year partnership has backfired, with Bing taking market share away from Yahoo.

"One of the points of the alliance is that we collectively want to grow share rather than just trading share with each other," Mayer told delegates.

We collectively want to grow share rather than just trading share with each other.

"We need to see monetisation working better because we know that it can and we've seen other competitors in the space illustrate how well it can work," Mayer said of the partnership.

Mayer also claimed Yahoo's biggest challenge is getting more page impressions. The internet giant is set to streamline its mobile apps from 60 to around 12 as it fights to get consumers to spend more time on Yahoo's websites to boost ad revenue.

Yahoo and Microsoft partnered up in 2010 as they thought they would be better positioned to challenge Google's dominance in the search market.

However, two years on, and the deal is yet to make a significant dent in Googles market share.

Google is still the most used search engine in countries such as the UK and US with 89 per cent and 66 per cent market share, respectively.

Despite Microsoft and Yahoo joining forces, the firms still lag behind with a collective share of 28 per cent in the US and 30 per cent in the UK.

Google's share of the UK search market hit a five-year low in December, according to new figures from Experian.

The internet giant saw its share of the market dip below the 90 per cent mark for the second month in a row, with the firm accounting for 88.35 per cent of the UK's online searches.

This is Google's lowest ranking in five years, while its rivals Bing, Yahoo and Ask all saw their share go up slightly in December.

There are seven times more searches conducted on Google than on all of the other search engines combined.

Google's UK market share was also down 2.8 per cent on December 2011, when it accounted for 91.15 per cent of the UK's search queries.

The results were compiled by Experian Hitwise, which monitors the web browsing habits of the UK population and how they interact with more than 1 million websites.

Its findings also showed that Microsoft's search sites, which include Bing, clocked a 0.19 per cent uptick in searches between November and December 2012, as well as a year-on-year increase of 1.15 per cent.

Meanwhile, Yahoo increased its share of the market by 0.08 per cent over the same month-to-month timeframe, and achieved a year-on-year jump in searches of 0.86 per cent.

Ask saw the largest jump in monthly searches with 0.52 per cent growth between November and December.

Overall, UK web users made 2.7 billion visits to search engines during December 2012, which is 400 million more than the same month of 2011, said Experian.

The company said the jump in December search activity corresponds with the rise in people using the web to buy Christmas presents.

James Murray, digital insight manager at Experian Marketing Services, said Google's drop in market share should make little difference to its competitive edge.

"There are seven times more searches conducted on Google sites than on all the other search engines combined. However, this is encouraging news for Microsoft as Bing...starts to gain some momentum in the UK search market," said Murray.

Bing popularity, he added, has been bolstered by its availability across multiple Microsoft devices, while Microsoft's recent technology tie-up with Facebook should also work in its favour.

"Becoming the default search engine on sites such as Facebook has also contributed to an increase in market share as the way in which consumers use search engines to continues to diversify," added Murray.

Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg treated the world to a sneak peek at the work his firm has been doing to overhaul the way people search for information on the site last night.

During a launch event in California, Zuckerberg showed off a beta version of the site's new Graph Search service, which will draw on the masses of data people post on the site to give users more personalised search results.

The service will expand Facebook's existing search capabilities which let members search for people, places and fan pages by allowing them to submit strings of queries that can be used to delve deeper into their friends' interests, photos and checked-in places.

Members can use the tool to find photos from a specific date, search for connections who like the same films as them or scour the site for friends of friends that could be single, for example.There's more content that we haven't got to yet than we have.The capability will be rolled out to "hundreds of thousands" of the firm's one billion users during the beta testing phase, which kicked off yesterday, and will initially focus on returning results relating to people, places, interests and photos.

Any queries Graph Search cannot answer will be handed over to Microsoft's Bing search engine to deal with.

As time goes on, Zuckerberg's plan is to include people's posts, but as he points out that will take time to come off because of the vast amounts of data Facebook's developers will have to sift through first.

"It will take years to index the whole map of [all our users' data]. There's more content that we haven't got to yet than we have," he said.

At the moment, there's no firm roll out date for the service. But, when it does eventually drop, it has the potential to seriously shake up the search market, and could benefit business users in several ways, too.

What it means for Google

This may have been an attempt by the CEO to dampen down pre-event speculation that Facebook was planning to launch a standalone search engine that would directly pit it against Google.

But, thanks to Facebook's technology tie-up with Bing, it's a scenario that has the potential to play out in this way, despite Zuckerberg's protestations.

"That isn't the intent...But [if] you can't find what you're looking for, it's really nice to have [Bing]," he said.Continues over page

If Facebook users type in a string, such as "Find restaurants where my friends eat in London", they'll be presented with a list of places their connections have recently checked-in at and recommended.

A similar search on Google would generate a list of London restaurants, but unless they've eaten there before or heard good things from a friend or colleague users will be flying blind.

Given the value people place in the recommendations of friends, users may over time become more inclined to rely on a Facebook search to find things to do than a Google one. Especially if it means they don't have to leave the site.

This could be a troubling development for Google, which has been striving to provide users of its Google+ social networking site with a more personalised web search experience for some time.

What Google has in its favour is that it already has the information (and possibly the algorithms) needed to deliver this, but the Google+ user base is nowhere near as large as Facebook's.

One way Google could make Graph Search work for it is by teaming up with Facebook in the same way Microsoft has. This is an idea Zuckerberg has entertained, but he suggested the firm couldn't agree on privacy terms with the web giant.

"I'd love to work with Google...[because] we want to make search social [and more open] in general," he added.

What it means for Microsoft

According to data from internet market analyst NetMarketShare, Google currently holds more than 83 per cent of the global search engine market for desktop devices. Yahoo is in second place with a shade over 8 per cent, while Bing is third with 4.6 per cent. I'd love to work with Google.On top of this, a report on US news site Daily Caller recently claimed that Microsoft is losing $2billion a year on Bing. The Facebook connection could help the firm staunch some of these losses by sending more traffic Bing's way.

This all largely depends on how long the Facebook-Microsoft partnership is forecast to last for and if the site never does manage to resolve its apparent privacy issues with Google.

At last night's event, it wasn't made explicitly clear if Facebook plans to make Bing a permanent part of its search service or rely on it to plug the gaps until it has the data needed to do that itself.

If it is a relatively short-term thing, it certainly won't do the Bing brand any harm to be closely associated with the world's largest social networking site. It could also provide it with a stay of execution, because there's only so long any company can afford to support a business that's supposedly not making much money.

If Facebook is planning to make Bing a permanent fixture (and users take to Graph Search in the way Zuckerberg obviously hopes they will), this could be very good news for the search engine and, at the very least, help it make a dent in Yahoo's market share.

As for Google, the internet giant is unlikely to roll over and let Facebook encroach too much on its territory, and the site will undoubtedly remain the default search choice for most web users for a long time to come.

What will be interesting to see is, if Google does lose some share to this Facebook-Bing venture, if this might prompt the firm to come round to the social networking site's way of thinking on privacy.Continues over page...

What it means for businessGraph Search's potential as a staff recruitment tool was demonstrated by Facebook's Tom Stocky, who said people could use it to search through their friends' networks for people who may have worked in particular industries or at certain firms.

Users could then approach their friends for more information about said person's character and suitability for a potential role, he said. You can only see content on Graph Search that was already on Facebook before.Whether or not people will use Graph Search in this way is anyone's guess. Many Facebook users tend to keep details about their work life off the site or use online resources such as LinkedIn to trumpet their professional achievements.

Where it might come in more useful for businesses is in building brand awareness, as corporations with a Facebook page stand a better chance of appearing within people's Graph Searches if they provide somewhere for people to check-in at and Like.

Graph Search could also provide businesses with an easy way of gauging the popularity of the services they offer and find out more about the wider interests of people who like their brand.

This was demonstrated last night when a search asking what music people who support Mitt Romney like was compared to a similar one investigating the musical tastes of Barack Obama fans.

Information like this could be used to hone products or market them differently, but the success and accuracy of this depends on how many Facebook users are willing to share this kind of information, and how many friends they have.

As Lars Rasmussen, director of product development at Facebook, pointed out last night. "You can only see the content [in Graph Search] you could already see on Facebook before."

Therefore, any photos, posts or interests uses have set to private will not be included in Graph Search's results.

Zuckerberg explained that Facebook has gone to great lengths to make it easier for users to hide information they don't want shared by introducing features, for example, that let people untag multiple items at once rather.

Ahead of the service being rolled out to users, the site will also feature a prompt on its homepage urging members to review the information they share so they can sweep anything incriminating under a virtual carpet.

This is all part of the firm's ultimate aim to roll out a search service that was "privacy aware," explained Zuckerberg.

"Each piece of content has a different person who can see it [and] most of the things people share with you aren't public, so you want a search tool that lets you get access to things people have just shared with you," he added.

Google has been given a public warning by EC competition commissioner Joaquin Almunia to respond to accusations from competitors that it is abusing its dominant position in the internet search marketplace.

The Competition Commission has been investigating Google over claims its search engine ranks its own property, such as YouTube, higher than its rivals'.

The Commission is also looking into accusations that Google's advertising breaks rules by blocking its competitors' ads.

The firm has also been accused of copying competitors' travel and restaurant reviews.

