The “search engine” part of Google, the part we love, is constantly under assault as Google tries to adapt and keep its business growing.

Now, with the introduction of Search Plus Your World earlier this month, Google has shown us it may believe it has enough clout that it can more or less ignore its original customers, the individuals who use search engines to find relevant content. Instead, it appears intent to focus on building its marketplace, expanding its audience, and delivering ever-better results to advertisers — even if that means degrading the experience to search engine users.

Search Plus Your World is the feature that integrates results from your social network, led by Google+, into search results. You can disable Google’s social search, but it’s on by default. Search Plus has some odd effects, such as prioritizing results from Google+, which is a tiny network compared to other, larger social networks like Facebook. Those results aren’t often especially relevant, so it looks like Google is just trying to pump up usage and pageviews for its own social network at the expense of competitors.

As VentureBeat’s Matt Marshall argued here last week, Google seems to be selling its soul. In the past, Google has always kept search engine relevancy sacrosanct, but for the first time, Google appears to be wavering on that. Search engine expert Danny Sullivan found additional fodder for this argument this week, when he found an obvious bit of (irrelevant) search engine marketing cluttering up a search he made for “santorum.”

Now a search marketing expert, Tom Blue, has discovered another bit of irrelevance: Some random post by M.G. Siegler showing up in the fourth position in a search he did for the word “television.” Siegler is a former VentureBeat writer, a minor Silicon Valley celebrity and a tech investor, but he’s certainly not the kind of worldwide expert who you’d expect to show up on the first page of results for a topic as massive as television, especially with an offhand post about a product that doesn’t exist yet. He’s also not in Blue’s circles on Google+. A search for “Christmas” put Siegler in the #2 slot.

Now, of course, there may be a logical reason Siegler is showing up in Google’s results. Many of Blue’s contacts may also be contacts of Siegler, and so Google’s algorithm may be listing Siegler as relevant to folks like Blue even if they’re not directly connected with Siegler. But the fact is, Siegler’s results aren’t relevant to Blue (as he attests in his post), and that’s where this fails. It increasingly appears this is all part of on-going experimentation by Google to tinker. To be fair, Google may be doing this quickly, to try to find a way that works better for people. But by moving quickly and not testing relevance before inserting such results so quickly, Google is opening itself up to criticism about why it’s doing this.

Greg Gorman comments, on Tom Blue’s Google+ page:

The point is, they are injecting Google+ into the results, and rather highly into the results, regardless of the relevance of that particular result. The algorithm may go something like this: search Google+ for the same search critieria, and then post the most important person’s results.

The procedure seems to be fairly straightforward: Put the Google+ result somewhere between the second and fifth position.

When I tried the same “television” search, guess who showed up in Siegler’s spot? Me. I had a similarly irrelevant post about the same nonexistent television as Siegler, but, in Google’s defense, at least I’m relevant to myself. A search for Christmas turned up a photo of some boozy Christmas gifts my friend John Abell had received, the lucky bastard.

When I tried the search again in Chrome’s incognito mode, hiding my personal information from Google, the Google+ and blog posts disappeared.

There’s some indication that Google has heard the cries of outrage, and has already started scaling back social search results, as PandoDaily’s Sarah Lacy reports.

That might come too late for some. Like Mat Honan at Gizmodo, I’ve experimented with switching my default search engine to Bing, and I’ve found that its results are at least as relevant as Google’s, and often more so, given that they’re not cluttered up with marginally-useful social search results. As a bonus, you can still use the + operator in Bing searches, which is nice for a search geek like me. Also, with Bing, I can copy the URLs of search results directly from the results page, instead of having to click through to avoid Google’s nasty, long referral URLs.

The Search Plus scandal is a warning to be cautious about relying on the search results from any one provider, and it’s a reminder that, whether you use Google or Bing, you are not the primary customer.

When Google ruffles feathers by changing its search results to prioritize its own products, such as Google+, over far more popular services like Twitter and Facebook, it’s making a calculated gamble: What it stands to gain from its customers (advertisers) outweighs any goodwill it might lose among its producers (you).

Yes, you are a producer of Google’s core product. Every time you do a search on Google, watch a video on YouTube, visit a website with Google AdSense ads on it, or post an item on Google+, you’re providing the raw material that Google needs: Attention. That brief instant that your eyes sweep across the ads on this page before locking on to these very fascinating words are the ore from which Google refines its product.

Add up a billion such passing glances, plus the occasional click, organize them through a marketplace designed to help advertisers find the optimum combination of keywords and context, and Google has a hot commodity indeed. Advertising produced nearly all of Google’s $37.9 billion in 2011 revenues. The advertising contingent is led by America’s much-beloved financial industry, which contributed $4 billion to Google’s top line.

Google has already been personalizing search results, tailoring them to your location, for instance — a practice it’s maintained since 2006. Yet few people are aware of this, and I suspect even fewer care. (When I spoke to a high school journalism class in Palo Alto yesterday, none of the students knew that Google delivers different results depending on who and where you are.)

As a result, I don’t expect Google to change its behavior radically. It may scale back the number of Google+ results, and it might make some efforts to include more results from other social networks. But at the end of the day, its mission is to increase the number of people looking at Google-delivered advertisements, whether that means growing usage of its search engine, increasing the reach of its AdSense program to more websites, or driving more poeple to use Google+. Or even abandoning search altogether.

Image credit: Flickr/dullhunk

But we’re sure the company is mighty proud of today’s numbers released by comScore that show Bing’s market share has, for the first time ever, surpassed Yahoo’s search market share.

For the month of November 2011, Yahoo grabbed 15.1 percent of the U.S. search market for home and work locations, while Bing took home 15 percent of that pie.

However, for the month of December 2011, comScore says Bing scraped ahead with 15.1 percent market share while Yahoo search dropped to 14.5 percent of the market.

Of course, the big winner here is still Google, which took 65.4 percent of the U.S. home and work search market in November 2011 and actually grew to 65.9 percent the following month.

Numbers from other sources this time last year had Bing pegged as a much more formidable opponent in the search space. In Feburary 2011, Hitwise said that Bing had gained around 27 percent of the search market.

comScore stats from the summer of 2011 show Yahoo at 16.1 percent and Bing at 14.4 percent.

Yahoo web search has been powered by Bing since the two companies struck a 10-year deal to that effect back in 2009. In combining their powers, Microsoft and Yahoo hoped to wedge Google out of complete search dominance.

