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Ever since Google launched its instantaneous search product last fall, I've noticed something - everywhere I go on the Web, I enter search terms and and pause for a second, only to remember that not everything has yet gone instant.

Today, Yahoo has announced that it too has gone instant, but with a slight twist on Google's solution to providing an ever faster real-time Web. Yahoo says it will offer "answers, not links".

After a litany of complaints about the declining quality of its search, Google has made a number of changes over the last few weeks to combat the spam in search results. It tweaked its algorithm, for example, and it unveiled a Chrome extension that lets you manually block certain sites from showing up.

That functionality will now be available without an extension (provided you're using versions Chrome 9, IE8 or Firefox 3.5 or higher) as Google is adding a new option to its search that will give you the ability to block domains from appearing in your future search results.

Google added Instant Previews to its search functionality last fall, giving you the chance to preview an image of a website without actually clicking on the link in the search results to take you there. It has just announced that that feature is now available on mobile devices as well.

Searching via your mobile browser can be pretty frustrating, what with a smaller search box and back buttons, for example. But part of the annoyance also occurs because many websites simply aren't optimized for mobile devices. Google's new Instant Preview may partially address that, as it gives you a preview of a full website and its content, as well as a glimpse of any mobile version that's available.

Cloud-to-cloud social media and webmail backup provider Backupify is announcing this morning the imminent availability of a new service called CloudSight. CloudSight will render a customer's entire archive searchable and available for restoration with a single click.

"The [CloudSite] service gives social media and compliance professionals an automated audit trail of customer- facing corporate online communications across all major social media and cloud platforms including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Gmail," Backupify says. A number of different companies are providing similar services now, but Backupify's appears unique in some important ways. Update: Unfortunately, it looks like the day of this announcement Backupify has experienced some down time.

According to analytics firm StatCounter, the Bing search engine has just overtaken Yahoo for the first time worldwide during the month of February 2011. From StatCounter Global Stats, Bing closed out the month with a 4.37% search share compared with Yahoo's 3.93%. However, both still fall far behind Google's search share of 89.94% of the global market.

Google made a change to its search algorithm last week that it said was designed to help users find more "high-quality sites." Although Google never described this move as one aimed at tackling the problem of content farms, many observers have viewed the algorithmic adjustments as Google's attempt to clean up its search results, following a number of complaints about the quality (or lack of quality) of the information in the sites that are retrieved and are highly ranked.

Google did say that the change would impact over 11% of sites, but would help surface those "with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on."

So, is a search via Google better now? Is original content easier to find while content farms are buried on subsequent results pages?

Google does almost nothing interesting in travel search. Bing offers a much more compelling travel search experience and today added a new little feature that makes me want to use it even more.

Search on Bing for the phrase "fly to..." and the name of a major destination city and you will now see an automatic display of the best dates to fly from where you are to that place, with the lowest price for a round trip ticket and advice about whether the price is likely to go up or down if you waited to buy the ticket later. It's really cool.

Despite the abundance of cooking websites, finding a good recipe can be quite challenging. It isn't simply a matter of finding highly-rated recipes or recipes with pictures. How do you wade through all the available recipes and find the one that matches dish you want to make, the cooking and prep time you have available, and the ingredients you have in stock?

To assist with that, Google has added a new feature to its search engine: Recipe View.

Microsoft's Bing search engine now includes tiles on its results pages which show dynamically updated visual cues and other information from partner websites. Included at launch are IMDb, Yahoo Movies, Rotten Tomatoes, OpenTable, Yelp, CitySearch, Urban Spoon, Cheap Flights, YouTube, MTV, Last.fm, Rhapsody, Pandora, MSN and dozens of others. The concept is very much reminiscent of Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 user interface, which also displays alerts and information through the use of homescreen tiles updated in real-time.

To use the new tiles on Bing, you simply perform a search query and the tiles will appear on the right side of the screen.

Last week hosted search provider IndexTank announced its new API that enables developers to add search to their applications or build search engines from data sets available on the Web. Documentation can be found here. The API uses an elastic, pay as you go model.

IndexTank was founded by former Inktomi software architect Diego Basch. It features real-time feed indexing, instantly available data, location based search and more.