The Federal Trade Commission announced the results of its investigation into whether Google violated antitrust laws with its current business practices today.

In a 4-1 decision, the FTC found that Google wasn’t guilty of violating antitrust laws related to how it displays search engine results. At the same time, Google offered to change many of its business practices to appease the commission. For instance, Google can no longer scrape data from competing services (like review sites) within its search results. It also must offer local and privately owned businesses an option to opt out from its location-based services (like Google Places) and prevent outsiders from manipulating search results to gain an advantage.

The FTC first started investigating Google’s search practices 19 months ago, prompted by competitors that claimed that Google was making its own services more prominent and hindering true competition. For example, last year review site Yelp pointed out that Google was unfairly scraping Yelp’s user-generated reviews without giving proper attribution.

During a press conference announcing results of the probe, FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz said all of the changes that Google agreed to make to its search practices are legally enforceable — meaning that if Google fails to uphold its end of the bargain, the FTC can take action against them in the form of hefty fines. That said, there were questions about how the FTC was able to monitor search manipulation since Google isn’t making its search data available to the commission.

The commission, however, did find that Google was misusing patents that it got as a result of its purchase of its sale to Motorola. The FTC’s decision will force Google to license the patents, many of which are crucial to mobile devices, to other companies.

Google has modified its popular image search to block many explicit pictures, a move that could be a big win for competing search engines.

While you used to be able to turn SafeSearch off to easily find questionable material, Google now only lets you “filter explicit images” or “report offensive images.” As you can see in the image above, a search for the word “porn” brings up some questionable material but nothing explicit.

Users on Reddit first noticed the changes this morning, and several were quick to label the move as “censorship.” VentureBeat can confirm that common searches in the U.S. and U.K. have blocked steamy images from showing up in image results and that SafeSearch is on permanently.

A Google spokesperson told us and other outlets the following statement about the changes:

We are not censoring any adult content, and want to show users exactly what they are looking for — but we aim not to show sexually explicit results unless a user is specifically searching for them. We use algorithms to select the most relevant results for a given query. If you’re looking for adult content, you can find it without having to change the default setting — you just may need to be more explicit in your query if your search terms are potentially ambiguous. The image search settings now work the same way as in web search.

Essentially, Google’s decision makes it much harder to find porn using Google. This is a big win for competing search engines, especially Microsoft’s Bing and ICM Registry’s Search.xxx. If Google doesn’t want the traffic, the underdogs certainly will take it.

Microsoft’s Bing, the No. 2 search engine on the web, still offers a robust image search, and we can confirm that it works perfectly well for looking at all kinds of explicit images. (Which is sort of funny considering how Microsoft has serious problems with nudity and pornography being hosted on its servers.)

Search.xxx is another winner. While it does not offer a full-fledged image search, Search.xxx does offer a safe browsing experience when you are looking for adult material. Plus, you know exactly what you’ll find when looking for video or images on it. As we’ve written before, Search.xxx only crawls online pages with the .xxx domain and it claims to be “safer” than using other search engines to find porn because all sites found through it are scanned daily by McAfee.

“We are still digesting exactly what this will mean in real-world search queries for the porn-searching consumer, but this seems to continue a trend we have seen in recent months by the major search engines towards adult content,” ICM Registry CEO Stuart Lawley told us via email. “Google’s decision only serves to reinforce the purpose and usefulness of what ICM Registry has been building: a destination for those adult consumers looking for high quality content.”

ICM Registry is the company behind the .xxx domain, and it’s launched a new search engine called Search.xxx that intends to make looking for online adult entertainment safer and easier to access.

Search.xxx works similar to Google, Bing, or DuckDuckGo, but it only crawls online pages with the .xxx domain. ICM says that it manages more than 240,000 unique .xxx domain, and its search engine scans more than 21 million pages to finds its results. Plus, at the top of the search page you can select between 19 languages and sexual orientation of the content you’re looking for.

“ICM Registry has worked for more than a decade to build .XXX into a globally accepted place for responsible adult online entertainment,” ICM Registry CEO Stuart Lawley said in a statement. “With a search engine dedicated to helping people find precisely what they want amid millions of pages of content, we’re providing an entirely new adult content experience in a safe, privacy protected, and trusted environment.”

Search.xxx claims it is “safer” than using any other search engine to find porn because all sites found through it are scanned daily by McAfee. These sites also carry a MetaCert Family Safety label that make it easier for parents to restrict access to these sites in their browser settings. Basically, the .xxx sites found on Search.xxx remove the worry of getting malware from looking for adult content and makes it easier to block sites.

“This is a safer, responsible environment where users aren’t subjected to potentially annoying images and offers that plague some porn portals,” Lawley said. “The site is also free of pop ups, pop unders and other unwelcome distractions.”

Palm Beach, Fla.-based ICM Registry opened up bidding for sites wanting a .xxx domain about a year ago and officially launched the domain last December. ICM charges a quite-pricey $60 a year for .xxx domains.

Google’s search engine chief Amit Singhal dreams of a day when, like Captain Kirk, you can just ask your computer a question and get a complex, detailed answer.

One step in that direction: Google is starting to roll out its new Knowledge Graph globally. Google announced Knowledge Graph a while ago; it treats your search queries as whole entities rather than just strings of letters, and it serves much better results in a much prettier interface that “normal” Google search.

For most of us, these changes aren’t that big of a deal; this is just the latest in a long string of incremental changes that Google is making to its search technology. Still, any time a giant like Google shifts its center of gravity a little, it has the potential to throw a big part of the world off balance.

Another big part of Google web search becoming more universal is a few feature: Search results can now include your Gmail messages and multimedia. You can sign up now to get early access. If you like Google Search Plus Your World, you’ll likely find this new feature quite useful as well. Also, this latest Google search field trial will include personalized, enhanced flight-tracking features, so you can more quickly see you’re going to be stuck in Newark for a few hours.

I spent some time with Singhal today as part of a press event where Google showed off its latest updates. He and I have something in common: We are united in our deep love for Star Trek. Specifically, we both want to bring the fascinating technologies of science fiction (and Star Trek in particular) to reality. The Enterprise computer operated on a deep understanding of human meaning, not a human understanding of machine-friendly keywords.

“To build the search engine I dream of, we need to make it truly universal,” Singhal says, “so you can do things that are not possible today.”

