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 [...]

In this video, Steve Baller, CEO of Microsoft, talks about all aspects of the future surrounding the company and the coming technology trends.

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%.

Norman Law, Microsoft Bing Product Manager, talks about Bing’s focus and future prospects in the embedded video.

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.

The engineers at Microsoft are working on a new feature where users have the ability to share search results. They are calling this search sharing feature “Bing & Ping”. From the photos provided, it appears that the results can be shared via Facebook, Twitter, and email.

Nicholas Kerr from Bing’s search blog wrote:

We at the Bing team are firm believers in the idea that the only thing better than searching with Bing is sharing what you’ve found with your friends. That’s why we’ve been working on a potential new feature for Bing that does just that in a couple of clicks, which we call Bing & Ping.

Let’s break this down with an example: say you use Bing’s Instant Answers feature to check the score of the game, and you notice that your buddy’s favorite team has just been beaten pretty handily. Say you want to “delicately” remind him of their less-than-stellar moves with the ball. Bing & Ping lets you share this NFL instant answer through various places, like Facebook, Twitter, or even email in as few as two clicks. Reminding someone that their team has no defense has never been easier (in spite of the screenshot below, we of course aren’t talking about our beloved Seahawks).

For the first time since Bing’s debut, Microsoft has released a video commercial promoting Bing Cashback.

Check out Bing Cash Back Deals: visit http://www.bing.com/cashback

From analyzing the data from Chitika, it seems that Google is still the preferred search engine even though Bing & previously MSN Live is set as the default search engine for Internet Explorer. Even with the Microsoft & Yahoo! search alliance, Bing will only have a total of 22% of all searches from Internet Explorer in comparison to Google’s 74.2% Internet Explorer web search.

A closer examination at the search data for Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft Bing reveals that Google dominates 65% of the U.S. search market. While at the same time, Yahoo and Microsoft combined sites produce 28% of the searches in the U.S. In terms of overall search users, Yahoo! and Microsoft has a 73.3% searcher penetration while Google has a 84.0% daily searcher penetration. Google on average generates 54.5 searches per month per internet user while Yahoo! and Microsoft produces 26.9 searches per person per month.

Chitika analyzed 163,211,927 searches – a sample of the Chitika network’s search data from July 30th through August 16th – based on operating systems.

Chitika Network released a report that Bing users are more likely to click an ad on your site than Google or Yahoo users.

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.