Technology Slice Blog

Microsoft Bing Gains on Google - Microsoft Bing has gained some ground in the search engine war, according to the latest statistics from ComScore. The figures show that Microsoft gained 0.3%, while Google and Yahoo each dropped 0.1%. AOL moved to the bottom of the most popular five engines, losing 0.1% to take 2% of the market. "More than 16 billion explicit core searches were conducted in November," ComScore said in a statement. "Google sites ranked first with 10.6 billion searches, followed by Yahoo sites in second with 2.6 billion, and Microsoft sites in third with 1.9 billion." But despite Bing's recent successes, it has a long way to go before it can challenge Google, which was introduced a variety of features including Google Instant to help increase traffic. Microsoft Bing Gains on Google

Microsoft Bing Mobile App - Microsoft unveiled a slew of new mobile, local, travel and social-media features for Bing in an effort to make the search engine more competitive with search-industry leader Google. One new feature aimed at social media fans is the option to rank search results based on what a Bing user's friends have "liked" on Facebook. Microsoft also updated its Bing mobile apps -- for smart phones such as the iPhone, Android and Windows Phone 7 handsets -- to enable users to make reservations using the popular OpenTable service or order takeout using Grubhub, all from within the app. Once checked in to a restaurant using OpenTable, a Bing app user can then "check in" at the restaurant using social-media location services such as Foursquare and Facebook Places. Microsoft Bing Mobile App Another new location-based feature for the Bing apps are reminders that users can set to pop up on their smart phones when Bing recognizes that its near ...