Bing now commands 15.1% of the search market, while Yahoo has dropped to 14.5%. It's not even a full percentage point, but this is the first time Yahoo has been ousted by Microsoft for that #2 slot behind Google.

Bing has a long way to go before being considered a serious competitor to Google, but its growth is still noteworthy. It may be hard to believe, but Bing was only launched in mid-2009. The product was essentially a rebranding of Microsoft's existing search engine, which trailed well behind Yahoo at that point.

Not content to remain at below 10% of the search market, Microsoft launched Bing in a bid to more aggressively compete with Google, whose search engine had risen to dominate 65% of the search market by 2009. In addition to sporting a simplified user interface and improved performance, Bing was also found to be closely emulating Google's own search results.

Almost as rapid as Bing's growth has been Yahoo's decline. The company has been struggling for a few years to figure out what kind of business it is in a world dominated by Google. When Microsoft launched its new search engine in 2009, Yahoo commanded 20% of the search market. It has fallen five percentage points since then while Microsoft has increased its own market share by 7%.

Jon Mitchell has details on Your Way, but in a nutshell, the new service better integrates Google+ content into Google search. That could have some looking for more objective ways to search, while also raising the ire of some big Web players.

All of this could play well for Bing. Since 2009, the number three search engine has had a partnership with Twitter similar to the one that lapsed with Google last summer. Since the Google agreement expired, it is now easier to find tweets in Bing via realtime searches than it is in Google. At the time of the breakup in July, it was unclear which side walked away, but Bing was quick to renew its ties with Twitter and strike a similar deal with Facebook.

Yesterday's news doesn't put Bing any closer to become a verb, but the search engine was running second to Google with 15.1% of the market in December (it's a distance third, as Google still controlled 65.9%, according to ComScore). In a keynote address at the Consumer Electronics Show this week, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said Bing, in conjunction with Yahoo!, now controlled 30 percent of the U.S. search market.

The fallout from search isn't the only reason why Bing may get a boost this year. The company has improved integration of Bing with Xbox and Kinect, which helps Microsoft grab a younger demographic when gamers move their search activity online from their consoles. Bing has also been working to improve its mobile offerings, releasing a much-imtpoved Bing app for Android and iOS5.

But perhaps the biggest indication that Bing is worth paying attention to came from Google itself, when it paid $900 million to Mozilla to be the default search engine in Firefox for the next three years.

Those changes, along with a newly-awarded patent for a feature that allows Bing Maps to route pedestrians away from unsafe neighborhoods, suggest Mcirosoft is driving to surpass Google Maps, which has dominated the space since surpassing MapQuest in site traffic and queries in 2008.

The changes that have been launched build off of a Microsoft Research presentation at the 10th International Symposium on Experimental Algorithms last May. Those tweaks could be significant because they can incorporate new metrics in a few seconds: fast enough, the paper's abstract noted, "to support real-time traffic updates and personalized optimization functions."

The newly enhanced mapping service also allows users to select up to three routes in a single directions request. That's similar to a feature Google Maps has offered for quite some time, but the recently-upgraded Bing pinpoints potential traffic problems and suggests quicker alternatives.

For example, a trip from Somerville, Mass., where I am typing this post, to South Boston - on the exact opposite side of downtown Boston and peak rush hour traffic - will take 17 to 19 minutes, depending what route I choose, according to Google Maps. Bing, on the other hand, also tells me the 6.6-mile trip will take about 15 minutes. But when I click on a link that lets me view the route based on traffic, Bing serves up real-time traffic conditions, showing construction delays and details and tells me in all likelihood the trip will probably take closer to 22 minutes.

To be fair, the Google Maps results incorporate traffic data as well, but the Bing upgrade makes those traffic problems more obvious by displaying them directly on the map.

A screenshot from a Bing Map route request showing real-time traffic conditions in downtown Boston during rush hour on Jan. 5, 2012.

Both sites trail far behind Google, which holds onto more than 65% of the market. While that position isn't threatened by any other search engine, it's interesting to note how quickly Bing has risen in the last few years.

It also doesn't hurt that Yahoo has been shifting its attention to things other than search and continues to struggle to figure out which endeavors would best support its business in the future.

ComScore's numbers didn't include mobile search traffic, but that will certainly be a trend to watch moving forward. Between Android's massive market share and Google's position as the default search engine on Safari for iOS, the current market leader on desktops is sure to remain dominant on mobile devices for quite some time, even if Apple does move away from Google at some point.

The mobile search game is one area where Google and Apple don't compete directly. Microsoft has a worthwhile mobile OS in Windows Phone 7, but best of luck to them in challenging both iOS and Android.