"If effective solutions were found quickly and tested successfully, competition could be restored at an early stage by means of a commitment decision," EU competition commissioner Joaquin Almunia said in the text of a speech to be delivered at Fordham University in New York.

"However, we are not there yet, and it must be clear that - in the absence of satisfactory proposals in the short term - I will be obliged to continue with our formal proceedings," he said.

The speech puts pressure on Google by making public the Commission's readiness to take a more aggressive line in negotiations.

The talks between the search giant and the Commission have been ongoing since July. The speech hints that very little progress has been made in talks to resolve the dispute and that few concessions have been made by Google.

If the case gets brought before the courts and the Commission is successful in showing a breach of competition law, Google may be fined 10 per cent of its worldwide revenues which for 2011 amounts to 2.9 billion (2.3 billion).

Almunia said proposals have to be valid worldwide and not just restricted to the EU. Google said it is currently working on meeting the Commission's demands.

"We continue to work cooperatively with the Commission," said Google spokesman Al Verney in a statement.

University of Glasgow computer scientists are developing a search engine that will give people real-time information about the city they are in.

The European-funded project, known as SMART, intends to develop and apply a system to allow users to search and analyse data from designated sensors.

Standard search engines, such as Google and Bing, are unable to answer search queries of this type.

By matching search queries with information from physical sensors across a city and cross-referencing data from social networks, such as Twitter, users will receive detailed responses to questions they ask.

The engine intends to help users find events that friends have been to and ascertain how busy a city centre is.

The researchers said that standard search engines, such as Google and Bing, are unable to answer search queries of this type.

The SMART project will be built upon an open-source search engine technology called Terrier, which has been under development at the university since 2004.

Dr Iadh Ounis from the University of Glasgow's School of Computing Science, said the search engine would answer high-level queries by automatically identifying cameras, microphones and other sensors.

The results will then be created based on the feedback given by these distributed sources in an intelligent way.

"SMART builds upon the existing concept of smart cities'; physical spaces which are covered in an array of intelligent sensors that communicate with each other and can be searched for information," said Dr. Ounis.

The search results sourced from these smart cities could be reused across multiple applications, he added, to make them more effective.

The University of Glasgow has been working on the project alongside nine other partners.

They include Atos, Athens Information Technology, IBM's Haifa Research Lab, Imperial College London, the City of Santander, PRISA Digital, Telesto and Consorzio S3 Log.

Ounis said he expects to test the system out in a real city before 2014.

The latest analysis of search engine and social network use in the UK found July was a good month for Microsoft.

The software giant's Bing search engine grew its share of the UK search engine market by 0.96 per cent last month to overtake the 3 per cent market share of Yahoo!

This growth also means Bing regains the second place it lost on its second birthday only last month to Yahoo! for the first time this year, accounting for 3.84 per cent of share of all UK Internet searches during the month, according to figures published by Experian Hitwise today.

The data intelligence firm said Microsoft was, in fact, the only firm to have achieved "notable growth" in the search market during July and mostly at the expense of Google.

Robin Goad, Experian Hitwise research director, stated: "The gains made by Microsoft sites this month are almost exactly equal to the losses suffered by Google, which means that some of the searches that were being conducted on Google engines last month are now being typed into Bing."

He said it was important for brands to understand where people were searching for products and, crucially, how rankings, paid rates and search success rates vary across the competitive search engine market.

"The key for Bing now is to hold on to its gains in the search market and build on its strengths which differentiate it from Google and the other engines," Goad added.

Despite the gains made by Microsoft, and even Yahoo! (which grew its July market share by 0.3 per cent), they were minor in comparison to Google's ongoing dominance.

Even though its share of searches declined by 0.98 per cent in July and 0.56 per cent year-on-year, it still accounted for over 91 per cent on searches conducted by UK Internet users.

The social network analysis revealed Facebook's dominance of the UK social market dipped to its lowest level since October 2009, when the network accounted for 50.5 per cent of all visits to the category.

The July Hitwise figures found the social network suffered a significant loss of market share this month, dropping from 53.7 to 50.1 per cent of all UK Internet visits to social networks.

By contrast, YouTube continued to be the fastest moving social network for the fifth consecutive month. One in every 35 visits to a website by UK Internet users now goes to YouTube, and the video site now accounts for 22.54% of all visits to social networks its highest market share of the UK social landscape recorded to date.

Goad added: "The growth of YouTube over the last year has been outstanding. Now firmly entrenched as the UK's third most visited website after Google UK and Facebook, YouTube's growth has come from usage on mobile devices."

One in 20 visits to YouTube now comes from a mobile device used on a home Wi-Fi network, he said.

It is hard to imagine your day to day working life without a search engine.

No longer do we struggle to find the answers or waste hours arguing over the most likely remedy. Instead we type in a few characters to a search bar and Bob's your uncle.

There have been many incarnations of search engines, with some achieving great dominance whilst others disappeared into the ether.

Microsoft might be the leader in a number of software products, but the company left it late to embark on this essential business, and consumer, tool.

Its search engine, known as Bing, was launched globally two years ago today, so we take a look back at some of the headlines the search engine made in its ongoing attempts to kill off its bigger rivals.

May 2009

Talk turned to truism in May two years ago when Microsoft's search engine was unveiled. Previously codenamed Kumo,' the website was unveiled to the press under the new title Bing.'

June 2009

The US might already have had its mitts on the new search engine but the rest of the world had to wait until 3 June for the global release.

July 2009

The search story had to move on from the days of mere answers to the days of integration and leading social networks were key. To this end, it only took Bing a month before it had Twitter results built in to the search engine.

September 2009

Words are great but how about pictures? The next addition to Bing came in the shape of visual search.'

November 2009

Despite numerous features being launched, it wasn't until October Bing came out of beta in the UK.

December 2009

Microsoft has had its fair share of days in court but the first one for the Bing product came when a design firm from St Louis named Bing! Information Design sued it for the title.

The year of 2010 saw Bing trying to grow market share and take on its rivals at Yahoo and, of course, Google. But along with new features, Microsoft dropped a number as well. In June, Bing's cashback' function, which allowed users to compare various e-commerce deals was let go.

February 2011

As Bing climbed up the market share rankings albeit still far behind its major rival it was no surprise its competitors asked why. At this point, Google made claims Microsoft had copied search results from its leading engine.

March 2011

Now it was time for Bing to expand further and take on some of the other internet start-ups. First on its radar was Groupon, when Microsoft launched its own version known as Bing Deals.

May 2011

It was no surprise when Microsoft set Bing as its standard search function in Windows Phone 7, but in May this year it won the backing of RIM, becoming the default search on BlackBerry devices.

It is still relatively early days for Microsoft's search engine, and it only has around 90 per cent market share in Europe, but a lot of events have passed. Happy 2nd Birthday Bing - we look forward to seeing what the future brings.

Microsoft is close to securing a deal to buy Skype for as much as $8 billion (4.9 billion), according to a report.

The acquisition could be announced today, although may still fall through as negotiations have not been finalised, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the matter.

The overall value of the deal would include clearance of Skype's long-term debt, which stands at around $686 million, meaning Microsoft would pay out close to $8.5 billion.

Microsoft and Skype declined to comment on a potential deal.

Many have questioned Microsoft's motives, with some pointing to its rivalry with Google and the Redmond giant's desire to have a big name brand on the web.

Google remains the dominant force on the internet, with around 90 per cent search market share here in Europe, although over in the US Microsoft's Bing has made some gains over its rival.

There have been suggestions Microsoft could roll Skype into its Kinect technology as well, for a potentially new take on videoconferencing.

The firm could be looking to make a bigger play in the mobile space as well, having recently hooked up with RIM to have Bing as the default search engine in BlackBerrys.

Microsoft has video conferencing functionality within Lync and Windows Live Messenger, but lacks video calling capability in Windows Phone 7.

"With Apple FaceTime - a competitor to Skype - now available on the Mac, iPhone 4, iPad 2 and the new iPod touch, it is definitely now or never for Microsoft," said Ovum principal analyst Richard Edwards.

"There are other products and companies out there that offer a much better fit architecturally than Skype (and they come with a much cheaper price tag too), but Skype is undoubtedly the product Microsoft needs to stay in the game."

Despite others' reservations, Edwards concluded a Skype acquisition would be a good fit for Microsoft's business model.

"It's popular, it runs on Windows PCs, and later this year it will be available on Windows Phone 7," he added.

"Perhaps more importantly for the rest of us, Skype also runs on other computers, such as Mac and Linux, and mobile phones too, such iPhone and Android-based devices."

Various tech giants, including Facebook and Google, were reportedly courting Skype.

According to a Reuters report, citing a source with direct knowledge of discussions about a potential Skype sale to Facebook or Google, a deal would have been valued at $3 billion to $4 billion.

The VoIP firm was under the control of eBay until 2009 when the retail giant sold a 65 per cent stake in the company to a venture capitalist group.

If the Microsoft deal does go through, it would be the firm's biggest acquisition to date.

Sony nightmare

Sony had what can only be described as a miserable week following the Bank Holiday weekend.

After two major breaches, one on the Playstation Network (PSN) and another on Sony Online Entertainment (SOE), the company came under heavy fire for not coming clean sooner to customers.

Over 100 million were thought to have been affected all of whom have been offered some freebies and greater protection in the future. The Sony boss came out and said sorry too, which was nice.