At that time, Google controlled 65.8 percent of the search market, again according to comScore — just nine tenths of a percent less than it claims today.

In a word, Microsoft’s “win” over Yahoo today is but cold comfort, since their powerful partnership hasn’t managed to budge Google from its highly favorable position.

But with Google’s new inclusion of social results in its web search, change-averse users may run to the hills — or, as it were, to Bing. On the other hand, the change could prove extremely positive for Google. The more interesting numbers are still to come, so stay tuned in for more news of the search wars.

Peak holiday travel may be near its end, but the battle for online travel search is just heating up, with Google’s recently launched flight search tools angering competitors.

Google debuted its flight search tool in September and starting placing its own flight search results at the top of regular searches in December, just in time for the holiday travel season. The flight results pop up when you type a query about trying to get from one place to another, like in my example in the screenshot above.

Competitors such as Expedia, Priceline and Kayak are unhappy about Google’s move, according to the Wall Street Journal. The paper suggests that competitors believe Google is abusing stronghold of the search market to control the $110 billion online travel industry.

Web analytics firm Compete says travel sites rely on Google for 10 to 20% of their traffic, so any time Google places its results at the top, it’s likely taking traffic and sales away from online travel sites. Because sites like Expedia and Orbitz charge airlines a fee for reservations, airlines prefer customers who book direct from their own web sites. Google redirects straight to airline reservation sites rather than linking to online site results. Kayak includes results to airline sites, Priceline, Expedia, Travelocity and Hotwire.

Google’s flight search is powered by ITA Software, which Google finished acquiring in April. When the travel search tool from ITA first launched, we suspected it could also inflict damage on Bing’s robust travel search features.

In the past, Google has faced antitrust allegations over its control over web searches and web data. Just recently, the European Commission met with Google chairman and former CEO Eric Schmidt to talk about the company’s unfair advantage in online search.

Kayak especially may have been hurt by Google’s move into travel, as it filed its IPO paperwork with the SEC back in Nov. 2010 but has not gone anywhere since. In Nov. 2011, the company reportedly said it was simply waiting until markets were favorable, but other factors like competition from Google could be in play. Kayak is backed by the likes of Sequoia Capital, Accel Partners and General Catalyst Partners.

Kayak, Expedia and Orbitz were not available for immediate comment, but we will update this story if any decide to clarify their positions further.

Bieber beat out 2010 Bing champion Kim Kardashian for the top spot. But don’t feel bad for the soon-to-be-divorced reality star; Kim still nabbed the number two position and was the most searched female of the year on Bing.

President Barack Obama, however, barely cracked the top 50 — the man at the top plummeted to the bottom and placed 49th on the list of most searched people. Last year, Obama dominated the leader board in the fifth position, but this year he fell well behind the likes of Jennifer Aniston (third), Lindsay Lohan (fourth), Jennifer Lopez (fifth) and Britney Spears (sixth), in terms of cultural relevance as defined by search queries.

Even Selena Gomez, girlfriend to the search-almighty Biebs and newfound tech investor, bested the president and secured the 11th spot on the list. What that says about our society or means for Obama’s odds at reelection are yours to unravel.

Bing aggregated billions of search queries to also uncover the most searched news stories, sports stars, musicians, consumer electronics, TV shows, movies, celebrity events and destinations of 2011.

On the consumer electronics side of things, Microsoft’s Xbox reigned supreme — which is not exactly a shocker considering that Bing is a Microsoft property and Kinect was a big hit with gamers. Amazon’s Kindle took second place, Sony’s Playstation nabbed third, the iPhone 5 — that chimeric phone that may one day come into existence — was fourth, and Apple’s iPad came in as the fifth most searched consumer electronics device of the year.

The Casey Anthony trial, somewhat surprisingly, trumped Osama Bin Laden’s death as the most searched news story of the year, and Tiger Woods was still the second most searched for sports star (Maria Sharapova ranked first) of the year. Continuing on with pop culture phenomena, the royal wedding topped Bing’s most searched celebrity events list, while Kim Karadashian’s extravagant (but ill-fated) wedding came in third for the year.

Of course, Bing only accounts for roughly 15 percent share of the U.S. market, so the search engine’s 2011 analysis only partially reflects the nation’s predilection for Justin Bieber.

The top 10 most searched consumer electronics, Bing 2011

[Justin Bieber image via Shutterstock]

While it’s easy to focus on evolving Google products like Gmail and Google+, Google still makes most of its revenues on search and advertising. Thus, the company needs to keep you coming back for more searches, and wants you to be dependent on reliable and relevant results. It also wants to keep you away from Microsoft’s Bing.

“Given the incredibly fast pace at which information moves in today’s world, the most recent information can be from the last week, day or even minute, and depending on the search terms, the algorithm needs to be able to figure out if a result from a week ago about a TV show is recent, or if a result from a week ago about breaking news is too old,” wrote Google Fellow Amit Singhal on the Official Google Blog.

Google has made a commitment to delivering better and faster search results over the past few years. In June 2010, Google debuted a new search indexing infrastructure called Caffeine that helped improve the the frequency of real-time results by aggregating more pages and indexing in half the time. The changes announced today are different from Caffeine implantation because that was purely an infrastructure change where this is algorithmic.

The areas of search most impacted, according to Google, will be:

• Recent events or hot topics: For recent events or hot topics that begin trending on the web, you want to find the latest information immediately. Now when you search for current events like [occupy oakland protest], or for the latest news about the [nba lockout], you’ll see more high-quality pages that might only be minutes old.

• Regularly recurring events: Some events take place on a regularly recurring basis, such as annual conferences like [ICALP] or an event like the [presidential election]. Without specifying with your keywords, it’s implied that you expect to see the most recent event, and not one from 50 years ago. There are also things that recur more frequently, so now when you’re searching for the latest [NFL scores], [dancing with the stars] results or [exxon earnings], you’ll see the latest information.

• Frequent updates: There are also searches for information that changes often, but isn’t really a hot topic or a recurring event. For example, if you’re researching the [best slr cameras], or you’re in the market for a new car and want [subaru impreza reviews], you probably want the most up to date information.

Microsoft posted record earnings for the most recent quarter — $17.37 billion, a figure that represents 7 percent year-over-year growth. All things considered, you can credit the growth to business tools (including big, boring server tech) and games (including the new exciting Gears of War 3).

It’s the same story, roughly, from the beginning of this year: Microsoft is winning in business tech and games tech.

