Tomorrow, the service will ramp things up a notch when its "pro" version launches. For $5 per month, Wolfram Alpha Pro will allow users to do way more with its data, as well as enable them to upload their own. The premium offering will be discounted for students and enterprise users.

The value offered by Wolfram Alpha Pro is two-fold, and it sits at both ends of the query process. First, users can upload their own data sets and have the service crunch through it for them, try to understand it and built out reports and graphs that previously could have taken them hours in Excel or elsewhere. In addition to text, you can even input images and get a detailed report about their visual characteristics.

Second, once a report is built - be it from Wolfram's data or your own - you can export the end results, images and all. This allows you to take the data analysis one step further using whatever other tools you want, effectively open-sourcing Wolfram Alpha's results. You can also turn charts and graphs into interactive versions of themselves. The Verge put together a detailed, hands-on overview of Wolfram Alpha Pro that is well worth checking out.

The potential these features have for people like journalists, business owners and Web analytics professionals is enormous. Just plug in a spreadsheet or other data set and let the knowledge engine work its computational magic. So much of the heavy lifting is shifted over to Wolfram Alpha's servers, freeing up the individual to spend time understanding the information, more easily spotting important trends and deciding if any further analysis is needed.

The premium plan is the latest part of the company's monetization strategy, which to date has included paid mobile apps, licensing of its API to third parties and various enterprise services.

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%.

When the deal expired in November, it gave rise to speculation that Google might not renew it, which would deprive Firefox of about 84% of its annual revenue. That possibility seemed bolstered by the fact that Google's Chrome was said to have recently ousted Firefox as the number two browser on the market. An end to the deal could have put the future of Firefox in jeopardy, although some thought the ominous predictions were overblown.

When the original deal was signed in 2008, Google was only getting started with Chrome, which then grew to be a significant player in the browser market.

Still, Firefox is used by millions of people and Google still wants a piece of that action. If the Google deal were to expire, it's conceivable that Microsoft could swoop in and replace it with Bing, handing a significant chunk of the browser market share over to one of Google's chief competitors.

Whatever Google would gain by pulling the financial rug out from beneath Firefox would be overshadowed by it losing even a few points in the search market, which is where most of Google's revenue comes from.

Google has marketed Chrome as a speedier, more secure browser and capitalized on the familiarity people already have with the Google brand and its products. In the beginning of the month, at least one firm who's counting said Chrome had eclipsed Firefox as the #2 browser behind Internet Explorer for the first time ever. These numbers vary from source to source, but there's no denying that Chrome is growing fast. Even so, the company behind it evidently sees no reason to try and bury Firefox even further at this stage of the game.

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.

Voluntary attempts to conform to government demands while maintaining the freedom of speech found in their originating culture, have proven unsuccessful for companies like Google, Cisco, Microsoft and Yahoo, who have made the push into China and other rigidly-policed tech environments. The analysts say the problem is getting worse.

In the report, members of think tank SecDev Group come down hardest on search engines for bending to rules imposed on them in order to maintain the security of the Chinese state.

These practices include surveilling and monitoring Web use and acquiescing to demands to remove content that "offends" the sensibilities of the 450 million Chinese using the Web.

Here is a map from the report that shows the connectivity of control.

Google, the world's largest search engine, tried to put up a fight against the nanny tactics of China, but even that company renewed its license recently. It now operates its servers in Hong Kong and routes Chinese search traffic through them.

Reports like these have been coming out for many years. In 2005, for instance, Yahoo was taken to task for letting local subsidiary Alibaba turn over the name and email credentials of a Chinese journalist, Shi Tao, after the government there demanded answers. Each new report gives the impression that Western companies must give away much of the cultural standards and ethical codes of conduct they practice in other parts of the world, as soon as they set up camp in authoritarian regimes.

