Microsoft, Google | featured news

Microsoft, Oracle, Kayak and other technology and search companies in the FairSearch.org coalition have filed a complaint with the European Union over Google’s Android mobile operating system, saying that the platform gives the tech giant an unfair advantage in mobile search.

Microsoft is skewering Google again with scathing ads that say as much about the dramatic shift in the technology industry's competitive landscape as they do about the animosity between the two rivals.

Google once was seen as such a ripe target for investigation that the nation’s antitrust enforcers battled over the right to claim it as their own, as a potential high-tech pelt to be posted on the wall alongside Microsoft and AT&T.

Nokia and Microsoft Corp took the wraps off the struggling European company's most powerful smartphone on Wednesday, in what may be their last major shot at reclaiming a market lost to Apple, Samsung and Google.

Yelp is feeding its online reviews of restaurants and other local merchants to Microsoft's Bing search engine in a move to compete against Zagat ratings on Google.

Last Thursday, Microsoft announced several new features to the upcoming IE10, which will launch as part of Windows 8. One of these features, which turns on “Do Not Track” by default, has caused quite a stir over the weekend as new outlets and bloggers have discussed the potential benefits and ramifications of this feature.

Microsoft, struggling to dent the dominance of Apple and Google in the smartphone market, is aggressively courting app developers for its Windows Phone.

In 2010, Google gave its search engine a jolt, moving the web’s de facto gateway onto a new software platform dubbed “Caffeine.” Designed by Google itself, Caffeine was a way for the company to more rapidly add new links to its massive index of websites, including news stories and blog posts and chatter from web forums. According to the company, it provided “50 percent fresher” search results than its previous indexing system, which was based on a seminal Google creation called MapReduce.

Microsoft unveiled Windows 8 for public testing on Wednesday in the hope that it will help the brand win back some of the ground it has been losing to Apple and Google.

Discovery comes just days after Web giant was found to be sidestepping the user privacy preferences in Apple's Safari. Read this blog post by Steven Musil on Security.