Venkat Balasubramani writes about this bizarre case Eric Goldman's technology and law blog. He asks why the case was took place in Nevada, and asks why not one of the 228 websites were able to say something in their defense. It is unclear whether all of these sites are even registered in the United States.

Chanel makes luxury goods and is concerned about counterfeiting. It has gone after counterfeit websites and seized approximately 600 domain names. A November 14 order added an additional 228 names to that list, including sites hahabags.net and cheapchanelbagsoutlet.net.

In the past day, seizures like this have occurred on the popular file-hosting service MegaUpload. Yesterday, on Cyber Monday, the government seized 100+ domain names in order to "protect the commercial interests of US companies."

And this is all happening while SOPA, the bill that would severely censor the Internet, is still up for debate.

Some sites that have been taken down aren't even registered in the U.S. In order to take down a site, Operation In Our Sites must obtain a seizure warrant foam a federal judge. The domain names are then re-directed to display a seizure notice.

Image via MyStuffSpace.com.

The update adds a split view for maps and lists, making it easy to see the locations of search results. The Android version now features transit routing and real-time transit news, previously only available on Bing's mobile site. The iPhone version gets Bing's mobile Web video content, which launched on the Web version last month. The update also adds Bing Deals to the search experience, an interesting move that adds a revenue stream for Microsoft and a convenience for consumers.

Curiously, Microsoft's update to its search app isn't yet available for Windows Phone 7, but that's the way the smartphone market is going, we guess.

The inclusion of Bing Deals is an interesting move from a business perspective. The Dealmap, which once partnered with Microsoft on Bing Deals, has since been bought by Google, and now Google is trying to close the deal on mobile search, local business listings and daily deals. Apple is also building Siri - its mobile voice assistant - to search Yelp for local businesses, bypassing both Google and Bing.

Today's Bing update shows that all the major mobile platforms see the need to get ahead on connecting users to local businesses. Search is an ad-supported business, and mobile, location-based search is where all the value is.

Read more about the update on the Bing blog.

What do you think of the new Bing app?

Sometimes it's difficult to catch every story that hits tech media in a day, so we thought it might be helpful to wrap up some of the most talked about stories. Assuming this goes over well, we're going to give you a daily recap of what you missed in the ReadWriteWeb Community, including a link to some of the most popular discussions in our offsite communities on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google Plus as well. This is a new feature at ReadWriteWeb so we covet your feedback. If you have suggestions, please leave them in the comments below or reach out to me directly at robyn at readwriteweb.com.

Many of you expressed a significant lack of interest at the fact that your Klout score may have dropped recently. However, due to the veracity of your non-feelings, we thought it might be fun to wrap up your responses.

Whether this relates to your feelings about Klout specifically, or if you just have too many other things to occupy your brain than a popularity metric, I'm not sure. At least one of you thought the apathy was a bit manufactured.

One of the best comments I saw put it all into context:

Since many of us at ReadWriteWeb were interested in why the scores decreased but did not feel overly excited one way or the other once we knew the reason, we'll take your word for it. Perhaps the scores themselves are much less important than the relative placement of a profile within the Klout ecosystem.

Blogging Is So Over: Jux Comes To The iPad

Jux made the leap to the iPad today, and the app is gorgeous. While some of you experienced intermittent issues with the site, due to server overload, the overall impressions were mostly favorable from the ReadWriteWeb community.

Android version requested, stat!

Still reading?

Then read on and check out some of the other stories you shouldn't miss from today:

Microsoft's Bing Partners with Mozilla's Firefox

Found App Impresses Without Tracking and Check-Ins

Nokia's Lumia Windows Phones Not Coming to U.S. in 2011 and more Nokia news from today here and here

Twitter Embraces Its Social Role in TV

Do You Know Your Neighbor? Nextdoor Wants to Make Sure You Do

Who Are The Top Tech Lobbying Firms?

What Mobile Businesses Can Learn From Spanish Consumers

Who Creates High-Tech Wealth in Africa? The Case For (& Against) Government and more reporting from Kenya today

RIM on the Next PlayBook OS: 'We're Still Working on It'

Can the iPad Save Magazines and Newspapers After All?

Skype Launches Expanded App Platform, Aims High With New Video Calling & More API Offerings

Mint.com's New iPad App Offers Better Engagement

Interested in a chance to win an iPad? Send in your question, by October 31, 2011, for our next Live Chat coming up on 11/1 at 10:00am PST. The topic? Intelligence Matters: Virtualize your Business Critical Workloads with Confidence (rules)

What does it mean for Google, Google's partnership with Firefox, Firefox, Chrome and Bing? Time will tell if it means anything and that's probably largely dependent on how far and wide such a custom browser gets used. It could be a good backup though in case Firefox's biggest revenue partner, Google, decided to focus all of its support on its own browser.

