Nancy Hill, the president of the American Association of Advertising Agencies (AAAA), recently sent out a letter in support of the Bing & Yahoo! search deal. Although the letter is short and concise, it highlights the fact that Google is a dominant player in the Internet advertising industry since it controls the main access point [...]

Since Bing’s debut in July, it continues to gain market share slowly. In August, Bing gained 0.4% of the search market, to achieve 9.3% of total search query volumes in the U.S. In the same month, Google’s market shared dropped by one point to 64.6% while Yahoo’s market share remained unchanged at 19.3%.

In comparison to other major search engines, Bing showed a steady growth of nearly a half-point market share gain every month for the past three months. Bing grew faster than Google for the first time in August, with a 31.9% annual increase in search queries compared to 21.6% growth for Google and 16.8% for Yahoo.

It is worthwhile to mention that while Bing might be growing faster than Google, Google still dominates the U.S. search market with 64.6% and the combine market share of Yahoo! & Bing is only 28.6%.

At TechCrunch50, Microsoft senior vice president Yusuf Mehdi announced a new visual search feature on Bing which returns results as an interactive gallery of images. VisualSearch is currently in beta and available to United States users only. You can still try it out by setting your preference to United States. We have tried out the new VisualSearch, and we strongly recommend you to try the VisualSearch for Travel Destinations, World Leaders, Celebrities, & Cars.

How many times have you seen a movie trailer and forgotten the name of it the next day? You go online to search for it but you can’t seem to find the movie with “what’s-his-name” in it anywhere but you can picture the actor in your head. A study conducted by Microsoft Research shows that consumers can process results with images 20% faster than text only results. So it’s clear that images play a big part in helping consumer’s with a variety of search activities.

Visual Search is a new way to formulate and refine your search queries through imagery, particularly for sets of results that tend to be more structured. We call these data groupings galleries. Simply go to www.bing.com/visualsearch and install Silverlight if you don’t have it already. What you’ll see is an amazing new visual search experience. Visual Search allows you to quickly scroll through the galleries or do a one-click refinement using the quick tabs on the left, which are specifically relevant to the type of results you are browsing through.

Now to find that movie you were looking for, click on “Movies” and scroll through the imagery to find “what’s-his-name.” Now that you found it, hover your mouse over the movie to view details including title, rating, reviews, and how much it grossed at the box office, all right under the search box. Think about how much time you saved using Visual Search.

Microsoft submitted a complaint to the National Arbitration Forum requesting the transfer of the domain name bing-news.com from Prakash Prasad Timilsina. The dispute resolution panel found Microsoft to be the rightful owner of the domain name. As we speak, Bing-News.com is in the process to be transferred to the Microsoft Corporation.

BongoBing, a web-based shopping platform developed by The Laptop Company, Inc. has filed a request for an extension of time to oppose Microsoft in its efforts to register a trademark for the name “Bing” with the United States Patent and Trademark Office. The Trademark Trial and Appeal Board has effectively granted the extension request until October 28, 2009.

We took a closer look at the details for the 10-year search deal between Microsoft & Yahoo!, and we discovered that as part of the agreement at least 400 Yahoo! employees will transition to Microsoft. An additional 150 Yahoo! employees will assist with providing the “transition services” between Microsoft and Yahoo!.

Microsoft agrees to pay Yahoo! $150 million to cover the costs involved in the technology transition process. Microsoft will also make a $50 million annual payment to Yahoo! during the first three years to cover other technology transition costs.

Erick Schonfeld (TechCrunch co-editor), Steven Levy (Wired Magazine), and Nick Wingfield (The Wall Street Journal) discusses the Microsoft/Yahoo search deal with Charlie Rose.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer discusses the search agreement with Yahoo! and what it will mean to customers, advertisers and the industry. Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz discusses the agreement and what it means to Yahoo! and its customers.

Earlier today, a new search deal between Microsoft and Yahoo! was confirmed with the following press release. Here is the press release and the summary.

Microsoft is having a new contest on Twitter and all you have to do is to tweet on twitter to be eligible to enter. Everyday, a winner will be selected to take home a $500 Visa cash card and a Bing backpack.

As reported in the Toronto Star and several other websites, Bing has had a decent June after capturing 8.4% of U.S. Internet searches…

Bing recently added Twitter feeds as part of its search results. Today, Federated Media & Bing announced the launch of BingTweets, a website that combines Twitter search results and Bing search results onto one page. Read our review.

As has been reported over the last week or so, Google is working on developing a web-based operating system, and making it available to users for FREE!! Its also been said that the new system might be ready as early as 2010….

As a major step forward in introducing Bing to its users, Microsoft has upgraded its QuickAdd feature from Hotmail with a number of features from its Bing search engine, including Bing Maps, Videos, Restaurants, etc…..

During Bing’s initial launch, a lot of speculators and critics claimed that the spike in traffic was purely due to public interest & curiosity. Bing now appears to be a real competitor to the Google search monopoly. 16.7% of the Internet users from the U.S. now uses Bing for search. Bing’s share of search result pages in the U.S. also climbed to 12.1%. And according to StatCounter, Bing has once again surpassed Yahoo! as the number two search engine provider in the U.S. Furthermore, according to Compete.com, Bing had over 49.5 million unique visitors and a total of 220 million page visits in June.