To that end, the company is also announcing voice-based search for iOS devices. Your searches are verbal and use natural language, and the app talks back to you, giving you verbal results in (more or less) natural language. It’s a lot like the Android voice search features the company showed off at Google I/O a couple months ago.

What Google is showing off today are a few baby steps, Singhal said, but they’re steps toward previously impossible goals like speech recognition, natural language processing, and true artificial intelligence.

Singhal says we’re not there yet, but just before his talk started, he, Google search guru Matt Cutts, and I were reminiscing about the “good” old days of AltaVista, Lycos, InfoSeek, and HotBot. My first real job involved doing search work at a startup in early 1999; Google wasn’t really a thing at that point, certainly not in sleepy central Virginia. And the search process pre-Google was excruciating, slow, and wildly unrepresentative of the web that existed at the time.

Those reminiscences stand in sharp contrast both to the future Singhal is envisioning and to the present state of web search. Over the past 13 years, we’ve come a lot closer Singhal’s goal of intelligent, human-friendly search, and we’re all excited about where search will go next.

Jack Menzel is one of the Googlers working on making the search engine smarter.

“We can use our understanding of the world to help you with more complicated tasks,” he says. He tells an anecdote about a road trip from the San Francisco Bay Area to Cedar Point, an amusement park in Ohio. Menzel needed some convincing to get in the car for such a long trip, and he puled up a Google search for “Cedar Point” to illustrate his point. In old-school web search, you’d see a list of links for the amusement park; you’d have to click through and copy/paste the names of rides into new searches to get more information on each one. But with Google’s new Knowledge Graph, the search engine’s newest “brain” rolled out a couple months ago, Google returns a map, contact information, specific rides in the park, images and videos, and a lot more — all on the first page of results, all arranged in pretty carousels, scannable boxes, and other information design elements infinitely better for humans than a list of links.

It’s not quite the Enterprise computer, but it’s getting closer. As Menzel told me during the Knowledge Graph launch, “Computers don’t really understand what people are talking about. To a computer, it’s just a string of letters.” Knowledge Graph treats queries as objects rather than strings, and it’s one of Google’s attempts to get closer to human-friendly, artificially intelligent search.

The other big part of Google’s web search evolution is speed. “Do you remember how slow it used to be?” Cutts muses. The Internet was slower, and our connections were slower 13 years ago. We’ve all been accelerating on every front, but Google has an institutional preference for lightning speed. It’s pushing and shoving the web to speed-focused standards, superspeedy Internet, speed-tweaked programming languages. Google is like a stupid teenager with his first car, with only one question on his mind: “How fast can this thing go?”

The bigger the dataset gets and the more we turn to Google for web search, the more urgent the need for speed becomes. Right now, the web has around 30 trillion unique URLs. Google crawls 20 billion pages every day, and we humans use Google to conduct 100 billion searches every month.

That kind of activity requires speed on every level of hardware, software, and even design. Today’s announcements, from the Gmail addition to search to the vocal search app, are all engineered to avoid wasting a millisecond more of your time, to get your head out of your devices, to make partaking in life simpler, to free up your brain for solving bigger problems than finding a movie tonight or finding an email you got last week.

“I dreamt all those dreams as a child,” Singhal says. “Thanks to all the wonderful research and the engineers at Google, we are so much closer to my dream of building the Star Trek computer.”

We know that Google’s still a business, and its primary goal is getting more users, selling more advertising, and making more money. But if it can move us a few more inches closer to Star Trek in that process, that’s okay with me.

Image courtesy of alpahspirit, Shutterstock

Google may be in the process of testing a new web search interface that transforms the left-hand sidebar into a horizontal bar on top of the results, according to a video obtained by Techno-Net.

The leaked interface clearly takes inspiration from Google’s tablet interface for search. Like the sidebar that’s been there for years, the horizontal bar lists Web, Images, Maps, Videos, News, Shopping, and a More tab that lists other Google services.

Let us know what you think of the potential interface change in the comments. Check out the video below to see it in action:

They may be quickies of a different kind, but a rendezvous between Microsoft and New York-based startup Qwiki has brought the young company’s interactive video presentations to search results for faster, more pleasing experiences.

Beginning Tuesday, Bing’s search engine will feature “qwikis,” or machine-generated video presentations on reference topics, attached to Wikipedia page results. So whenever a Wikipedia entry is surfaced in search results, the searcher can click to watch a video that talks her through the topic in question.

“When we started this company, we looked at the search page and said … ‘there should really be a play button next to each result,’ and it’s incredible to make that vision come alive,” Qwiki co-founder and CEO Doug Imbruce told VentureBeat. “For the first time, the two biggest trends in Internet history, search and video, are combining into this incredibly powerful platform.”

Example of a Bing results page with a Qwiki video

Two year-old Qwiki, which has raised $10.5 million in funding to date, makes technology that pulls rich media content from web data sources to automatically build video presentations on reference topics. The company’s web and iPad products are accessed by roughly 1 million people per month.

After a year of radio silence, the startup released the Qwiki Creator in late May to help publishers create their own qwikis. Today, that tool exits beta and goes live for all. The startup is also today releasing an API that enables content creators to mass produce qwikis from their own content. Together, Creator and the API are essential tools for Qwiki’s future success, as they should add much-needed color (ie. content beyond reference topics) and range to the startup’s database of qwikis.

But right now, the Bing-Qwiki deal is the most profound as it exposes the startup’s video machinations to millions of searchers in a way that feels just right. The partnership brings the best of what Qwiki does right now — Wikipedia-like video presentations on reference topics — to Bing, making informational videos native to search and empowering the searcher to get more from the results page. As such, the tie-in nicely compliments Bing’s recent search-plus-social endeavors.

Qwiki’s video presentations in Bing will only work on the web for now, but mobile support is coming soon, Imbruce said.

The relationship between Microsoft and Qwiki, forged roughly one year ago when Bing development lead Franco Salvetti reached out to the startup, is not exclusive, Imbruce said. No money is changing hands in the deal either. But both of those factors could change in the months ahead as Qwiki builds out its database, with the help of publishers, and works to turn any search result into an interactive experience, he added.

“Over these summer months, we’re finally completing the vision … of a 360-degree publishing platform,” said Imbruce. “I think the embedding-side of Bing proves that we can create the kind of massive scale and distribution that can help us change, and forever improve, the way the world gets information.”

