The surprising news of this week is the claim by Google that Microsoft has been 'cheating' by taking search results from Google to use on their Bing search engine. The story was first broken on Search Engine Land and has quickly developed into a war of words between the two leading search engines.

The articles reports that Google has recently run a sting operation against Bing that, it says, proves the Microsoft search engine has been watching what people search for on Google and the sites they select from Google’s results. They have then used that information to improve Bing’s own search listings.

Bing doesn’t deny this and say that use 'multiple signals and approaches' which seems to include tracking search activity through the Internet Explorer browser and the Bing toolbar. They accuse Google of manipulating their search results to identify one element of Bing's search criteria, and to time the exposure of the news to coincide with a Microsoft event to discuss the future of search.

This story is already generating much news and blog comment and is likely to run for some time as the two search giants exchange claims and counter-claims.

Yahoo7 in Australia has sent out an announcement regarding the integration of Microsoft's Bing search results, which has already taken place in the US at the end of 2010. In the email, Yahoo7 says:

"As you may know, we are working closely with Microsoft to implement our global search alliance. Now that we've transitioned Yahoo!'s organic and paid search technologies to Microsoft's platforms in the U.S. and Canada, we are ready to begin these transitions around the world as well.

In Australia, we expect to transition Yahoo!7's organic search results (the non-paid listings found on the main body of the page) to Microsoft during January 2011.

While no action is required on your part for the organic search transition, if organic search results are an important source of referrals to your website, you'll want to make sure that you're prepared for this change:

* Compare your organic search rankings on Yahoo!7 Search and Bing for the keywords that drive your business, to help determine any potential impact to your traffic and sales
* Decide if you'd like to modify your paid search campaigns to compensate for any changes in organic referrals that you anticipate
* Review the Bing webmaster tools and optimize your website for the Bing crawler, to help ensure your site is prominently listed in both Yahoo!7 and Bing organic search results.

For more specifics on the organic search transition, please read the Organic Search Transition FAQs."

The email also says that the transition of the paid search services to Microsoft technology is scheduled to take place in the second half of 2011. It is hoped that the new platform will be more user-friendly than the existing Yahoo! one, and that it will help to give advertisers a more effective alternative to just focusing on Google AdWords.

The big news for Twitter this week has been the new deals announced with Bing and Google, as the two search engines start competing to add new functionality and issue press releases. This latest news has been covered widely, such as on the BBC website, and the deals will see messages from the 'micro-blogging' service - or tweets - show up in Bing and Google search results almost as soon as they are posted on Twitter.

Microsoft's Bing search engine has moved first to set up a stand-alone Twitter search page accessible from the main site, whereas Google countered the announcement and said its Twitter search service would debut within the next few months. Although some parts of Twitter already show up in some search results they tend to be for individual accounts or messages that have been archived. Both deals will now take a feed of all public Twitter streams to make them searchable almost as soon as they are sent.

The Bing Twitter search page shows the most popular topics mentioned in the 140 character tweets. Visitors to Bing can also search for specific terms and see relevant messages ranked chronologically, as well as the most popular website links referred to from the relevant posts.

Microsoft has announced a new feature for the recently launched Bing search engine. As reported by the BBC website, the new feature is designed to set their search experience apart from Google and will allow users to browse results using pictures instead of text.

The visual search option will initially concentrate on the four main areas where Bing has been providing specialised search options to date - namely travel, health, leisure and shopping. At the recent launch, Microsoft claimed Visual Search allowed users to conduct some searches faster than the "traditional image search" offered by rival Google and other search engines.

Microsoft say the new feature is "like searching through a large online catalogue". When a searcher enters their search term, a link at the top of the first page of results allows users to "visualise" what Bing has found.By clicking on the link displays a gallery of related images which the searcher can then scroll through and select to enter the relevant web content.

At the moment only a small number of search results will return a visual display and the feature is currently only available on the US version of Bing, but these categories and coverage are likely to be expanded as the tool moves out of beta.

As reported by the Sydney Morning Herald, Microsoft's new Bing search engine is targeting regional users through the home page image that changes daily on the site. These images - often of stunning natural scenery - are being adapted for different countries, with the Australian version of the site including images of events such as the Bledisloe Cup and the Darwin Beer Can Regatta.

These, and other images, may be displayed to coincide with national events, in the similar way that Google sometimes revises its logo design for a landmark date. In addition, a number of 'hotspots' on the images appear as a mouseover function, which then takes the user into the search engine results for some content related to the image.

Although Bing's daily changing search page image is an attractive reason to visit the site, the ongoing use of the service will be more dependant on the quality of the search results, and although Bing is adding some new innovations to the service, it will remain an uphill struggle to draw users away from Google on a regular basis, when 'googling' has become an accepted part of website usage.

Bloomberg reports that the search share of Microsoft's new search engine, Bing, rose to 11.1% in the first week of June. According to ComScore figures, this increase in the first week in operation was up from the 9.1% share in the US during the previous week. This is probably to be expected with the luanch publicity and advertising campaign as people try it out - no doubt promising news for Microsoft execs, but the real figures will need to be seen over a longer period of time to show that search habits can be changed.

After some weeks of speculation about the launch date - and name - for Microsoft's new search engine, the new tool, called Bing, has now appeared as the replacement for Live Search. This is undoubtedly a big event for Microsoft and touted as their last chance to really make an impact on Google's search dominance. It's supported by a US$100m advertising campaign that positions the search engine as a 'results' tool and hopes to get Google users to try it out and be impressed.

We will be looking in more detail at Bing in our next newsletter (July 09), but some early reviews from Search Engine Land provide a good background on this new search engine and how it compares to Google's results.