Still, there's something that feels heavy about this.

Firefox, of course, was born and lived with Google's help mostly to wrestle control of the browser market away from Microsoft and IE. Even if aliens (or agents of apocalypse) came and abducted all the people who work for Mozilla right now, the world would still forever be a better place for all they've done to push the envelope for technical standards and choice.

Some studies indicate that in blind tests, Bing actually outperforms Google. (Update: Google called me on this claim and upon trying to reproduce the specifics all I could come up with was this very small test. Sorry about that, I take it back.) Its market positioning has been as a second rate option, though, something Firefox runs the risk of becoming in the eyes of people who value Google Chrome's performance above all else. Maybe the Firefoxes of the future plus Bing in the search bar will be a whole new experience for users and will win back hearts and minds for both vendors.

Maybe it's no big deal, though. Just another option.

Microsoft's investment with Facebook has always been strong - they were one of the early investors in the social platform, so Bing has been able to freely integrate with Facebook as they please.

The new Bing Translation feature on Facebook pages is yet another step toward Facebook's bigger goal: to make the Web fully focused on social search.

Do you use Bing social search? How do you think Facebook's new translation service will affect Facebook's global reach?

The app allows participants to post status updates, and it displays their locations on a map, though they can tap 'leave' at any time and stop sharing their location. When the event expires, everything gets automatically cleaned up, and location sharing stops. It's kind of like Glympse but with group messaging features. We're In is currently only available for Windows Phone users in the U.S., but the post says the team is "working on bringing this app to more devices."

Google could integrate its calendars, maps and Huddle group messaging into a service like this. Facebook could combine events, Facebook Places, and its new Messenger app, which already has the location-sharing features. But neither of those Web giants could close the loop before Microsoft stepped in today.

As far as the platform, while Windows Phone 7 does not currently have much market share, an upcoming new OS version and new hardware from Nokia has the potential to stand out starkly from Android and iOS.

What do you think? Does We're In sound useful?

This is honestly the kind of thing I can imagine using and I can imagine other people using it too. "I often cannot find my way out of Baby Gap," confirms ReadWriteWeb's Dan Rowinski. Mall navigation is a serious problem genuine inconvenience that mobile technology ought to solve.

Malls of the Future

Someday indoor maps will probably be ubiquitous. A base level of place data that will be built on even further; mall messaging, store-created mobile experiences and other technologies are likely. For now it looks like a very handy innovation as is.

What will mobile retail look like further down the road? Some interesting perspective is available from marketing agency White Horse Design's recent research report titled "The Future of In-Aisle Mobile: A Framework for Consumer-Centered Innovation."

"Mobile's role in the overall in-aisle customer experience is at a very early period in its evolution... some retailers are beginning to recognize the importance of the mobile context as an opportunity to deliver richer digital experiences directly to the consumer in the right place (in-aisle) and at the right time (in a browsing/buying frame of
mind)...

Awareness is growing that retailers have been excluded from the hidden conversations happening within their aisles: conversations with both external agents (both competitive and informational), as well as with consumers' own personal advisors, brought invisibly with them into the stores through text messages, micro-blogs, and location-based networks. These hidden conversations create an imperative to monitor, engage, and ultimately influence the in-aisle experience. Retailers can do so by leveraging the advantages inherent to the contexts they do control: physical place (macro and micro, wall, and shelf), and announced opportunity (shopping occasions)...

To the extent that retailers' failure to create a welcoming in-aisle mobile experience stems
from a false belief that in-aisle mobile usage is only for price checking (which just favors
discounters), our data contradicts that perception."

(Disclosure: I am a member of one of White Horse's advisory boards but haven't mentioned the report here until it was relevant. See also PSFK's recent Future of Retail report, which I was also consulted for.)

Starting today, if you perform a search on a particular category, Google will display some of the most popular and referenced items within that category. It will also include the three top sources of this information.

The improvements here aren't just about suggested links in broad categories. Google also says that, if applicable, related searches will display images. If you search for an artist like Van Gogh, for example, a selection of his artwork will show up at the bottom of the page. Similarly, if you search for a film, the related search will include cast members.

On the front-end, this should make finding related material easier for users. And behind the scenes, the technology isn't entirely new. Google has accomplished this with its Google Squared technology, something it introduced into Google Labs in 2009. Google explains the process as such:

"To better understand and answer your searches for a list, we use a variety of signals to assess what the web collectively thinks are the most significant items associated with your search keywords. Since Plato is discussed so frequently in pages about Greek philosophers, our algorithms can infer that he is an important Greek philosopher."

As this work is based on common search patterns and is another example where Google's algorithms try to predict what it is we're actually looking for (or at least what Google thinks we should be looking for).

With Bing's app discovery feature, normal Web searches will also return results for popular iPhone applications, even if you don't specifically say "iPhone app" or "mobile app" or something similar in the text of your query.

That means a search for Facebook, for instance, will return the Facebook iPhone app, while a search for a movie may return apps like IMDb or Fandango.

When you explicitly search for iPhone apps, like a search for "top apps," a category search or a search for a particular app name, the results will also include direct links to the app's download page.

Not Just Integration with Bing Search Results, Search Within Apps, Too

The most interesting aspect of this new feature is Bing's ability to actually launch your iPhone apps for you, from the search results. If you have the app installed on your iPhone already, in some cases, Bing will be able to launch the app and take you directly to the search results within the app itself.

In the example posted on Microsoft's Bing Search blog, a query for "Thor 3D" provides a link to IMDb, as usual. But for those with IMDb installed, clicking "download" opens up the app on your iPhone, with a "Thor 3D" query already in place.

This is a unique use case for Bing, where it's positioned as an app that aims to replace or augment the more basic app search options built right into the iPhone itself.

Microsoft Building for iPhone Users

It's not unusual these days to see Microsoft build specifically for the iPhone. It's already the maker of several iOS applications including OneNote, Windows Live Messenger, Photosynth, Tag Reader Bing and others. Notably, though, it has yet to launch a native Office for iPhone app.

This is also not the first time Microsoft has attempted to leverage the iPhone's popularity for its own ends: in 2009, Microsoft promoted its new Visual Search feature, which lets you search by flipping through pictures, as yet another tool for iPhone app discovery.

But Bing builds for other mobile devices, too, besides iPhone. For example, this week Bing also launched an update to its mobile browser website at m.bing.com, which supports iPhone, Android and RIM devices running HTML5-compatible browsers. The update brings new features like Facebook sharing options, a news section for U.S. users, split views for maps, search history and trends and more.

In other words, why it initially may be attention grabbing to say "Microsoft" and "iPhone" in the same sentence - (How did this headline work for you, by the way? We had a little fun with that.) - it's not odd, nor is it even a new move by Microsoft to build things for iPhone users. It's just business as usual.

Data marketplaces are hot and likely to get hotter. Place, space, time and streaming are all key characteristics in an increasing number of data sets of interest. OnTerra's map app works in conjunction with Bing Maps. Bing has partnered with OnTerra on a number of mapping projects over the past several years. In January OnTerra released a service called MapSavvy WMS that helps business and security customers to capture web imagery of Bing Maps for a low subscription price.

One of Forrester analyst James Staten's top ten cloud predictions for 2011 was that a growing number of companies would begin using Windows Azure DataMarket to sell their data. Nine months ago, though, the marketplace had 77 data sets and today that number is only up to 91. Data sets available to subscribers of the service include contributions by Wolfram Alphra, ESRI, the World Bank, InfoChimps and the Microsoft Utility Rate Service.

A handy app for mapping those data sets sounds like a valuable addition to the service and a helpful competitive differentiator in an increasingly crowded market of data marketplaces.

This will change the way people design websites, it will change the way people do search marketing, it will change a lot of things. It should be very, very interesting.

Above, a screenshot of the kind of search results Google has displayed since offering its Rich Snippets markup documentation. In this case, it will be easy to know what the cooking time for this recipe is because "cookTime" is one of 10 standardized fields in the recipe schema under schema.org, so there's one standardized way to communicate cook time for a recipe and every third party indexing a recipe Web page will know what the cooking time is immediately.

Bing says of the project:

"We've made great progress on the technical front to begin to model the real world from the messy bits of data scattered across the web. Things like movies have benefitted from this work. We're now able to understand 'Casablanca' is a movie and literally mine the web to re-assemble information about that movie from millions of sites.

But we think we can do better. We want to enable publishers to give us hints about what things they are describing on their sites. Rather than rely solely on machine learning and other AI techniques, we asked "what if we could enable publishers to have a single schema they could use to describe their sites that all search engines could understand?...We at Bing see this as a major step forward for the web, simplification for webmasters and richer more informative search results for consumers. As search continues to evolve from finding links to taking action, we're excited about the potential this new system provides."

Here's how I understand such work: technical standards like standardized markup for content types allows search engines and other sites to skip spending time and work figuring out what kind of content is on a page and move directly to the stage of doing something interesting with that content.

It's not easy for a Web service to know that a page is about food, or wine or a movie - but if all pages that are communicate that in a standard fashion, then 3rd parties like search engines can proceed directly to building beautiful food, wine and movie search results pages or other services that present the content in a more compelling fashion. That could make searching more pleasurable and useful and ultimately drives more traffic to the most useful and best formatted sites in the search results.