Rebecca MacKinnon, a former CNN journalist and well-known free Internet advocate cautions that while the urge to slide into China is strong, social networking companies may not be doing this kind of thing just to obey Chinese rulers. The recent changes, she says, are likely just an attempt to mimic the success of Google+ Circles.

"Facebook does a lot of things that are not the best thing for free speech or dissent, because their success as a business is more important to the company than being a platform for free speech or political activism," she says. MacKinnon , who just wrote a book on Internet censorship called "Consent of the Networked", and has a Ted Talk about the topic featured at the book's site.

Facebook did not respond to a request for comment sent to their press department.

Map image of Asia connectivity comes from the SecDev Group report

PostPo.st thinks that it has come up with the solution. When you sign up for the service PostPost will determine 200 of your most relevant follows and index up to 400 tweets for each user. If some of the people you follow are also PostPost users then nearly all of their tweets will indexed. PostPo.st attempts to be as comprehensive a Twitter search engine that exists today.

"Tweets are often terse. Especially those with links in them," Noble said. "In order to account for that, we index not only the Tweets themselves, but also key parts of target pages. So, a search for "tsunami" can bring back Tweets that are about the 'tsunami' even though they don't have the word 'tsunami' in them. Here's an example."

PostPo.st stops the number of relevant followers at 200 because it is following Dunbar's Number, the theoretical limit of the number of people with whom any one person can maintain a significant social relationship. This does two things: A) attempts to bring you the most relevant search results and B) takes a significant load off of PostPo.st's servers. If PostPost did not truncate the number of relevant followers and tweets it indexes it would not provide the useful information that you are looking for and every search that you do the engine would be crawling everybody you follow and all their tweets. The end result would be a very poor search result.

The interface of PostPo.st is not unlike a historical version of social media aggregator Storify that just went to public beta this week. If a user has posted a picture with a tweet, PostPo.st will open that picture in the search timeline the same way that Storify does when manually curating feeds. A good example of this was adult magazine Penthouse, which signed up for the service April 27 and tweeted a picture tweet search history for adult star Nikki Benz (no nudity, mostly safe for work).

For those that do a lot of user research (like corporate community managers, for instance), the more powerful the search tool, the more useful it is. PostPo.st has the potential to be the de facto Twitter search tool. It also looks like it might have a business plan through the use of its API and plans for smartphone applications. PostPo.st could license its API to a mobile developer to be the search smarts for an application, bring relevant and rich media to Twitter search results on the go.

You can now try Instant Search for Twitter, Bing, Wikipedia, Flickr or iTunes, or just head to the new site Instantise to find links to 16 instant search apps inspired by Google's innovation last week.

Ideal for non-text searches

The format is especially effective for search engines that depend on text queries to find images and videos. Text and natural language queries are still most effective when searching for documents. But if you want to search for a video using words, shifting results as you type provides instant feedback on how to refine the query.

YouTube Instant starts playing videos as you type your query - way more fun than trying to guess which of the similarly-named and sometimes fake videos that pop up is the one you want. Its creator, Feross Aboukhadijeh, announced the launch on Hacker News. It abruptly went viral and two days later, YouTube offered Aboukhadijeh a job. (Which also encouraged some people to build instantization searches as resume-builders or in hopes of getting a job - see here, here and here.)

Stephen Ou had the idea for iTunes Instant because the iTunes search is too slow, too clustered and too complicated to view. Google's Instant Search and the instantization apps it inspired him convinced him to develop it now.

"I definitely see Google is making a big move through Google Instant," Ou said. "...They started to lead off a whole industry move toward instant search. And I am sure this trend will continue to grow and grow in the upcoming months."

Easy to build

The other factor driving Google Instant imitations is the relative simplicity of implementation. Aboukhadijeh bet his roommate he could build YouTube Instant in an hour (it took him closer to six). Ou built iTunes Instant in three hours. Web developer Michael Hart has already beat Google in building an instant search for Google Maps and Google Images.

Instant search is simple but compelling user interface innovation and we're only seeing the first of its use cases. (It may also make you smarter.) After a week of using it, what do you think of Google Instant? And who will be the next to get mashed?

UPDATE: Instant searches continue to proliferate. Check out Etsy Instant and App Store Instant. "I think that [instant search] is captivating because people just start typing, and interesting stuff just shows up. Even if it's not relevant, you can just enter another character and you are 1 step close to your destination," said Michael Hart, developer of instant searches for Etsy, Google Maps and Google Images. "I think it's great. A lot of these mashups are brilliantly simple, and work quite well. The underlying javascript is very simple to write and understand," he said.

Even though Bing lost some ground in the overall search market, it did quite well in the verticals it already specializes in. Year-over-Year, the percentage of upstream traffic from Bing to automotive, health, shopping and travel sites grew more than 100%. Month-to-month, Bing also saw double-digit growth according to Hitwise.

Google, of course, remains the most important source of traffic for these verticals and it's worth noting that even though Bing's important is growing, it only delivers between 2 and 4% of the upstream traffic for these key industries. To some degree, though, Bing isn't really interested in delivering this traffic to outside sources and would rather serve its customers by giving them answers right on its own site.

Worldwide, Internet users conducted over 131 billion searches in 2009. Every day, people over 15 around the world conducted about 3.6 billion searches. That's almost 25 million searches conducted per minute.

According to comScore, Internet users in the U.S. conducted the highest number of searches on the top 10 search engines in 2009. U.S. Internet users over 15 conducted over 22 billion searches last year, followed by China (13 billion) and Japan (9 billion).

Just yesterday, we reported that traffic analyst firm Hitwise's latest data shows that the traffic to social networks in Australia is getting to the point where it will soon surpass traffic to search engines. Judging from these numbers, even if social networks pass search in terms of traffic at some point, search still has a lot of headroom to grow and will continue to do so in the near future.

Here are Google's and Bing's lists of top search queries of 2009:

Some of these are pretty straightforward (Twitter, Michael Jackson, Facebook), while others, like 'torpedo gratis' (which refers to a free SMS service) and 'tuenti' left us slightly puzzled at first. It is also interesting to note that a lot of these search terms in Google's list are basically just URLs (Twitter, Facebook, Hulu, dantri.com.vn).

Sanitized Lists

It's important to note that Bing's list was mostly scrubbed of obvious URL searches, so a direct comparison between Bing and Google is sadly impossible. Neither Google, Bing or Yahoo made lists of their actual top queries available this year. All we got so far are highly sanitized lists of "trending topics." While these reflect the current mood, they don't really give us a good idea of what people search for on a day-to-day basis.

Your Personal Top 10 in Google's Web History

If you have Google Web History feature turned on, you can find a list of your personal top queries of 2009 here.

Ask.com

Ask.com also just published its top questions of 2009 - though questions like "What is Miley Cyrus' phone number?" make us wonder about the validity of this list.

1. How much should I weigh?
2. How do I get out of debt fast?
3. How do I get pregnant?
4. What is Twitter?
5. What is Miley Cyrus' phone number?
6. What is the meaning of life?
7. When will the world end?
8. How long does marijuana stay in your system?
9. What are the symptoms of Swine Flu?
10. What time is it?

Fresher Search Results

Until now, if you wanted to see the freshest search results, you had to apply a little URL-hack, but now, this feature has become default in the Search Options panel.

Another interesting new feature is the ability to filter results by sites you have already visited and by sites you actually haven't visited yet. This feature only works when you are signed in to your Google account and have your Web History enabled.

Books, Blogs, and News

Google already introduced the ability to just search for books a few weeks ago, so this isn't really a new feature, but the company now also allows users to filter by blogs and news. While you could obviously always use Google News or Blog Search for this, you can now easily toggle back and forth between these sources and stay within the same search interface.

Shopping

Given how hard it has become to do product research on Google, as the search results are often cluttered with shopping sites, the ability to see more or fewer shopping sites is probably the most important new feature here. As Google points out, if you are doing research and aren't ready to buy just yet, being able to tone down the number of shopping sites will be extremely helpful.

For now, this new feature is only available in the United States, though according to a blog post on the Google Book Search blog, the company plans to make this feature "available elsewhere in the future."

There has been quite some discussion about whether this actually turns out to be true, though. Judging from this new study by Summit Media, there really haven't been too many changes to the rankings in Caffeine, though the Summit Media team did notice some interesting differences.

There was no major difference between the kinds of categories of sites Caffeine prefers compared to Google's 'vanilla' search. Caffeine, for example, doesn't give any more weight to price comparison sites than Google's current search infrastructure. One slight difference that the Summit Media study noticed was that slightly more co.uk domain names now appear in searches that originate from the US. The difference there, though, was only minor.

Difference: News Sites

One area where Summit Media noticed a difference, however, was sites that fall into the 'Information,' and 'News' categories. Here, at least for generic search terms, Caffeine shows a bias towards more timely information and seems to punish sites that don't update often and mostly consist of archived material.

Does it Help to Have a Keyword in Your Domain Name?

Summit Media also tested another popular SEO theory: does it help to have your keyword in your domain or page URL? Summit didn't find a difference between the Caffeine and 'vanilla' search results and maybe more importantly, having a keyword in your domain name doesn't seem to make a real difference when it comes to search rankings. According to Summit, only about 6% of all search results on the first three search results pages actually contain the specific keyword in the URL. That's a very small number, and, as the report concludes, it is also "a demonstration that SEO needs to be based on actual research - rather than perceptions over browsing a few pages of results."

Interestingly enough, Ask, a search engine few of us think about anymore, continues to grow rapidly. Compared to last month, the number of searches on Ask grew almost 48%, though the company still holds only about 3% of the search engine market.

All eyes are obviously on how the partnership between Bing and Yahoo will work out. Chances are that Bing will continue to grow over the next few months, but, as Compete's Marko Madjarac points out, Yahoo "will need to bring high-quality advertisers whose sponsored search results generate more paid clicks." While Microsoft's data shows that users are quite happy with Bing, we will also have to wait and see what happens once Microsoft slows down its $100 million marketing campaign for Bing.

Breaking the Habit

According to Weitz, this is why Microsoft decided to brand Bing as a 'decision engine' and not just as a search engine. Microsoft wants to get consumers into the habit of demanding more from a search engine than Google can currently deliver. This explains Bing's current focus on shopping and travel, for example, where Bing generally delivers superior results.

In order to gain more traction in a marketplace that is driven by habit, however, Microsoft also partnered with a number of hardware manufacturers to make Bing the default search engine on new computers, for example. Of course, the ubiquitous marketing campaign for Bing has quickly made the new search engine a household name, though as these survey results show, that alone won't be enough to drive a substantial number of users away from Google if the search results on Bing don't live up to users' expectations.

Bing and Yahoo

So far, this campaign seems to be working well enough. According to comScore, Bing is now close to a 9% share of the search market, up from Live Search's 8% in May. Once Bing also takes over Yahoo's search, these numbers will probably top 25%. It is also important to note that most users already use more than one search engine and are now becoming more and more familiar with Bing.

Another positive sign that the Bing team has noticed is that a growing number of users have started to recommend Bing to friends and family, and when asked to name a search engine, the number of users who bring up Bing unaided has also risen dramatically. As we pointed out last week, Bing Shopping is also growing rapidly.

Demand More

Of course, the Bing team is also not just sitting at home twiddling their thumbs and resting on its laurels. Microsoft will continue to update Bing over the next few months and continue to differentiate itself from its closest competitors.

We agree with Weitz that consumers should probably expect more from search engines than just a simple list of links. We will have to see if Bing will succeed to break most users' habit of just going to Google as their default search engine, but, if anything, it will drive Bing's competitors to stay on their toes and continue to innovate as well.