The bright spots

Enterprise sales didn’t fare too well in the Q3 earnings report, but as Chief Financial Officer Peter Klein noted at the time, “We have a great product pipeline. We don’t have visibility into exactly what business spending will be, so we’re just going to have to work through that in the next couple quarters.”

And work through it they did. This quarter, the Business division earned $5.62 billion, and the Servers & Tools division posted $4.25 billion. Together, these two areas accounted for around 57 percent of Microsoft’s total revenues.

“PC sales to emerging markets continued to outpace other markets,” said Bill Koefoed, general manager, investor relations. This finding is similar to what Intel revealed in its earnings this year. “As we look toward to holiday season, we’re particularly excited about Ultrabooks,” said Klein, referring to the super-thin laptops from Intel.

Both Koefoed and Klein had positive remarks on Office 365, the company’s end-to-end cloud service for businesses, which encompasses not only its desktop Office software, but also its server software, such as Exchange and SharePoint.

Games has been quite a bright spot for the company for some time now, with Xbox’s popularity only growing with the availability of the controller-free Kinect hardware.

“There will be over 70 Kinect titles available for the holidays,” said Koefeld, noting that TV content for Xbox Live is also coming in the next couple months. “We believe we have the most compelling entertainment offering in the living room,” he said.

Keep in mind that corporate signings tend to be cyclical. One great quarter for enterprise sales doesn’t necessarily guarantee repeat performances throughout the year. Klein stated the company expects unearned revenue to follow seasonal norms throughout the fiscal year.

The downsides

What about Windows Phone 7? Are we still looking at a potential sleeper hit, or is Microsoft ready to talk numbers?

“We are well positioned to become the third mobile ecosystem,” said Klein. Koefoed added, “We also signed a broad agreement with Samsung on the development and marketing of Windows phones.”

Bing’s ad revenues were below expectations, however,  continuing to work with Yahoo on improving ad revenues is the company’s “number-one priority.” Koefoed said Microsoft is “laser-focused” on getting the revenue per search up in the months to come. As far as Yahoo is concerned, “This is a long term alliance.”

The company’s acquisition of Skype was a hot topic during the Q&A portion of the call. Klein said Microsoft is expecting “low single digits” of percent growth for revenue for the second quarter and “growth in the teens for the full fiscal year.” However, revenue from Skype was not part of today’s posted earnings, and the company is still very much in the beginning stages of figuring out how Skype will figure into its larger business, including its mobile and advertising offerings.

Google on Tuesday launched a new flight search tool that integrates with Google search and will challenge Bing Travel and ticket-finding sites like Kayak and Orbitz.

The new flight search tool is powered by ITA Software, which Google finished acquiring in April. When Google announced its intention to purchase ITA in July 2010, it said it wanted to “create a new, easier way for users to find better flight information online.” Since that time, travel sites and Bing’s search engine have improved to offer new features. But of course, Google has the advantage of being the number one search engine and one of the most used sites on the Web.

Google said that, starting today, people searching for flight information on Google will now have a “Flights” tab that appears on the left-hand side of the screen. At present, I couldn’t get the Flights tab to come up in general searches, but google.com/flights works just fine.

Google boasted that, with help from ITA’s software, its flight results are fast, easy to scan and sort, and helpful at parsing possible destinations and prices.

“Flights are chosen primarily based on cost and total travel time, while covering a variety of departure times and airlines,” Kourosh Gharachorloo, Engineering Director, writes on Google’s Inside Search Blog. “We automatically set the filters to focus on options which are reasonable in both price and duration, and you can always adjust the filters to show even more flights.”

The new feature could easily inflict damage on Bing Travel, one of the best features that Microsoft’s No. 2 search engine has to offer. Bing Travel is still superior thanks a price predictor that tells you if you should buy flight tickets now or later and a strong hotel search. Other full-featured travel sites such as Kayak, Orbitz, Priceline and Expedia may also see traffic declines.

What do you think of Google’s new flight search? Will you use it over Kayak, Bing Travel or other travel sites?

He thinks Bing’s progress in the search market should be applauded, especially given the fact that Bing’s only been around for 2 years. You have to consider Microsoft’s history in search: Live Search, Microsoft’s search product before Bing, had less than one percent name recognition when Bing took its place.

As Bing seeks to dominate the search landscape, it’s very conscious of the fact that it’s competing with Google — a utility so ingrained into the public consciousness that we use the company’s name as a verb to mean “to search the web.” We’re not “Binging” just yet, but the search engine has managed to wrest around 30 percent of the market away from Google.

Still, the “this isn’t a zero-sum game” defense has been a favorite among underdogs since time immemorial. Ralph Nader used that line when I interviewed him in 2004, and Weitz, the company’s search director, used it today.

In addition to talking about the Bing-versus-Google dynamic, we also talked about how the concept of keyword search is due to die out and what Weitz envisions as the future of web and mobile search technology.

Google Dorks have been around for a while, as the name for an attack where hackers scan web sites, using commonly used links within company networks, to see if there are any unsecure links that can be used to break into a company’s web site. A report being released today by Imperva warns that the combination of the highly automated botnets and the Google Dorks are a new vector for hackers to break into companies on a massive scale.

Hackers sometimes manually scan sites for such stray links, but that’s like looking for a needle in the haystack. They have now figured out how to automate their scanning. They do so by getting botnets, or farms of compromised computers that have been hijacked without the owners’ knowledge. These botnets are used to automatically search through a series of links that may be related to a company’s web site. They use the botnets and Google Dorks to uncover weaknesses, and then they launch conventional hacking attacks against them. The result of these attacks can be contaminated web sites, data theft, data modification, or compromised company servers.

The hackers can efficiently use popular search engines as an attack platform to retrieve sensitive data. Botnets automate the process and can evade anti-automation detection techniques commonly deployed by the search engine providers. By using bots that are distributed throughout the world, the hackers fool the search engines into thinking that the searching is being done by real human individuals, not a herd of bots controlled by a hacker.

“This is what the hackers do to conduct cyber reconnaissance,” said Rob Rachwald, a senior security strategist at security firm Imperva, in an interview. “This used to be a manual process, but now it’s automated.”

With the automation, attackers can get a filtered list of potentially vulnerable web sites in a very short time. Mining search results can expose neglected sensitive files and folders, and unearth network logs and unprotected network-attached devices.

With botnets, the hackers can run 80,000 queries in a day, eluding detection and efficiently fishing for attack targets. Imperva’s Application Defense Center observed a particular botnet in action during the May-June time frame and witnessed its use against a well-known search engine provider. By tracking this botnet, Imperva found how attackers lay the groundwork to simplify and automate the next stages in an attack campaign against web apps.

