Lili Cheng, General Manager of Microsoft’s Fuse Labs, announced the debut of Spindex, the company’s stab at a dynamic social media aggregation tool.

Aimed at bringing together the varied strands of a personal web at each point of a user’s online experience, Spindex is currently only available in a tech preview.

Sponsor

“Spindex…aggregates your social streams (Facebook, Twitter, Bing, etc.), making it simple for you to find what’s new, see personalized trending topics, and generally make the most of the time you spend being social on the Web.”

Spindex seems learns from your online behavior, harvesting relevant information to a central page. It also links to Bing search information and allows you to use Evernote, another Labs innovation, within the application.

Discuss

Central Desktop announced today a new collaborative framework that allows people to open, save, edit and co-author files stored in the cloud directly from Microsoft Office.

Adding to the services are new features that allow multiple people to co-edit and co-author Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents. Central Desktop maintains that the added features eliminate the need to upgrade to Microsoft Sharepoint or Microsoft Office 2010. The new features will be available in June.

Sponsor

We see Central Desktop as part of a new wave. Co-editing is the next step to real-time collaboration, fitting with activity streams, co-commenting and such services as the ability to create individual rich profiles.

Co-editing served as a hallmark feature of Google
Wave upon its introduction. Novell Pulse offers integration with Google Wave to offer the co-editing capabilities.

Cubetree may best express the value of enriched co-editing. Yesterday, SuccessFactors bought the startup for a deal valued at $50 million.

Discuss

Google has launched a new feature in its search results, which displays results that are deemed "similar" to the query. If you search for eBay, for example, you may get results for Craigslist, uBid, Buy.com, and ebayanuncios.es.

Basically, if someone searches for a brand, there is a good chance Google will inject links to the competition on that results page by default (though at the bottom).

It’s actually not a new feature entirely. "We’ve offered a ‘Similar’ feature on results for a while now as a way to discover new, useful sites, but it hasn’t been too visible," says Google software engineer Doantam Phan. "Since we’ve been continuously improving this feature and we think it’s really useful, we’re now going to start showing these alternative sites more prominently."

I thought it would be interesting to see what pages Google thinks are similar to Google itself and some of its competitors. When I searched "google" I didn’t get any similar pages. When I searched "bing", I got the following:

For "facebook" I got the following:

For Yahoo, I got the following:

I find it interesting that Google deems Bing to be more like Dogpile than Google or even Yahoo. It’s also worth noting that Gmail is in the mix for Facebook, with Buzz presumably being the connecting factor, which is interesting in itself since Buzz is more like FriendFeed than Facebook, and Facebook actually owns FriendFeed, but that’s not listed (while Microsoft.com is listed as similar to Bing).

Sorry, Google fans, but from a financial perspective, the search giant seems to have lost some of its luster.  Goldman Sachs hasn’t come close to suggesting that anyone sell their stock – and is in fact still recommending that people buy more – but at the same time, the firm has removed Google from its "Conviction Buy" list.

You can blame the nasty dive Google’s stock took following the company’s quarter one earnings report for this move; a drop from $595.30 at the closing bell to $563.00 at the opening one definitely counts as "underperformance," and Google’s stock has since fallen further to around $536.24.

What’s more, five-day, one-month, three-month, and six-month views of the stock’s performance all show losses.

Google’s stock is still up 38.92 percent if you look at it using April 28th, 2009 as a starting point, though.

Google’s stock is up this morning, too, by a not-unimpressive 0.87 percent.

By comparison, Microsoft is up 0.15 percent, Yahoo’s down 1.15 percent, the Dow’s down 0.14 percent, and the Nasdaq’s down 0.13 percent. Google’s shareholders don’t exactly need to go calling for anyone’s resignation just yet, then.

Google has launched a new feature in its search results, which displays results that are deemed "similar" to the query. If you search for eBay, for example, you may get results for Craigslist, uBid, Buy.com, and ebayanuncios.es.

Basically, if someone searches for a brand, there is a good chance Google will inject links to the competition on that results page by default (though at the bottom).

It’s actually not a new feature entirely. "We’ve offered a ‘Similar’ feature on results for a while now as a way to discover new, useful sites, but it hasn’t been too visible," says Google software engineer Doantam Phan. "Since we’ve been continuously improving this feature and we think it’s really useful, we’re now going to start showing these alternative sites more prominently."

I thought it would be interesting to see what pages Google thinks are similar to Google itself and some of its competitors. When I searched "google" I didn’t get any similar pages. When I searched "bing", I got the following:

For "facebook" I got the following:

For Yahoo, I got the following:

I find it interesting that Google deems Bing to be more like Dogpile than Google or even Yahoo. It’s also worth noting that Gmail is in the mix for Facebook, with Buzz presumably being the connecting factor, which is interesting in itself since Buzz is more like FriendFeed than Facebook, and Facebook actually owns FriendFeed, but that’s not listed (while Microsoft.com is listed as similar to Bing).

Sorry, Google fans, but from a financial perspective, the search giant seems to have lost some of its luster.  Goldman Sachs hasn’t come close to suggesting that anyone sell their stock – and is in fact still recommending that people buy more – but at the same time, the firm has removed Google from its "Conviction Buy" list.

You can blame the nasty dive Google’s stock took following the company’s quarter one earnings report for this move; a drop from $595.30 at the closing bell to $563.00 at the opening one definitely counts as "underperformance," and Google’s stock has since fallen further to around $536.24.

What’s more, five-day, one-month, three-month, and six-month views of the stock’s performance all show losses.

Google’s stock is still up 38.92 percent if you look at it using April 28th, 2009 as a starting point, though.

Google’s stock is up this morning, too, by a not-unimpressive 0.87 percent.

By comparison, Microsoft is up 0.15 percent, Yahoo’s down 1.15 percent, the Dow’s down 0.14 percent, and the Nasdaq’s down 0.13 percent. Google’s shareholders don’t exactly need to go calling for anyone’s resignation just yet, then.

Remember when Bing launched its recipe results? Now Google has launched a similar feature with recipe rich snippets. "For example, if you were searching for an easy to make thai mango salad, you can now see user ratings, preparation time, and a picture of the dish directly in search result snippets," explains Google. It may not be incredibly far-fetched to suggest that maybe Bing’s offering nudged such a feature into development, whether or not Google would admit this.

This story isn’t about recipes though. It’s about the major search engines’ quest for gaining or keeping you as a user. It feels like Bing has been around quite a while know, but in reality, it hasn’t even been out for a year. Right out of the box, Bing seemed to make Google want to improve. Google is even in the process of testing redesigned search results pages that borrow some design characteristics from Bing.

Where are You Getting the More Relevant Results? Let us know.

Both Google and Bing still have their relevancy issues. We recently looked at an example of a query for "matt cutts" on Google (though we compared them to Yahoo rather than Bing, as Yahoo mentioned the same query in a blog post). Frankly, Google’s results left a bit to be desired. It wasn’t that that they were bad exactly, but personalized results pushed the more relevant results further down the page, and Matt’s Facebook profile was MIA, despite Facebook being one of the most popular sites on the web, a good result for a search on a person’s name (It was in the first few on Yahoo’s results).

Microsoft may like consumers to think that Bing gives all the right answers. Those commercials would certainly seem to suggest they have a leg up over the competition in that regard, but they’ve got their own relevance issues. For example, for an article I was writing recently, I was looking for that site Bing has that showed all of the latest features they’ve released. I couldn’t remember the name of it, so I searched (on Bing) for "latest bing features". Given Bing’s philosophy of wanting to provide answers, I would expect to easily find what I was looking for through such a query, but instead the first organic result is an article called "The Latest News from Bing" from November of 2009.

Search Diversifying

In the latest search market reports, Google has lost a little bit of market share. Bing is gaining (and has the potential to gain a lot more for reasons discussed here). Another thing Bing has going for it, or Google has working against it rather, is that search itself is becoming much more diversified as a result of mobile, social media, and geo-location. People are simply using more ways to find the information they’re looking for. It’s not that they’re not using Google anymore. It’s that they’re maybe using it less for certain types of queries. For example, where someone may have once used Google to search for a movie showtime, maybe they now have an app for that on their phone.

Is a Bingized Yahoo Good for Yahoo Search?

At some point in the near future, Bing’s results will be taking over Yahoo’s results to some extent. While most will agree that the Microsoft-Yahoo deal will be good for search advertising. Another question would be is it good for people who use Yahoo to search? Are Bing’s search results better than Yahoo’s? I’m not so sure, looking at the "matt cutts" example. For the "latest bing features" example, however, I can’t say that Yahoo’s results are really any better than Bing’s.

I realize that just looking at a couple of examples is kind of grasping at straws and are hardly representative of all queries in general, but it’s still a question worth pondering. Are Bing’s results better than Yahoo’s? Does it even matter? Will the average Yahoo user even notice a difference?

Google’s Edge in Innovation

Google still seems to have the edge in getting out new and interesting features. Take real-time search. Microsoft and Google both announced deals with Twitter around the same time. Microsoft even had one with Facebook too. While Bing had a separate destination relatively quickly, where users could search Twitter with Bing, they didn’t integrate real-time Twitter results into Bing results themselves. Google did this after a little while with not only Twitter, but many other sources to make up its real-time search results. Just this week, Bing announced that it is starting to include such results, and only from Twitter, and only to a small subset of users in the U.S.

That’s not to say that Bing doesn’t do some things first (like the recipes for example), but Bing has a lot more to prove (and in all fairness, they do regularly release new features). Google is already established. Bing is still trying to win people over.

Google is frequently making acquisitions to better its search technologies. Just this week, Google acquired Pink, to better its Google Goggles product, which lets people search with their phones by simply pointing their cameras toward an object. They recently acquired Aardvark, a social Q&A search service (a space that is growing rapidly – see AnswerBag/MerchantCircle news for one of the latest examples).

Wrapping Up

With regards to relevance, you’re going to find better results on Google, Yahoo, and Bing on a query-by-query basis. In reality, none of them deliver perfect results all the time, and that is why the diversifying of how people search is likely to continue, and for the better. The search engines can work to personalize results all they want, but in the end, it’s the user that personalizes how they search, and right now, it’s not  looking like any single search engine is going to control all of that.

Which search engine do you think most consistently delivers the most relevant results? Are you turning to other ways to find information beyond search engines? Tell us what you use.

U.S. Internet users watched 28.1 billion videos in February, with Google sites leading the way as the top video property wit 11.9 billion videos, accounting for 42.5 percent of all videos viewed online, according to the latest report from comScore.

YouTube accounted for more than 99 percent of all videos viewed at the property. Hulu ranked second with 912.5 million videos, representing 3.2 percent of all online videos viewed. Microsoft sites landed in the third spot with 623 million (2.2%), trailed by Yahoo sites with 455 million (1.6%) and Turner Network with 318 million (1.1%).

More than 174 million viewers watched an average of 161 videos per viewer during the month of February. Google sites attracted 132.2 million unique viewers during the month (93.9 videos per viewer), followed by Yahoo sites with 53.5 million viewers (8.5 videos per viewer) and CBS Interactive with 45.3 million viewers (6.4 videos per viewer). The average Hulu viewer watched 23.3 videos during the month, representing another all time high for the property.

In February, Tremor Media ranked as the leading video ad network with a potential reach of 81.7 million viewers, or 46.9 percent of the total video viewing audience. YuMe Video Network ranked second with a potential reach of 75.5 million viewers (43.3% penetration) followed closely by Advertising.com Video Network with 74.8 million viewers (42.9%).

Other key findings from comScore include:

*83.1% of the total U.S. Internet audience viewed online video.

*132.4 million viewers watched 11.9 billion videos on YouTube (89.5 videos per viewer).

*The length of the average online video was 4.3 minutes.
 

It’s been about five months since Rupert Murdoch first claimed that he would block search engines from News Corp. content, and even if not a lot’s happened as a result, Murdoch hasn’t let the matter slide.  He issued another warning yesterday while at the National Press Club.

Do you think Murdoch will follow through on his threats?  Let us know by commenting.

"We are going to stop people like Google or Microsoft or whoever from taking stories for nothing . . . there is a law of copyright and they recognise it," Murdoch said according to Paul Harris.

The chairman and CEO of News Corp. later added, "They take [news content] for nothing.  They have got this very clever business model."

Of course, Murdoch didn’t make any fresh announcements regarding News Corp. content and pay walls, or establish any sort of timeframe for when he might do so.  So if these statements have any effect at all, they might weaken his position by highlighting the fact that Murdoch hasn’t taken action so far.

It’s possible that these comments will draw out a few more supporters, though, giving Murdoch a more defensible stance if he ever does flip the switch.  The situation will bear watching.

Tell us in the comments section what you make of Murdoch’s position.

UPDATE: In a new WebProNews video, Abby Johnson provides a good perspective on the conflict between publishers and search engines, citing recent events and cutting to an interview with Danny Sullivan.  You can watch the video below.

March was an interesting month for the search market, according to new statistics from comScore.  Not so interesting that Google isn’t still on top by a huge margin, of course, but interesting insofar as the search giant lost a bit of market share, even as Bing and Yahoo improved their standing.

Let’s start with Google’s story.  In February, comScore puts its market share at 65.5 percent.  That declined to 65.1 percent in March, which is a moderately unusual turn of events.