Part of that vision includes an consumer-facing Qwiki iPhone application that device owners can use to create qwikis from their own mobile media. Expect that application to drop some time in August.

Photo credit: Shutterstock

Remember this? It’s from Google’s 2004 founders’ IPO letter:

Our search results are the best we know how to produce. They are unbiased and objective, and we do not accept payment for them or for inclusion or more frequent updating.

Google very clearly stated that its search results are not for sale. This was a significant statement to make, because in the early 2000′s the integrity of search results as an honest and accurate reflection of what the web actually contained was very much at issue.

Google’s IPO letter also contained this sentence (emphasis added):

We also display advertising, which we work hard to make relevant, and we label it clearly.

“Clear labelling” is what is most at issue right now. Sullivan has been writing about Google’s changing ad inclusion policies for weeks, focusing on Google’s vertical search engines for hotels and flights.

Google’s challenge is that the role of a search engine is changing from just finding information to enabling actions. This is largely a user experience-driven shift: as a user, your goal is to book a flight. A service that allows you to both find the best flight with the best price and book it immediately is often preferable to one that teasingly reveals the best flight but won’t let you book it. For hotels and flights, Google’s services have evolved to enable just that.

But it’s also a revenue opportunity. Not only is there more money to be made when companies pay to be included in search engine results, there’s transactional revenue when search becomes commerce — a referral fee when the user purchases the flight or books the hotel.

But there are three problems.

The first problem comes when users don’t know which companies have paid for inclusion. The second is when it’s not clear how much Google stands to gain from referring a paying customer to a service. (If Google makes $10 for a client who books with American Airlines versus $5 for a client who books with Air Canada, what controls are in place to ensure that American is not getting preferential treatment?) And the third problem is simply visually distinguishing ads from results.

For example, can you find the “Ads” designation in this image?

The ads are the two results at the top of the list in color, but to the average user, it could simply appear that they are search results that are highlighted — perhaps because they are most relevant. The format is identical, the look is the same: just the background color and a tiny “Ads” differentiate it from other results.

Contrast this with standard web results on google.com. The ad unit is much more clearly displayed — it is much more obvious what is an ad on this page and what is not. Not only is the display clearer, the language is much more obvious. Both “Ad related to standing desk” and “Why this ad?” indicate to the user that this is indeed, a paid placement.

Sullivan has been reporting on search engines since 1996 and runs the popular Search Engine Land website. He has asked the FTC not only to review how search engines are treating their 2002 guidelines but also to consider updating the guidelines for 2012 and following.

Image credit: AHMAD FAIZAL YAHYA / Shutterstock.com

The European Union’s antitrust chief has given Google a final chance to settle matter related to anti-competitiveness with its main search engine, according to a Reuters report.

The EU first opened up an investigation in November 2010 after rival companies like Microsoft accused Google of abusing its dominant position in the search market to boost up its own advertising services. If Google is found guilty, it could face a fine of up to 10 percent of its global financial turnover.

EU antitrust chief Joaquin Almunia said both regulators and Google are eager to reach a settlement, thus avoiding lengthy proceedings that risk becoming obsolete due to the rapid growth of technology, according to the report.

“I believe that these fast-moving markets would particularly benefit from a quick resolution of the competition issues identified. Restoring competition swiftly to the benefit of users at an early stage is always better than lengthy proceedings,” Almunia said. “Google has repeatedly expressed to me its willingness to discuss any concerns that the Commission might have without having to engage in adversarial proceedings, this is why today I’m giving Google an opportunity to offer remedies to address concerns that we have identified.”

In a letter to Google, Almunia is said to have given the search giant a matter of weeks to come up with a first proposal that would satisfy all the EU’s issues regarding anti-competitiveness.

EU flags photo via jorisvo/ShutterStock

Fred Wilson, managing partner at Union Square Ventures, shed some light today on why his VC firm invested in search engine startup DuckDuckGo, even as it pales next to Google and Bing.

DuckDuckGo has seen incredible growth in the past few months, and it doubled traffic from 500,000 searches a day in December 2011 to 1 million searches a day by mid-February. Union Square Ventures is one of the few investors in the search engine.

“We didn’t invest in it because we thought it would beat Google,” Wilson said today at TechCrunch Disrupt conference in New York. “We invested in it because there is a need for a private search engine. We did it for the Internet anarchists, people that hang out on Reddit and Hacker News.”

Recent Experian Hitwise numbers suggest Google has about 64.4 percent of the search share, with Bing at about 30 percent. That means other search engines fight for about 6.6 percent of the remaining share. Wilson said DuckDuckGo could become a top 5 player in the search engine category because of its steep emphasis on privacy.

Fred Wilson photo: Sean Ludwig/VentureBeat

Finally, Google’s search algorithm is getting a huge boost from a source we can actually trust.

No, it’s not your dimwit friends and their Facebook shares. It’s Knowledge Base, a semantically structured body of data 500 million items strong and growing.

With Knowledge Base plugged into Google Search, Google is going to get a heck of a lot better at knowing what things (not just what words) you’re searching for and delivering better results — more useful, more visual results.

How Google’s new brain works

Briefly, Knowledge Base is Google’s attempt to change your search experience from strings (of characters) to objects, whole entities with collections of their own data.

For example, yesterday, Google could parse your search for “roots” as five letters that might have a connection to a wide range of URLs. Today, Google knows you are probably searching for The Roots (the music group) or or Roots (the TV miniseries) or roots (the biological feature of plants), and it will help you get to the best results for that object faster.

Here’s a quick tour of how Google Search will look with Knowledge Base powering it:

Knowledge Base takes structured data from Wikipedia, Freebase, and other sources, including MusicBrainz (an open encyclopedia of music facts), the CIA’s World Factbook, and many other repositories of publicly available open data.

“Our overall mission is to organize the world’s information,” said Google Search project management director Jack Menzel in a phone conversation with VentureBeat yesterday.

“We’ve done some really clever things when it comes to understanding your query, but computers don’t really understand what people are talking about,” he continued. “To a computer, it’s just a string of letters.”

While Google’s parsing of misspelled and incomplete search terms as well as synonyms and related terms has been helpful to users, Menzel has been working to give Google’s search engine a more useful, more advanced understanding of search terms as interconnected objects in a database.

