Just about a month ago, Microsoft announced that it would end free access to its Bing Search API and start charging a minimum of $40 per month for the service. Today, the company is officially launching the Bing Search API on its Windows Azure Marketplace, but unlike its previous announcement, the company has decided to continue to offer a free tier as well. Developers will still be able to make up to 5,000 queries per month for free. This, says the Bing team, will still allow most existing developers to use the service for free.

For developers who need more than 5,000 queries, pricing starts at $20 per month for 10,000 queries and increases all the way up to the top tier of 2.5 million queries for $5,000 month. This API gives developers access to web, image, news and video search results. There is also a cheaper web results-only version of the Bing API that starts at $13 per month for 10,000 queries.

The Bing team also announced that it made some changes to the API’s terms of use. These changes, says Microsoft, “now allow greater flexibility to re-order and blend results so that you have greater control over how Bing data is integrated into services and applications.”

Developers will have to buy access to the API through the company’s Azure Marketplace, which also offers access to various other data sources and applications that can run on the company’s Azure cloud computing platform.

Until now, developers had virtually unrestricted access the Bing Search API. This, is some ways, gave Bing an advantage over Google, which only gives developers a free quota of 100 queries per day.

Last week, Bing began the initial phase of rolling out a major redesign, in fact the “most significant” redesign in its three-year history. Today, the wait is over. This afternoon, Bing officially turned on its new design, and has made it available for everyone in the U.S. You can check it out here.

The new Bing is now integrates search and people in our social networks through a dedicated social “sidebar.” With sidebar, Bing brings together the best of the web, with what experts and your friends know, giving you the confidence to act. This new way to search lets you share, discover, and interact with friends like you do in real life. If you’re on the go, you’ll notice we’ve optimized the layout and placement of the social results on the mobile device for smaller screen sizes and for touch input, so the user experience will be different than what people see on a PC.

The new design is Bing’s answer to the problem of “Search Overload,” something many are familiar with — the feeling of being overwhelmed by the bramble of links, maps, tools, and options that prevail in today’s search model. And, really, it’s a response to the public disapproval over Google integrating social into its search results. Obviously, Google has retained its iron grip on search for some time, but, with its redesign Bing is positioning itself an unbiased, pure alternative.

In this vein, Bing is taking steps to offer a cleaner, pared down experience, in an effort to clean up its search results. As Josh noted at the time, the redesign essentially divides its search results into three groups: Simple, text-based, algorithmic results placed front and center; maps, reviews, and input fields are placed on the right side; and social context from friends and one’s social network in a panel on the far right.

As Bing said in its blog post today, this dedicated social sidebar is a response to Google search’s G+ integration, serving actionable information from friends and experts. Bing now suggests friends on Facebook that might be relevant to your search — based on what they “like,” their Facebook profile information, and the photos they’ve shared.

This will work in varying degrees of effectiveness, meaning that the “right” friends may not always show up, because the search engine is using public Facebook information along with the content you’ve given it permission to access. According to its blog post, it “won’t match friends based on other Facebook content, such as status updates or check-ins,” in an effort to respect privacy settings. Which means that you won’t see information from friends who have opted out of Facebook instant personalization or that have blocked the Bing app.

For those who do choose to opt-in to Bing’s Instant Personalization partnership with Facebook, you will be able to see if friends have “liked” search results. But, an important qualification of this feature is that those “likes” do not alter search rankings, nor do they add to the clutter of results with social identifiers, names, and faces. Instead, you’ll just see that thumbs up icon adjacent to Bing’s algorithmic, center pane, with the ability to hover over the icon to see who liked those results.

Furthermore, its intermediate section, the one that lies between algorithmic results and social, shows stuff like maps, product reviews, restaurant ratings, and allows users to book flights. Bing has struck a number of partnerships with startups like OpenTable and FanSnap to make booking tables and finding tickets easier.

Bing now has a whole lot more social functionality, but the key is that its social integration doesn’t get in the way, the goal being, in Bing’s words, to create a new way to search that “lets you share, discover, and interact with friends like you do in real life.” If Bing is going to be a “decision engine,” as its mission statement declares, boosting its results with the right amount of social influence and direction is paramount.

To address this, Bing’s new social pane includes an “Ask Friends” field, which allows searchers to enlist the service of their friends. Bing posts your submitted questions to your Facebook wall, whereupon you’ll get a notification if a friend swoops in to the rescue, and guides you to the best nightspot for margaritas, or the best hotels to check out when in Los Angeles. You can also go further, requesting help from “Friends Who Might Know” — those who’ve “liked” your search results, but aren’t in your friend list.

Bing has taken some major steps forward to get itself back in the ring with Google, but it’s still got a lot of ground to make up. Don’t be surprised if you find a massive Bing marketing campaign show up on taxis, TVs, and billboards near you.

For more, give the new Bing a try here. Sorry international Bingers, it looks like you’ll have to wait a bit longer.