Some have pointed to the possible LastPass breach as an example of how Sony should have handled the situation, updating customers almost immediately after something dodgy cropped up.

No doubt it'll all turn into a giant Who Dunnit?" now. Whoever it was, Anonymous is adamant it had no part in the theft, despite Sony pondering whether it was the hacktivism group in a letter to Congress.

Whatever happens now, let's just hope Sony has learned its lesson and this shocking mess is cleared up soon. For the Japanese manufacturer, however, this may just be the beginning of a lengthy clean up process.

Good job RIM

There were plenty of smiles going round the smartphone world this week, especially over at RIM.

The manufacturer made Bing the default search engine and map service on all new BlackBerrys - a deal that certainly made sense to Mary Branscombe. RIM also introduced the newest version of its BlackBerry Bold smartphone, with improved performance specs and the firm's latest OS.

RIM will be hoping to slow the seemingly unstoppable rise of Android, which was evidenced in yet another report this week.

There was good news for privacy advocates as well, as Apple put its smiley face on and fixed the tracking issue which had infuriated so many recently. Will other manufacturers make similar moves considering it seems everyone is tracking us? It's an Orwellian Nightmare, I tell thee.

Best of the rest

We've shipped our intrepid Acting News Editor, Jennifer Scott, off to the US for a couple of weeks, where she's been at a Brocade summit.

The firm has launched a range of networking products and talked about the move from IPv4 to IPv6, whilst we caught up with the company's CEO too. As Back to the Future's Dr Emmett Brown once said, Great Scott!

Elsewhere, Intel got excited about some 3D transistors it made, whilst BT decided to bring in some extra help for its fibre rollout in the form of ex-armed forces personnel. Over and out.

Every now and then there are suggestions that Microsoft should buy a phone maker like Nokia or RIM. Instead of buying one platform, Microsoft prefers to partner with the ones it sees as strategic. That's not necessarily because they're the most successful, but because they're in competition with companies Microsoft is also in competing with.

As the saying goes, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. But making Bing the default search engine and map service on all new BlackBerrys, and building it right into the BlackBerry 7 OS on new devices this autumn, is as much about technology as it is about snubbing Google.

For Microsoft, RIM is already a partner. To use BES you need a mail server and, often, that's Exchange Server. Indeed, the two companies recently announced that RIM would be running versions of BES for Office365 customers. Microsoft will carry on developing for Android and iPhone devices, but what it does for BlackBerry will be the kind of platform-level services apps on Windows Phone can use rather than individual ones.

As the saying goes, the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

"While Microsoft will support the top phone platforms with our cloud services we're going to invest uniquely in RIM, in addition to our own Windows Phone platform," Steve Ballmer said this week at BlackBerry World.

Bing Maps architect Blaise Aguera y Arcas demonstrated the search engine putting your location on the BlackBerry lock screen ready to find information and offering maps and a directory of nearby services. Bing will use voice search and Streetside augmented reality to find what you're looking for and show you how to get there. It will then link to reservation services and coupons for nearby businesses on the assumption that if you search for a restaurant, you're most likely planning to actually eat there. Microsoft is also likely to bring the Photosynth app it's just released for iPhone to BlackBerry.

While Ballmer didn't miss an opportunity to criticise the competition, he did explain why BlackBerry is easier for Microsoft or third-party developers to work with.

"With Android the volumes have risen but there's an ensuing chaos that has caused a level of frustration with consumers and developers alike," he said. "The Apple platform has certainly offered opportunity for app developers but there are a very limited set of ways to collaborate and extend experiences of their device for businesses and consumers. On BlackBerry we see opportunities to create unique experiences. This goes way beyond a search box and links with ranked URLs. It's about finding real tools that help real people get jobs done."

For RIM, Microsoft and Bing is a better combination than Google because Android is far more of a threat than Windows Phone. What's more, as the underdog Bing's team is more motivated to work on the level of integration that RIM wants.

When Mark Zuckerberg announced social search integration with Bing rather than Google, he said Facebook had chosen Microsoft because "the companies doing great innovation tend to not be the incumbents". To tackle Google's head start in search, Bing is thinking differently. The instant answers you get today for weather and flight status information are evolving into tools that are more about doing things like booking a table in a restaurant, sending a message or spending money than finding information. That means the way Bing thinks about search is very close to the way RIM thinks about what the BlackBerry is good for: giving you the right information at the right time for what you're trying to achieve.

What RIM wants, says co-chief executive Mike Lazaridis, is search super apps.

"BlackBerry super apps can speak to each other seamlessly and we've working with Microsoft to deliver a richer experience for that, from the cloud," he said.

I see a sentiment with people moving away from using Google and starting to use Bing because they don't want to be seen to be siding with the 'evil empire.'

Microsoft is a good choice to give RIM the help it needs with that richer experience, according to Stuart Carlaw, an analyst at ABI Research. "I think there's a lot of mileage in this. The Achilles heel of BlackBerry has always been maps," he told IT PRO

"There's a lot in the Microsoft partnership with Nokia that's going to benefit the RIM platform more than they could have done themselves. NAVTEQ is one of the leading contenders in mapping, not only for traditional positioning but value added services."

The more controlled BlackBerry OS is a better place to build these integrated information tools than the fragmented Android, Carlaw claims. "In the future search will be the way we view location today. [It will be] an enabler for what people want to do," he said.

"I won't search Google to find out what time my train is, I'll just type train time' and the info will be there. That can only happen where there's a unified environment where that search occurs."

According to Microsoft, RIM has been driving a lot of the work on the search concepts demonstrated this week. Carlaw points out that, increasingly, Microsoft is a more attractive partner in the mobile space than Google.

"There was a short term marriage of convenience but the problem with Google is that it is commoditising everybody's business around it and there's no value add in what it's doing." he said.

"I see a sentiment with people moving away from using Google and starting to use Bing because they don't want to be seen to be siding with the 'evil empire.' And Microsoft is in no position [to] 'do a Google' on somebody and dictate terms."

Here at IT PRO we always refer to companies in the singular and not the plural since they have a legal identity all of their own separate from the people that actually run and staff it.

So, for example, 'Acme Corporation is found guilty of selling baby unicorn burgers' instead 'are found guilty'.

Despite this legal fiction, we're acutely aware that personality conflicts, petty squabbling, power struggles and individual daftness are probably the real reasons behind some of the more peculiar corporate decisions and incidents of the past week.

BP's leaking again

The Deepwater Horizon oil disaster last year in the Gulf of Mexico was one of the worst environmental disasters in American history. It severely tarnished the reputation of BP, one of the companies responsible much like a pelican or turtle slowly gagging in a pool of petrochemicals.

To add insult to injury for the local people affected by the spill, BP revealed an employee lost a laptop containing the personal details of around 13,000 victims claiming compensation from the company. I'll bet a dozen gallons of Brent Sweet Light Crude the laptop wasn't encrypted.

Although the poor sap responsible for the data loss probably had nothing to do with the oil spill, he's probably getting a royal dressing down for adding to BP's collective public relations woes. I almost feel sorry for the lot of them.

Microsoft squeals 'play fair!' to EU

Microsoft has been the subject of numerous anti-trust investigations on both sides of the Atlantic over the past decade or so. It's therefore distinctly ironic the Bing developer has now accused Google of anti-competitive behaviour in the search engine market in a filing with the European Commission.

Lawyers are no doubt poring over the legal documents right now, but all we hear is the distinct sound of Steve Ballmer throwing his toys out of a pram, probably against the better advice of his nannies. I mean aides.

Google closes its fist over Android

First Google announced it was delaying the release of the source code for its open-source Android 3.0 Honeycomb operating system.

Now, according to Bloomberg, Google is tightening its hold over Android even further by demanding final approval over any code changes made by hardware manufacturers and threatening to withhold early access to new versions if it doesn't get it.

For a company that touted the 'openness' of its mobile operating system , this is quite a change. Although arguably less 'open' and more 'closed,' it will hopefully reduce the number of mediocre and plain awful Android products we've seen in recent times.

Nevertheless that sound you hear is the sound of countless Android/Google/open-source fan boys, normally procrastinating about the advantages of 'openness,' now frantically trying to rationalise and justify this new course of action.

Microsoft has filed a formal complaint against Google with the European Commission (EC), accusing its rival of anti-competitive behaviour.

It marks the first time Microsoft has filed an antitrust complaint with the EC and comes as Google is being investigated by the same body over whether it broke European competition law.

Google has faced a number of investigations into its competitive actions in the US, where it has less of a market share than in Europe.

In its EC filing, the Redmond giant claimed Google was guilty of engaging "in a broadening pattern of walling off access to content and data" which rivals needed to compete in the market and attract advertisers.

Microsoft gave a number of examples where it believed Google had impeded competition, including the 2006 acquisition of YouTube.

According to Microsoft, Google implemented "a growing number of technical measures" to prevent other search engines from including YouTube videos in results.

Google was also accused of blocking Windows Phone 7 devices from using YouTube properly, preventing access to extra services, such as the ability to find favourites and see ratings.

"Microsoft is ready to release a high quality YouTube app for Windows Phone," said Brad Smith, vice president and general counsel for Microsoft, on a blog.

"We just need permission to access YouTube in the way that other phones already do, permission Google has refused to provide."

Microsoft claimed Google also sought to prevent others from offering so-called "orphan books" those publications without a copyright holder.

The Redmond firm then moved on to advertisers, alleging Google "contractually prohibits advertisers from using their data in an interoperable way with other search advertising platforms, such as Microsoft's adCenter."

"This makes it much more costly for Google's advertisers to run portions of their campaigns with any competitor, and thus less likely that they will do so," Smith said.

"That is a significant problem because most advertisers figure that they have to advertise first with Google."

Microsoft also suggested Google had got its claws into search boxes within websites by contractually blocking "leading websites in Europe from distributing competing search boxes."

"Finally, we share the concerns expressed by many others that Google discriminates against would-be competitors by making it more costly for them to attain prominent placement for their advertisements."

"Microsoft has provided the Commission with a considerable body of expert analysis concerning how search engine algorithms work and the competitive significance of promoting or demoting various advertisements."

In a statement sent to IT PRO, a Google spokesperson said the firm was not surprised Microsoft had taken the step as a subsidiary - Ciao.de - was one of the original complainants which sparked the EU investigation.

"For our part, we continue to discuss the case with the European Commission and we're happy to explain to anyone how our business works," the spokesperson added.

The search spat between Microsoft and Google stepped up a notch earlier this year, when the Redmond giant was accused of copying Google results.

Google claimed it saw various URLs from its own search results appear in Bing "with increasing frequency for all kinds of queries."

Microsoft denied the claims, saying it used "multiple signals and approaches in ranking search results."

Microsoft has denied claims Bing results were directly copied from Google, as the two tech giants came to blows.

Google claimed it had seen various URLs from its own search results appear in Bing "with increasing frequency for all kinds of queries."

These included popular, rare, unusual and misspelled queries, Google claimed.

"Even search results that we would consider mistakes of our algorithms started showing up on Bing," Amit Singhal, Google Fellow, said in a blog post.

"We couldn't shake the feeling that something was going on, and our suspicions became much stronger in late October 2010 when we noticed a significant increase in how often Google's top search result appeared at the top of Bing's ranking for a variety of queries."

Google then carried out an experiment, creating around 100 "synthetic queries" searches users would not be expected to carry out, like random word jumbles.

Google gave 20 engineers laptops installed with Microsoft Windows running Internet Explorer 8 with the Bing Toolbar added.

Furthermore, the IE8's 'Suggested Sites' feature was added and default options for the Bing Toolbar were used.

"We asked these engineers to enter the synthetic queries into the search box on the Google home page, and click on the results, i.e., the results we inserted," Singhal explained.

"We were surprised that within a couple weeks of starting this experiment, our inserted results started appearing in Bing."

He claimed that some Bing results increasingly appeared "like an incomplete, stale version of Google results - a cheap imitation."

Microsoft has fobbed off Google's claims, offering its own blog post from Harry Shum, corporate vice president of Bing.

He explained the firm receives clickstream data from some users who opt-in to sharing anonymous data which will then go into improving search results.

Shum said Google had not accurately portrayed how Microsoft uses opt-in customer data "as one of many inputs to help improve our user experience."

"We use multiple signals and approaches in ranking search results," said Stefan Weitz, Microsoft director of Bing, in a statement sent to IT PRO.

"The overarching goal is to do a better job determining the intent of the search so we can provide the most relevant answer to a given query. Opt-in programs like the toolbar help us with clickstream data, one of many input signals we and other search engines use to help rank sites."

Microsoft also had a mini-spat with Yahoo this week, after it said the latter's mail offering was to blame for Windows Phone 7 'phantom data' leakage.

Now Yahoo has responded by saying the problem had not affected any other devices on which its mail service runs and was specific to Windows Phone 7.

Google has said Chrome is now fit for business with new features designed to give administrators the control they need.

First off, the search giant has created an MSI installer to allow companies using standard deployment tools to install Google Chrome for all managed users.

Policy management controls will let firms keep a grip on what employees can use the browser for.

Furthermore, administrators can also use a set of templates to customise browser settings to better manage security and privacy.

To get hold of these administrative features, admins need to go through Google Apps for Business either by phone or email as part of their Apps deployment.

"By deploying Google Chrome, organisations can take advantage of improved security and web application performance without needing to upgrade other expensive software licenses or buy new hardware," Google said in a blog.

"Since Google Chrome is the same as the browser on Chrome OS, admins considering Chrome OS for their organisations can start testing their mission-critical web applications by deploying the Google Chrome browser."

Earlier this month, it emerged the first laptops featuring Chrome OS would not be arriving in time for Christmas as had been hoped. In fact, the wait will most likely continue through to the middle of 2011.

Microsoft moves

Meanwhile, rival Microsoft has updated its Bing service as it bids to take some of the search market away from Google.

As part of the refresh, Microsoft has expanded its work with Facebook by including the capability to like' search results.

Maps have been revamped as well as the Redmond firm sought to reduce clutter and make searching maps easier from the desktop.

Bing apps for mobile have also seen improvements designed to "to reflect how customers are using mobile devices," Microsoft said in a blog.

ANALYSIS When tech giants launch impressive new products, they will often come under the scrutiny of security professionals.

Thus it should come as no surprise a security researcher has warned the new Google Instant search function could help improve hackers SEO campaigns.

Blackhat SEO threats use illicit methods to place malicious sites higher up on search rankings, and PandaLabs' Sean-Paul Correll has said Google Instant could help improve such methods.

"We know for a fact that most Blackhat SEO campaigns automatically query Google's trending topic results and now it seems that Google Instant will be suggesting those trending phrases (verbatim), potentially putting millions of victims directly in cyber criminals' cross hairs," Correll claimed.

The researcher tried a search for "antivirus" and found Antivir Solution Pro, a notorious rogueware infection, was one of the suggested search terms.

Of course, the previous version of Google search already suggested what was popular among web users when information was entered, similar to what Instant does. Therefore, one could query whether there is actually much difference between the new and older versions in terms of assisting malicious website creators.

In response to the concerns, a Google spokesperson simply told IT PRO the change did not impact the ranking of search results.

"As with all changes to search, there will always be people who work to optimise their pages to fit the Google experience. There are no ranking changes with this enhancement and as always we continue to focus on showing user high-quality, relevant queries and search results," the spokesperson added.

There was no specific mention of SEO poisoning from Google.

A mini comparison

Luis Corrons, technical director of PandaLabs, told IT PRO he had tried out search on Google and Bing to compare which was better for returning fewer poisoned sites.

While Bing had fewer malicious results, Corrons was quick to point out cyber criminals will be more drawn to Google, simply because it is the most popular search engine.

"One thing for certain is that criminals are not focusing that much on Bing when compared to Google," Corrons said.

He also pointed to the quality and experience of security researchers at Microsoft.

"That helps a lot and is helping Bing be cleaner compared to Google," Corrons added.

"Google should try to [improve] as much as possible in avoiding this kind of stuff."

Conclusion... kind of

While the quicker results may aid Black Hat SEO attacks to some extent, in that results, including malicious ones, will be immediately accessible, it is hard to see how Google Instant places more power in the hands of cyber criminals.

Given that suggestions based on trending was already a feature in the previous version of Google and the search results are the same, hackers should not expect to get much more help with Instant than before.

Nevertheless, as Corrons suggested, the fight against this kind of attack should be something at the top of any search engine's priorities.

Yahoo snatched nearly a whole per cent out of search leader Google's market share lead for the month of July, according to analyst comScore.

The latest figures for the US market sees Yahoo with a 17.1 per cent share of the 15.6 billion searches logged during July, up from 16.7 per cent in June. Yahoo's gain is mirrored by Google's fall from 66.2 per cent to 65.8 per cent for the month.

Third-placed Bing from Microsoft remained steady on 11 per cent, effectively losing ground in its bid to close the gap on Yahoo.

For the first time, comScore's analysis restricted search results to what it calls "explicit core search", where users have actively sought results for a search term, and ignored contextual search, which delivers search results through the automated delivery of related content such as in a photo slideshow.

Both Yahoo and Bing had made what appeared to be significant gains over Google in recent months through contextual search methods.

The pair are also set to begin the process of transferring Yahoo's back-end search operations in the US and Canada from its own Search Monkey platform over to Bing this week as part of the 10-year agreement between Microsoft and Yahoo to share strategic resources to compete more competitively against Google.

"Keep an eye out for the 'Powered by Bing' indicator at the bottom of our search results page, which will indicate that you are viewing listings from Microsoft," Yahoo search product operations vice president Shashi Seth said in a blog post.

Yahoo claims it will retain control of how the results are presented, and promises to provide users with added-value contextual information customised to their preferences on top of the raw search data.

The full transition to Bing-powered search is expected to happen later this year, while Microsoft has agreed to provide Yahoo with the benefit of its exclusive global sales force for premium advertisers.

Apple has launched Safari 5.0.1 with a number of vulnerabilities patched up and add-ons made available.

One hole was in Safari's AutoFill feature, which could have let slip information to websites without users knowing about it. This has now been fixed, along with 14 other security flaws in the updated version of the browser.

Safari Extensions has also now been switched on, after developers created plenty of new add-ons for users to play around with.

A number of big names from the web world have produced add-ons that can be acquired either through the Safari Extensions Gallery or a developer's site.

One addition is the new Amazon extension that lets customers add items from any website to their Amazon Wish List with just one click.

Other extensions include ones from Twitter, Bing and the New York Times. All add-ons have been built with HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript web standards.

