First, there’s Bing.  Bing Twitter is Microsoft’s take on the up to the second data stream of tweets.  It would simply be another Twitter search, except Bing has analyzed the data stream to eliminate a lot of redundant tweets, and you can select a ‘best match’ option rather than the default ‘latest’ post option to try to boost relevancy. Bing also gives you two sets of results, first the most recent tweets themselves in chrono order, and then the most popular links within tweets.

Bing says they evaluate the authority of tweets by looking at the number of followers of the post plus the retweet pattern.  This is a beta release, so it isn’t always right on target, but it’s an interesting addition to the ever-growing world of search.

I think it helps a lot with some of the kinds of searches I might do, like reputation management for a customer.  For a really thorough and typically good treatment of this, see Danny Sullivan’s post at Search Engine Land.

Then Google makes a splashy announcement almost within a day that it has reached an agreement with Twitter to use its data in real time search results.  Google hasn’t yet rolled out how it will integrate that data into search results — might be a separate index, like Microsoft — but I think it will  have some kind of user option built into it, probably in the ‘show options’ like you have for blogs, video and so forth.  Then again, that’s probably way too easy for Google.  What will they think of next?

On that note, there’s Danny Sullivan again, this time gushing about Google Social Search:  I don’t see a lot of things that make me go “wow,” that’s useful. This did.

Google has yet another beta product here (and I do not know where in the world they get the ideas for all the stuff they roll out, but they are busy!).  The basic idea of Google Social Search is to extend the personalization of your search results by linking them to your networks of friends.

To make it work, you need a Profile set up on your Google account.  On that profile, if you list your social network accounts (especially Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn — aka the big 3), Google will recognize them and — to the extent they are visible — filter your search results through your friends.  Somehow.  I haven’t seen it done yet, but I’m looking forward to it!

In a flurry of recent back and forths over the Microsoft-Yahoo search deal, there’s been a lot of talk about the importance of scale.  The MSN and Yahoo folks think it’s ‘good’; Google tries to downplay it because of decreasing returns to scale (Google should know, shouldn’t it?).

But here’s one little piece of info that cuts through the clutter.  Advertising Age reports that Ben Edelman, who teaches at Harvard Business School, found that click prices at Yahoo were 30% cheaper than Google, and at Bing (Microsoft) 27% cheaper.

Prescription:  mercilessly cut the poorer performers at your Google account and use the money to purchase keywords that convert on Yahoo and Bing.

The important thing is, search results have to be trustworthy. Once you blow it on the trust issue, you cannot get it back.  I cannot help seeing Microsoft’s testosterone-driven culture overwhelming its thinking head here.  So stupid, so self-defeating, and most of all, so confirming of what a lot of people already think about Microsoft.

Until Bing?  The NY Times has written that Bing delivers credibility to Microsoft’s search efforts, finally, pointing to its gains in query volume since its launch in May.  Yet most of those gains seem to be coming from weaker challengers like AOL and Ask (another perennial search pretender), and the industry’s talking heads don’t think people will switch to Bing for good.  Why bother, when Google delivers the goods?

To rub salt in the wounds, Google recently announced its own frontal assault on Microsoft with its plan to develop the Chrome OS for netbooks.  Google’s language in the announcement almost seems like it’s taunting Microsoft: So today, we’re announcing a new project that’s a natural extension of Google Chrome — the Google Chrome Operating System. It’s our attempt to re-think what operating systems should be…Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system…

Google describes this as the operating system for people who spend most of their time online and invites developers to begin making applications for it.  I am betting that they will.

Sometimes I wonder at Google’s need to take it to Microsoft, but I think I get why they do.  From the user’s point of view, you want to have a framework of programs and applications that work together – interoperability is essential.  Once you begin to use a set of products that are integrated like this, you tend to keep using all of them.  There is a price to pay to use applications outside the network because it can’t have access to all your information and preferences.  Once you are inside one of these families of software, you will see the ads running there, and not somewhere else.  So both Google and Microsoft are extending their offerings and necessarily moving into the other’s space.

There’s almost no one alive who hasn’t got the message that cloud computing is the future, which seems to give a natural advantage to Google in the long run.  But no one knows for sure.  And sure enough, Microsoft continues to try to reinvent itself by moving into the web services with its Azure platform.

Then, just yesterday, Microsoft announced it would be offering light versions of its flagship applications Word and Excel as Internet-based programs to compete with Google’s successful Apps.  Here’s the leader from Marketwatch on Microsoft’s announcement:

Microsoft Corp. on Monday made the latest edition of its Office software suite available for testing and plans to make key applications such as Word and Excel available over the Web – acknowledging burgeoning competition from Internet giant Google Inc. and others.

I’m glad to see this. Letting Google define our total existence online is not a good idea, even if it were true the G didn’t “do evil.”  We need this competition — they will make each other better.

Statcounter suggests the Bing gains are at the expense of Google — the lines in the graph suggest that. Could be true. We’ll see how it holds.

MSFT has a sad history with search, slowly losing ground to Google (mostly). They’ve had some really bad decisions (what the heck was ‘live search’ supposed to do running parallel with the generic MSN search engine?) coupled with the fact that Google is good.  And Yahoo is fine.  It isn’t like people couldn’t find information on the web.

But the stakes are enormous, so here we go again.  Some early reviews talk about interesting new features that may appeal to users. For instance, the NYTimes reports that Bing will have a multi-layered search result page that will have a ‘table of contents’ that will be somewhat different for each search. It will suggest drill-down options for follow up searches to help the visitor get to what they want more quickly.

I am looking forward to trying it!