As all the major search engines continue to add social search features to their feature line-up, it can often look as if there isn’t any space left for startups in this space. Wajam begs to differ. The Montreal-based company is probably one of the most ambitious players in the social search market right now and after launching its latest efforts for Google last month, it is now ready to bring its enhanced social search results to Bing and Yahoo as well.

Wajam is a browser plugin (as well as a standalone social search engine) that automatically integrates the company’s own social search results from your network on the search result pages of Google, Bing and Yahoo. It also works on a number of other popular sites, including Amazon, Yelp, TripAdvisor and YouTube.

Wajam creates its own index of everything your friends share on Google+, Facebook and Twitter. It’s worth noting that it looks at your friends’ status updates, as well as the sites they link to. It then applies its own PageRank-like algorithms to rank these status updates and sites depending on what you are searching for and displays its results alongside your standard search results.

As Wajam’s founder and CEO Martin-Luc Archambault told me earlier today, the service currently has over 2 billion pieces of content in its index. Archambault stressed that Wajam’s algorithms are also able to categorize the items in its index (think pictures, restaurants, hotels, videos etc.). The company’s latest data shows that it is currently able to show social search results for around 44% of its users’ queries.

With this update, Wajam is bringing its redesigned interface to Bing and Yahoo. The update, of course, comes at an interesting time, given that Bing announced its social search updates just a few days ago. Wajam, however, argues that it offers a far more complete social search experience than Bing because it also includes results from private updates your friends have shared with you (assuming you opt-in to this feature) and because it also highlights photos and videos, as well as product recommendations.

Wajam also notes that while Bing lets you ask your friends questions right from its search result pages, Wajam gives you results immediately. Unlike Bing, Wajam also lets you filter results by date, relevancy, links, photos and videos.

The Wajam team also put together this little infographic that explains how its approach to social search differs from Bing’s, Yahoo’s and Google’s.

Just a day after it announced its well-received updates to its search result pages, here is some more good news for Bing: according to the latest data from Experian Hitwise, Bing-powered searches — that is searches on Bing.com and search.yahoo.com — now account for 30.01% of all U.S. searches. By itself, Bing grew 16% year-over-year and 5% month-over-month and now accounted for 14.32% of all U.S. searches in April 2012. Yahoo grew somewhat slower, but still at a respectable 5% month-over-month and 7% year-over-year.

Things didn’t quite look so rosy for Google, though. Searches on Google.com, according to Hitwise, declined 3% in April 2011 compared to the previous month and were down 5% year-over-year. Google, of course, still remains far ahead of its competition. In April, almost 64.5% of all U.S. searches were powered by Google.

The 65 smaller search engines Hitwise also tracks only accounted for 6.51% of U.S. searches, by the way.

While Bing is still losing money – and while there have been some rumors about Microsoft trying to sell its search engine to Facebook – there can be little doubt that Microsoft’s persistence is slowly paying off and eating into Google’s still sizable lead. Leaving out the searches it powers on Yahoo, Bing itself, of course, still remains a niche player at under 15%, but crossing the 30% barrier is quite an achievement for Bing.

While Google keeps cramming its search results pages full of tools and social content, today Bing confirmed with me the full roll out a redesigned search results page that completely clears the left sidebar, and replaces the tabbed header with a cleaner set of links. Bing’s Facebook integration is also more subtle now, instead of plastering names and faces beneath Liked results.

This more relaxing, dare I say zen, design gives Google a more claustrophobic and exhausting feel by comparison. Microsoft seems to have realized that if it can’t match Google’s algorithmic prowess, it could win with sleek design that doesn’t bombard you with a thousand options.

Bing has been testing several of these changes for a few months. Here are the rest of details on redesign that’s supposed to reach all US users [Update: not the whole world] by the end of Tuesday if it hasn’t already:

• Related Searches have been shifted from the now-gone left rail to beneath the ads in the right rail
• A ‘thumbs up’ icon now indicates that friends have Liked a search result, and you can see who did by hovering over the icon
• The “narrow by time range” filter formerly in the left rail now only appears if you select the “News” search type from the “More” options
• Update 8am PST 5/2/12: There’s also now more space between lines to aid readability, pages load faster, and the additional whitespace may host future changes

Personally, I dig minimalist product design that keeps things focused. If there’s a tool or option I only need sometimes, I’m okay spending an extra click to reveal it. The desktop Internet is brain-frying enough with so many applications and windows and tabs displayed at once. That’s why it seems more people are championing streamlined apps like Path, ad-blockers, and services that strip clutter out of news articles.

When faced with a much more established competitor, your only move is to differentiate or die. For a while that meant Bing getting cozy with Facebook and Twitter. It appeared to be working as it surpassed Yahoo in search query volume in January, though the product was still bleeding billions of dollars. But then Google Search went social, sparking controversy and solidifying the public as uncomfortable with personalized results.