“We found out because we were observing,” Rachwald said.

Today, search engines detect automated search routines by detecting the searcher’s internet protocol, or IP, address. If the same address is used over and over again for slightly different searches, the search engines block it. But botnets consist of computers scattered around the world, all using different IP addresses. Hackers can hide their identities behind these botnets, which are available on the underground for rental.

The botnets can be used with a distributed search tool to find distinguishable resource names and specific error messages that say more than they should. Dorks are often exchanged between hackers in forums. Some of the lists of Dorks are posted on various web sites. Dorks and exploits go hand in hand.

In the attack that Imperva observed, the attackers used dorks that match vulnerable web applications and search operators that were tailored to a specific search engine. For each unique search query, the botnet examined hundreds of returned results. Full told, the number of queries topped 550,000 queries, including one day with 81,000 queries — all via  single botnet.

The attackers targeted e-commerce sites and content management systems. The more success they had, the more the attackers refined their search terms. Imperva saw 4,719 different variations of dorks used in the attacks.

Fortunately, there are some solutions that Google, Bing and Yahoo can use to protect against these attacks. Search engines are in a unique position to identify botnets that abuse their services and can thus find out more about the attackers. The search engines can identify unusual queries such as those that contain terms from publicly available Dork databases, or queries that look for sensitive files. By doing so, search engines can come up with more blacklisted IP addresses. Google can force some searchers to fill out a CAPTCHA form, (where you look at handwritten characters and type the word that you see), to prove they are human searchers.

Rachwald said that web site creators should attack themselves using common Dork search terms and find out if they are vulnerable. They should also mask their links so that they are harder to guess.Web application firewalls should be able to detect and block attempts at finding application vulnerabilities. The web sites can also use reputation controls to block attacks coming from known malicious sources.

The results from Baidu are currently primarily in Chinese. That includes search queries that users type in English. For example, typing in “Last.fm” will deliver search results in Chinese, even if the link in the search results points to the English version of Last.fm.

The new deal will give Microsoft a foothold in China, where it has a very small portion of the search engine market share. Google was the former largest U.S.-based search engine in China, but the company pulled out of the country. That has left Baidu virtually unchallenged by an American search provider in one of the largest markets in the world.

Google has a rocky relationship with China. The search giant sparred with the country over censorship concerns in January last year. That caused Google to drop its Chinese search website, Google.cn, and redirect users to its Hong Kong-based search website. Google also said the Chinese government was meddling with the Gmail accounts of some users earlier this year.

Baidu is the dominant search engine in China. The company’s chief executive officer Robin Li said 99 percent of China’s 420 million people surfing the Internet use Baidu over other search engines.

This sounds like a smart move in many ways. Nokia’s smartphones will be using Microsoft’s Windows Phone operating system next year, so it will be wise to use Nokia’s brand in it’s own services. Ovi would not be very informative, at least for the new Nokia users.

Ovi is a Finnish word for door. The service was introduced in 2007 and the first beta was out in 2008. The application store opened in 2009. I was among the many users that weren’t impressed. It was slow, hard to use and the software selection was mediocre and awkwardly priced. For example, I was supposed to pay 10 euros (that’s about $14) for a Twitter client.

The best part of the Ovi offering is definitely the map service. And the latest rumors from Search Engine Land claim Ovi Maps is going to be a part of Microsoft’s Bing Maps. It’s likely that Microsoft will continue user interface design, but everything else will be made by Nokia.

The story is highly speculative, and it would be a huge move from Microsoft. The company has invested massively in the product development to compete with Google.

But it that happens, Nokia and Microsoft will probably join forces to fight the dominance of Google Maps.

For a mobile user, Nokia’s maps are pretty useful. You can download the maps to your phone. You can then navigate without any need for a cellular network. That can actually make a huge difference if you are in a foreign country. Downloading the maps over cellular networks while roaming in another network can be very costly. Also, with preloaded maps the possible glitches in a network won’t affect navigating.

But Windows Phone 7 owners, arguably the users that Microsoft should be bending head over heels to please, are still waiting for their own Photosynth app.

Microsoft’s decision to prioritize iPhone development for Photosynth is indicative of a bigger problem that it’s facing with Windows Phone — is it better to deliver cool technology to the bigger iPhone audience, or make it exclusive to Windows Phone?

I’m a fan of Windows Phone 7’s design and overall polish, but it admittedly doesn’t have much in the way of killer apps. If Microsoft delivered Photosynth to WP7 first, it could have served as something to inspire pangs of jealousy in iPhone and Android owners. That’s a strategy that Google has been employing with Android, which features updated versions of Google Maps with 3D buildings and extensive voice controls not available to iPhone users.

There’s also a third option Microsoft could have considered: release Photosynth on both Windows Phone and iPhone at the same time. That way Windows Phone users don’t feel snubbed (which many do, according to comments across the web), and Microsoft gets to take advantage of the iPhone’s larger user base.

The Photosynth iPhone app lets you upload your panoramic creations to Photosynth.net, Bing Maps and Bing local business listings, so it’s something of a Trojan horse for Microsoft. The app also stacks up well against 360 Panorama, the current king of iPhone panorama apps: Photosynth offers higher resolution images, full 360-degree capture, as well as more ways to share your creations.

Microsoft first showed off Photosynth in 2006 as a way to stitch together multiple photos to virtually visit famous locations — for example, you can see the results of a Photosynth made up of 396 photos stitched together around the Statue of Liberty. Microsoft is also working to bring live video into Bing Maps using Photosynth, according to a TED demo from last year.

This April 25-26, VentureBeat is hosting its inaugural VentureBeat Mobile Summit, where we’ll debate the five key business and policy challenges facing the mobile industry today. Participants will develop concrete, actionable solutions that will shape the future of the mobile industry. The invitation-only event, located at the scenic and relaxing Cavallo Point Resort in Sausalito, Calif., is limited to 180 mobile executives, investors and policymakers.

That may seem a bit underwhelming after all the rumors about a rival social network, but this is actually a big deal for Google. Like the company’s executives have been saying for a while, +1 isn’t a standalone site. Instead, it adds a social layer to Google’s two key products — Google search and AdWords. It’s also an answer to the social search partnership that Facebook and Microsoft’s Bing announced last fall.