“As a search engine, all the results might look like good web pages, they all contain that word … but it’s not enough,” he said.

Why we’re in love with structured data

Knowledge Base has been a Google project at least since the company acquired Metaweb in 2010. The San Francisco startup was the maker of Freebase, a massive open-structured database. While Freebase was a starting point for Google’s foray into structured data, it was just the beginning.

Web companies are having a very public love affair with structured data these days. Basically, companies like Google, Microsoft (with Bing), and Facebook (with Actions) are attempting to understand not just the letters and words you type into their systems, but also what those letters and words mean and how they’re connected to URLs, to each other, and to sets of facts.

“We look at all the publicly available information on the web, and we try to reconcile them into a representation of the real world,” said Menzel. “It’s a huge challenge, and we’re just getting started.”

But, the Googler noted, even at its initial launch to the public, Google’s structured database contains 500 million people, places, and things; and these objects are connected by 3.5 billion attributes. Menzel thinks this gives Google’s web search a competitive advantage over Bing.

And because of how those attributes are structured, Google search is now able to return fascinating chunks of information for many kinds of queries — think of it as rich snippets on mega-steroids.

“When you do a query for a specific, real-world thing, we can synthesize a summary on the fly based on what the most relevant information is,” said Menzel. “That acts as a map of all the information that’s available to you on the web.”

For example, if you search for “roots,” Google will ask you if you mean “The Roots” the musical act. If, in fact, you do mean to search for that group, Google will quickly pull up a slew of related data — stats, members, shows, pics — all neatly organized in a scannable table for you. Think of it as a mini-infographic each time you search for something.

Here’s a video Google made to show off some of the new Knowledge Base features:

The “Wikipedia Hole” is coming to Google

And the searches just keep coming, too. “When you’re doing a research task, you very rarely want to do just one query,” said Menzel. “We help people create a map of the topic they’re interested in so they can more quickly explore the information.”

Menzel and the Google web search team call this “serendipity.” You or I might call it a “rabbit hole” — a dark, delicious tunnel of information, a bottomless pit of trivia from which you may never emerge. This happens a lot to the casual Wikipedia reader, and while it can suck up a ton of time, it can also yield some fun facts and new knowledge for your sponge-like brain.

Also, just like Wikipedia, Google has built in some tools for reporting incorrect information. “This is a tremendously ambitious task that’s really, really hard, and the world is constantly changing … so we’ve built a feedback mechanism so that in two clicks, you can report any problems you find,” Menzel told us.

The long and winding rollout

The new search features are launching today and will continue to roll out over the next few days for Google search on all platforms and devices — in English only, for now.

“Ooh boy, languages are hard. And understanding how to rank this content internationally is hard,” said Menzel. Other languages and regions will be coming soon … ish.

“As you can understand more about what people and web pages are talking about, you can imagine doing queries that are pure science fiction,” Menzel continued, “like finding a Lady Gaga concert this year outdoors in warm weather. Today, that’s crazy. That’s going to take a long time to figure out. With Knowledge Base, we’ll be able to answer that very complicated and nuanced question quickly.”

Finally, we asked Menzel how Knowledge Base — that big, slick, data-driven machine — was going to mesh with Search Plus Your World, Google’s social approach to search, which launched earlier this year.

Ultimately, he told us, Google web search is just about getting you quickly to the best possible information.

“Sometimes, that best information is the private information that only you have access to, like the Search Plus Your World information,” he said. “And sometimes it’s Wikipedia, and sometimes it’s sports data, and sometimes it’s the weather. I don’t want to belittle the importance of social data, but knowledge overall does have a larger scope.”

Image courtesy of alpahspirit, Shutterstock

A week after previewing the revamped Bing, Microsoft has released the latest version of its search engine to people in the U.S. Head over to Bing.com/new to test out the new social features as well as annoy your friends with questions in the process. It doesn’t have all of the new bells and whistles announced last week, and you can only sign in with a Facebook or Windows Live account — though Quora, LinkedIn, and Twitter support should be coming soon.

New Bing has a gray sidebar on the right that, once you login with Facebook, shows all the new social features. When you search a topic, new Bing will list friends who might be able to answer your question and help with the search based on whether they’ve “liked” or mentioned something with that keyword in it. It even shows any relevant images they’ve posted.

You can then post a question directly to Facebook or specific friends in the know from the sidebar. If you find something useful while searching or want to answer a buddy’s question with a link, you can post the URL directly to Facebook from the sidebar. Relevant Twitter results from random people are also sometimes shown at the bottom of the box under “People Who Know”.

Most of my test searches showed no “Search With Friends” results, even for things I know my friends love and post about often such as cats, cheese, Dollywood, robots, or the Maker Faire.

Earlier this year when rival company Google first attempt to mashup your social graph and search habits via “Search Plus Your World,” the results seemed invasive and annoying. Second-place Bing seems to have learned a bit from Google’s stumbles, cordoning off the social element on the far right side of your screen.

However, even if the social/search feature was more helpful, I’m not sure there’s a big need for this kind of integration. Most people have mastered searching for things themselves, or posing questions to Facebook. If they haven’t, I usually send them to lmgtfy.com.

via Search Engine Land

Bing has had an epiphany.

Rather than compete with Google in the sheer number of features it can cram onto its results page, Microsoft’s search engine is going the opposite direction towards simplification by releasing a clean, more streamlined results page.

The result is pretty nice: Microsoft has stripped the Bing results page down to its very skivvies, tightening up the header area and moving the Related Searches from the left side to the lower right. The result is a clean, simple page that’s far less cluttered and far more attractive than the overwhelming mass of information that the Google results page has become.

Simplicity, it seems, is now a point of differentiation for Bing, and one that Microsoft hopes information-inundated web users will notice. It’s a somewhat perverse notion that simplicity has become a feature in the technology world – but its also very telling. As the success of simple interfaces like iOS has shown, less has now become more. And as you can see from the Metro interface on Windows Phone and Windows 8, simplicity is a concept that Microsoft finally seems to understand.

The Bing design shift is important for another reason. In the wake of the controversy surrounding Google’s Search Plus Your World results, users have been fleeing the search engine towards the welcoming arms of competing services like Bing and DuckDuckGo.