In fact, Google’s disastrous Search Plus Your World created an opportunity for a clever Bing pivot. Microsoft heard that people were asking for a return to the simple results pages of yesteryear. Today that’s what we got. Now we’ll see if less really is more — more market share for Bing and less for Google, that is.

[Image Credits: Old Bing Diesgn Tnooz, Mr. Clean]

Soon when you logout of Facebook, you could be greeted with a full recreation of the Bing home page, complete with pretty photo and an active search box. Facebook has wasted no time launching the new logout page ad unit it unveiled on Wednesday. This morning TechCrunch reader and MyJobLinx co-founder Raj Singh’s Facebook logout page featured a Bing search box that when used opened a Bing search results page in a separate tab.

[Update: Facebook has confirmed that Bing is the first advertiser to use its new logout page ad unit.] The new featured placement for Bing stems from Facebook’s longtime partnership Microsoft, where Microsoft is an investor and provided display ads, Bing powers the social network’s internal search engine and other features, and Facebook contributes data to Bing’s own social search features.

Facebook’s latest monetization strategies focus on exposing users to more ads without taking away from their social experience. Because there is no social content on the logout page and people usually just wait for it to show up as a confirmation of their logout before navigating away, Facebook may see little harm in displaying an ad or sponsored functionality there.

On Wednesday Facebook announced a new logout ad unit where advertisers could pay to have their Page posts displayed. It noted that 37 million people logout of Facebook each day in the US alone, and 105 million per month. This new ad unit is supposed to go live in April, but now Facebook tells me the Bing search experience is its live debut.

When Singh tried clicking the ‘close this’ button in the top left, he was shown the traditional Facebook logout page. There’s no information available right now about how Facebook would decide whether to show a Page post Sponsored Story ad or the Bing experience, though the latter could appear to users who don’t meet ad targeting critieria.

Bing’s current integration with Facebook is relatively buried in its internal search. This is much more prominent and could help Bing strengthen its position as an alternative to Google. When you logout of Facebook, there’s a decent chance a web search is your next move. This makes Bing’s engine the most obvious choice.

LeGuide.com Group, a pan-European publisher of online shopping guides, comparison websites and the like, has acquired online shopping portal Ciao from Microsoft.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but LeGuide.com says it paid for the Ciao assets in cash and didn’t need to take on debt to finance the transaction.

Founded in 1999 and present in 7 countries – Germany, UK, France, Italy, Spain, The Netherlands and Sweden – Ciao is said to reach some 20.8 million unique visitors. Combined, LeGuide.com claims, the online shopping guide network will reach close to 33 million unique users.

Acquired by Microsoft in August 2008 for close to half a billion dollars, Ciao also operated Microsoft’s Bing shopping engine in Europe.

LeGuide.com Group, a pan-European publisher of online shopping guides, comparison websites and the like, has acquired online shopping portal Ciao from Microsoft.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but LeGuide.com says it paid for the Ciao assets in cash and didn’t need to take on debt to finance the transaction.

Read more over at TechCrunch Europe.

According to Israeli businesspaper Calcalist (in Hebrew), Microsoft has acquired San Mateo, California-based video search technology company VideoSurf for about $70 million.

We’ve confirmed the acquisition with multiple sources, although we haven’t been able to nail down the exact price (yet). One source who requested anonymity pegged it at $70 million too, though.

Update: we’ve now learned the total acquisition price amounts to just under $100 million.

Update: Microsoft just announced the acquisition (more details below)

VideoSurf raised $28 million from a couple of tech heavyweights, including Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and her husband, SurveyMonkey CEO David Goldberg, along with Al Gore and Current Media CEO Joel Hyatt and other investors, including Pitango VC and Verizon Ventures.

Likely, the acquisition is meant to beef up Microsoft’s Bing service.

The company’s technology is able to scan a wide range of video websites (Hulu, Dailymotion, Metacafe and others) and thus enables users to quickly find specific videos.

VideoSurf was originally started in 2006 by CEO Lior Delgo, Chief Scientist Achi Brandt, CTO Eitan Sharon, and COO Shai Deljo. More about them here.

Fun fact: VideoSurf chief executive Lior Delgo earlier founded travel search startup FareChase and led it to an acquisition by Yahoo back in 2004 (its technology now powers Yahoo Travel).

Update 2: from Microsoft’s press release:

Founded in 2006, VideoSurf offers a back-end computer vision technology that “sees” frames inside videos to make discovering content fast, easy and accurate. Over time, Microsoft will integrate this technology across its entertainment platform to augment the Xbox 360 ecosystem and evolve search and discovery of entertainment content on Xbox LIVE.

“VideoSurf’s content analytics technology will enhance the search and discovery of entertainment content across our platform,” said Alex Garden, director of Xbox LIVE for the Interactive Entertainment Business at Microsoft. “This holiday we will launch voice search across our entertainment partners on Xbox LIVE. Over time, as we integrate VideoSurf’s technology into our system, we are excited about the potential to have content tagged in real time to increase the speed and relevance of the search results.”

