This is no longer just a doomsday scenario passed out in a Hollywood movie. This is exactly what Google declares China did earlier this month to it. Google announced that some of its copyrighted code had been stolen, and the code owned by several other companies as well. Google, with help from VeriSign iDefense, when it investigated these attacks, did not even know if it has its original code anymore. They believe that China’s government has possibly inserted alterations in Google’s core coding that will help them spy on Chinese citizens using Google to search for restricted information in China. Why, in Greece, five years ago, hackers inserted alterations to Vodafone’s code, so that they could listen in on conversations conducted by the country’s political and military leaders.

Just as Microsoft has been a favored target for years, Google and Adobe are in the cross hairs today. Adobe’s software is reputed in particular to be deeply flawed security wise; since it enjoys 95% market penetration with one or another of its products, anti virus experts have their attention trained on Adobe now. It is becoming obvious too, that China, a country that first rose to prominence for its cheap knockoffs of reputed branded goods, still retains its knack for counterfeiting. Routers by Cisco, for example, are legally required to include firmware that will allow the government to obtain a backdoor into your information, for criminal investigations purposes. China could easily manufacture counterfeit Cisco routers, that will help the Chinese government look in for more information than a democratically-elected government would ever be allowed to. As it happens, the biggest risk that software corporations face still lies in the way employees can get careless, and open tainted spam when they are at work, at a company terminal.

Amazon.com ‘s Mechanical Turk and Live Work websites have been picking up freelance efforts in this way from all around the world for years now. But in the years it’s been around, it’s only lived on the fringes of the outsourcing business. For the last three years, the Californian start up CrowdFlower has really got into this business, to try to make it a regular part of the average major corporation’s outsourcing plan. CrowdFlower allows businesses to use Mechanical Turk and Live Work and allows them to verify the credentials of the online workers they list too;, and it will keep an eye on quality control in addition, in a way that ordinary freelance classifieds like Amazon’s ventures could never do.

This is quite a fascinating way in which to tap human resources. And it is reminiscent of the way cloud computing works too – with the cloud, you are supposed to not actually have any computing resources yourself; nor are you supposed to have resources earmarked for you at a remote location. You’re just supposed to trust that in all the pooled resources, somewhere, will be something for you at the right time. And it still always turns out to work exactly as if you had your own dedicated arrangements. Crowd Flower allows you to switch on or off an entire global army of qualified labor, and leave it to the managing companies to pick up the loose ends. You could hire your own full-time gopher to do your work, and micromanage and pay that person all the time, or you could farm the work out to a dozen people for a fraction of the pay. You get your results in a fraction of the time too. It isn’t just the small Internet businesses trying to make a quick buck that step into crowd sourcing either. Corporations like Microsoft and Oracle have discovered this as a way of simplifying their little jobs too.

At the opposite end of the crowd sourcing spectrum is the way companies try to harness creativity in the crowd. The French company Eyeka does marketing, or consumer engagement, as it is called, in this way. Companies and brands contact Eyeka to have innovative viral advertising campaigns dreamt up for them. Eyeka’s thousands of members pick up assignments they like and create videos or pictures for the project. If they get picked, they get the job. If it happens to be any good, some young kid out there who’s been putting out videos on his personal YouTube clone for free, suddenly gets a couple of hundred thousand dollars for his trouble. From pennies an hour to hundreds of thousands of dollars, crowdsourcing seems to be finding its niche.

Certainly these are improvements, but most interesting about them is the fact that it gives us some clues as to how Bing is trying to outdo Google. Take the innovation at Bing that they call entity cards. Searching on subjects like celebrities, travel destinations, or disease
symptoms, little “entity card” boxes pop up with what Bing considers to be useful asides. If there are a lot of people around the world searching for the same thing, say the city of Paris, Bing will reckon that it must be some event in Paris, and try to offer a hotel and travel information, and listings of important events in those entity boxes. Or if you are looking for information on a pop music personality, Bing will fill those boxes with tour dates and ticket availability information.

All the major search engines have great integration with the important social networks; but Bing is looking for ways to take it higher. In Twitter, Microsoft allows you to sort tweets by celebrity, and look up the busiest Twitter celebs first. Bing’s Facebook plan is to lay your friends out on a grid and allow you to choose among the most active ones in lots of convenient ways. Bing isn’t about real revolution yet; it is about thoughtfulness, trying to think like the user, and plying them with lots of delightful little cosmetic touches. This seems to be working, in an age of short attention spans. We’ll get to see if it is a Google beater, not long from now.