That’s evidence that Google, for all of its market dominance, is more than a bit vulnerable. And Bing may just capitalize on that.

Via TechCrunch

In 2009, Seuk Weon Song of Seoul, Korea, realized the Internet had a fundamental flaw: Google.

The dominant search engine for the majority of Internet users was giving websites top billing for all the wrong reasons — SEO, keyword stuffing, tricks that most users would never see.

“Google made $37.9 billion last year mostly from search engine ad revenue … They merely connect Internet users to content others created,” said exec Joseph Lee Stanfield at the DEMO conference in Santa Clara, Calif., “We create the content that is the life blood of a search engine. So, isn’t it fair that we receive a share of the revenue?”

Instead, Song posited, the system could be fixed with a simple arrangement of payment for content that users found valuable. In other words, capitalism might be able to fix web search.

Song founded Ecobe with exactly that proposition in mind. “Because existing search engines focus only on speed and technology, Song felt confident that a search engine built upon a business model could succeed in overtaking Google,” said Stanfield in a recent interview with VentureBeat.

Here’s how the Ecobe system works: Ecobe gives website creators 40 percent of its profits. The cash gets divvied up based on each website’s “contribution” — that is, how many users click through to see the content on that particular website. Website owners can collect their payments once a month. Websites’ revenue starts adding up before anyone from that site formally registers with Ecobe; starting with the very first time a web search user clicks on that site, Ecobe is tracking the contributions.

“Ecobe restores balance to the Web ecosystem,” Stanfield continued. “Content providers are [currently] not motivated to create better and higher quality content for the web, resulting in a dire situation.”

Stanfield also noted that the startup acknowledges the origin of each geographical region’s intellectual property and promotes growth around the globe, making its scope truly worldwide. And the Ecobe model also shows a unique respect for content creators, copyright, and intellectual property, as well, putting their money where Google’s PageRank is.

“I have a dream that through Ecobe, a sustainable Web ecosystem can be created that can give people a chance to be happy,” Stanfield concluded.

Ecobe has taken a little more than $1 million in seed and angel funding to date. During DEMO in Santa Clara, the startup hopes to be able to talk with Microsoft and Yahoo, both of which also have a vested interest in creating better, more sustainable search experiences than that currently offered by Google.

Ecobe is one of 80 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Spring 2012 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After we make our selections, the chosen companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

Image courtesy of Semistach, Shutterstock

There a new search engine in town to freak out about: Ark, a “people” search engine that scrapes social networks to compile its own profile of you.

Ark found that over 30 percent of searches were for individuals. The startup asked the question, “What could Google and Facebook build if they were not at war with one another. Co-founder Patrick Riley believes the answer to that is Ark. The company looks at every major social network (including Facebook, RenRen, LinkedIn, and more), and then creates profiles that are housed on its own servers. People can then query the database to search for individuals not by name, but by different qualities. For instance, if you’re looking for a person who lives in New York, speaking Mandarin Chinese, and works in technology, you can find that person using Ark.

Ark has already indexed over a billion people this way, which is roughly 14 percent of the world’s human population. The average length of time people spend on Ark is 13 minutes per session, which is a pretty fair amount. However, it’s obvious why people spend so much time on the site — Ark is another way for people to stalk those they don’t know.

This is just another lesson in “watch what you put on the Internet.” Much of the information people supply to Facebook, Google+, Twitter, even Myspace is easily accessible by the public. If you aren’t okay with people aggregating that picture of your kids, your hometown, or the place you worked when you were in high school don’t put them online. Otherwise you’re subject to having your data crawled and collected by companies like Ark, which is essentially just trying to make it easy for people to meet each other.

The startup currently has 10,000 beta testers, and it’s received over 80,000 requests to join the beta test in the past 48 hours alone.

Ark is one of 39 companies presenting at Y Combinator’s Demo Day Spring 2012 event. Check out other cool companies making their debut here.

Popular Russian search engine Yandex has something Google doesn’t: The approbation of Twitter and access to the entire stream of public tweets.

Yandex has signed an agreement with Twitter to license the full feed of public tweets, otherwise know as the Twitter “firehose,” and will begin including tweets in search engine results. The search engine, which dominates in Russia with 64 percent market share, announced the deal in a press release early Tuesday morning.

“With more than 250 million tweets a day, Twitter is a valuable information source and the fastest way to find out what’s happening in your world,” Twitter’s director of business development April Underwood said in a statement. “Through this partnership, Yandex and Twitter will work together to make it easier for Yandex users in Russia and elsewhere to find real-time content about the people and things they care about most.”

Twitter-infused search results will be incorporated into Yandex’s “Blog Search” tool. Alternatively, searchers can visit twitter.yandex.ru to specifically query for tweets.

“Tweets of over two million users are available for search on Yandex,” the Russian search company said. “Twitter posts of those users who tweet in Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian or Kazakh, as well as top feeds in any other language, will be included in Yandex’s Blog Search results.”

The deal comes more than seven months after Google and Twitter failed to renegotiate an agreement that would keep tweets in Google’s realtime search product. Without Twitter data, Google was forced to dissolve Google Realtime Search. The search giant later turned to its fledging social network Google+ to develop a crafty workaround for incorporating realtime results.

In January, Google introduced Search Plus Your World, a controversial addition to the core search product that favors Google+ profiles and content over content from other social sites. Twitter CEO Dick Costolo said the update was not in the best interests of the searcher.

Terms of the Twitter-Yandex deal are unknown, but Yandex is likely paying a substantial fee for its access to the Twitter firehose. Previous reports estimated that Google and Microsoft (which licenses the firehose for search engine Bing) paid north of $20 million for their original deals with Twitter.

Russia, according to third-party analysis, has under 5 million Twitter accounts and ranks twentieth in terms of Twitter accounts when compared to other countries.

Photo credit: The Daring Librarian/Flickr

A handful of publications have indicated that Microsoft paid an estimated $70 million for the company, according to a report from TechCrunch Europe.

VideoSurf specializes in video search technology that scans several video related sites for results, such as DailyMotion, YouTube, Metacafe, Hulu and others. The site’s results focus on specific episodes of web shows, notable individuals and more. Admittedly, I haven’t used the site much, but I have noticed that it takes great care in separating viral/user-generated videos from the production quality videos (e.g. things from College Humor, Hulu, etc.).