"We're thrilled to see so many leading developers creating great extensions and think our users are going to love being able to customise Safari," said Brian Croll, Apple's vice president of OS X product marketing.

Safari 5 was launched last month on the same day as the iPhone 4 was unveiled.

Microsoft's Bing passed its first birthday with another steady jump in US market share, but continues to make little new inroads into the gap to nearest target Yahoo.

The latest comScore figures show Bing is now still gaining slightly as the third most popular search engine in the States behind Yahoo and market leader Google.

However, the figures for June saw Yahoo match its 0.6 per cent rise, with both eating slightly into Google's formidable majority. Yahoo now sits with 18.9 per cent of the US market, Bing with 12.7 per cent and a still-dominant Google on 62.6 per cent though more than a per cent down on May.

In total, Americans conducted 16.4 billion core searches over the month an increase of three per cent over May's levels.

The analytics firm attributed Yahoo and Bing's gains to their provision of better contextual search options than Google.

"Both Yahoo sites and Microsoft sites have experienced gains due in part to the continued utilisation of contextual search approaches that tie content and related search results together," the market share report revealed.

The figures included included partner and cross-channel searches, but mapping, directory and video searches on the likes of YouTube were left out. Bringing up the rear for the five major US search networks were Ask (3.6 per cent) and AOL (2.2 per cent) both slightly softer than in May.

The start of June marked a full year in existence for Bing, with the service having grown from around 6 per cent at launch to upwards of 10 per cent by the year-end, and now to 12.7 per cent.

However, Microsoft has had to work hard and spend heavily in promoting its search engine and having stated all along that its target was Yahoo rather than Google, it has seen the gap to the second most used search service stagnate at six per cent no doubt in no small measure due to the latter's $85 million advertising drive announced in May.

MEPs are backing a controversial ruling that would make search engines store details of all web searches in order to track child abusers.

Written Declaration 29, which was formed by two MEPs in the European Union as an "early warning system" against paedophiles and sex offenders, would require the likes of Google and Bing to keep track of search terms for even longer than the two years currently required.

It has gained support of 324 MEPs and only needs 45 more to enforce an examination by the European Commission.

The new declaration has drawn criticism from civil liberties groups, questioning the impact it will have on privacy.

"It is not acceptable or appropriate to dissolve the fundamental right to privacy on the basis of an utterly incoherent argument that it will protect our children - when clearly it will ultimately fail to meet such a mandate," said Privacy International in a statement.

"Our representatives should focus on solutions that are credible and viable rather than supporting ideas that we might have expected from North Korea."

This latest move from MEPs is contradicts to one made two weeks ago by the EU's Article 29 Data Protection Working Party.

The party's chairman, Jacob Kohnstamm, wrote a letter to Google, Microsoft and Yahoo telling them to cut down the time they held IP addresses from search terms from nine to six months, due to privacy concerns.

He wrote: "Fair and lawful processing of personal data by search engines is becoming more and more crucial due to the explosion and proliferation of audiovisual data (digital images, audio and video content) and the increasing use of geolocation on the internet."

"Given the predominant role of the Google search engine in the daily lives of all citizens of the European information society, the apparent lack of focus on privacy in this area is concerning."

Google responded by saying its current policy provided "the best experience for users both in terms of respect for their privacy and the quality and security of our services," whilst Microsoft said it was happy to adhere to the party's recommendation.

Microsoft has abandoned its Bing cashback feature, which provided shoppers with an area to browse various e-commerce offers.

The move will not affect deal hunters in the UK, where the Bing shopping experience is delivered through Microsoft-owned Ciao, as the cashback service is only supported in the US.

However, those wanting to take advantage of the deals only have until 30 July to get on board.

Microsoft confirmed customers would have a year to redeem any cashback earned and it would provide 12 months of customer support for users.

"After a couple of years of trying, we did not see the broad adoption that we had hoped for," Yusuf Mehdi, Bing's senior vice president for its online audience business group, said in a blog post.

"In lots of ways, this was a great feature we had over a thousand merchant partners delivering great offers to customers and seeing great ROI on their campaigns, and we were taking some of the advertising revenue and giving it back to customers."

Mehdi explained Bing would be taking its experience with the soon-to-be-defunct feature and putting it into new projects.

"For merchants and advertisers, we have some ideas for making it easy to get a broader array of products and offers into Bing, and we'll share some details on this later this summer," Mehdi added.

Microsoft's Bing search enginemay replaceGoogle as the default search engine on the Apple iPhone, according to sources widely quoted by media reports.

Google has been the default search provider on every generation of iPhone since the iconic handset first appeared in 2007. But with Google and Apple increasingly at odds over competing technologies, speculation has been mounting that Apple is looking at alternative browsers for the iPhone 4G, which is widely expected to be unveiled at Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference in San Francisco next week.

Reports over the weekend claimed Bing is being lined up as the default search option not only on the fourth-generation iPhone but the iPad too.

That Apple's relationship with Google has been deteriorating for some time is nothing new. From its search engine origins, Google's increasing focus on the lucrative mobile market has led to accusations from Apple of deliberately targeting its operations.

In fact, this isn't the first time Apple and erstwhile nemesis Microsoft have been reported as looking for common ground in the search arena.

At present, Google is understood to be paying Apple as much as $100million for default search status on the iPhone, along with the ability to serve search ads.

Microsoft has invested heavily trying to increase Bing's market share and break Google's search stranglehold. Gaining a serious foothold in the mobile market outside of its own Windows Phone 7 handsets will certainly be a significant coup for the Redmond company.

Apple declined to comment on the rumours.

Google's US market share slid last month, as both Microsoft and Yahoo managed to make slight gains.

According to stats from ComScore, Google's US market share slid to 65.1 per cent in March from 65.5 per cent the month before.

Yahoo managed to pick up a small bit, moving to 16.9 per cent from 16.8 per cent. Microsoft's US share, including its new engine Bing, grabbed a small slice more as well, climbing to 11.7 per cent from 11.5 per cent the month before.

Year-on-year, Microsoft's core search volume is up 51.3 per cent, compared to Google's 10.1 per cent.

Stats from another analyst firm mostly echoed ComScore's findings. Experian Hitwise showed Google's share slid to 69.97 per cent from 70.95 per cent.

Microsoft essentially held steady, sliding just a bit to 9.62 per cent from 9.70 per cent, while Yahoo posted a rise to 15.04 per cent from 14.57 per cent.

Microsoft is gearing up to unveil television ads publicising its Google search rival Bing.

The new ads will first appear on our screens this week as part of a three-month promotional run aimed at increasing awareness of what Bing has to offer.

The tagline of the ads will be "Bing and decide" and they are backed by a 2 billion investment.

"This is a big moment we are taking out our slingshots and taking on Goliath," Microsoft UK's managing director and vice president of consumer and online, Ashley Highfield told the Guardian.

In a dig at rival Google, which dominates the search space, Highfield added: "People feel overawed by the internet and what they turn up when they are searching. We are also in a world where people have forgotten there is an alternative search engine."

Microsoft has made good on its promise to drop IP addresses from search data after six months, meeting the pleas of privacy advocates.

Microsoft previously promised to cut its data retention time, but only if its rivals also did. Now, it's decided to go ahead with the move without Google, which holds IP addresses of searches for nine months. Yahoo holds such data for just three months.

Peter Cullen, Microsoft's chief privacy strategist, said in a blog post that it was an "important change."

"We will delete the entire Internet Protocol address associated with search queries at six months rather than at 18 months," he explained.

"Under our current policy, as soon as Microsoft receives a Bing search query we take steps to de-identify the data by separating it from account information that could identify the person who performed the search," he added.

Now, the IP address, "de-identified cookie" and other session identification will be deleted after six months.

The change will roll out across Bing over the next 12 to 18 months, Cullen noted.

Cullen credited the Article 29 Working Party with the change. The group is made up of European data protection regulators which advise the European Commission on data protection. The Working Party has long called for Google to cut its retention to six months.

But Cullen also said the change is because of the "current competitive landscape," suggesting Bing is trying to better Google on the issue.

Microsoft's Bing search engine continues to gain market share steadily, with December seeing its biggest percentage jump since its launch five months ago.

Figures from market research firm comScore show Google still has a stranglehold over US search, taking a 65.6 per cent share of the 14.7 searches racked up in December.

But Bing, which held an eight per cent slice of the search pie when it was officially unveiled in the summer, has gained ground every month since, and now stands at 10.7 per cent, with December's jump of 0.4 per cent representing a better performance over the month than any of its rivals.

Google itself remains on an upward trajectory too, however, and now holds a higher market share than at any time in the past year. The primary losers are Yahoo and AOL, which have dropped 2.3 per cent and 0.5 per cent respectively since Bing's launch.

Trailing in a distant fifth place is Ask.com, though its performance remains reasonably steady even if it's only responsible for around one in 25 searches made in the US.

With nearly a fifth of the search spectrum, Yahoo is still the second most popular service in the US by some margin, but Microsoft has almost halved the gap between them in five months to just 6.6 per cent.

Bing officially went live in the US on 7 June after being unveiled by Microsoft at the end of May. It built on Redmond's existing Live Search infrastructure.

Since then it has integrated computational search results from startup search site Wolfram Alpha to add to its appeal, and Microsoft has just announced a collaboration with HP that will see Bing installed as the default search tool on new HP machines.