Google already has a social search feature, which allows users to see comments and annotation made by their friends in their search results. It upgraded the feature last month, making it more prominent and bringing in comments from other social networking like Twitter, leading me to speculate that Google’s big social launch was almost ready.

+1 takes the social search idea step further. Now, users should see a “+1″ button next to every search result in Google. When they hit that button, they’re recommending that result, and that recommendation will show up in their friends’ search results. Here’s how Google explains the social mechanics:

So how do we know which +1’s to show you? Like social search, we use many signals to identify the most useful recommendations, including things like the people you are already connected to through Google (your chat buddies and contacts, for example). Soon we may also incorporate other signals, such as your connections on sites like Twitter, to ensure your recommendations are as relevant as possible.

Users can also hit “+1″ to recommend ads they like, which should make Google’s advertising programs more powerful — if a friend has recommended an ad, users are much more likely to click on it.

This doesn’t look like a direct threat to Facebook, but besides being a response to Bing’s social search partnership, it also poses a challenge to Facebook’s goal of expanding its reach beyond the site itself using tools such as the Like button and other social plugins. In fact, Google told Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan that it’s working to make a +1 button available to website publishers, another area where the Like button has made inroads. And +1 should increase the number of people who fill out their Google Profiles, since you need a profile to make and see recommendations.

So is this the limit of Google’s social ambitions? Sullivan speculates that it could lay the groundwork for a bigger social push in the future. When he asked Google, he was told:

As we’ve already been saying, we’re committed to making the web more people-centric, and we’ve been gradually giving people new ways to share things and interact within our products. This is just another example of how we’re centering our products around the millions of people who use them every day.

Our focus is on improving our search results — to ensure we get the most relevant results to our users as quickly as possible. Relationships and recommendations are one way to help us achieve that goal — and this is what today’s announcement is all about.

While many Twitter users are retweeting without complaint, others are pointing out that this campaign seems like a crass marketing opportunity for Bing.

Comedian Michael Ian Black, who has nearly 1.6 million Twitter followers, graphically responded to the campaign with this tweet: “Hey @bing, stop using a tragedy as a fucking marketing opportunity.” Searching for “@Bing” on Twitter at the time of this post reveals plenty of other users who aren’t taking too kindly to Microsoft’s campaign.

This backlash shows us that as useful as social media is for inspiring activism, it must be carefully deployed so as not to seem like a craven publicity stunt. Most recently, we saw a similar backlash to Kenneth Cole’s tweet about Cairo amid Egypt’s recent protests, in which the fashion label plugged its spring collection.

I can’t imagine how Microsoft didn’t see this coming. It would have received plenty of good will by simply donating $100,000 to help out quake victims. This campaign, on the other hand, seems like a forced attempt to get people talking about Bing, and ultimately to get it trending on Twitter. Now people are indeed talking about Bing, but Microsoft likely won’t appreciate what they’re saying.

Update: the Bing folks have now apologized and will donate the full $100,000 amount to help the quake victims.

Tweet image via Ethan Maffey

The company says this is the first time Bing has ever surpassed Yahoo, but that’s only according to StatCounter data. In September 2010, the research company Nielsen found that Bing ousted Yahoo as the second place search engine worldwide.

It’s not unusual for web analytics companies to have differing data, but it’s definitely worth taking note when their disparate data ultimately reaches the same conclusion. Now Bing is clearly even more of a threat to Yahoo.

Statcounter found that Bing accounted for 4.37 percent of searches globally, while Yahoo only held 3.93 percent. Their single digit traffic also goes to show just how powerful Google is with its 89.94 percent of the market. In the US, Yahoo still holds a slight lead over Bing at 9.74 percent versus 9.03 percent. Earlier this month, Hitwise noted that Bing’s usage saw a significant bump in January — going so far as to take search share from Google in the US.

Bing also powers Yahoo’s search in the US, Canada, Australia, Brazil and Mexico, so Yahoo’s success in those markets is still helping out Microsoft. Bing will completely replace Yahoo’s search back-end globally in 2012. Yahoo announced in July of 2009 that it would be giving up on its own search technology and teaming up with Microsoft to take on Google.

Microsoft’s Bing wrests search share from Google — Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, now has 27 percent of the search engine market and is quickly gaining on Google, according to Hitwise.

HP unveils a cool reclining touchscreen PC straight out of Star Trek — It seems like there’s no end of uses for the touchscreen.

Angry Birds get Super Bowl appearance and Android SMS payments — The Super Bowl ad represents huge exposure for Rovio, which was barely known more than a year ago, and its blockbuster Angry Birds mobile game.

Verizon iPhone launch is no AT&T iPhone launch — The much-hyped Verizon iPhone is finally available for purchase, and if you haven’t preordered or picked one up yet, there’s still a very good chance you’ll be able to snag one.

HP’s WebOS TouchPad reveals iPad’s multitasking weaknesses — Unless Apple significantly revamps iOS for the iPad, it’s going to be blown away by HP’s upcoming WebOS TouchPad tablet when it comes to multitasking.

And here are five more stories we think are important, thought-provoking, fun, or all of the above:

Symbian is dead: Nokia jumps to Windows Phone 7 — Nokia CEO Stephen Elop announced a long-rumored partnership with Microsoft yesterday that would make Windows Phone 7 Nokia’s primary mobile platform.

Memo to the government: Nissan will not sell 25,000 Leafs this year — For such a hotly anticipated car, the Nissan Leaf has seen deliveries creep slowly off the assembly line — but don’t tell the Department of Energy.

Silicon Valley’s shopping spree: One Kings Lane, Abe’s Market and more – A new wave of e-commerce is coming, backed by tends of millions of dollars from Silicon Valley’s savviest investors, that’s reinventing more than just how consumers shop online.

AOL picks up The Huffington Post for $315M — so who’s next? — AOL has agreed to buy The Huffington Post, the fast-growing Internet-publishing startup backed by a controversial political figure, for $315 million in its third major acquisition of a power player in online media.

Bing Gordon’s love poem to the game industry, and to me (video and poem text) — Bing Gordon accepted one of the video game industry’s highest honors this week.

The bigger news, and perhaps the underlying reason for the rise: Microsoft’s Bing might be the better search engine. Hitwise says that Google’s “success rate” is just 65 percent, compared with an 82 percent score for Bing. The success rate is the percentage of times users click on links yielded by searches.

Google is still by far the most popular search engine, with 68 percent of the market. Hitwise measures 70 other search engines, which together share 4.6 percent of the market.

