But Microsoft’s ads won’t take on Google, Yahoo, or even Ask.com directly by name. Instead, the Bing ads will try to convince you that by using "today’s search engines" you’re missing out on all that your search experience could be. To back up this assertion, Microsoft offers some internal data indicating 42 percent of all searches need to be refined after the first query, AdAge reports. Furthermore, Microsoft has found 25 percent of all post-search clicks hit the back button instead of a Website link when looking at a search results page.

The inability to find what you want on the first try may be where Microsoft believes Bing has an edge. In March, when screenshots of Microsoft’s new search engine leaked online under the codename Kumo, the photos showed a "related categories" feature on the results page. If you were looking for a set of new stereo speakers, for example, you would see links to reviews, manuals, prices, and so on related to the specific product you were seeking. There were also examples of Kumo/Bing yielding different related categories in a search for entertainers with related categories like biographies, song lyrics, and albums. The ability to refine your search with directly relevant categories could be a very helpful search tool, as opposed to starting all over from scratch with a new query if you don’t find what you’re looking for.

If Bing’s "related categories" feature can offer results directly relevant to your query each and every time you hit the search button, then Microsoft may be able to peel off some, but definitely not all, of that Google mojo. However, Bing’s competitors may already have features comparable to related categories in their arsenals. Google rolled out its own set of tools to help you refine your search at its recent Searchology event, and Yahoo will launch search refinement tools in the coming months.

Whether Bing’s features are a huge jump forward over Google’s new tools or Yahoo’s upcoming overhaul is hard to know, since no one outside of Microsoft has had a chance to try Bing. This week, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is expected to demonstrate Bing during the D: All Things D conference, which runs from May 26 through 28. It’s not clear if Ballmer will announce a launch date for the new search engine from All Things D; however, once Bing is finally available to the public, I have no doubt many people will want to test drive the new search engine. But even if Bing can win over some early converts, the true test will be whether those users are still ‘Binging’ instead of ‘Googling’ a month or two later.

Service is not the only obstacle for a challenger to Google’s dominance, either. To keep users coming back for more, Microsoft must dislodge the idea from the public consciousness that the name Google is synonymous with Internet search. Will 100 million greenbacks be enough to convince people that ‘to Google’ is not actually a verb? Microsoft may think so, but what do you say?

Microsoft May Rename Live Search ‘Bing’: Massive Ad Campaign Planned

"There will be a moment when you can fill out a form or something and give us money," said Evan Williams, co-founder and chief executive officer.

"We’re working on it right now," Williams said at The Wall Street Journal’s D: All Things Digital conference.

Williams and Twitter co-founder Biz Stone mentioned possible revenue-generators, including a service that would authenticate the source of information. For example, Dunkin’ Donuts could pay to make sure that impostors don’t send messages under its name.

Still, after nearly one hour of questions from journalists Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher and from the audience, the co-founders gave no clear picture of Twitter’s business model. Stone demurred when asked what would be the company’s key revenue driver in two years.

Williams said he wasn’t opposed to banner advertising but was unenthusiastic.

"I think it’s probably the least interesting thing we could do," he said.

Williams said one of his top priorities was hiring more people to help grow the company but he didn’t give a headcount target. San Francisco-based Twitter has 43 employees, he said, double its count in January.

Twitter allows anyone to write about what they’re doing or what’s on their mind in messages sent through the Web or cell phones, also known as "tweets," which are limited to 140 characters. The unconventional, free service has attracted millions of users.

The co-founders said they know the hype surrounding Twitter won’t last forever.

"If you pay attention to it too much, you can run yourself off the rails," Stone said. He added, "Pretty soon, everybody’s going to hate us."

The privately held company has been a subject of buyout speculation by a big technology company, but Williams said he believed Twitter would remain independent.

Twitter founders plan to charge users

Google said it has put together a flu trends tracking system for Mexico based on the U.S. Google Flu tool launched last fall that is used by U.S. Centres for Disease Control and Prevention to figure out where influenza is heating up.

It is based on Google’s observation that people who are sick with flu tend to search for the same types of information on the Internet, and these searches can be used to predict where an outbreak may be occurring.

“We have seen evidence in Mexico that Google users also search flu-related topics when they are experiencing flu-related symptoms,” Jeremy Ginsberg, lead engineer for Flu Trends at Google, said in a telephone briefing.