It’s likely that Microsoft purchased the company with the intent of strengthening video search in its Bing search engine.

Previously, VideoSurf raised $28 million from several notable investors, including former Vice President Al Gore, Current Media CEO Joel Hyatt, SurveyMonkey CEO David Goldberg and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg as well as funding from Pitango VC and Verizon Ventures.

Founded in 2006, the San Mateo, California-based startup has 35 employees.

The talks are said to still be in the early stages, and no serious offers have been made, but the play would be for Yahoo’s “core business.” The Wall Street Journal’s source said that a formal proposal hasn’t been assembled, and it’s possible Google could end up not even perusing a bid.

Any deal between the two companies would undoubtedly draw the attention of antitrust regulators, and Google is already in the hot-seat. In September, Google Chairman Eric Schmidt testified at a Senate Judiciary antitrust hearing. The committee is concerned that Google’s dominance of the search market gives it an unfair advantage when promoting its own businesses.

Google is just the latest big name to be tied to a possible Yahoo acquisition. Rumors of Yahoo putting itself up for sale have been circulating wildly since it fired Chief Executive Officer Carol Bartz in September. Microsoft, Aol and Chinese company Alibaba have all expressed interest in buying all or part of the company. Yahoo co-founder and former CEO Jerry Yang considered making a deal with private equity firms to buy up the company and take it private.

The struggling company is currently being led by interim CEO Tim Morse.

Duck Duck Go, which has a tiny percentage of the search engine market share in comparison to Google, doesn’t primarily base its results on algorithms. It also differs from other big search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo) by not tracking its visitors the way that Google does.

Since launching in 2008, Weinberg has resisted the urge to take on outside investment until there was a compelling reason to do so.

“So why now? At the end of last year I noticed that the search engine started to really click with a greater percentage of people in a way that it hadn’t before,” Weinberg said, noting the company’s  zero-click info policy, privacy policy and goodies (a page of useful unit conversion and math tools).

Weinberg says the startup plans to use the money to hire new employees and expand its infrastructure.

Despite Duck Duck Go’s tiny market share of the overall search engine market, Union Square Venture’s Brad Burnham has a positive outlook for the startup. In a blog post about the investment deal, he writes:

“Our confidence in Gabriel and DuckDuckGo is informed by having watched the decline of Microsoft’s hegemony in the 90′s. Two things happened that fundamentally changed the game: a shift in venue and a shift in business model. The venue moved from the desktop to the web and the business model shifted from packaged software to open source. It turned out that the way to compete with Microsoft was to not to compete, at least not directly. The way to compete with Microsoft was to change the basis of competition. We invested in DuckDuckGo because we became convinced that it was not only possible to change the basis of competition in search, it was time to do it.”

The Paoli, Penn.-based startup will add Burnham to its board of directors. The new funding round also includes investments from Scott Banister, Jim Young, Jeff Miller, Joshua Schachter, Kal Vapuri, Joshua Stylman and Peter Hershberg.

Wine can be intimidating and often pushes people away just for the fear of looking stupid. (I know, it’s hard to believe anyone would feel insecure with a bunch of people slurping, swishing and spitting around them, but hey, this is the wine-snob norm.) TasteJive aims to open that culture up by referencing wine in a less sophisticated and more understandable way.

TasteJive relates wine to things you already know such as pop culture references, places, music, film, and more.

For instance, it might describe a wine this way: “With curves in all the right places and legs that just don’t quit, this wine will stop you in your tracks like a half-naked supermodel.” The accompanying photo of a half-naked supermodel will probably also stop you in your tracks, even if you can’t read the copy.

Or, it might rate a wine as “Overrated, and with a checkered past, like Kim Kardashian,” with a photo of Ms. Kardashian.

The wine search engine learns from your preferences, too. The more you use it, the more it detects what kinds of wine you like. TasteJive groups lovers of the same wine together and integrates with Facebook to give better, individualized recommendations based on what your friends like. The app is available on the web as well as on the iPhone.

“TasteJive enables its users to express themselves through short, clever wine recommendations,” said Paulo Lerner, chief executive and co-founder of TasteJive. “We’ve been having a lot of fun, both with the content and the evolution of TasteJive.”

Perhaps fun is the point. According to studies by WineBusiness.com, Portraits USA, and VinTank, wine is a $30 billion a year industry in the United States with more than 80 million people drinking wine in the U.S. each year. Of those 80 million, only 16 percent can be considered connoisseurs or enthusiasts. The rest of these people have no clue how to store red wine, don’t care about aerating it, probably drink Gallo from a refrigerated box, and need a little more entertainment in their lubrication education.

There are a ton of competitors out there who may not have the fun factor, but do have a deep wealth of insight into the wine industry. These include Wine.com, Snooth, Wine 2.0, HelloVino and more who may not have the most fun with their recommendations, but do appeal to a crowd who wants to learn more. These competitors also play the sophistication card, which may speak to the culturally refined side of wine. TasteJive is not afraid to take a more lowbrow, and they hope accessible, route.

TasteJive is a product of Kleintech, which was founded in 2009. There are six employees head quartered in San Francisco working on TasteJive, with a Brazil office and outsourced engineers in Russia. The company has raised a $1 million seed round from private Brazilian angel investors.

TasteJive is one of 80 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Fall 2011 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After our selection, the companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective. There’s still plenty to see at DEMO, and VentureBeat readers can get a special discount on registration for the remainder of the show at demo.com/VBDay.

On August 15, 2011, CCTV aired a half-hour program exposing Baidu’s practice of ranking search results based on the amount paid to Baidu for a priority listing, instead of based on the relevance to the search terms used.

Undercover CCTV reporters also demonstrated how easily a fictitious company selling unlicensed weight-loss products could buy its way to the top of Baidu’s search results, all with the assistance of Baidu’s authorized sales and marketing agents.

This was not the first time that CCTV attacked Baidu for ethical lapses. In November 2008, the state-owned television network aired several news reports that highlighted Baidu’s practice of auctioning off top search results to the highest bidder, and of punishing companies that didn’t purchase priority placements buy removing links to their website from search results. The programs also showed that Baidu sold priority placement for certain key medical terms to fake hospitals and unlicensed medicine suppliers.