ZDNet’s Larry Dignan writes that “Microsoft’s deal with Yahoo [to run Bing results in Yahoo searches] appears to be paying off.” In one sense, that’s true: Without Yahoo, Bing’s market share would be just 12.8 percent. But searches on Yahoo fell in January, from 15.2 percent of the total to 14.6 percent, while searches at Bing.com rose by 21 percent.

I fully agree with Dignan, though, when he says that Bing is increasingly looking like a threat to Google.

The idea is a novel one and it fits with the notion that social games can be played anywhere that users are, whether that’s on Facebook, on the iPhone, or even while searching the internet. With the addition of Bing, Sibblingz becomes more attractive for developers. Essentially, it allows the developers to create a game once and then deploy it on Facebook, a web site, the iPhone, or Bing. The players can access their own game — with their own unique data — from any of the platforms. They can also play with players who are playing the game on a different platform. Usually, game developers have to painstakingly adapt a game so it runs on different platforms.

The version of Happy Island for Bing will have a new mini-game unique to the search engine. Customers using Bing can play and progress through the first levels of Happy Island without having to sign in. They will also be able to log in using Facebook account and associate their game environment with their Facebook friends. The move comes shortly after Microsoft and CrowdStar, which is a sister company to Sibblingz (both have the incubator YouWeb as a major investor), struck a deal.

It took a very short time to adapt the Happy Island game to run on Bing, thanks to the cross-platform nature of Sibblingz. The companies say it took a lot less engineering time to implement the integration with Bing. That’s important in the social game industry where speed is critical. Ben Savage, chief executive of Sibblingz in Burlingame, Calif., said, “With this partnership, we’re really thinking outside the Facebook canvas.”

The appeal of Sibblingz is that it makes developers less dependent on any one platform and thus makes them more independent. Happy Island has millions of users, mostly on Facebook. But Sibblingz adapted the game to run on mobile social networks in Japan as well.

Back in October, Bing and Facebook unveiled a feature where Bing highlights search results that are endorsed by your Facebook friends (endorsements taking the form of Facebook Likes). So if you’re signed into Facebook and you perform a search for steakhouses on Bing, then if one of your Facebook friends has said they “like” a certain steakhouse, it will show up in a special section of the results called “liked by your Facebook friends”.

Today, the Bing team said it’s moving that social information out of a specialized box and into the regular algorithmic search results. For example, group program manager Paul Yiu showed search results for “baby won’t stop crying”. That’s a case where you probably don’t want to spend a lot of time reading multiple websites with lengthy instructions. Yiu saw in the Bing results that one of his friends had hit the Facebook Like button on a related article, so he clicked on that article first and found a handy list of tips about what to do when, yes, your baby won’t stop crying.

Satya Nadella, senior vice president at Microsoft’s online services division, acknowledged that even with today’s addition, Bing’s social features only affect a small percentage of search results. (One thing that increases usage is the fact that users don’t have to sign in to Bing — one out of five Bing visitors are already logged into Facebook, so they automatically get social results.) Still, Nadella said that when social data does improve results, “It’s magical to see some of the queries change.”

“Even if a small percentage [of searches] have this moment, it’s a big change,” he added. “And then you come to expect it, and it causes you to prefer one search engine over the other.”

Why is it so “magical”? On a theoretical level, Nadella said the Web is now divided into the “Web of pages” (which is the traditional Web) and the “Web of people” (the social connections on a site like Facebook). With its social search, Bing tries to connect these two areas.

Google is looking to acquire the flight data provider for around $700 million to improve results for Web users making travel plans. The deal seems innocuous enough — Google said it had no plans to sell plane tickets and would direct Google search users to other sites to purchase tickets. Still, a number of companies including travel search company Expedia and Microsoft, which runs search rival Bing, have launched the Fair Search Coalition to try to stop the acquisition.

Keeping Web surfers on search sites for as long as possible has become the new game for search providers like Microsoft and Google. Google’s added a lot of functions to the search engine that offer direct answers. Searchers can drop in simple mathematical equations and questions about things like sports scores and get direct answers on Google’s search page. Google also already embeds some flight data in its search engine, as does Bing.

The acquisition of ITA promises to make Google’s data more accurate and up to date than it already is. That can prove to be the deciding factor that keeps a search user on the page long enough to leave an impression and generate some ad revenue. Multiply that by the number of people who use Google search on a daily basis, and it adds up to a ton of additional revenue for Google. So it makes sense why Google is paying $700 million for the data, and why Microsoft would love to stop the deal and get a slice of that information.

The coalition argues that it would increase prices and drive down competition and business innovation, but it really all boils down to advertising revenue. Travel is a huge part of e-commerce — worth around $80 billion a year, according to the Wall Street Journal report. ITA’s software handles around 65 percent of all e-commerce flight bookings, and travel advertising accounted for about 6 percent of all online advertising revenue, according to the coalition’s website, FairSearch.org. Stealing just a small slice of that — which Google probably already owns a large part of — represents a significant financial gain.

There’s a new trend in search engines: Searches tailored to the individual and his or her social network. Most recently, Bing and Facebook announced a partnership that would allow Microsoft’s search engine to return results based on the Facebook “likes” of a user’s friends.

Unsurprisingly, many in the search engine optimization (SEO) field have wondered how this will affect the industry. If search engines are returning customized results tailored to the needs of one particular person, will SEO professionals be able to ensure top placement for their websites? And the inevitable follow-up question is: Will SEO practices change in response to this development?

The answer is yes

The simple answer to this question is yes. We believe that it is imperative that SEO practitioners adapt to the changes in search engines. However, believing that this is a dramatic change to SEO is misunderstanding the industry itself.

At the end of the day, the people who program search engines and the people who optimize websites typically have the same goal — providing users with the best search returns possible. In that sense, we are all working together to ensure that people get the answers to their questions.

It is impossible to ignore the importance of social media today. Facebook has more than 500 million users. Sites like Yelp, LinkedIn, and Twitter continue to affect the way people interact with the Internet, and many SEO professionals have already begun to work social media into their arsenal of services. In this sense, the Bing-Facebook agreement is an indication of how important social media optimization should be to an overall search-engine optimization plan.

Understanding modern SEO

SEO today is about more than merely securing top-page placement for websites. It is about meeting all of a client’s online needs. It is about consulting with a client on natural search, pay-per-click search, social media strategies, video proliferation, and more.