…

In the coming months, Microsoft will bring nearly 40 world-leading TV and entertainment providers to Xbox LIVE, including Bravo, Comcast, HBO GO, Verizon FiOS and Syfy in the U.S.; BBC in the U.K.; Telefonica in Spain; Rogers On Demand in Canada; Televisa in Mexico; ZDF in Germany; and Mediaset in Italy. T

his acquisition will also make it easier for world-class video partners to take full advantage of advanced features such as voice search enabled by Kinect for Xbox 360. With Kinect, users will be able to easily search and discover content across multiple entertainment providers within Xbox LIVE and then interact with and enjoy content in extraordinary ways using voice search powered by Bing on the Xbox 360.

According to Israeli businesspaper Calcalist (in Hebrew), Microsoft has acquired San Mateo, California-based video search technology company VideoSurf for about $70 million.

We’ve confirmed the acquisition with multiple sources, although we haven’t been able to nail down the exact price (yet). One source who requested anonymity pegged it at $70 million too, though.

VideoSurf raised $28 million from a couple of tech heavyweights, including Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and her husband, SurveyMonkey CEO David Goldberg, along with Al Gore and Current Media CEO Joel Hyatt and other investors, including Pitango VC and Verizon Ventures.

Read more at TechCrunch Europe.

Microsoft this morning blasted out an email to all subscribers of its Bing Daily Deals offering, informing users that the service will henceforth be known as ‘MSN Offers’. It’s a confusing move, but then Microsoft has a history of making confusing moves when it comes to naming and branding its products and services.

The company claims it didn’t want people to mix up the daily deals it offers with its Bing Deals service, which essentially aggregates daily deals from a range of third-party providers.

Microsoft also says aligning its own daily deals offering with MSN “seems to make good sense”.

Well, as long as we’re 100% sure about it …

Here’s the email that was sent to all Bing Daily Deals subscribers:

Hey Bing Daily Deals Subscribers,

Thanks for signing up to get the best offers around–we hope you’re living it up and exploring all the awesome stuff in your city!

We wanted to give you a heads up that Bing Daily Deals will soon be re-named MSN Offers.

It’s the same great set of values in your local area, but we wanted to clear up confusion between the Daily Deals you receive via email and the Bing Deals feature which aggregates daily deals from hundreds of providers at Bing.com/Deals. Moreover, better aligning Daily Deals with MSN, where you can go to find the best things going on in your local area, seems to make good sense.

You don’t need to do or change a thing. You’ll still be getting the same great deals, with the same account information.

Thanks again for subscribing, we hope you enjoy the new experience.

Best,
Daily Deals Team

Microsoft appears to be readying the formal launch of a Bing-branded daily deals website powered by white-label group buying platform service provider Tippr, a well-informed source tells me. You don’t have to take my word for it: Microsoft and Tippr are testing the service right now, and the Bing-exclusive daily deals site is hiding in plain sight (see here and here, or check screenshots below).

For the record, this offering is notably different from Microsoft’s earlier launch of Bing Deals, which basically features links to aggregated deals from a number of partners, including group buying service providers like Tippr, Groupon, LivingSocial, Zozi and Gilt City but also over 2,000 merchants through Bing Shopping, including Target, Nordstrom, and Zappos.

I haven’t found any mention of, link to, official videos or screenshots of the Bing-exclusive daily deals site powered by Tippr. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m pretty sure Microsoft has never made any announcements concerning the Bing.com/daily-deals website whatsoever.

As you can tell from the screenshots embedded below, Bing’s group buying destination site will be familiar to you if you’ve ever visited the likes of Groupon and LivingSocial for deals.

You can use your Facebook account or Windows Live ID to log in, browse and share current deals, past deals, and read more about how it works. The latter page notes:

Subscribe to Bing Deals and we’ll e-mail you a new deal every day from a great local business. You can also search at Bing.com or browse for deals at Bing.com/daily-deals.

Again, this site is the only one I can find on the Web that has ever made any mention of the URL / website Bing.com/daily-deals.

The website also mentions something called a ‘sweetened deal’, which is described as follows:

What is a sweetened deal? It’s a deal that gets better over time. Some of the deals that appear on Bing Deals will get a better value as more deals are purchased.

For example, a deal may start off as $10 for $20 at Some Corner Bakery. If enough people purchase the voucher, the deal hits the sweeten point and it becomes $10 for $25! No matter what, you will always pay the same amount for the deal you purchase, but what you get for your hard earned dollars goes up!

The cool thing about Sweeten Deals is that as more people buy, the value of the deal gets better for everybody who purchased and will purchase the deal. This is why it’s a great idea to share the deal you bought with your friends, so you and everybody else get the biggest bang for your buck.

As you can tell from one of the screenshots below, daily deals are / will be available in 12 markets, including Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles and Seattle.

