Published February 06, 2010
The world’s largest online social network, with over 400 million registered members, has announced it would end its advertising partnership with Microsoft.
Microsoft has been serving cost-per-click advertising on Facebook to users located in the United States for the past three-years. During the partnership, Facebook would sell its own advertising from it’s in house advertising division to users outside of the U.S.
The Microsoft deal was scheduled for renegotiation this past week, prompting Facebook to drop the software giant in order to sell advertising directly to advertisers.
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Published January 20, 2010
Apple Computers has been engaging in talks with Microsoft Corp. to change the default search engine found on the iPhone from Google search, to Microsoft’s Bing search.
The information comes from a source familiar with the discussions on condition of anonymity.
The rivalry between Google and Apple is intensifying, not necessarily in online search directly, but in online mobile advertising. As a record number of people begin adopting online browsing with their mobile phones as web browsers become easier and actually usable, the trends indicate traditional Internet advertising is heading towards online mobile advertising.
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Published January 19, 2010
Microsoft today announced the company would alter its privacy settings for its Bing search engine. Specifically, Microsoft will purge all (including Internet Protocol (IP) addresses) identifiable information to users search queries after 6-months.
Microsoft’s existing privacy policy already automatically unlinks search queries from Microsoft accounts (such as Hotmail), therefore removing any link between a users search query and an associated Microsoft account.
Yahoo currently most quickly purges identifiable information related to its users and their search queries to only 90-days. Google removes its data in about 10 months.
Published October 19, 2009
Privacy concerns are being raised over the search giant accidentally making private voicemails available publically from its popular Google Voice service
A technical error in the Google algorithm is indexing private voicemail recordings from Google Voice and making them available to the public.
If you currently search “site:https://www.google.com/voice/fm/*” in Google, it will return various voicemails, some dated as far back as many months ago, to even only hours ago.
As of right now, if you perform the search string noted above, the voicemails are still available publically with transcription.
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Published September 14, 2009
Microsoft today just unveiled its new visual search engine feature for Bing at the TechCrunch50 technology conference.
The new visual search lets you search for items that you might not necessarily know what its name is. The search results present a grid of images to you, where you can subsequently narrow your results with criteria based on your search.
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Published August 02, 2009
Google has just introduced a new left column pane to its images search to better allow you to refine your searches.
These option were previously hidden in the advanced search page, but have now been pushed out to the main search page.
The move comes as competition is set to intensify in the online search engine space with the biggest rivals, Microsoft and Yahoo announcing a joint partnership to take on Google.
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Published June 10, 2009
Google has just released a new Mac search application dubbed Quick Search Box that will allow you to easily search your Mac and the web from the app. It is essentially like using Spotlight to search for local files, but now you can easily search the web and local files from one text-box.
Google notes Quick Search Box is different from Google Desktop in that Google Desktop doesn’t support the ability to actually launch applications.
With Quick Search Box, you can also update your Twitter status straight from the text-box after you have set up your twitter account details. Quick Search Box does not have the ability to search through Tweets, or do much else with Twitter except let you update your status.
Google firstly announced Quick Search Box back in January.
Published January 29, 2009
U.S. Search engine market share numbers have been released my ComScore. There were 137 billion search queries in the U.S., 85 billion of which done through Google (Google holds 63.5% market share in the U.S.) Via
Published November 19, 2008
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said Wednesday that he is still open to a strategic partnership with Yahoo only on a search engine deal. He went on to say that Microsoft is no longer interested in a full acquisition of Yahoo and a search partnership is now an only option. Ballmer’s comments sent the Yahoo stock price up about 12% and it is now trading at about $9.88 just one hour before the closing bell. Jerry Yang recently stepped down from his post as CEO after intense pressure as he was the one responsible for foregoing a $47.5 billion (about $33 per share) Microsoft take over. In addition, Google recently pulled out of a Yahoo ad partnership after government scrutiny. A search partnership between Microsoft and Yahoo will likely have opposition, including from Google, but it shouldn’t have any problems with the Fed.
