Lots of search engine deals with Twitter this past week, first Bing, then Google.  I like Adam Ostrow’s comment at Mashable about how these deals validate Twitter’s model:  With a fresh $100 million in the bank and both Google and Microsoft implementing tweets in search, it looks like Twitter is in it for the long haul.

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!

I know a lot of businesses, including my own, that purchase keyword-driven ads on Google’s pay per click networks.  But not too many that also use Yahoo and/or Bing.  If this fits you, you might want to consider adding that extra outlet.

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.

Whoa! This just amazed me.  It’s “old” news now, but a week ago Shane ONeill reported in CIO that Bing search results were fixed.  Yes:  natural search results were manipulated to return pro-Microsoft and/or anti-Apple or anti-Google results.  You need to read this article–I’m not going to repeat the details — and it seems the problem has been ‘fixed’ — though searching Bing for ‘why is windows so expensive’ just now (evening 11 Aug) returned a #1 result whose point is ‘why are Macs expensive?’.

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.

Not long ago we talked about Microsoft the monopoly using its vast power to squash would-be competitors. Now it seems almost like poor Gulliver being tied down and lashed by the tiny knives of its Lilliputian enemies.  It just can’t get no respect.

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.

At least according to Statcounter, Bing search engine edged past Yahoo into the number 2 spot in search. This was as of June 4th, and was true both worldwide and in the US. Whether Bing will hold this position over time remains to be seen.  Of course, you need to put this in perspective:  Google is still a huge leader in search, with about 87% of search worldwide (according to Statcounter).  Here’s what the trends look like:

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.

Hope – and huge financial incentives – spring eternal. Microsoft is going to be launching its newest attempt at search on Wednesday next week when Bing goes live.

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!

I ran across a post about Microsoft’s mobile Live search and thought I’d give it a test drive (I’m usually a late adopter).   Kind of funny, kind of sad.

I decided to make it easy by dialing in and asking for services in San Luis Obispo since that’s a pretty well-known town (unlike Morro Bay which no one outside of CA has ever heard of).  After going through a minute or so of introduction, instructions, and options, the voice-activated system took me through a quick menu to find the kind of business I wanted to find — ‘restaurants’.  It asked me what kind of restaurant I wanted, and I said ‘california’ — no answer to that one.  So I tried ‘wine country’ and got the same response, and decided to let the system tell me what my options really are:  pizza, chinese, fast food, mexican, italian.  That’s a hip pocket survey of American culture right there isn’t it?

I chose Italian and we started down a numbered list — you choose by saying the number at any point.  I listened and tried #3 and got the response it didn’t have that option, and would you like to hear the list again?  So this time I picked ‘one’ and it clicked, giving me my options for ‘unna avola’  which I think means Buona Tavola, including one option to get directions.

The system did recognize ‘Morro Bay’ and it basically clicked on my home address as well!  I registered the home address and then asked for the directions:  after a few seconds, Live search announced it couldn’t find the directions at this time, and re-opened the main menu.  Square one.

By this time, I would have been half way into SLO and in the usual cell phone dead spot just north of the Cuesta campus.  I gave up.  A good idea but not well executed. I’m sure this is hard to do technically speaking, but when it doesn’t work well, people will leave for other systems.

Poor Microsoft.  It is actually facing stiff competition on lots of fronts these days.  The browser wars continue, and MSFT’s contribution to the fray is the new IE8 browser launched today at noon EDT.  You can download it for free to your Windows machine running XP or Vista.

Walt Mossberg at WSJ’s All Things Digital has has published a review of the IE8 browser.  He tested pre-release and then the final versions of it for several months, comparing its features and performance against Firefox, Chrome and Safari 4 for PC.  Bottom line:  IE8 has some great new features, but it is slow in comparison to the others.  Mossberg still rates Mozilla Firefox the best browser for Windows users.

A couple nice posts from Techcrunch here, outlining the Microsoft push into social networking (lots of money still sitting around since NOT buying Yahoo).  In this first one, Michael Arrington tells about how MSFT leveraged its user base in Windows Live Messenger (by FAR the biggest IM network) to jump start its social network at home.live.com by importing the profiles of the IM users.  Microsoft is apparently making an energetic attempt to lock in online users with a suite of online apps and web services to encourage more commitment to the brand and to get the viral push of the network.  Arrington followed up a couple days later (today, Nov 14) with a post that points at how MSFT used its connection at Facebook (remember that $240 million investment they made a while back?) to mine user information, including email addresses, to try to get more people enrolling on their new social network.  Is this in violation of Facebook’s privacy policy?  Microsoft wants to be invited to the party but they aren’t; so, they crash it. I will be very curious watching their shiny new social network evolve.

Microsoft reaches into its deep pockets to offer cash back on its comparison shopping site. A challenge to Google?

Steve Baldwin has a nice post about it over at Mediapost, with some thoughts about whether or not it moves us closer to the CPA (cost per action) holy grail.  I wanted to check this out for myself, even willing to sign up for the service by giving the Empire my name, but when I went to search.live.com and tried to click on the Cash Back image link, I got an error message.  On the actual Microsoft site.  Isn’t that perfect?