Studies show that between 35 and 40 percent of all visits to the Internet are started by people looking for health information.

Ginsberg said the Mexican data have not been cross-checked with years of data on actual flu cases in Mexico like the U.S. flu tracker has, so the data may not be reliable.

But he said the company is optimistic that the system, which generates maps based on peaks in flu-related searches, “may reflect actual flu activity.”

“We did see a small increase in many parts of Mexico before major news coverage began last week,” he said.

Ginsberg said people search for different things when they are sick — like the word thermometer — than they do when they are looking for news about flu outbreaks.

Ginsberg said the group has also seen a spike in U.S.-related flu searches that correspond with increases in U.S. cases being reported.

He said the hope is that the tool might offer one more way to predict hot spots in an outbreak as they happen.

“If it spreads quickly, it may give public health officials the chance to respond quickly,” he said.

Google’s flu tool for Mexico can be found here

Google puts flu tracker to work on swine flu

The Book Search settlement, announced in October, followed a three-year battle over Google’s right to display copyrighted books on its Web site. The Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers claimed Google was violating copyrights by doing so. Google eventually agreed to pay $125 million to ensure authors and publishers could register to receive payments anytime their books were viewed within the service.

The deal is proving to be quite divisive, and now, with the Justice Department’s reported antitrust investigation, things could get even more dicey. Here’s a look at five key arguments from both sides of the debate.

Google’s Book Search Deal

The Sunnyvale Web portal said it would carry out the layoffs, the third round in just over a year, in the next two weeks in hopes of saving money and freeing resources to hire elsewhere in the company. Executives said the cuts will be focused on Yahoo’s product managers and engineers.

After three months on the job, CEO Carol Bartz is still grappling with turning Yahoo around in an environment in which advertisers are slashing their budgets. Although she’s made some relatively minor tweaks at the company, Bartz is still weighing several bigger decisions such as whether to team up with rival Microsoft Corp. in search advertising.

Against that backdrop, Yahoo’s first-quarter profit fell 78 percent to $118 million (8 cents per share), from $537 million (37 cents) a year ago. The comparison isn’t quite as dire as it seems, however, because Yahoo’s quarterly earnings in 2008 were helped by a $401 million gain from an investment in Alibaba, a Chinese e-commerce company.

Absent those proceeds, Yahoo’s first-quarter profit would have declined 16 percent.

First-quarter revenue fell 13 percent to $1.58 billion from $1.82 billion for the equivalent period in 2008. Yahoo attributed some of the decline to the sale of its Kelkoo shopping search engine and unfavorable foreign currency exchange rates.

Excluding fees paid to partners, Yahoo would have had $1.16 billion in revenue.

The results met analyst expectations of 8 cents per share in profit and $1.2 billion in adjusted revenue.

Sameet Sinha, an analyst with JMP Securities, said that Bartz has made clear that Yahoo’s revival is no short-term project. The longer it takes, he said, the more pressure she’ll be under to reach an agreement with Microsoft, which has been Yahoo’s on-again, off-again suitor for more than a year.

"Carol Bartz is in there making some significant changes, but she said that it’s not one or two quarters of changes," Sinha said. "There’s still a long way to go."

Yahoo cut 1,000 jobs in January 2008, and trimmed 1,500 more in October. An announcement about the new cuts was widely expected Tuesday after leaks to the media last week.

Bartz said she hoped she could make Yahoo more streamlined, in part by reducing some of its inefficiencies in its workforce.

"We sort of had one product management person for every three engineers, so we had a lot of people running around and telling engineers what to do." Exasperated, she used some of the salty language that she’s known for, but that is rarely heard in conference calls with investors, declaring "But nobody was f- doing anything."

"Excuse me, I knew that would slip out one of these times," she said.

Yahoo had 13,500 employees at the end of the first quarter.

Bartz has eliminated several of Yahoo’s minor services, continuing a process started under her predecessor, Jerry Yang, and is contemplating more significant changes. Career site HotJobs is a candidate for sale while Yahoo Maps may be outsourced to another company, analyst Trip Chowdhry of Global Equities Research said in a recent research note.

Last week, Yahoo sold its 10 percent stake in Gmarket, a South Korean e-commerce site.

Bartz has said she wants to focus Yahoo on its core properties, where it is already successful, including its home page, e-mail and finance.