There have been other reports out there wondering if Yahoo is preparing to shut shop entirely; if they don’t do their own search, what is it they do? Yahoo’s management has put out a vehement statement about how it isn’t fair for anyone to consider Yahoo a spent force. The statement claims that Yahoo has a great relationship with its developers and a commitment to open platforms; well, my Log Blog was an innovative service that developers and geeks loved too. And that’s been closed by Yahoo as well. GeoCities recently got the ax, and it looks like Yahoo these days is all about closing down and outsourcing. It would appear that pretty soon, the US search market will be left with just a big two – just like the US auto market when it lost Chrysler.

But Yahoo is still in the search business to all appearances. They take care of all the advertising business on their own site as well as on Bing’s. Yahoo’s plan is to cut costs, of course. But to do that, it still needs to be around, doesn’t it? Yahoo is no longer a website that provides original services; it is just an aggregator. And this makes for the passing of an era.

With that in mind, MSN has a brand-new makeover this week, having retained the same look since 2004. The new MSN is pleasingly streamlined, fashionably minimalist and glossy in the way Windows 7 and Bing are. Even MSN’s stylized butterfly is drawn edge-on to look closer to the Bing logo. Bing is integrated quite deeply into the MSN experience now. MSN Local Edition, the popular service that serves up a community news catalog by ZIP code has Bing-searchable indexes now for example. Local weather reports are no longer just cursory; they give you additional information for everything you might want to do in good weather: they give you concert news, restaurant opinions, traffic information and so on.

Integration with Twitter and Facebook exists now too, in a nod to that side of the market. You can keep up with all the Twitter, Facebook and Windows Live updates coming to you right on the MSN home page. That must make sense, seeing how it is reported that half of all MSN regulars are Facebook fans too. But the integration could have been better; clicking on the Facebook widget only takes you to the Facebook site. There is nothing right on the MSN site that can help you keep in touch with Facebook.

MSN’s ambition is to be a one-stop website for every need, perhaps in a way similar to what Yahoo attempted a while ago. But Yahoo has seen considerable success with its remodeling. Will MSN find the magic balance too?

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According to figures released by Hitwise last month, Microsoft’s search market share will rise to around 21.5% or roughly one quarter of Google’s share. Ergo, SEO people have to concentrate on Bing while promoting their clients’ sites for reaching all the net surfers.

When we focus on search algorithm, it is clear that Bing concentrates on keyword placement in the sub or root whereas Google focuses on exact keyword matches. By default, Bing’s results are richer than Google and Yahoo. It is more likely that the market for search engine Bing will expand.

If you don’t have an account with the Bing webmaster tool, it is time to start your account and learn the difference between Bing and Google to optimize your site for Bing.

Even if Bing does not overtake its rival Google, it will be the second largest search engine. Hence you have to work for Bing to reach global audiences irrespective of search engines used. Obviously the changes will not take place overnight, but potentially Google could have a much bigger, consolidated competitor in the near future.

Microsoft is a multinational computer technology corporation that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of software products for computing devices. There are hundreds of new features on Microsoft’s Bing. A few of the interesting features include:

Bing will provide useful links and information related to your search. For instance, if you search information about a black berry, Bing will provide links to reviews on the item and give you complete details about the particular product as well. This feature will reduce a user’s clicks to find specific information.

Going into search engines, typing something in, and searching items is very difficult nowadays. Bing facilitates people to save favorite sites while they are searching information. It helps them to save their time by saving their favorite stuff and accessing them at anytime.

Microsoft maintains partnerships with different online services like airlines, hotels and holiday resorts. If you are searching for flight information, Bing can offer specific information like flight deals, reviews etc.

Bing will Auto-Suggest the search queries. For instance, if you’re looking for “Obama” then it will auto-suggest some additional queries like his biography, information on his speeches, quotes, facts and so on.

Bing can also provide videos and images about an item in the search results page.

Microsoft is currently holding a third-place behind Google and Yahoo Inc. it hopes that Bing will play a big role to reach a good position in the search market. Microsoft is trying to pull people away from Google and Yahoo.

Effectively this means that Google can serve ads on Yahoo’s results page. The percentage is around 3% of all Yahoo searches will show Google ads.

Is this a calculated shot from the two internet monsters that they will not accept Microsoft’s pestering of Yahoo lying down?

Read the full story on BBC News