Even though nearly three years had elapsed between the programs, and Baidu had launched Phoenix Nest, a new online marketing system designed to improve relevance in paid search, the recent CCTV show explained that Baidu is still following the same old paid search business practices. It still allows unlicensed companies to buy their way to the top of the search results for key terms, CCTV claimed.

The program closed with an overt call for regulation, stating that it was clear Baidu was incapable of regulating itself.

Baidu’s practice of auctioning-off top search placements stands in sharp contrast to the Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) approach. As the selection quoted below from the founders’ letter in Google’s initial public offering prospectus states, Google decided long ago that their search results would be as good as they could make them.

Google users trust our systems to help them with important decisions: medical, financial and many others. Our search results are the best we know how to produce. They are unbiased and objective, and we do not accept payment for them or for inclusion or more frequent updating. We also display advertising, which we work hard to make relevant, and we label it clearly. This is similar to a well-run newspaper, where the advertisements are clear and the articles are not influenced by the advertisers’ payments. We believe it is important for everyone to have access to the best information and research, not only to the information people pay for you to see.

Commentators have pointed out the many possible motives that might lie behind CCTV’s reports on Baidu, ranging from the political, to the commercial, to journalists actually doing their job.

Whatever the motives, rumors do suggest that China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology may issue new online search regulations, including restrictions that would affect Baidu’s paid search rankings.

Deng Hongmin, Deputy Director of the Internet Safety Bureau at the Ministry of Public Security, confirmed during another Baidu-focused CCTV program aired on August 18, 2011, that several departments are currently revising relevant internet regulations. If those new rules are written, what might they look like?

One obvious regulatory solution to the Baidu paid search problem, as pointed out in several of CCTV’s programs, is to categorize the service as a form of advertising subject to China’s existing advertising regulatory regime. As risk factor number eleven in Baidu’s most recent annual report points out, paying for priority search placement is not currently classified as advertising under Chinese law, and thus Baidu (as the provider of the service) is not currently required to ensure that the content is fair and accurate or otherwise in compliance with applicable law.

For the advertising regulatory solution to work, however, paid search results and organic search results need to be differentiated. Otherwise Baidu might be placed in the impossible position of being held responsible for the content of every webpage that appears in its search results.

And that brings us to an interesting potential resolution: China’s regulators might force Baidu to segregate paid search advertising from organic search results, just like Google has been doing for years.

But how would the regulators determine if Baidu is complying with the new rules? Google faced a similar dilemma when it first entered the Chinese market and needed to learn how to censor its search results in order to comply with Chinese law. Since regulators wouldn’t tell them what information needed to be blocked, as described in Google’s February 2006 testimony before the U.S. House of Representative’s Committee on International Relations, Google analyzed searches that originated inside China’s “Great Firewall.” It then censored, from its own search results, any materials that China’s regulators themselves blocked.

Now those same regulators could consider reversing this process, by using Google’s Chinese language service to see what organic search results look like and comparing those with Baidu’s results to see if advertising links are clearly identified.

In 2010, Google ended its own challenging relationship with China’s internet regulators when it decided to stop censoring its search results to comply with Chinese law, and made a noisy exit from China’s search market.

Given this antagonistic history, an outcome where China’s regulators force Baidu to be more like Google, and perhaps used Google’s services to test Baidu’s compliance, would be an ironic twist worthy of a novelist.

Greg Pilarowski is the founder of a boutique international law firm focused upon the internet and digital media industries in China.

Photo: Julien Gong Min/Flickr.com

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 company making it possible is Reputation.com, an online privacy company that just picked up a $41 million round led by August Capital.

However, the details of the product, still under development, are unclear.

Michael Fertik says it’s designed to put consumers in control of their own data.  “It’s like a vault where they can put data and get paid for it themselves,” he explained in an interview with VentureBeat. Advertising is one of the biggest business models behind the Web, and consumers should be able to leverage that, according to Fertik. One way is to seek payment when such data is sought for by advertisers.

While the idea of having control over my data enough to monetize it is tempting, I think I’d want to know more about the back-end processes Reputation.com engages in. Here the details are frustratingly vague — especially for such a sensitive proposition.

After the interview, I was left with no details about how the company farms my data from the web, and slightly creeped out.

Indeed, much about Reputation.com’s existing product is unclear. The company’s main offerings defends customers against negative mentions in search results. It monitors the internet for relevant content about their customers,  and somehow — it won’t quite say how —
Reputation.com says it makes negative posts appear lower down in search engine rankings. (See image for an example of before and after).

But here too, Reputation.com doesn’t explain how. Fertik, answered only: “There’s a lot of math involved.” The company even says it can remove personal information entirely. Again, no details. (In years past, the company contacted sites directly to encourage them to remove undesirable content. Fertik explained that Reptation.com no longer makes these requests.)

Finally, when we asked the company’s PR person for more information about how personal information is removed from the web, they refused to divulge anything. I bet there was a lot of math involved.

To be fair, some of this information is what makes Reputation.com successful, it’s the secret sauce. The PR person explained, “This expertise is something we hold close; it is one of the skills that makes us most valuable.”

Though, the secret sauce is to remain hidden, there’s something to be said for allowing search engines to provide results naturally and not hide negative commentary. VentureBeat asked whether Fertik believed “controlling” search engine rankings might skew the truth a bit, rendering an inaccurate portrayal of the searched subject. To believe you are getting an accurate portrayal in the first place, he said, you have to believe that “Google is pristine on its own, you have to believe that Google is perfect,” implying accurate portrayals are unrealistic:  “Google is just a machine, it’s not God, it’s a machine.”

Fertik used the example of an ex-boyfriend posting slanderous comments, which you’d naturally like to suppress in search rankings for your professional profile.

That is undeniably desirable, but the flip side is the mother who needs to know if her nanny is actually trustworthy or the consumer who wants to know how reliable their dry cleaner is. What’s to prevent shady characters from using Reputation.com to slant their online profiles toward the positive? The company says it it has clear policies about this, saying it doesn’t serve criminals. But I’m not talking about criminals per se, I’m talking about all that gray in between.

Reptuation.com was founded in 2006 and has 150 employees. Funding to date is around $66 million from August Capital, JAFCO Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Floodgate Fund.

Instant Pages uses web rendering to load webpages from search results 3 to 5 times faster for the average person, according to Google’s Amit Singhal, who reaffirmed the company’s commitment to a faster search experience during the demo.