In addition, Microsoft and Yahoo already have a 10-year search and advertising partnership in place, with the former providing the search and the latter its global advertising nous.

In the UK, Bing has been slower to pick up traction largely because it only came out of beta two months ago.

Click here for our review of Bing.

This year may not have been the best year for the economy, to say the least, but that didn't stop the tech from coming thick and fast.

There's were some very significant technology launches of both hardware and software, and IT PRO was there to give you the low down with our product reviews.

We take a look back at 2009 and take on the tricky task of picking out our favourite top 10 reviews of the year.

Palm Pre

This year was undoubtedly the year of the smartphone, and the most eagerly anticipated handset was the Apple oh hold on it was actually the Palm Pre.

First previewed back in January at CES, it took a full six months to reach the shops and then only US ones - it took until October for it reach UK shores. What the fuss was all about was that it was the first smartphone that could genuinely take on the iPhone thanks to features such as multi-touch.

It even bested it in some areas with true multi-tasking and wireless charging. Whether it will have the legs to maintain the pressure on the iPhone remains to be seen, but this was still the smartphone launch of the year.

HTC Magic

Before the Palm Pre, the main iPhone challenger was the HTC Magic. The Magic was the second Google Android based phone, which probably made it more significant than the first, the G1.

This was because it was better than the G1 as it was free of the chunky chassis and keyboard, but also because it marked the beginnings of a flurry of Android based phones and despite newer software and flashier features, not all are better than the Magic.

The iPhone 3GS may have pushed things back in Apple favour, but the Magic showed that you could make a very usable and pocketable Google phone, and was one of the most significant launches of the year.

Ubuntu 9.10

Is there any group more vocal about their love than Linux fans? Ubuntu has become the people's' Linux flavour, but that doesn't mean its devotees are less passionate. The latest version of Ubuntu, 9.10, also known as Karmic Koala, is slicker, faster and easier to use than previous versions, and though it's not as smooth looking as say Windows 7, it's more than acceptable.

The sheer fact is that you can get a complete OS, pre-loaded with almost everything you need for free, makes this a very attractive alternative to adopting the Microsoft hegemony, and that makes it a highlight of the year's releases.

Sony VAIO VGN-Z31VN/X review

Sony's Z-series notebooks have always been a favourite of ours, cramming in everything you need in a small and powerful laptop the true definition of a ultra-portable.

The VGN-Z31VN/X may not have a the catchiest name, but it's got everything else a high res 1,600 x 900 LED backlit display, a great keyboard, a powerful 2.66GHz Core 2 Duo and dual graphics chips giving a choice between power or stamina.

The latter delivers over nine hours - true all day computing without charging. SSD or standard HDDs are an option, and you get Wireless N, Bluetooth and integrated HSDPA. A true marvel of a machine, and all for a mere 1,781. Well, there had to be a catch somewhere.

Google Wave: First Look

No one innovates quite like Google, and the hype was intense for its new collaboration tool Google Wave. It was going to change the way we communicated forever, replacing 40 year old email technology with something new, dynamic and exciting.

Developers were the first to gain access before invitations began to trickle out to those in the general public that had signed up. At this point though the general mood went from "when can I get it?" - to "what is it?"

The mix of instant messaging and email, with the ability to add images, video and widgets sounding intriguing but confused users as much as anything else. A highlight of the year undoubtedly, but at this point, the jury is still out on this one.

Windows 7

If there was one thing that Microsoft had to get right it was Windows 7. Vista had been a marketing disaster and with the threat from Google looming ever larger the consequences of another poorly received OS could have been dire.

Fortunately it got it right and it did by listening to its massive user base for once. Even in January the beta impressed us, and the OS was essentially done and dusted by August when IT professionals were given access to RTM code.

Features such as Libraries, Powershell 2.0 management, Direct Connect, Bit Locker to Go, and XP mode made it appealing for businesses and the clean, shiny Aero Glass interface made it attractive for everyone.

iPhone 3GS

While the iPhone finally had some real competition from the likes of the HTC Magic and the Palm Pre, there's no doubt that the iPhone 3GS was still one of the smartphone highlights of the year.

In it's third iteration, the iPhone finally reached its potential that it hinted at when the first version launched two years previously.

The hardware added a physical compass, enabling improved Google Maps navigation and the potential for turn-by-turn directions, while faster clock speeds adding an appreciable turn of speed. The icing on the cake was the new features in the iPhone 3.0 OS, with push notifications, MMS, copy and paste, and landscape keyboard being the highlights.

In a nutshell, it's still the phone to beat.

HP Z800

With the Z800 HP proved that you don't have to be Apple to make a desktop computers cool. This was all the more impressive for the fact that it was a workstation.

Key to the Z800's success was that it was designed by BMW Designworks in the USA, who made a chassis that was both functional and attractive.

The toolless design meant you could access all the interior components without having a screwdriver. You can even take out the power supply just by pulling a handle, making replacements super easy.

When dev time equals money, things like this really count. With awesome power from its Nehalem based Xeons' and up to 192GB of RAM, if you need to design a 3D movie, or analysis geology for oil, this is the computer you need.

Dell Adamo

An exquisitely designed laptop chassis, bristling with satisfying details and oozing premium class it could only be a Dell?

Love or hate Apple, it's clear that it spurned the competition to up its game and Dell clearly has the MacBook Air in its sights when it decided to create the Adamo and we're glad that it did.

In our review, we described this lightweight, ultra-portable machine as "impossibly slim", and at 1.8Kg it won't weigh you down. But it's how it looks and feels that crucial with tiny lights embedded in the chassis and cool engravings rather than stickers used for the service number.

It's not the best value or most powerful machine, but it takes the crown as the best looking Windows-based ultra-portable on the planet.

Wolfram Alpha

It seems madness these days to try and take on Google these days, especially in its core search market but when Wolfram Alpha appeared it used the rather clever explanation that it wasn't a search engine'.

Then again, everything about Wolfram is clever. The brainchild of Professor Stephen Wolfram, the idea was to create a, computational search engine' based on the Mathematica modelling system. Instead of just pointing you towards information on the internet, the tool will actually perform computations on data you enter, delivering statistical analysis and comparative data in a flash.

It can be fantastic, but it's heavily dependent on it understanding on having data on whatever you input. It doesn't always understand what you enter, but it's amazing it works at all.

Its basic results have since been integrated into search engines such as Bing but on its own, many will struggle to find a use for it. Even so, it was undeniably one of the most innovative new products of the year.

Click here for our top tech news stories of the year.

A small design firm from St Louis, Missouri, is set to take on Microsoft in a legal battle, accusing the technology giants of taking its name for its search engine.

Bing! Information Design launched the case in a local court claiming it has used the trademark "Bing!" yes, with the exclamation mark since 2000 and Microsoft's use of the name is damaging its brand.

The filing for the court case said: "[It causes] confusion with regard to the relationship between the plaintiff and the defendant, confuses the public with regard to the origin of the plaintiff's services and dilutes the value of the plaintiff's trademark."

In addition to seeking damages, which could amount to millions of dollars, the design company wants Microsoft to "pay for corrective advertising to remedy the confusion it caused."

The David in this Goliath battle may face a tough battle as although Bing! Information Design claims to have used the name for nearly ten years, it only filed for the trademark back in May two days before the search engine was officially launched.

Microsoft on the other hand filed for the trademark in March to cover all its endeavours under the name.

A spokesperson from Microsoft told IT PRO: "We believe this suit to be without merit and we do not believe there is any confusion in the marketplace, but are aware of the suit based on media reports."

"Microsoft respects trademarks and other people's intellectual property, and it looks forward to the next steps in the judicial process."

Mozilla's director of community development has encouraged Firefox users to switch to Bing, after Google's chief executive claimed that people worried about privacy probably have something to hide.

Asa Dotzler, a ten-year veteran of Mozilla, was responding to Eric Schmidt's comment that "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."

The remark was made as part of an interview with CNBC, which an infuriated Dotzler has written in a blog post entitled "He doesn't even understand."

Beneath it he noted: "That was Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google, telling you exactly what he thinks about your privacy. There is no ambiguity, no 'out of context'."

He followed it up with instructions on how to make Bing your default search engine in Firefox rather than Google, before noting "Yes, Bing does have a better privacy policy than Google."

It's unclear how his stance will sit with the rest of his Mozilla colleagues. Recent financial records showed that 91 per cent of the foundation's revenue came from a search deal with Google.

Google pays Mozilla to set the default homepage of Firefox to a customised Google search page, and place a Google search box in the browser's toolbar.

The deal is set to run until 2011.

Google has taken its search real time, adding tweets and other social networking updates as well as breaking news to its results.

The search giant and its rival Bing both announced a move to real-time using Twitter on the same day in October, and Google is set to roll out the system over the next few days, and also include other social networks like Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, Jaiku and Identi.ca.

"Now, immediately after conducting a search, you can see live updates from people on popular sites like Twitter and FriendFeed, as well as headlines from news and blog posts published just seconds before," wrote Google Fellow Amit Singhal on the company's blog.

"When they are relevant, we'll rank these latest results to show the freshest information right on the search results page."

Enter a search term, and the standard results still come up, but underneath them is a constantly updating box of "latest results".

This means you can find what others are saying as they say it, "right after" it's published, Google said.

