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comScore’s February Search Query results have Google increasing it share from 67.0% in January to 67.5% in February. Microsoft edged up from 16.5% to 16.7% while Yahoo! decreased from 12.1% to 11.6%.

Poor Microsoft. People who use your search engine seem especially interested in ... Apple. Bing published its most-searched news stories for 2012, and topping the list -- ahead of the presidential election, Superstorm Sandy and the London Olympics -- was the iPhone 5, the newest version of Apple's iconic smartphone.

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.

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.

You can't Google this. OK, maybe you can. But MC Hammer doesn't want you to. The venerable rapper, who helped usher hip-hop into the pop mainstream in the early '90s, has rolled out a search engine he hopes will outperform Google, Bing and other established tools.

Baidu and Microsoft have added another element to their developing cooperation: This year the Chinese search engine will start sourcing some results for users' English-language searches from Microsoft's Bing search engine, the two companies said.

Slowly but steadily, Microsoft Bing has become a potent threat to Google in the search market. Over the last few months, Microsoft’s aggressive strategy with Bing has started to yield market share gains over competitors Google, Yahoo and AOL in the U.S. search market. Bing’s market share, which was around 11% in September 2010, is now close to 14% as of February 2011.

No wonder Google seems so panicked about Bing. The latest results from market researcher Experian Hitwise show not only that Bing grew at Google's expense in January. They also show that Bing is delivering more accurate results. In the U.S., Bing now powers more than 27% of search results, up from 25% in December. That's despite a slight decline in traffic to Yahoo's search site, which has been powered by Bing since December.

Google alleges Microsoft uses its web browser and Bing Search bar to harvest information on Google users.

According to Nielsen data out this morning Microsoft's Bing has passed Yahoo to become the number two search engine in the US. Nielsen says that Google's August share is 65% (and growth is flat) but that Bing and Yahoo have now switched places.