Singhal explained that the average webpage takes about 5 seconds to load, making the total search experience roughly 30 seconds long, according to the “Query Timeline” infograph used in the demo. That amount of time will probably seem arbitrary for anyone not in charge of improving the world’s most successful web search engine.

The company first made an effort to speed up the search experience with Instant Search, which begins working immediately as a user starts entering words into the search bar (without having to press enter or the “search” button). Instant Pages seeks to do the same with the webpages people are navigating to.

The Instant Pages feature will be available on Google Chrome Beta later this week and is currently available on the developer version of Google’s Chrome browser. Since the code is open-source, Google hopes other browsers will adopt the pre-rendering functionality as a standard.

Google also announced that Instant search functionality is coming for images as well as the ability to search via voice or image from a desktop.

Check out Google’s official demo video for Instant Pages below.

Search engines rely on schemas, or HTML tags, to improve results and make them more accurate. When webmasters set out to optimize their sites for SEO, they can use these markups to help push their sites to the top of results.

A lengthy note on schema.org gives a little more background and explains why finding common ground with website markup is so important:

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.

This isn’t the first time the biggest players in search have collaborated on a project of this nature. In 2006, Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft came together to create sitemaps.org, which helped standardize Sitemap protocol.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Quixey, a new startup that’s developing a search engine dedicated to apps, announced today that it will also make life easier for developers by giving them an easy way to manage their apps across multiple stores.

Such a feature would be a boon to developers, since they can manage messaging for theirs apps in one location instead of having to visit each app store one at a time. Additionally, Quixey’s App Developer accounts will allow developers to see what users are saying about their apps in one location. The company says it has received “extremely positive feedback” from developers who’ve been testing out the accounts.

Quixey’s search technology will also scrape the web to find all available versions of apps, which will remind developers of the platforms they haven’t yet hit, and will offer consumers an easy way to see which platforms their favorite apps support.

Quixey has built from scratch an app search engine that responds to user needs. For example, a query of “find cheap gas” will bring up apps that will help with just that. Founders Tomer Kagan and Liron Shapira call this “functional search” and describe it as “a new type of search specifically for the app world.”

The company will compete directly with Chomp, which has been attacking the app discovery problem for some time now — first with app recommendations, and now with a search engine focus. Appolicious has also been in the app search game for some time now.

Mountain View, Calif.,-based Quixey has raised $400,000 in seed funding from investors including Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavours and Archimedes Ventures. The company plans to launch at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in New York City on May 23 to May 25.

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.

Rosenblatt had to endure a lot of criticism in silence due to the quiet period before Demand Media’s IPO and its first earnings report. Now, however, he said it’s time to respond. First, he acknowledged that Demand Media’s articles often address somewhat arcane topics, but he said that doesn’t mean they aren’t serving a real need for readers.

As examples, Rosenblatt offered two articles that have run on Demand Media sites. First, the company estimated that nearly 100,000 people search for “how to make a paper lantern,” and that 20,000 of them ended up reading the Demand Media article on that topic.

“I don’t have a use for that article, but lots of people do,” Rosenblatt said.

And with the snowy weather, the company estimated than 12,000 people recently searched for how to rake their roof, with thousands of them reading Demand’s article on that topic.

The second big criticism is about Demand Media’s quality. But Rosenblatt argued that the company’s editorial team has a strong quality control process in place, outlined on a new “Content Matters” website. In fact, he said the company “matches or exceeds traditional media companies.”

During the analyst question session, Rosenblatt also talked about Google’s new efforts to cut down on spammy content in its search results. That won’t hurt Demand Media’s traffic, he said — in fact, reducing duplicate or bad content in results actually helps the company’s traffic.

Rosenblatt was thinking about these criticisms earlier in the call when he talked about Demand Media’s flagship site eHow, where he said direct traffic is growing faster than search engine traffic. The implication: Demand Media isn’t entirely beholden to Google.

I don’t think that a few sound bites and a corporate website are going change Demand Media’s image, but hey, at least the company is making its case.

As for those earnings, Demand Media reported $73.6 million in revenue and $1 million in net income, beating its earlier estimates.

[image via Flickr/B Garrett]

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.

Ask.com might possess some value if it were spun off into a standalone company outside of IAC, but it hasn’t gained any significant ground in the search engine market since it was acquired five years ago, Diller said.

“I don’t think anybody ascribes any meaningful value to Ask.com when compared to a site like Vimeo which has huge potential,” he said. Vimeo is an online-video site within IAC’s portfolio.

The admission calls into question Diller’s skills as a media dealmaker. Historically, he has made his name buying and selling properties, everything from cable channels to e-commerce sites. Over time, his company has repeatedly changed its name and focus. But after spinning off many of its businesses in 2007, a smaller IAC has concentrated on online media and advertising properties.

Ask.com still accounts for 3.8 percent of all searches on the Internet, according to data from comScore — but that’s compared to Google’s colossal 65 percent market share and Yahoo’s 17 percent market share. Data from comScore several years ago also suggests Ask.com has been losing momentum. It powered 4.5 percent of all searches on the Internet in August 2007.

“We didn’t gain share, and I don’t think we’re going to gain share,” Diller said. “We’ve held it, which is a bit of a miracle, but that’s not what we intended when we picked it up five years ago.”

The Oakland, Calif.-based company was founded in 1996 and was a public company between 1999 and 2005, when IAC acquired the search engine. Ask.com was formerly AskJeeves.com before it decided to throw out the company’s mascot, a friendly looking butler named Jeeves, in 2006 and rebrand the website.

Largely as a result of IAC’s spinoffs, Diller is on the board of directors of five companies including IAC. He serves as the chairman of travel site Expedia, formerly owned by IAC. He announced today that he will resign as the chairman of live event hosting company Live Nation’s board of directors by the end of the year, which merged with former IAC property Ticketmaster earlier this year.

Update: Diller has released a statement in response to the article, which an IAC spokesperson sent to VentureBeat via email.

“I did not say that Ask has no value inside of IAC, period. In response to a specific question, I said that many of our assets are not ‘valued’ in the stock, and Ask is one of them…I was asked specifically if Ask would be better off with us or another company or standing alone. In the context of that question, I said that since it wasn’t valued in IAC –  like so many of our businesses, because we have so many –  that it would only be ‘valued’ stand alone.”