When reached, Tippr CEO Martin Tobias declined to comment on the partnership between Microsoft and Tippr. A Microsoft spokesperson tells me he believes this is part of something they’ve talked about before, then referred to as Bing Exclusive Deals for some cities, which are deals you can only get through Bing, but that the team is still “getting it up and running and working out kinks”.

It’s also worth noting that Microsoft last week expanded its Bing Business Portal, adding the ability for local businesses to run group deals – rather than regular deals – on Bing (among other things).

Search Engine Land offers an excellent run-down of everything that’s new.

Other daily deal sites in the U.S. include Groupon, LivingSocial, Google Offers, BuyWithMe, AmazonLocal, HomeRun and Dealster, among many, many others.

On the rare occasions that I’m not sitting in a chat room and writing about phones, I usually play the role of “hang-out coordinator” among my friends. You probably have too: messaging people to see who’s available, finding out who wants to eat what, getting ETAs from prospective partiers, the works. It’s a bit draining to say the least, but if you’re usually stuck with that responsibility and you have a Windows Phone, then Bing’s newly-launched “We’re In” app may be just right for you.

The process is simple: when you use the app to create an event and invite people to it, the invitation goes out via text message. Once your friends respond (either from the Windows Phone app or the mobile website), their locations will be plotted on a map, which is great for keeping tabs on that one friend who’s always late.

All the participants can leave status updates on the fly, so the first person who makes it to the restaurant can let the others know that he’s snagged a table in the back. It’s just as easy to duck out of event you’ve committed to, although protocol suggests you should leave a parting status update so as not to gain a reputation as a flake.

In a way, it almost seems like We’re In is Foursquare’s other half: while Foursquare lets you know when someone makes it somewhere, We’re In deals with all the back-end logistics of getting there in the first place. Instead of having to message individual people back and forth and try to determine who knows about what, We’re In puts all of that information in one location. The Bing team has announced their intention to bring We’re In to other devices, but sorry international partiers: it’s U.S. only for now.

The combined search market share of Microsoft’s Bing and Bing-powered Yahoo (AKA BingHoo!) keeps creeping up.  The latest market share figures from comScore’s qSearch service are out, and the combined BingHoo! climbed to 30.2 percent market share of total explicit searches (excluding the effects of slideshows, contextual search, and Google Instant), up 0.2 percent from May.  Google remained steady at 65.5 percent share.

When you drill down into the data, Bing keeps adding share (up 0.3 point to 14.4 percent), and Yahoo seems to have stabilized at 15.9 percent for the last three months.  And Bing’s year-over-year growth in market share is an impressive 41 percent, compared to 6.4 percent growth for Google.  That’s not a bad growth rate for Bing two years after launch.

The big question is whether the combined BingHoo! can ever get significantly above 30 percent. Since October, it’s gained about 2 points, from 28 percent.

Google also powers search on Ask and AOL. If you add those up, it’s share goes up to 69.8 percent. So there is still a lot of room for Bing to grow. And these numbers do not include mobile search, where Google is even more dominant. It’s gonna be a long war.

(Table courtesy of Mark Mahaney at Citi).

Editor’s note: Guest contributor Semil Shah is an entrepreneur interested in digital media, consumer internet, and social networks. He is based in Palo Alto and you can follow him on twitter @semilshah.

While the tech world is buzzing about the launch and implications of Google’s new social network, Google+, it’s worth noting that Google isn’t just in a war with Facebook, it’s at war with multiple companies across multiple industries. In fact, Google is fighting a multi-front war with a host of tech giants for control over some of the most valuable pieces of real estate in technology. Whether it’s social, mobile, browsing, local, enterprise, or even search, Google is being attacked from all angles.  And make no mistake about it, they are fighting back and fighting back, hard. Entrepreneur-turned-venture capitalist Ben Horowitz laid the groundwork for this in his post Peacetime CEO / Wartime CEO, saying Larry Page “seems to have determined that Google is moving into war and he clearly intends to be a wartime CEO. This will be a profound change for Google and the entire high-tech industry.” Horowitz is exactly right.

Before I investigate each battle front in the war, it’s important to highlight the fact that perhaps no other tech company right now could withstand such a multifaceted attack, let alone be able to retaliate efficiently. Sure, Apple might get pushed around by Facebook, so it integrated Twitter into iOS5, and sure, Amazon and Apple have their own tussles over digital media and payments, but at the end of the day, Google is in this unique and potentially highly vulnerable position that will test the company’s mettle and ability to not only reinvent itself, but also to perhaps strengthen its core. Let’s take a quick look into the GooglePlex, which may now resemble more of a military complex, plotting out strategies and tactics for this war. Google must battle on at least six fronts simultaneously.

The Browser Front: Users have a choice between Internet Explorer (Microsoft), Firefox (Mozilla), Safari (Apple), and Google’s offering, Chrome. The speculation is that Facebook is interested in a browser, too, since Mozilla co-founder Blake Ross is an employee, but that hasn’t happened yet. More recently, the social browser RockMelt has captured some peoples’ interests, and last week secured $30M in financing, adding Facebook board members Jim Breyer and Marc Andreessen to its board. Andreessen obviously knows a thing or two about browsers. Though most browsers enable users to power their search by Google as an option, Googe’s Chrome offering isn’t the lead browser by market share, and not even in second place.