Meanwhile, Yahoo continues to feel the impact of the economic downturn. Display advertising revenue dropped 13 percent. Search advertising revenue fell 3 percent, reversing double-digit growth in previous quarters.

Yahoo’s results contrasted with Google, which is facing some of the same economic headwinds, but nevertheless reported a 6 percent increase in first-quarter revenue.

Bartz said that she is pleased with how Yahoo performed in the first quarter under difficult circumstances and that she expects the business to turn around with the economy.

Yahoo to lay off 675 after profit slides 78%

Unlike the case of Napster, The Pirate bay doesn’t actually host the copyrighted files, it simply allows users to posts links to copyrighted files on third party servers. That’s why the they were charged of “assisting making available copyrighted material” instead of “assisting copyright infringement”

Could this be the end of torrent file sharing? And how about other torrent search engines, could they be next, If simply posting links to copyrighted materials can be charged of “assisting making available copyrighted materials”, surely there are many sites that fits this profile. One problem is, most of the links to copyrighted materials are posted by users and not necessarily the owners of site.

How about Online file sharing sites like rapidshare, megaupload, easyshare and others, Some of it’s users upload copyrighted materials, Even though they deleted files if found to be in violation of their terms of service. Problem is how to determine if the files are copyright, as most of the uploaded files are archived and renamed. Are the owners of the site also liable?

And One Big question, since Google, Yahoo, MSN Live.com also indexes copyrighted materials, are they also liable?

The Pirate Bay Verdict – Netcrunch

The figures, published by web developers’ portal W3Schools, shows Firefox with 46.4 per cent, up nearly one percent from January, while various versions of IE, when taken together, dropped by 1.2 per cent to 43.6 per cent. Google’s Chrome browser rose slightly to four per cent.

However, as W3Schools explains, it is primarily a site for people with an interest in web technologies. These users are therefore “more interested in using alternative browsers than the average user” and so not fully representative of the general market.

“The average user tends to use Internet Explorer, since it comes preinstalled with Windows. Most do not seek out other browsers,” the site explains.

The latest statistics from Net Applications make better reading for Microsoft. They put Internet Explorer’s market share for February at 67.44 per cent, with Firefox at 21.77 per cent.

Microsoft will be hoping the release of the latest version of Internet Explorer this week will help it to increase its market share over Firefox, which has been gradually gaining in popularity.

IE8 was designed to better comply with web standards, offer more security features and improved performance.

In recent months Microsoft has also seen its competition increase, with arch rival Google launching its own web browser, Chrome, into the market. The latest stats from Net Applications shows Chrome in fourth place behind IE, Firefox and Safari, with a 1.15 per cent market share.

Firefox a hit with web enthusiasts

The overall number of videos watched online in the US in January climbed 4 percent from the previous month to 14.8 billion, with YouTube viewing accounting for 91 percent of that growth, comScore reported Wednesday.

Google-owned websites, predominantly YouTube, ranked at the top of the US online video heap with 6.4 billion snippets watched during the month, according to comScore.

Fox Interactive Media, which owns online social-networking service MySpace, had the second highest number of videos viewed – 552 million.

Yahoo! online destinations were third with 374 million videos watched, the industry tracking group reported.

Approximately 147 million US Internet users watched an average of 101 online videos each in January, with 102 million of those people using Google-owned sites, according to comScore.

YouTube topped 100 million US viewer mark in January

Last week, I started experimenting with Yammer, a Twitter clone that facilitates private microblog user groups, a feature that Twitter not only doesn’t have but refuses to say if it will ever offer.

My team of five started using Yammer on a Monday, and by Friday, we decided that it was pointless. First, it’s not integrated with anything else we use–Twitter, IM, Skype, e-mail, etc. What’s more, the Yammer application for BlackBerry is embarrassingly bad. I realized pretty quickly that it’s better to just use e-mail, if you want to communicate to a small private group–at least for now.

Lest you think I am picking on Yammer, I’m not. My recent short-lived experience showed me that enterprise microblogging provides minimal benefits to the organization. If our group had been much larger, and we wanted to do some kind of short announcements, it might prove useful, though hardly compelling.

The lack of threaded messages among the users and the challenging interfaces of most microblogging services also affect communication styles by enforcing a shortened message. That sounds like a good idea, until you are forced to spend more time trying to figure out what someone meant in 140 characters. The reality is that most people are poor communicators, and they are even worse, when it comes to their writing and editing skills.

When it comes to business, you don’t want to read between the lines, as you do in your personal Twitter verse. Even with enterprise e-mail overload and a never-ending supply of documents flying back and forth, at least you have the ability to state and substantiate a point.

I know of at least one other Twitter-like service that will launch in the next month or so, with several new compelling features for enterprise users. Meanwhile, we’ll go back to e-mail and IM for our quick communications.

The case against enterprise microblogging

The image — that is no longer on the site but which was obtained by The News, Pakistan’s English language daily newspaper — shows what appear to be three Predator drones outside a hangar at the end of the runway. The Times also obtained a copy of the image, whose co-ordinates confirm that it is the Shamsi airfield, also known as Bandari, about 200 miles southwest of the Pakistani city of Quetta.

An investigation by The Times yesterday revealed that the CIA was secretly using Shamsi to launch the Predator drones that observe and attack al-Qaeda and Taleban militants around Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan.

US special forces used the airbase during the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, but the Pakistani Government said in 2006 that the Americans had left. Both sides have since denied repeatedly that Washington has used, or is using, Pakistani bases to launch drones. Pakistan has also demanded that the US cease drone attacks on its tribal area, which have increased over the last year, allegedly killing several “high-value” targets as well as many civilians.

The Google Earth image now suggests that the US began launching Predators from Shamsi — built by Arab sheiks for falconry trips — at least three years ago.

The advantage of Shamsi is that it provides a discreet launchpad within minutes of Quetta — a known Taleban staging post — as well as Taleban infiltration routes into Afghanistan and potential militant targets farther afield.

Google Earth’s current image of Shamsi — about 100 miles south of the Afghan border and 100 miles east of the Iranian one — undoubtedly shows the same airstrip as the image from 2006.

There are no visible drones, but it does show that several new buildings and other structures have been erected since 2006, including what appears to be a hangar large enough to fit three drones. Perimeter defences — apparently made from the same blast-proof barriers used at US and Nato bases in Afghanistan — have also been set up around the hangar.

A compound on the other side of the runway appears to have sufficient housing for several dozen people, as well as neatly tended lawns. Three military aviation experts shown the image said that the aircraft appeared to be MQ1 Predator unmanned aerial vehicles — the model used by the CIA to observe and strike militants on the Afghan border.

The MQ1 Predator carries two laser-guided Hellfire missiles, and can fly for up to 454 miles, at speed of up to 135mph, and at altitudes of up to 25,000ft, according to the US Air Force website www.af.mil

The News reported that the drones were Global Hawks — which are generally used only for reconnaissance, flying for up to 36 hours, at more than 400mph and an altitude of up to 60,000ft. Damian Kemp, an aviation editor with Jane’s Defence Weekly, said that the three drones in the image appeared to have wingspans of 48-50ft.

“The wingspan of an MQ1 Predator A model is 55ft. On this basis it is possible that these are Predator-As,” he said. “They are certainly not RQ-4A Global Hawks (which have a wingspan of 116ft 2in).”

Pakistan’s only drones are Italian Galileo Falcos, which were delivered in 2007, according to a report in last month’s Jane’s World Air Forces.

A military spokesman at the US Embassy in Islamabad declined to comment on the images — or the revelations in The Times yesterday.

Major-General Athar Abbas, Pakistan’s chief military spokesman, was not immediately available for comment. He admitted on Tuesday that US forces were using Shamsi, but only for logistics.

He also said that the Americans were using another air base in the city of Jacobabad for logistics and military operations. Pakistan gave the US permission to use Shamsi, Jacobabad and two other bases — Pasni and Dalbadin — for the invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001.

The image of the US drones at Shamsi highlights the extraordinary power — and potential security risks — of Google Earth.

Several governments have asked it to remove or blur images of sensitive locations such as military bases, nuclear reactors and government buildings. Some have also accused the company of helping terrorists, as in 2007, when its images of British military bases were found in the homes of Iraqi insurgents.

Last year India said that the militants who attacked Mumbai in November had used Google Earth to familiarise themselves with their targets. Google Street View, which offers ground-level, 360-degree views, also ran into controversy last year when the Pentagon asked it to remove some online images of military bases in America.

Google Earth reveals secret history of US base in Pakistan