Bing, 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.

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.

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.

The December 2009 global search stats are out from comScore and unsurprisingly Google took the top spot for total worldwide searches last month, with 87.8 billion searches over Google sites. Google's searches rose 58 percent from December 2008's searches, which totaled 55.6 billion searches.

Apple and Microsoft are reportedly in talks to make Microsoft's Bing the default search engine on the iPhone. So long Google!

Bing's share of the search market grew another percentage point in July, indicating that some of those initial users may be sticking around for the long haul.