The Mobile Front: Apple’s iOS took the mobile world by storm in 2007 with the first iPhone. Then Google’s Android operating system roared alongside it, turning into a freight train of downloads, as Bill Gurley said, only recently to be slowed by Apple’s release of a phone with Verizon. While Android may have more installs, they don’t have the developer community to build killer apps because the Android marketplace (both for hardware and firmware) is highly fragmented, whereas iOS is about symphonic convergence. All the along, there’s been ample speculation about whether Facebook was building its own mobile phone device, or as the company has publicly hinted, how it would integrate social layers into different mobile operating systems and platforms.

The Search Front: Whether we’re on the desktop/laptop, a tablet, or a phone, Google wants to be powering our search, and this is where they dominate, though Microsoft’s Bing has been able to acquire an impressive number of clicks. While everything is fine today, there are some troubling warning signs. On desktops and laptops, people will continue to use a variety of browsers, though they end up spending a lot of time on Facebook, which scares Google because of the trend of people moving slowly from search to discovery. This, however, won’t shift overnight. For mobile devices, it’s trickier. Most iOS users navigate the web either through Apple’s own browser, Safari, and can have it search by Google. On Android-powered tablets and phones, Google controls more of the user-experience, including search, navigation, and application integration. While this is going on, users are trying their hand at realtime search on Twitter or BackType, looking for content directly within Quora, or using Blekko’s hashtags to better cut through and sort the web.

The Local Front: When users search for things on Google and click through, Google gets a little cut of that click. It knows how to drive traffic online and be paid handsomely for it. Driving and directing traffic that originates online into the real world, however, is a different story. As Steve Cheney elegantly stated, when we search online for places to go and then end up there in real life, the place itself does not have a clear sense of what drove them there. This is why the Daily Deals space is so red-hot and competitive, as it helps to close this major, valuable loop. If you search for a restaurant via OpenTable and make a reservation, the merchant knows exactly what drove you to the door. That’s why Yelp, which only used to provide reviews, offered the ability to check-in for credit after Foursquare built up a head of steam. The opportunity here is so complex yet fragmented that it drove Google to offer $6B for Groupon just six months ago. In local, Google is competing against Groupon, but also Amazon (which has a stake in LivingSocial), and a host of smaller (Loopt) and forthcoming deals companies will continue to roll out. This is just the beginning.

The Social Front: Yes, again, Google is fighting a war with Facebook. That much is obvious. What’s less obvious is how other social networks have been able to capture bits and pieces of our identities, leaving Google without any information of who we are. Users have been pumping personal content into blogs like Tumblr, networks like LinkedIn, and even asking search-related questions on Quora. Although we may all predominantly search via Google, the company is struggling in the social field. That is why Larry Page stepped in as CEO, why he tied bonuses to social, and why Google+ is their social sword and shield to fight back and capture user data, despite it being late in the game. Strategically speaking, even if Google+ doesn’t hold or catch fire, it will probably cause its rivals to pause for a moment and consider a range of short- and long-term implications.

The Enterprise Front: If you think the browser, mobile, social, local, and search isn’t enough, check out Google’s combatants in enterprise—just some names like Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, and VMware, among others. Google’s App Engine could go up against AWS, though that doesn’t seem likely. Google competes with IBM and Oracle on enterprise search (such as OmniFind) and email and work collaboration tools (Lotus). Google’s Chromebooks are seen as a potential entry point into enterprise computing, going up against hardware giants like HP, Dell, and Lenovo. Furthermore, Google may be trying to push Android into the enterprise, which would apply even more pressure on Research in Motion. There’s VMware, which offers Zimbra, PaaS, and presentation tools, to name a few. And, of course, there’s Microsoft, which competes with Google for a wide range of productivity applications. For all of Google’s consumer-facing brands and applications, its strength in enterprise sometimes is underestimated despite the fact that they currently hold many excellent positions.

It’s easy to pile on Google given their size, their wallet, and their global influence and impact. They are the goliath, and have been for many years, and are now facing many challenging tests, all at the same time. And while it’s a fun parlor game to sit around and pontificate about how Google’s reign might be over or how slow GMail loads, the reality is that no other company could compete legitimately on so many different battlefronts against so many different competitors. There’s no way Google can win each battle, and they must know that, but they will win some, and it will be fascinating to see how the company both adapts and stays the course along the way. Google is not going to go down without a fight, and it could take another decade for all of these battles to play out. The company has some of the world’s brightest engineers, a stockpile of cash, and incredible consumer Internet mind share, worldwide. Sit tight.

Photo credit: Flickr/hellosputnik

We all want solutions tailored to our needs for a lot of things, online and offline, but does that include a search engine that shows results for queries based on dozens of factors (and more importantly, hides from you certain results based on those factors)?

