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Since Microsoft launched Bing, the company has been trying to position it as a 'decision engine' and not just as another search engine. Today, Microsoft is taking another step in this direction with the launch of Visual Search in Bing. For a growing number of searches, instead of giving users a list of 10 blue links, Bing will now give users the option to visualize the search results on a 3D grid with icons or photos. Now, for example, if you search for 'Top iPhone Apps,' Bing will not just present a list of links to other sites but also provide the option to show you those iPhone apps directly in Bing, with the added ability to filter them by price, category, or publisher.

According to Ask.com spokesperson Nicholas Graham, while companies are expected to help community organizations, it's not unheard of for these cause-related partnerships to also benefit the companies. After donating $25,000 to Autism Speaks through a targeted awareness campaign, 80,000 visitors changed their Ask home pages to Autism Speaks-related skins and 63% of campaign visitors became permanent users. Despite the fact that the promotion lasted only a few days, Ask saw a 10% increase over other holiday and non-cause related skinning promotions. In anticipation of October and Breast Cancer Awareness Month, Ask is building upon its community successes and teaming up with Susan G. Komen for the Cure in "Search for the Cure".

Bing Local Search has some interesting features you won't find in Google, so the prospect of seeing Bing listings appear on top of your iPhone's camera viewer when you point at a restaurant or business is intriguing. That's what forthcoming iPhone app RobotVision offers - and it displays a view of Tweets and Flickr photos published nearby wherever you are.

RobotVision is a new Augmented Reality (AR) app for the iPhone 3Gs. It's not available yet, but it will be as soon as AR apps are formally welcomed into the App Store by Apple, probably sometime next month. AR browsers "turn the world inside out" by exposing latent online information about your surroundings; there will soon be enough of them that they will compete based on user experience. RobotVision looks like it could be a good one.

Since the launch of Bing, watching the developments in the search engine market is finally interesting again. According to the latest data from Compete for July, Bing continues to grow slowly but surely. At the same time, though, Compete notes that Bing has not been able to convert its growing search share into a rise in paid clicks on ads on the site. In July, Bing's sponsored click rate fell slightly to 5.5%, even though in June, it still saw an impressive growth in paid clicks.

According to the results of a new survey by the American Consumer Satisfaction Index, Google's users are extremely happy with their search engine. Google scored 86 points out of a possible 100, followed by Yahoo with 77 points. It is important to note, however, that this survey was conducted before Microsoft's Bing arrived on the market, so the current numbers would probably look different. In this survey, Microsoft's Live Search received 75 points. However, while the numbers might be a bit old, they clearly show the problems Bing faces in a marketplace where most consumers are perfectly happy with Google.

Bing Shopping, the comparison shopping tool that is part of Microsoft's new search engine, saw some impressive growth last month. According to Hitwise's Heather Dougherty, visits to Bing Shopping increased 169% last month and Bing is now the 4th most popular shopping comparison site in the US. Just last month, Bing was still in 8th place. Clearly, Microsoft's marketing muscle behind Bing.com and consumer interest in Microsoft's Double Cashback promotion brought a lot of new users to Bing Shopping in June.

Earlier this morning the Internet was buzzing with news first reported by The New York Times Bits blog: Doug Cutting was leaving Yahoo. In specific, he was leaving Yahoo for Cloudera, a small startup.

Cutting was one of Yahoo's best and brightest, especially in the area of search and software infrastructure. He got to work on the largest installation of his wildly successful software Hadoop, an open source solution for dealing with huge data sets. Both Yahoo and Cloudera use Hadoop, so the work is the same on the most basic level. Why would he leave to join a 20-person team at a young company?

PCWorld and CIO.com ran a story by Shane O'Neill today alleging that Microsoft's search engine Bing returns results for certain queries that are contrary to the searcher's intent and biased in favor of Microsoft. "Why is Windows so expensive?" and "Is Microsoft evil?" are the two examples O'Neill says bring back anti-Apple and anti-Google search results.

The only problem is, that doesn't seem true. At least not anymore in our experience. While some Microsoft conspiracy theories may have some merit (European courts say so), this one either doesn't or has already been vanquished by a couple of articles on the web.

According to a recent report, Chinese netizens are twice as likely to use chat and three times more likely to micro-blog, blog and use video conference than American users. The Netpop Research study shows that mainland Chinese citizens are "more likely to share information broadly and openly." This comes as a surprise as the country's censorship has been such a topic of contention. Nevertheless, the study estimates that up to 92% of Chinese netizens use social media, meanwhile, only 76% of US netizens do the same.

Oh, the irony. One day after it was announced that Microsoft's Bing will be replacing Yahoo's own search engine on Yahoo.com, Yahoo! came out with a new local search functionality that ought to be the envy of every search engine.

Searching for local businesses on Yahoo now brings up a nice interface containing reviews, an overview, photos and driving directions inside a drop down box you can access without leaving the page you're on. It's a smoother user experience than Google or Bing offers and Yahoo may have more local business information than either of those two competitors can offer in-house as well.