"Our real-time search enables you to discover breaking news the moment it's happening, even if it's not the popular news of the day, and even if you didn't know about it beforehand," Singhal said.

Micheal Jackson, Twitter and swine flu were a few of the most queried terms across the major search engines this year.

The singer's death prompted enough searches that his name danced its way to the top of Google's fastest rising chart and Yahoo and Bing's overall searches.

"As millions of fans said goodbye to the King of Pop, Michael Jackson led the list of our top 10 fastest rising queries across the globe," Google's vice president of user experience Marissa Mayer wrote in a blog post.

Twitter also captured the attention of online searchers, picking up the fifth spot in Google's ranking, and second on Bing.

"This year's Zeitgeist also confirms that the social web is alive and well," noted Mayer.

Swine flu ranked third for Bing and topped the US rising chart for Google. "In fact, in the US, swine flu was searched even more than another major event of the year: the inauguration of President Obama," Mayer said.

Bing's most searched terms for 2009

1) Michael Jackson

2) Twitter

3) Swine Flu

4) Stock Market

5) Farrah Fawcett

6) Patrick Swayze

7) Cash for Clunkers

8) Jon and Kate Gosselin

9) Billy Mays

10) Jaycee Dugard

Google's fastest rising global terms for 2009

1) michael jackson

2) facebook

3) tuenti

4) twitter

5) sanalika

6) new moon

7) lady gaga

8) windows 7

9) dantri.com.vn

10) torpedo gratis

Yahoo's top search terms for 2009

1) Michael Jackson

2) Twilight

3) WWE

4) Megan Fox

5) Britney Spears

6) Naruto

7) American Idol

8) Kim Kardashian

9) NASCAR

10) Runescape

Google appears set to revamp its homepage and search results page - something it doesn't do very often.

The page isn't officially live yet, but has been apparently made the default for some users as a trial. Others have figured out how to access it, however.

The new homepage isn't much different from the old one, with new colouring to a few buttons, keeping in line with the design of Google Wave.

The search results page has also been tweaked, to include a new sidebar with categories for topics and time - similar to what would-be rival Bing from Microsoft has.

Some users have already been given access to the new page, but if you're not one of the early ones, Gizmodo has published a simple hack.

Go to www.google.com, making sure you're not signed in. Paste the following code into the URL:

javascript:void(document.cookie="PREF=ID=20b6e4c2f44943bb:U= 4bf292d46faad806:TM=1249677602:LM=1257919388:S=odm0Ys-53ZueXfZG;path=/; domain=.google.com/ncr/");

Then hit refresh. You'll notice some of the buttons are now blue - how's that for change?

Click here for our history of search.

Microsoft Bing review

Bing in the UK finally slips its beta tag but how effective is it really compared to Google? We go exploring with it for a day to find out if we can really bear to live without our normal search engine of choice.

HP ProLiant DL385 G6 review

Quad-core not enough for you? This HP server offers up AMD's six-core Opteron's to take the fight to Intel. Dave Mitchell comes away reasonably impressed but has reservations and not just because Intel's own six-core Nehalem's are just round the corner.

Parallels Desktop 5.0 review

If you want to run Windows 7 on your Mac then this is a fairly essential tool, and a significant upgrade to the previous versions. However, if you're only an occasional user, the upgrade cost - even at just 52 - could be a little hard to justify.

Head to Head: Windows 7 vs Ubuntu 9.10

In our latest head to head, we pitch the might of Windows 7 against the very latest that Linux can offer in Ubuntu 9.10. It turns out to be something of a shock for our reviewer, who comes away pretty impressed at how the free offering stacks up against Microsoft's latest.

Microsoft Office 2010 beta

Come early next year and we'll all be expected to switch office suite once again. Will you be joining the upgrade bandwagon? Simon Bisson takes us through what we can expect to see and what's new since the Technical Preview released earlier this year.

BlackBerry Bold 9700

BlackBerry is still the number one business smartphones and it's clearly not resting on its laurels with this impressive upgrade to its already fine BlackBerry Bold, which is further bolstered by the presence of version 5.0 of its OS.

Last Friday, Microsoft officially launched the UK localised version of its Bing search engine, some six months after it was first unveiled as a beta here.

Microsoft said it would not take the search engine out of beta until it felt it could offer a level of performance for the UK that it was happy with. It would seem that time has now come.

Microsoft's history in search up to now has been spotty. The myriad of name changes over the years, such as MSN Search, Windows Live Search, Live Search and finally Bing, have reflected its confused strategy, while in the background, Google was relentlessly establishing itself ever further.

While Microsoft was just trying to come up with a name for its search offering, Google became a verb, part of the language and of the fabric of most people's everyday lives. Competing with that is a tall order and perhaps a challenge that only one as stubborn, (read rich) as Microsoft could try and take on.

But let's face facts, Microsoft isn't stupid. It knows it's not going to topple Google in search, but it has to be in that space to give itself a chance, as any percentage increase in search margin is worth a huge amount in advertising revenue. And if it helps to slow down Google in any way, then all the better.

At a briefing last week, Marie Thirlwall, one of Bing's UK product managers, was quite sensible when she told IT PRO: "It would be great if we could get to number two." At least Microsoft can feel better about itself that while it may never reach verb status, at least many are getting used to the word Bing'.

Is it any good?

So now it's out of beta, is Bing any good?

To start with we found it something of a mental effort to actually not use Google. Most people have it as their default engine in the search bar at the top right of their browser but if you want to add Bing to Firefox, you can just install this add-on. There's even one that lets you search both side by side.

Bing has gained some love for its homepage design, choosing an image that it overlays with hotspots that lead to interesting links, images and videos about the subject of the picture. You can easily scroll through the archive of images via arrows at the bottom right and we've been informed that it's popular with teachers who like to project the day's image onto classroom screens to start discussions with pupils.

Microsoft likes to refer to Bing as a decision engine, rather than a search engine. That's why down the side of all searches you get an explorer bar where you'll find related searches or search refinements, which does make things more convenient. However, it also creates some redundancy too, as you might get a sidebar displaying Images and Video, which are repeated at the top as well.

Images and Video

Bing's image search impressed us on its first release and it remains a highlight. You get larger default images than Google with further details that appear when you roll over an image. As ever, the filters, such as small and large, appear down the side. Actually, there are very similar options available in Google by clicking Show options' at the top, but it's more clearly flagged in Bing. A bigger change is the infinite scroll features, which just means that instead of having to click 'next' through pages more choices appear as you scroll.

Google's video tab has always been something of a damp squib, ever since the now Google-owned YouTube became dominant, and the presentation there is a little drab. Bing innovates with videos that play automatically when you scroll over them and the lack of lag is impressive. There are filters here for length; aspect ratio, resolution and size and all are effective here.

Bing Maps

As we reported, Bing Maps has undergone something of a makeover. Here, some of the UK flavour is apparent, with nearest tubes popping up over London locations, an effective directions tool, that can be email or printed, and a Tube map overlay.

Bing Maps defaults to the A-Z style maps, which personally we find too busy, but you can choose to use a simpler road Maps style, which is more like Google Maps. In Bing Maps, business and location searches are separated out, but which ever box we tried, when we typed in HMV, it took us to Hemavans Flygplats in Sweden, which isn't quite what we were after. On the plus side, the directions for the 1753.8 mile, 35 hour trip, came up in a flash.

The other feature Bing Maps offers is a Bird's Eye' view, which is actually an angled, isometric' view. It certainly looks nice, but compared to Google's Street View, isn't that helpful in actually identifying where you're going unless you plan to travel by micro-light.

Shopping

Shopping is an area that Microsoft has said it has worked on to optimise for the UK, and this means that it has now fully integrated the Ciao!' comparison engine into Bing itself. This does give you a starting point, but to our eyes its layout is still confusing. We appreciated seeing the Reviews' tab on the left as this is something we often want when looking for products, but it's only as good as the data available - and using the closed wall of Ciao, rather than the wider internet, is asking for trouble.

Our test search- a Panasonic TX-P42V10' plasma TV - came up with a price comparison. However, the reviews tab was populated with other Panasonic products and none of the TV itself. To add insult to injury Google's price comparison found several cheaper options.

Localisation

Fortunately, much of the promised UK localisation works well. Type Premier League' into Bing and you get a run down on the next six football fixtures right at the top above the core results Google gives you the last and next game. Type a football team in and you'll get a list of its next games, and related searches down the side, such as Kit', Tickets Fixtures' and so on. Type in the name of a movie and you'll get cinema times based on your location, with slightly more detail than Google and with a movie poster too, which is nice.

We also really liked how it dealt with businesses. Type in Debenhams and it provides the main link and Deep Links to sub-sections, just like Google, but it also pulls out the Customer Service number, which is a nice touch. And, yes, even for HMV too.

Visual Search, Twitter and Wolfram Alpha

Other great features are visual search, which is designed for when you don't know exactly what you're looking for by name. For example, if you don't want a dog but don't know your breeds you can type in dog breeds and it will display a gallery of images for you to browse. It's a nice idea, but you're limited to what Bing provides and with only five options available it's one aspect that's still very much in Beta.

However, two other features have made it to prime time: Twitter and Wolfram Alpha integration. Go direct to www.bing.com/twitter, and you'll find the trending topics with some sample tweets, but you can also search anyone's Tweets directly by typing twitter @xxx. (xxx meaning the person's Twitter name').

