Microsoft, Search Engine | 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.

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.

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.

Competition's all relative. Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL all compete for ad dollars, but they all agree that marketers ought to put their budgets into premium content, not search or social.

Mozilla and MIcrosoft have teamed up to release a special version of Firefox that integrates Bing as the default search engine.

As search spending continued to rise in the just-ended third quarter, Google regained market share lost during the last couple of quarters to Microsoft's Bing search engine, according to a new report to be released Tuesday morning by Efficient Frontier, which manages about $1 billion in search, display, and social advertising for agencies and advertisers. ...