Google Corp. has unveiled a new search tool, dubbed Google Twitter Replay, that aims to make tweets from Twitter more useful in that people could search for past events and find all related tweets and conversations from that specific time period on the social networking website.

We firstly reported that Google initially signed an indexing deal with Twitter worth $15-million to allow the company to index tweets in real-time. At that time, Twitter also inked a deal with Microsoft Corp worth $10-million.

Read the full story

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.

Read the full story

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.

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.

Read the full story

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.

Read the full story

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.

Read the full story

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.