The realities of search-engine optimization have changed dramatically over the course of its existence. Many SEO firms are now involved in all aspects of their clients’ online needs, and the services they offer have become so diverse that the name “SEO company” may no longer apply. That’s why we like to think of these firms as DMAs: Digital Media Agencies.

So what’s a Digital Media Agency?

SEO is still a major part of a modern DMA, but it is just one of many vital services a company must offer in order to succeed. Yes, a DMA’s goal is to secure top-page placement for its clients –- but that is just one of many goals. A DMA also manages a company’s online reputation, handles PR campaigns, and directs the many other aspects of their online brand. It is a full-service shop dedicated to marketing its clients on all aspects of the Web.

Will SEO professionals have to alter the way they do business in order to respond to these changes? We believe they will. But we believe the new Bing-Facebook agreement merely highlights a change that is already occurring, as some SEO firms transform into full-fledged DMAs.

Lu acknowledged that there’s a perception of Microsoft as stodgy and not particularly innovative, but he argued that this perception doesn’t necessarily reflect reality.

“There are plenty of challenges and hurdles, but if we are committed and we all believe in technology … we can also figure out a better way to organize ourselves,” Lu said.

He didn’t say much about the organization of Microsoft as a whole, but Lu did talk about how he organizes the online services division (which is responsible for products like search engine Bing). On a large team, it’s important to have a clear mission statement, and then to come up with principles that help translate that statement into practice, he said.

“Our fundamental mission, as we see it, is to empower every human being on the planet with knowledge,” Lu said.

It’s not clear how widely Lu’s ideas are shared outside his division. He joined Microsoft about two years ago, and whenever I’ve heard talks from or spoken to someone from the Bing team, I’ve noticed that they seem a little more “startup-y” and innovative than other Microsoft employees (who are perfectly nice, but more corporate). Even Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has said he likes working with Bing because it’s more like a startup.

As for those big ideas Lu talked about, here was my favorite: “On a mobile handset, no one should type in anything.”

Microsoft’s mobile competitors have also shown an interest in voice commands, but Lu’s statement was a provocative way to underline the importance of a voice interface. Lu said he wants to evolve Microsoft’s technology so that it not only converts voice-to-text but also understands what users want when they give a command like “table for two.” (The concept sounds similar to Siri, the mobile app acquired by Apple earlier this year.)

[photo credit: Dean Takahashi]

The two companies were already worked together, with Bing providing search results in Facebook and using public Facebook data to create a “social” area within Bing. Today’s announcement goes further by personalizing results in regular Bing searches.

Microsoft and Facebook team members said there are a number of ways that Bing can use Facebook data to personalize your results, with two initial features going live over the next few days. First, Bing will be able to highlight search results that have been “liked” by your friends. For example, if you search for a steakhouse in San Francisco, you’ll get the regular Bing results, but if your Facebook friends have said they “like” a specific steakhouse in San Francisco, that will show up as well. Bing will even tell you which friends recommended the restaurant. Bing can also use Facebook data to improve the results when you search for a name, so that a Facebook friend is more likely to turn up in the results than a random person with the same name.

As with anything involving Facebook, especially anything that involves Facebook working with outside websites, there are privacy concerns. Both companies emphasized that Bing will only show “likes” that Facebook users have chosen to share publicly. Bing, meanwhile, won’t share any of your search information with Facebook and will give searchers an opportunity to opt-out.

Still, at the Microsoft press conference, TechCrunch’s Jason Kincaid wondered if this might just feel creepy. For example, it could be uncomfortable if you’re searching for a disease and you suddenly see that your friend has recommended an article about that disease.

“I don’t think that would be creepy at all,” said Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg. Again, your friend chose to share that article with the public, and the fact that you searched for that disease won’t be shared with your friends.

As for why Facebook is working with Microsoft and not Google on this kind of integration, Zuckerberg said it’s because Bing is in a better position to innovate.

You can read more details on the Bing and Facebook blogs.

That’s actually a general rule with Facebook’s platform strategy, Zuckerberg said — when choosing its closest partners, Facebook prefers working with “really scrappy” underdogs. Those underdogs are more likely to understand the potential to “go deep” with Facebook’s social features. For example, much of the success on Facebook’s applications platform has come from games, and social gaming was led by startups like Zynga, not established game companies.

It’s strange to hear Microsoft described as scrappy, but in search it is indeed an underdog against Google. That’s not just a matter of marketshare, either — whenever I’ve spoken to Bing team members, they really do seem more humble and open to new ideas than other Microsoft employees.

With incumbent leaders, even smart incumbents like Google, there’s always a tension between innovating and protecting what you have, Zuckerberg said.

“We’ve never felt that with Microsoft,” he said. “They’re just trying to rapidly gain share by doing awesome stuff.”

Microsoft and Facebook employees are still talking about the new integration, which I’ll cover in a separate post.

Update: Read this post for more details about the Bing-Facebook announcement.

Zuckerberg discussed this issue again during the question-and-answer session at the end of press conference. He said Facebook would be open to working on a similar integration with Facebook (“We would like to work with everyone”), but that Microsoft seemed like it was a better partner to start with for the reasons mentioned above.

“If you look at a lot of great companies that have done innovation, they tend to not be the incumbents,” he said.

To Microsoft’s credit, the tech giant has tried a number of new marketing strategies, like posting a question-and-answer thread with the tech team behind IE9 on social news aggregator site Reddit that had nearly 3,000 comments. Microsoft even purchased advertising for IE9 on Reddit, a community that hasn’t traditionally been friendly to the black sheep of the browser family.

It’s not clear if those efforts to win over tech influencers had any impact on broader adoption. But bad buzz has seemed to hurt past Microsoft browser efforts. IE9 was downloaded more than 2 million times in the first couple of days. In comparison, the beta version of Internet Explorer 8 saw only 1.3 million downloads in five days when it launched in August 2008.

Microsoft is marketing IE9 as bringing out the “beauty of the Web,” suggesting that the IE9 experience was focused on websites, not add-ons and plug-ins. IE9 essentially strips down the Web browsing experience to little more than a window and a search bar. The new browser supports HTML5, the latest version of the HTML standard for Web pages, which is largely seen as a replacement for Adobe’s Flash technology that powers a number of popular video and game websites. IE9 also offers new features like “pinned sites” on the Windows Task Bar that show up as website icons.

IE9 also includes hardware acceleration — meaning it uses a computer’s graphics processor to render parts of a web page — which Google’s Chrome browser and Mozilla’s Firefox browser have yet to include.