As for how Bing did, it’s still Microsoft’s little search-engine-that-could, achieving its tenth straight month of gains.  Not huge gains, perhaps – its market share just moved from 11.5 percent to 11.7 percent between February and March – but the streak remains impressive, and even the tiniest numbers add up over time.

Then there’s Yahoo’s tale to consider.  Unfortunately for Carol Bartz, the company’s standing had dropped each of the previous 13 months.  However, moving from February to March, comScore recorded a 0.1 percent gain, nudging Yahoo from 16.8 percent to 16.9 percent.

So it was definitely an interesting month, as these things go.  And Bing and Yahoo, at least, are no doubt hoping April turns out to be just as unusual.

According to the latest data from analytics firm Hitwise, Ask managed to grow an astonishing 21% last month (from 2.84% to 3.44%), while Microsoft’s Bing actually lost 1%. After a long period of slow but steady decline, the total number of U.S. searches on Yahoo grew about 3% last month, while Google lost about 1% and fell under 70%. Alternative search engines only accounted for 1.93% of all U.S. searches.

Sponsor

Verticals

Even though Bing lost some ground in the overall search market, it did quite well in the verticals it already specializes in. Year-over-Year, the percentage of upstream traffic from Bing to automotive, health, shopping and travel sites grew more than 100%. Month-to-month, Bing also saw double-digit growth according to Hitwise.

Google, of course, remains the most important source of traffic for these verticals and it’s worth noting that even though Bing’s important is growing, it only delivers between 2 and 4% of the upstream traffic for these key industries. To some degree, though, Bing isn’t really interested in delivering this traffic to outside sources and would rather serve its customers by giving them answers right on its own site.

Discuss

It’s been about five months since Rupert Murdoch first claimed that he would block search engines from News Corp. content, and even if not a lot’s happened as a result, Murdoch hasn’t let the matter slide.  He issued another warning yesterday while at the National Press Club.

"We are going to stop people like Google or Microsoft or whoever from taking stories for nothing . . . there is a law of copyright and they recognise it," Murdoch said according to Paul Harris.

The chairman and CEO of News Corp. later added, "They take [news content] for nothing.  They have got this very clever business model."

Of course, Murdoch didn’t make any fresh announcements regarding News Corp. content and pay walls, or establish any sort of timeframe for when he might do so.  So if these statements have any effect at all, they might weaken his position by highlighting the fact that Murdoch hasn’t taken action so far.

It’s possible that these comments will draw out a few more supporters, though, giving Murdoch a more defensible stance if he ever does flip the switch.  The situation will bear watching.

Google and Apple have clashed a number of times in recent months, and a Taiwanese hardware manufacturer is poised to ensure that the two companies butt heads yet again.  Asus has indicated that it will challenge the iPad with a tablet PC powered by either Android or Chrome OS.

Elizabeth Woyke talked to Asus chairman Jonney Shih and reported afterward, "Shih said one Asus tablet will likely run Google software, such as the upcoming open-source operating system, Chrome, or the mobile operating system, Android."

"There will be an Apple camp, but Asus always tries to address the open camps of Google and Microsoft," Shih explained.  He also stated, "Content will play a very important role on tablets.  The Google tablet will have a lot of media."

Considering that Android is doing rather well against the iPhone (the most recent AdMob report puts their U.S. market shares at 42 percent and 44 percent, respectively), this could be a smart move for Asus.  For Google, too.  It just seems certain that Google’s relationship with Apple will suffer as a result.

We’ll see what happens.  The new tablet PCs from Asus should debut sometime this year, and probably sooner rather than later.

February was a quiet month for the search market; we’re not going to suggest any companies either break out the champagne or fire their CEOs as a result of the small changes that took place.  Still, for those who are curious, comScore believes it was Google and Bing that came out looking like winners.

Google managed to increase its share of the U.S. search market to 65.5 percent, up from 65.4 percent in January, according to comScore’s data.  Bing, meanwhile, accomplished a more impressive feat (in overall terms, and especially in relation to its size) by grabbing 0.2 percent of market share.

That put Bing in control of 11.5 percent of the market, up from 11.3 percent the month before.

Yahoo’s share of the search market then decreased, heading from 17.0 percent to 16.8 percent.  Which is embarrassing, but not yet catastrophic, as the company’s partnership with Microsoft moves towards completion.

The interesting thing will be if Bing and Yahoo keep trading share.  Also, of course, if Google keeps increasing its dominance.  We’ll be sure to cover comScore’s next report to see if any trends have emerged.