Features

• Google considers Bing a serious threat

  Google very publicly called out Microsoft's Bing search engine -- claiming that it copies its search results from Google. The initial charge has been followed by a back and forth exchange of insults and accusations, but one thing that is sort of lost in the melodrama is that Google apparently considers Bing to be a serious threat.

• Google management shuffle: Right move, wrong guy?

  Today's announcement that Google co-founder Larry Page would replace Eric Schmidt as the company's CEO was a surprise, but maybe it shouldn't have been. While the company's earnings are still stellar, Schmidt has made a series of embarrassing statements and the company has had some very public failures.

• Google's Realtime Search update does what Twitter won't

  Searching for status updates is not Twitter's forte, so leave it to Google to make its own Realtime Search engine more powerful instead.

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  Google's China decision ignores conventional wisdom

  Google's decision to stop censoring search engine results in China, announced in a blog posting Monday, flies in the face of common wisdom when it comes to doing business in the country.

• Bing gains again -- should Google worry?

  Microsoft's Bing search engine may still be a bit player in the lucrative online search business dominated by Google, but it's slowly and steadily gaining users.

• Bing now a serious challenger to Google

  Given undistinguished history of Microsoft's late and unlamented Live Search engine, the predecessor to Bing, it's easy to dismiss Redmond as a hapless also-ran in the search market. But given the vast sums of money and resources that Microsoft is investing in its fledging Google challenger, this could change in a hurry.

• Google Caffeine FAQ: your questions answered

  Google has unveiled Caffeine, a "next-generation architecture" for its Web search platform. The retooled search engine is said to be faster, more accurate, and more comprehensive than the current Google search setup.

• Yahoo Search: RIP

  Yahoo started out in 1994 as a ragtag site called "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web," named after founders Jerry Yang and David Filo who were at the time students at Stanford University.

• Searching where Google can't

  We read a lot about the delivery, and popularity, of SMS services such as market prices, health advice and job alerts in developing countries, information there is clearly a need for. Only last week Grameen's AppLab initiative, in conjunction with Google and MTN, launched a suite of SMS services in Uganda. These are the services you'll get to hear most about when you search the Web, trawl the blogosphere and attend various conferences on the subject. It all seems pretty sewn up on the content side -- I mean, what else could people earning a few dollars a day (at most) possibly want?

• Ask.com bets on semantic search, targeting special audiences

  In the past eight months, Ask.com has unfurled a set of changes to its search engine that the IAC unit calls a success, although its share of U.S. search queries has actually shrunk during that time period.

• Five slick search engines you should know about

  With Microsoft's recent addition of Bing to the search landscape, the spotlight is again shining on who has the best engine for finding anything and everything on the Internet. The debate over who has the best search likely will go on into eternity with a focus on the big three: Google,Yahoo and Microsoft. But there are countless other search engines out there focused on zeroing users in on the data they want or need. Here is a look at five that are offering some slick service.

• Bing makes gains, but is Google actually suffering?

  Microsoft is gaining new ground with its freshly rebranded Bing search engine, some recently released data suggests. Bing, the research finds, grew 0.8 percent during its second week online.

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  Microsoft Bing goes live: So what?

  Now that its available, my first experiences with Microsoft Bing lead me to a simple, inescapable conclusion, "So what?" I had imagined that something as widely hyped as Bing would be a life-changing experience. It wasn't. Not even close.

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  Hands on with Microsoft Bing

  At last, Bing has arrived. I tested a preview release of Microsoft's new search/decision engine, previously called Kumo, to see how well it compares. Here's a breakdown of its new features and how well they perform.

• Search engine Wolfram Alpha focuses on great answers

  The natural-language search engine Wolfram Alpha is expected to launch May 18 and more details about the site are emerging. Most notably, Stephen Wolfram, Wolfram Alpha's creator and the brain behind the computational software Mathematica, says his site is not the next Google killer, but an add-on for your Web searches.