Microsoft is also rolling out a new version of its search engine’s home page. The new Bing home page will take advantage of IE9′s HTML5 support to provide moving images as the background for the search engine and give users a reason “to just leave it up instead of moving on to the next site,” said Yusuf Mehdi, senior vice president of online audience business at Microsoft, at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco earlier this week.

Google has so far announced 19 acquisitions in 2010, well past the seven deals it closed last year and accounting for 28 percent of all of Google’s acquisitions to date, according to Reuters data.

Google has typically leaned toward acquiring smaller companies for either their personnel or technology. Aside from a few high-profile acquisitions — namely AdMob and travel software company ITA Software — Google has had a number of sub-$100 million purchases in the form of companies like GrandCentral (which later became Google Voice). And that strategy is unlikely to change, said Google vice president of corporate development David Lawee, who took over Google’s Mergers and Acquisitions group in 2008, according to Reuters.

Google has plenty of cash to continue its shopping spree. The search giant had around $11 billion in cash at the end of its most recent quarter, according to a 10-Q financial statement filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Acquisitions like the $750 million AdMob exit in 2009 might seem like a pretty significant fraction of Google’s cash reserves, but Google has consistently recorded net income of between $1 billion and $2 billion in all but one quarter since 2007, and generated more than $9 billion in cash flow from operating activities last year.

[Photo: dannysullivan]

AOL still possesses a 2.3 percent market share of the search market, which isn’t negligible, though it’s dwarfed by Google’s Boeing-sized 66 percent market share, according to ComScore. Yahoo checks in next at 17 percent, with Microsoft’s Bing a seemingly distant 11 percent despite its efforts to unseat the de facto overlord of search.

But this could be a sign that Google feels threatened by Bing and is willing to pay out to secure its dominance in the search engine market. Yahoo and Microsoft recently inked a 10-year partnership deal that would power Yahoo back-end search with Bing.

AOL will receive a portion of the revenue from text-based searches and some of AOL’s video content will be featured on YouTube as part of the agreement.

At AOL’s zenith as a dial-up Internet provider, the company boasted nearly 30 million users according to a BusinessWeek report, but with the advent of broadband its star has begun to wane. According to the company’s most recent 10-Q filing, it had 4.4 million subscribers in June 2010, down from 5.8 million a year earlier. Former Googler Tim Armstrong is currently leading an effort to revive the company as its CEO.

But since Android is much more deeply integrated into Google’s search and navigation offerings than the iPhone, the release of the Bing app honestly strikes me as curious. Who would actually use this thing? And is Microsoft doing anything with it to entice Android users to choose Bing over Google’s myriad services?

At first glance, the answer to the last question would be a simple “no”. The Android app is a dead ringer for its iPhone sibling: The main page features the Bing image of the day, and from there you have access to the app’s various sections, like “Images”, “Movies”, and “Maps”. Also like the iPhone app, the Bing image search is attractive and easy to use, and Microsoft has integrated voice search capabilities into pretty much every aspect of the app.

By bringing over the basic features of the Bing iPhone app to Android, Microsoft has managed to deliver a competent product. But, at least as it stands right now, there’s little reason for an Android user ever to launch the Bing app. All of Google’s search and navigation services are better, and it also has already integrated voice commands into the Android OS. The Bing Android app also appears to be missing some of the newer features of the iPhone app, including social search, and “visual scanning”, Microsoft’s take on the Google Goggles camera search feature.

Like Yahoo’s simplistic Android search app, Microsoft most likely brought Bing to Android just to have a presence on Google’s mobile platform. But aside from simply being on the Android Market, it doesn’t seem like there’s much it’s going to accomplish with the app.

Microsoft is planning to bring the Bing app to other Android carriers later this year, according to TechFlash. It launched the app on Verizon first because of the carrier’s existing mobile search deal with Bing.

Yahoo will start to replace its search back-end with Bing’s starting at the end of the week, at which point search results will show up with a “Powered by Bing” descriptor at the bottom (I’m already seeing this in my searches). But even though the results will be coming from Bing, Yahoo stresses that its typical user experience will remain the same. The only thing users may notice is the Bing indicator — and hopefully better search results. Bing isn’t expected to fully replace Yahoo’s search back-end globally until 2012.

Once the transition is complete, Bing will account for 31.6 percent, or 5.2 billion, of searches every month, according to Microsoft. But as All Things Digital points out, the latest Comscore metrics show that number may be closer to 28.1 percent. It’s an improvement from Microsoft’s current 11 percent search share, but still significantly less than Google’s leading 65.8 percent.

Yahoo announced a year ago — just two months after Microsoft launched Bing — that it would be giving up on its own search technology, and that it had made an agreement with Microsoft to have Bing take over its search duties for the next 10 years. Microsoft’s AdCenter platform will drive self-service ads for both companies, while Yahoo is free to use its own technology and data for display advertising and other business areas. Both companies will keep separate display ad businesses and sales forces.

The transition should happen in two phases, said Senior Vice President Satya Nadella. First, the companies will switch over Yahoo’s standard search results so that they come from Bing’s algorithm, then search advertising will be transferred as well. Yahoo is currently testing Microsoft search results with limited groups. Making sure this transition goes smoothly has become “in some sense, all our day jobs,” Nadella said.

Nadella and the other Bing executives were speaking to a group of reporters in San Francisco about their progress over the last year, and they gave an overview of recent and coming improvements to the user interface. They reiterated that these interface changes are for Bing proper, while the Yahoo deal is more about the search results and ads.

The team also highlighted new data from comScore saying that Bing has 12.7 percent of the US search market. That’s far behind Google (and there has been some debate about how accurate comScore’s numbers are), but Bing has better momentum. Asked about how Microsoft is achieving that growth, and how much it had to spend, Nadella said most of the growth has come from integration with MSN and from distribution deals, where Bing is available in toolbars for Dell, HP, and others.

“We will continue to compete super-aggressively in all dimensions,” Nadella said, meaning that Microsoft plans to continue spending on the product, on marketing, and on distribution deals. “We clearly understand that ultimately, the product has to carry the day.”

As for when Bing will become profitable, Nadella said that question would be better directed at Microsoft executives like CEO Steve Ballmer. He did say that if Microsoft was really determined to make Bing profitable, it could do so now: “We could just take out a bunch of cost.”

In terms of the feature previews, perhaps the most noteworthy one was of a native application on an unidentified device using Google’s Android operating system. The first Bing Android app should come in a month or so, with more coming later.