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Microsoft’s Bing search engine aims to rival Google

Microsoft stepped up its efforts to cut into the search dominance of Google, launching a public preview version of its widely praised Bing search site on Monday.

The site offers several features that are not automatically available on Google such as instant excerpts that allow users to see the contents of a page without actually clicking on it and a sidebar detailing related searches.

The Bing home page is also fancier than Google’s famously spare design and shows a picture of hot air balloons flying over a craggy desert landscape in Cappadocia, Turkey. Like Google, the page offers links to specific search categories like news, video, shopping, maps and travel, and also includes a link to Microsoft’s cash-back search rewards programme.

Microsoft currently trails far behind Google in the search market, which is the most lucrative advertising format on the internet. Google has 64 per cent of the US market, compared to 21 per cent for Yahoo and just eight per cent for Microsoft, according to recent figures from web tracking firm Comscore.

The Microsoft CEO, Steve Ballmer, first unveiled Bing last Thursday at a California technology conference and the early reactions have been very positive.

Google’s experimental Gmail Labs has many free features users can add to the e-mail service. But that doesn’t mean all of them are cutting-edge.

A Google software engineer wrote in a blog post announcing latest Labs feature: the ability to insert images directly in the body of an e-mail.

Most e-mail services have offered this capability for years, but Google Gmail users had to settle for sending images as attachments.

Now, however, once Labs users have activated the “Inserting images” feature, they can insert images in two ways, either uploading image files from their computers or pasting in an image URL.

Users can activate Labs features by enabling them within Gmail’s Settings.

US software giant Google said it had removed several images from its Street View software, which allows web surfers to view parts of 25 British cities, after users raised privacy concerns.

Street View displays 360-degree ground-level images captured by roaming cars using digital photography equipment.

The cars began taking images last summer, and continue to capture images across the country, allowing the service to expand after its launch here on Thursday.

Just 24 hours after its release in Britain, however, Google said it had removed several pictures, including ones that users found embarrassing, such as one of a man leaving a sex shop in central London’s Soho neighbourhood, or another one of a man vomiting outside a pub in the east of the British capital.

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Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft announced a joint effort to help reduce duplicate content. The three major search engines came together to allow users to point out their preferred version of a url. This format offers users more control.

Duplicate content has been a challenging issue for a long time. Websites containing a lot of content such as a retail site, could end up with several urls for each page making it difficult for search engines to crawl.

Google gives the following example on the Webmaster Central blog:

<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish” />

Simply place this link tag in the head section of the duplicate content urls.

The tag can only be used on pages within a single site. Both absolute and relative links are acceptable, but the search engines recommend absolute links. Also, links to all urls will be directed to the one preferred url.

For more information, each of the search engines have explanations and examples in their own announcements: Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft.