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%.

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.

However, is this collaboration routing around existing web standards, as promoted by the governing web body the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)? Since the news was announced, we've discovered that the W3C was not consulted about Schema.org. And given that Google dominates the search market, should we be worried that Google will control a substantial part of the markup used on webpages if - as expected - Schema.org gets significant take-up? Here's why the alarm bell should be rung...

Specifically, here are the two main issues about Schema.org which leads us to suspect this is a land grab:

1) The 3 companies - Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! - write the schemas and host them centrally. These schemas sometimes directly compete with existing open standards - such as the e-commerce markup standard GoodRelations, which has been receiving solid take-up from the likes of Best Buy. Update: Martin Hepp, creator and lead developer of GoodRelations, replied in the comments that "Google and Yahoo have confirmed that they will continue to support GoodRelations in RDFa for product and offer information."

2) Whereas open standards like GoodRelations use RDFa (a simpler version of RDF, the main markup of the W3C-sponsored Semantic Web), the Schema.org markup will use Microdata - which is a spec written by Google.

RDFa Adoption Will Suffer

Schema.org will certainly lead to a decrease in RDFa usage, which ultimately hurts the W3C's long-running push towards the Semantic Web - that is, a Web with added meaning and structure.

Over the past year, RDFa received significant take-up from large companies like Facebook and Best Buy. It's particularly notable that Facebook used RDFa in its Open Graph protocol. Facebook is Google's main competitor in the social Web, so Schema.org could also be viewed as a competitive move by Google against Facebook.

Simply put, the argument here is that Schema.org is a strong push by Google (and less so Microsoft and Yahoo!) to be in centralized control of key aspects of Web markup - at the expense of W3C open standards. As Web data becomes more and more structured, we have to question any moves by a large, influential company that may put it in a position of control over that data.

Indeed, last year we raised the same questions about Facebook's Open Graph. Because although Facebook used RDFa, they used their own custom version of it. Despite this, both Facebook and the W3C argued that the Open Graph would actually help the adoption of RDFa.

Why Did Schema.org Choose Microdata Over RDFa?

ReadWriteWeb has learned of rumors that Yahoo! wanted RDFa to be a core component of Schema.org, but that Google and Microsoft insisted on Microdata. Why is that?

Microdata is the markup specification written by Google on which Schema.org is based. It's similar to RDFa, in that it adds semantics to HTML in order to provide more structure to Web markup.

Google explained the Schema.org decision to use Microdata over RDFa on a Google Webmaster Central help page:

"Historically, we've supported three different standards for structured data markup: microdata, microformats, and RDFa. Instead of having webmasters decide between competing formats, we've decided to focus on just one format for schema.org. In addition, a single format will improve consistency across search engines relying on the data. There are arguments to be made for preferring any of the existing standards, but we've found that microdata strikes a balance between the extensibility of RDFa and the simplicity of microformats, so this is the format that we've gone with."

That explanation makes logical and business sense, but even so we have to ask why Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! chose to route around the W3C supported standard of RDFa.

There is some politics happening here, because Microdata is sponsored by a non-W3C work group called Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG), which was formed in 2004 in response to the perceived slow development of web standards at W3C.

Is This a Land Grab by Google? You Tell Us...

Regardless of the politics, there is a real danger that Google in particular will come to control a significant part of Web markup through Schema.org.

While it is a positive sign that the major search companies are pushing for more structured data, the big question is about control. Why isn't Schema.org using RDFa, the W3C open standard, as the base for its schemas? Does Google now have too much influence over the future of structured data? We'd love to hear your thoughts about these important issues regarding the future of the Web.

There are no major surprises here. The app gives you access to the majority of Google's standard mobile search features (search suggestions, access to your search history, local search etc.) that are also available on the iPhone and Android, with the notable exception of voice search. This is an interesting omission, especially given that Google has recently made voice recognition a focal point of its mobile apps. Microsoft's Bing-powered built-in search engine features voice search and is obviously deeply integrated into the user experience on Microsoft's own operating system.

If you have a Windows Phone 7 device already, you can download the app by searching for "Google Search" in the Marketplace. The app is available for free.

While Chitika's data puts Bing at a paltry 0.58%, the actual number is probably quite a bit higher. As Chitika's research director Daniel Ruby told us, this data only represents Web traffic from Safari. The native Bing app for the iPhone does not send a referral URL, so it is almost impossible to fully understand its impact on Bing's iPhone traffic. He estimates that the "real" number for Bing is somewhere between 1% and 4% (though we would guess that it's at the lower end of this scale).

Using Secure Search

To access this new feature, head to https://www.google.com. Google, however, is only rolling this feature out slowly, so it might not be available for you yet. It's also important to point out that this secure connection is only available for the main Google Search page right now. Searches on Google Maps and Image Search are not encrypted at this time and links to these unencrypted services won't appear on the secure Google Search site.

It is worth noting that Google itself just got into hot water by "accidentally" gathering data from on unencrypted Wi-Fi connections while collecting WiFi data for StreetView and its geolocation API. Google itself, of course, will still collect data about your search history and use it to personalize its own ads and services accordingly.

Now, Google will put a virtual keyboard next to the search bar on 35 non-English versions of its search engine. This will make it a lot easier for Google's users to search in their native languages, even if they are using a standard keyboard that is meant to be used for writing in English, for example. You can find a full list of the 35 supported languages here.

If your language isn't supported yet (there are no virtual keyboards for Nepali and Scottish Gaelic yet, for example), you can vote for your own language here.

In addition, Google is also rolling out smarter corrected spellings for names. As Google notes, people often search for names, but don't know the exact spelling. Now, whenever you add a person's profession, affiliation or other related keywords to an approximation of this person's name, Google will offer better suggestions and more useful spelling corrections.

This feature, too, is currently only available in the U.S., though Google plans to roll it out in other parts of the world within the next few months.

Auto-Correction for 31 Additional Languages

Google is also rolling out auto-corrected spellings for 31 additional languages. These auto-corrections kick in whenever a user misspells a common word. For uncommon misspellings, Google will still give you a link to the corrected search results behind a link that says "Did you mean: ReadWriteWeb."

Whenever Google feels confidents that the auto-corrected version is what you were really looking for, the search engine bypasses the link and just drops you off on a search results page that is based on the correct spelling.

According to the interview, Bing is looking at becoming a "credible No. 2" as soon as Microsoft closes a deal with Yahoo, making Bing the backbone for Yahoo search. We do see a few areas where Bing has been gaining ground and wonder if Microsoft may be able to come back out of the red.

"The nice thing is we can say (to advertisers) you can be close to 30 percent share in one easy buy," Mehdi told Reuters. "Clearly there's a huge return in the search marketplace that can more than make up the investments we've put in to this point."

In addition to the Yahoo partnership, Microsoft has been in talks recently with Apple about becoming the default search engine on the iPhone. We looked at this scenario last week and found that Bing looks to potentially gain up to 50% of iPhone traffic were it to take over Google's default spot. At the same time, we also noted data from Hitwise, which showed that Bing had actually lost market share recently.

Image courtesy of Business Insider's "Chart of the Day".

To enable Google Search in Gmail, go to Gmail Labs and look for "Google Search" (around the middle of the page).

Great for Users, But What About the Sites that Supply these Answers?

For users, this is a nice step forward as it makes it easier and faster to get the answer you are looking for. It will, however, be interesting to see how website owners will react to this change. After all, if you don't need to click through to the site to get the answer, the site that produced the content won't be able to benefit from Google's traffic.

Also New: Rich Snippets for Events

In addition to this change, Google also announced that it is introducing rich snippets for events. Rich snippets allow webmasters to annotate their pages with structured data that can then be displayed in the search results. In the case of events, Google could, for example, display upcoming events at a theater or concert hall right on the search results page.

While Mayer expects the search market to continue to grow, she also thinks that a lot of additional growth can come from introducing new ways of searching the web. Translation and personalization are also a major issue for Google.

Asked about SearchWiki - which Arrington considers a failure - Mayer said that Google wants to morph the user experience a bit, but didn't go into any details.

Regarding the Google Goggles and Google's current dependency on text to power its search, Mayer noted that the application looks at more than just location data and image recognition algorithms. Speech recognition, however, is still easier to do for Google than image recognition.

Mobile Search

Talking about mobile searches, Mayer said that the number of mobile searches doubled last year. Mobile searches make up slightly more than 5% of all of the search queries that Google processes.

Chrome and the ChromeOS

With regards to Chrome, Mayer noted that Google wants to focus on the user experience with features like the new tab page. She described the ChromeOS as an anti-operating system. In total, Google sees "tens of millions of Chrome users," though characteristically, Mayer did not go into any details.

Google and the News Media

Google wants to increase users' engagement with news. According to Mayer, if we were to reinvent the news today, it would look very different from what we know today. She cited Google Living Stories as an experiment that tries to reinvent the news for the 21st century.

Currently, readers tend to come to articles from Google and only read one article. To increase engagement, Mayer wants to create more personalized services. In addition, she also thinks that newspapers can do a better job at keeping users on their sites. Why, for example, do most sites not offer links to related articles?

The Future of News

Mayer's vision of the future of news is a personalized stream of news that is portable. The personalization would take into account stories that your friends read, location and a knowledge of the topics a user is interested in. Asked about Rupert Murdoch, Mayer noted that Google partnered with MySpace to aggregate real-time status updates from MySpace users. She hopes that Murdoch will not pull all of his content out of Google.

Surprisingly, Mayer didn't completely deny that Google would be willing to pay publishers for their content.

Music Search

Mayer said that she was happy with Google Music as a start, especially because it includes song lyrics. Mayer sidestepped any discussion about the future of Google's Music search feature.

Google and Social Networks

Asked about Google Social Search, Mayer noted that search can help social networks by helping users to find experts in their circle of friends. Mayer noted that users are more likely to trust their friends when it comes to certain queries (snow conditions, for example). The perfect search engine would also be able to crawl private updates that a user is credentialed to see.

Mayer also noted that Google might be able to help to create an authority ranking system for real-time updates from services like Twitter and Facebook.

Google Wave

Arrington asked Mayer if users need to be trained better to understand Wave or if Google plans to tweak the experience. Permanent URLs are one of the features that Google plans to add. The fact that Google Wave doesn't have critical mass yet is also hindering the experience. Some teams at Google are currently using Wave for their internal communication. Mayer did not make any announcement regarding the future of Wave.

Yahoo Search continues its steady decline. Yahoo Search lost another 1% market share last month and has now lost a total of 5% since September 2008 when it still owned 18.8% of the market according to Compete. The total search volume on Yahoo was down 8% and Yahoo served 100 million less queries in September than August.

Google, Ask and AOL Hold Steady

Google's market share grew slightly from 72.3% to 72.6%, while Ask and AOL remained stable. Based on this data, Bing seems to be eating into Yahoo's market share, but isn't growing at Google's expense.

Searches Per Day

Compete's Marko Madjarac points out that Bing's numbers are even more impressive when we take into account that Bing's users tend to perform fewer searches on the service (5 searches per user per day) than Google's users (5.6 searches). Bing apparently lives up to its promise to get users to relevant answers faster than any other search engine. Yahoo users performed an average of 7.8 searches per day.

Update: According to Google, "the removal appears to be an internal error and not part of a DMCA request."

According to Chilling Effects, a clearinghouse for DMCA takedown notices, the complaint was apparently sent by an adult entertainment company, Gwen Media's Destined Enterprises, which has filed similar complaints with Google before. According to TorrentFreak, the complaint was sent by RemoveYourContent, a company that specializes in sending out DMCA complaints for the adult entertainment industry.

For the time being, the effect of this takedown notice is that PirateBay.com, a scam site that really shouldn't appear in Google's index, now sits at the top of the search results.

It's important to note, though, that this is far from the first time that Google has deleted search results after receiving takedown notices. To the best of our knowledge, however, this is the first time a well-known site like the Pirate Bay has been affected by this.