Well, I’m inclined to think that’s not such a bad thing at all, or at least not that big a deal.

DuckDuckGo, a tiny alternative search engine, begs to differ, and this morning they spread the word about a new website they’ve set up to give home to an illustrated guide of the ‘search engine filter bubble‘ concept and why they think it ducks sucks.

Go visit DontBubble.us and please make up your own mind.

For the record, MoveOn.org board president Eli Pariser came up with the term ‘filter bubble’ (see his TED talk), and has even authored a book about it.

Also, you can add &pws=0 to any string on Google and it will turn off personalized search results (though there is some debate about if it actually does what it’s supposed to).

(Via Hacker News, where there’s an interesting discussion about the ‘filter bubble’ being complete nonsense or of the utmost importance to mankind)

Escape your search engine Filter Bubble! An illustrated guide by #DuckDuckGo http://t.co/WP8OnVu—
  (@duckduckgo) June 20, 2011

Yahoo was first to break the news, drawing historical comparisons to the last time the three leading search companies put their heads together to create sitemaps standards. It’s a very interesting move, and will no doubt have website creators the world over paying attention to the new standards advocated by schema.org.

Schema has elements of Yahoo’s longtime Search Monkey project and Google’s rich snippets, which enable websites to improve their position in search results by giving them tools and guidance as to how to do so, and uses meta data to enhance the search results display.

In other words, the site will provide a collection of schemas, or HTML tags, webmasters can add to their pages to make it easy for search providers to recognize their sites, which rely on this markup to improve the display of search results, making it easier for people to find the right web pages — and for search engines to display them.

As Google pointed out, it’s a tricky and time-consuming process to add markup to webpages, especially if each search engine asks for data in different ways. How to fix this? Standardize the vocabulary. Which is exactly what they’ve done. And, hey, it might even work on other search engines. Whatever those are. Just kidding, Blekko.

For more, here’s Schema.org’s description of what they’re up to: “Many sites are generated from structured data, which is often stored in databases. When this data is formatted into HTML, it becomes very difficult to recover the original structured data. Many applications, especially search engines, can benefit greatly from direct access to this structured data. On-page markup enables search engines to understand the information on web pages and provide richer search results in order to make it easier for users to find relevant information on the web. Markup can also enable new tools and applications that make use of the structure.”

And for good measure, here’s Yahoo’s announcement, Google’s announcement, and last but not least, Bing’s.

We recently broke the story of a small search software outlet named Masterobjects taking on Amazon.com in a notable patent infringement lawsuit, later also taking Google to court.

Now it’s apparently Microsoft’s turn to get sued by the company, and my guess is more will follow. The patent-in-suit, US patent no. 7,752,326, describes a method to immediately start showing search results even while a user is still typing his query into the search box.

That search functionality, call it instant search if you will, is evidently used by many major online website operators, particularly e-commerce companies.

Microsoft uses similar technology to power its Bing Instant search engine.

Masterobjects alleges that Microsoft has been infringing on its patent since 2006, however, when the company introduced Suggestions, a feature that suggests to the user possible search queries as the user types. The suit also mentions an upcoming HTML5-flavored version of Bing, which will likely incorporate instant search functionality as well.

For your background, here is the summary of the patent, originally filed in August 2001 and entitled “System and method for utilizing asynchronous client server communication objects”:

A session-based client-server asynchronous information search and retrieval system for sending character-by-character or multi-character strings of data to an intelligent server, that can be configured to immediately analyze the lengthening string and return to the client increasingly appropriate search information.

Embodiments include integration within an Internet, web or other online environment, including applications for use in interactive database searching, data entry, online searching, online purchasing, music purchasing, people-searching, and other applications. In some implementations the system may be used to provide dynamically focused suggestions, auto-completed text, or other input-related assistance, to the user.

For what it’s worth, Masterobjects isn’t your typical patent troll but a real company that has been actually making and selling software products powered by the technology it claims to have invented.

The obvious next question: are others giants like Yahoo, eBay and Apple next on its hit list?

Yesterday, in a massively botched press launch, Bing released some new features that begin to really tap into the huge amount of social data exposed through its partnership with Facebook. The alliance isn’t a new one — the companies have had a friendly relationship ever since Microsoft made a $240 million investment in Facebook that valued the social network at $15 billion in 2007, and Bing launched Facebook’s Instant Personalization last October.

But Bing’s Facebook integration up until now was a little superficial — if you ran a query relevant to something your friend had previously ‘Liked’ on Facebook, you’d see that in a special module embedded in the search results page. Beginning today, things are getting much more interesting: Bing will actually reorder search results based on friends’ Likes (in other words, your friend’s recommendations won’t just be relegated to a standalone widget, they’ll influence the Ten Blue Links).

