Microsoft, Google Vs. Microsoft | featured news

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.

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.

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.

A month ago, Google's three-year effort to push its Web browser, Chrome, took a major step when analysts said it had passed Mozilla's Firefox to become the second-most popular tool of its kind on the Internet. Today, that climb continues and has some tech observers wondering whether Chrome could do the unthinkable and topple perennial leader Internet Explorer from atop the browser rankings.

Essentially, Rizzo says that Google just throws stuff out there, sees if it sticks and then only continues to develop and support those pieces of software which customers actually want to use. In contrast, Microsoft does lots and lots of planning about what it is going to do and then sticks with it having done so.

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.

Microsoft prepares to launch the latest version of its Office software, with features similar to those offered by Google. The latest version of the software has a free online component - called Office Web Apps.