Wolfram Alpha searches are also now live in the UK. That said, it will only work on calculations that it knows to explicitly send to the Wolfram Alpha database, but at least Bing can now keep pace with Google for integrated calculations.

Conclusion

Taken as a whole, it seems more than reasonable to have taken Bing out of beta. Microsoft has clearly worked on usability, accuracy and speed, and in most cases it does as well as Google. Some might even find some aspects easier and more satisfying to use than Google, while there are those that are clearly not as effective.

The problem for Microsoft is that it's clearly worked very hard to produce a search engine, that is, most of the time, a match for Google, but no more. For example, while we do slightly prefer Bing's image search, and we admire the categories and filters, these are hardly major reasons to stop using Google. It's more of a case that should you ever find it as a default, there's no longer any need to cringe, and we're sure that Microsoft won't be sitting still from this point and that we can expect more improvements to keep up that pressure.

On that basis, that number two spot in search doesn't seem too unrealistic a target.

Verdict

Bing has clearly been improving gradually over the past six months and it's now a very reasonable search engine, with some pleasing touches. There's no longer any need to run a mile should you need to use it, but equally it's unlikely to pull too many away from the safety of Google.

Microsoft has taken the UK version of its Bing search portal out of beta in a bid to gain market share against main rival Google.

The site was removed from beta at midnight, contrasting with earlier rumours that the site would remain in beta status until early 2010 .

"Bing is optimised for UK consumers," Marie Thirlwall, senior product manager for Bing told IT PRO in a briefing.

Thirwall said that Microsoft had ensured that Bing would bring up UK place names ahead of US versions, and prefer British synonyms.

"One of the things we feel passionately about is the user experience for the UK - the look and feel," said Thirwall. "It's about creating a better product for the UK, one we feel is truly appropriate."

Thirwall said that Microsoft had put a lot of time into adding UK specific content such as football and local shopping.

Among the recent changes is the integration of the Ciao shopping comparison engine that Microsoft purchased in August 2008, the integration of Twitter feeds, and visual search.

Microsoft also updated Bing Maps earlier this week, in a worldwide roll out, while Wolfram Alpha was also integrated in the US.

Thirwall declined to make any firm predictions about how Bing would do now that it has come out from beta. "Our goal, as Steve Ballmer has said, is to create a fantastic product. Though it would be great if we could get to number two," she admitted.

However, as Rob Bamforth, principal analyst at Quocirca notes, gaining market share for Microsoft will not be easy. "The market share challenge is tough as Google has strong mindshare - even becoming a 'verb'."

Bamforth praised Bing for its UK search relevance and its feature set, but said that is still might not be enough.

"Bing now looks very good on features, but it is not always the best feature set that comes out on top - Microsoft has to step up its marketing and linkages to other parts of the business to encourage more bang for Bing," he said.

Bing has integrated super-smart search from Wolfram Alpha into its own system, months after rumours suggested Microsoft's search engine would do so.

Bing is the first to use the commercial API for Wolfram Alpha's self-described computational knowledge engine.

"By using our API, Bing will be able to seamlessly access the tens of thousands of algorithms and trillions of pieces of data from Wolfram Alpha, and directly incorporate the computations in its search results," wrote Schoeller Porter, architect for developer relations, in a blog post. He added the deal had been in the works since earlier this year.

Microsoft said certain Bing searches would use Wolfram Alpha's algorithms and data. "Specifically, we will bring nutritional information and tools into Bing's search results, as well as some straight up hard maths and homework help," said program managers Tracey Yao and Pedro Silva in a blog post.

For example, you'll be able to compare the calories in two dishes - handy for dieters - or calculate your BMI right in Bing. If that doesn't catch your eye, you can always use it to solve complex maths problems.

As with all things Bing, the function is being rolled out in the US over the next few days, but will likely take a while to show up in the UK version. The UK version is actually still in beta, and not expected to be fully released until 2010.

Read on for our review of Bing and Wolfram Alpha.

Microsoft's Bing search engine will remain in beta until the beginning of next year at the earliest, according to a reports.

Marketing magazine cited sources close to Microsoft as confirming the timescale of Bing's full release in the UK. Although Microsoft is now remaining tight-lipped on the issue.

Microsoft unveiled Bing to much fanfare in May 2009, replacing its poorly received Live Search, to take on Google.

In July, the full version of the service was released in the US, but in many territories around the world, Bing has remained in beta form. In the UK, there has been no marketing push since its initial launch, with Windows 7 very much taking centre stage in terms of TV advertising.

The delay makes sense, according to Paul Mead, managing director of VCCP Search.

"If you are up against a Goliath with an 85 per cent share and it's much more of a challenge than in the US, where Google only has a 60 per cent share - it makes sense to have a product where you get it right first," he said.

"For me the strategy makes sense as if you're not offering anything extra people will try it once and leave. They've got to work on the local part and if its good... they'll be in a strong position to get some market share."

IT PRO contacted Microsoft but a spokesman said that the company would not comment.

Yesterday, Microsoft announced an update to its Bing Maps service, and confirmed that this would be worldwide change.

Bing Maps has gained a performance boost thanks to changes in the way its data is spread throughout the world.

Speaking to IT PRO at Microsoft's Tech Ed conference in Berlin, Chris Pendleton, Technical Evangelist for Bing Maps, said that map data has been moved from its previous single location in Virginia, US, out to Microsoft's Edge Caching Network (ECN). This consists of 12 nodes around the world, so users of the service don't have to contend for the same bandwidth.

"All the data is co-located round the world, so all users will see huge performance gains," he said.

Pendleton added that the bandwidth used by the Bing Maps page had been halved, thanks to code improvements.

Microsoft also made some changes to the Bing Maps interface. Pendelton said it was now easier to reorder saved push pins, and that different points on a plotted route could now be grabbed and moved.

This has been available in Google Maps for some time and Pendelton admitted that "this is a competitive catch-up feature". Users can now also embed Bing Maps in web pages.

Pendelton said that Microsoft had also now altered the terms and conditions for Bing, and that educational institutions and non-profit organisations could now use it free of charge.

However, there is a cap on the free use, which is limited to 125,000 sessions.

Pendelton said that with Silverlight Control 1.0, Bing now works on a session based model, which lasts until the browser window is closed. He said that that in the event of the 125,000 sessions being exceeded, the organisation would be contacted to open discussions about licensing.

Further Bing Maps are on the way and their importance on Bing to Microsoft as a whole will increase, according to Pendelton.

"We're continuing to beat the drum on Bing Maps and would encourage users to stay tuned," he said.

"I think location awareness will continue to grow. [Bing] is not just a consumer portal it's a core component for all Microsoft products... it will go very flat and wide for all Microsoft products to leverage."

Twitter has decided not to play favourites, and instead go for market share, signing real-time search deals with rivals Microsoft and Google on the same day.

The two firms will be given access to Twitter's data for search. The financial terms of the deals weren't disclosed.

For Google, the agreement means results from Twitter will soon be surfaced in search listings, giving users access to real-time information from the social networking site.

"We believe that our search results and user experience will greatly benefit from the inclusion of this up-to-the-minute data, and we look forward to having a product that showcases how tweets can make search better in the coming months," said search products vice president Marissa Mayer in a blog post.

"That way, the next time you search for something that can be aided by a real-time observation, say, snow conditions at your favorite ski resort, you'll find tweets from other users who are there and sharing the latest and greatest information."

She said the product would arrive "in the coming months."

After Bing launched earlier this year, it quickly added Twitter-friendly features, including feeds from a selection of celebrities in searches.

With such features and its beta already going live, it seems a few steps ahead of Google when it comes to searching Twitter.

Microsoft was also expected to announced that it would be including data from Facebook in Bing, but details on that service were scarce.

Click here for our guide to Twitter for business.

Microsoft's Bing is losing marketshare in an ever increasingly competitive space, according to the latest figures from Net Applications.

Although the drop is slight, Bing Microsoft's new search tool is languishing down near the bottom of usage graphs. Net Applications' numbers show that Bing lost 0.2 percentage points, and fell to a 3.39 per cent marketshare of the global search market. Google lost similar market share but with a massive 83.13 per cent user base it could possibly survive the drop.

Baidu, the Chinese search site, has more users than Bing with its 4.38 per cent share, while Yahoo has managed to gather together just under seven per cent of all net searchers. AOL and ASK can only muster under one per cent, according to the statistics.

Just a glance at rival firm StatCounters' alternative graph, for July through to October usage, shows how deep the divide is. For US users Google's red tower on the graph is at skyscraper height with its 80-odd per cent. Nothing else even comes close. StatCounter found that not only did these firms have a low share but they were also losing users. In September, Bing fell from 8.51 per cent from 9.64 per cent in August, while Yahoo dropped from to 9.40 per cent from 10.50 per cent.

Globally, StatCounter said, Bing's share dropped from 3.58 per cent to 3.25 per cent, while Yahoo fell to 4.37 per cent from 4.84 per cent share. Meanwhile, Google broke the 90 per cent mark, rising to 90.54 per cent.

"The trend has been downwards for Bing since mid August," said Aodhan Cullen, chief executive at StatCounter, in a statement.

"The wheels haven't fallen off but the underlying trend must be a little worrying for Microsoft."

Bing's drop comes in stark contrast to the success it enjoyed back in August as reported by comScore.