That isn’t all. If you run a query that matches information in a friend’s profile (but not necessarily their ‘Likes’) then Bing might show a link to their profile too (for example, run a query for “San Francisco” and you’ll see which of your friends live in SF). Sometimes Bing will show that a certain result has been liked N number of times by other users, even people who aren’t your friends. Bing’s blog post announcing the news outlines the features in more detail. And they look nifty.

But there’s still a big question: will social search, a term that gets tossed around as if it’s some kind of Holy Grail, actually be useful?

The average Facebook user has around 130 friends, which isn’t that many in the grand scheme of things, so you’ll be drawing from a limited amount of recommended content. And my hunch is that the majority of ‘Likes’ are concentrated around a few key areas that include movies, TV shows, breaking news, and humor — you know, the things you see popping up in your Facebook News Feed all the time. Obviously people search for those things on Bing, and when you’re looking for that awesome dancing Android video you heard about but don’t know the name of, surfacing these water-cooler links can be invaluable.

But people use search engines for a ton of other tasks too, and many of them aren’t involving the sort of content that people share to Facebook. How times have you actually ‘Liked’ the new shoes you just ordered? Or your favorite hotel in the Caribbean? Or the how-to guide on repairing your dishwasher? Everything you Like is shared with your friends via the News Feed, and when you share something they’re interested in — like breaking news, or something funny — there’s positive reinforcement as they interact with that shared story. But at the same time you’re probably going to be a little hesitant to start Liking things that are more mundane, even if you found them useful.

And there’s also the question of whether people actually care what their friends think. Internally, Facebook has found that people aren’t necessarily motivated to click links because they share similar tastes with their friends — sometimes, people are interested in a piece of content because it was shared by their friend. In other words, we care about our friends’ recommendations because we care about our friends, not necessarily because we like similar things. So do these ‘Liked’ pages become helpful for finding the information you’re searching for?

I asked some of these questions to Stefan Weitz, director of Bing, who was unsurprisingly a bit more optimistic than I am. He says that the ‘new web’ is inherently social, and that for the first time in human history we can tap into the data that was previously stored in people’s heads. But that’s long-term.

The features Bing launched yesterday, he says, are not ‘the ultimate social search’. He explains that we’re just at the tip of the iceberg, and that social search isn’t going to revolve exclusively around Facebook data. “It’s hard to predict where it’s going next,” Weitz says. “Facebook went from zero Likes to what they have now in one year. The challenge is to not get too locked into one signal — we have to pivot quickly around the current zeitgeist.”

As for my concerns about the way people are ‘Liking’ content with Facebook and how that ties into search, Weitz says that it’s still up to the user to figure out which of their friends’ recommendations are relevant (e.g. if you see one of your gadget-savvy friends ‘Like’ a camera, that’s important; someone else’s recommendation may not be).

And, regarding the scope of content that people are Liking, Weitz points out just how new the Like button is, and that it generally appears in inconsistent places on webpages. Bing launched a new browser toolbar as part of yesterday’s news that solves this issue, but this is only available to IE users. And I’m not convinced that people are having a hard time finding the buttons — I just don’t think they’re compelled to click them unless they really want to broadcast something to their friends.

Of course, Facebook isn’t standing still either. It has every incentive to get you to Like a broader array of content online — after all, its ad platform revolves around showing your friends what you’ve Liked. And it also has a strong incentive to give partners like Bing a way to leverage that data in a useful way.

A couple days ago, the headlines blared that Bing now has 30 percent search market share in the U.S. Not so fast. Those numbers were based on Hitwise estimates. Today, comScore came out with its own qsearch estimates, which is what Wall Street analysts following Google report. The comScore numbers tell a slightly different story.

If you include all searches, then the combined market share of Bing (13.3 percent) and Yahoo (17.7 percent), which is powered by Bing, is indeed 31 percent. But this “core” search number includes Google slideshows, contextual search in places like Yahoo News, and Google Instant. Every time you go through a slideshow on Yahoo, for instance, related search results appear below, inflating its numbers.

But ComScore strips out those numbers to come up with what it calls “explicit search” (you know, when someone actually types a query into a search box). When you look at explicit search, Bing and Yahoo combined only had 29.5 percent market share in the first quarter of 2011, which is up from 28.0 percent in the fourth quarter of 2010. So Bing is making gains at the expense of Google, whose explicit search share in the first quarter was 65.6 percent, down from 66.4 percent in the fourth quarter, or almost a full point. But it hasn’t quite reached 30 percent yet.

Bing also keeps taking share from Yahoo, which ends up being a wash. Over the past nine months, Bing has gained nearly 3 percentage points in explicit search share, but half of that has come from Yahoo.

In March, 2011, Bing reached 13.9 percent, while Yahoo dropped to 15.7 percent, for a combined total of 29.6 percent share, which is actually down 0.1 percent from February. Google’s explicit search market share in March was 65.7 percent, up 0.3 percent from February, and pretty much flat with nine months ago.

The table below is courtesy of Citi analyst Mark Mahaney: