A few weeks ago I posted about the Bing-Facebook partnership ; their plan was to make search more social. This morning on Bing's Search Blog Group Program Manager, Paul Yiu, posted that they have successfully and completely deployed the new social features they have created in partnership with Facebook. According to Yiu ,

Over the past few months Google has been testing out 3 new categories in "related searches": brands, stores, and types. Search Engine Roundtable tried out the new feature using the terms "diamonds" and "cameras", while I performed queries using the key words "laptops" and "smartphones". Both searches displayed the new "related searches" refinements and gave me a list of popular brands, types and places where I could purchase the items.

Yesterday, alternative search engine, Blekko finally went live after 3 years of development and just over 3 months of beta testing. Back in July , Search Engine Land did a write up on the new search engine, highlighting some of its shining features and big flaws. One of, if not the main feature,

In an effort to improve local search and its Places pages , Google announced a project six months ago , in which it would supply interested business around the United States, Australia, and Japan with photographers that would take high-quality photographs of their businesses. Since that time business in over 30 cities have participated and today Google announced their plan for these photographs .

In mid-September news broke that Google was in talks to purchase ITA Software Inc, which is the leader in flight data information, for $700 million and it has made a lot of people very unhappy . A group of very popular online travel companies have formed a coalition called FairSearch.org and planning on taking their cause to Capitol Hill and the members of Congress to demonstrate how unfair they feel this deal will be to them and their businesses. Companies like Kayak.com,

It has been over a year now since the localized suggestions have appeared in Google search results and the search powerhouse has been tweaking the feature so that it offers up all the best suggestions in your neck of the woods. Over the weekend Google rolled out a global version of Autocomplete )formally Google Suggest( to every country that already supported locally relevant search prediction feature. Their official blog gives two international examples: Barcelona and Madrid,

Announced this week is a new partnership between Rasmussen College and Market Motive, one of the leaders in Internet marketing and training. With this partnership students in the Rasmussen Business Management Bachelor's program can opt into a specialization in Internet Marketing. Top notch training in this program will come straight from Market Motive leaders including Bryan Eisenberg, Aavinash Kaushik,

Google's mobile blog posted yesterday that it has launched four new languages in Voice Search. Czech, Polish, Russian and Turkish are the newest additions to the Google Voice Search family. Users need only change their language preferences on their smart phone devices and if you don't already have Voice Search installed, you can download it from m.google.com. Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal .

Announced this week is a new partnership between Rasmussen College and Market Motive, one of the leaders in Internet marketing and training. With this partnership students in the Rasmussen Business Management Bachelor's program can opt into a specialization in Internet Marketing. Top notch training in this program will come straight from Market Motive leaders including Bryan Eisenberg, Aavinash Kaushik,

Today Google announces Demo Slam. Demo Slam is a place were creative and tech-savvy people can create videos to help the rest of the world understand all the newest and greatest technology out there. Characteristically, tech demos are not very fun to watch. A lot of the time those people that are the best at understanding the intricacies of technology are far from the best at explaining it in terms that normal people can grasp and enjoy.

In the wake of mistakenly collecting Wi-Fi payload informatio n, Google announced that they would no longer use their Street View cars to collect information on the locations of Wi-Fi networks. Yesterday, the company released a report on Street View and it stated that "collection is discontinued and Google has no plans to resume it." The issue as to whether or not Google would find out why the cars were collecting the data,

Making good on their promises to add social layers to its search platform, Google has added "shared by" and "recent updates" links to the bottom of some of its results in Google News. The features, however, are merely tests as of right now and both Malcolm Coles and Barry Schwartz can view these features. According to their posts,

In an interview with SeekingAlpha.com Google's CEO Eric Schmidt and VP Jonathan Rosenberg discuss many topics including the company's third quarter earnings. The company announced them for the first time ever )and believed to be the last time(. Among the the subjects that were touched on briefly was the matter of Google Instant coming to mobile. Patrick Pichette asked Rosenberg when we could all be expecting to see Instant become available for mobile devices.

Over the weekend Google announced on their LatLong blog that they redesigned the look of the Places page. A couple of months ago we noticed that Google had removed Yelp reviews from search results, but were trying to find a way to work with the user generated review site to incorporate their content in Google search results. It appears that they have found a solution because in addtition to other sites, Yelp reviews are now back on Google.

Rumors abound that AOL and several other private equity firms are in talks to buy Yahoo. Though the details of the deal are complex and limited, it has been said that in order for it to happen there will, most likely, be a sale of Yahoo's stake in Alibaba. Moreover, Yahoo has yet to be contacted about said deal and has a much larger market capitalization at $20.56 billion compared to AOL's $2.86 billion.

Yesterday, comScore released its " Search Share Report " for September. The chart, which reflects last month's scores in comparison to August's, shows that there has been very little change across the board. Google is up 0.7%, while Yahoo is down that same number. Microsoft is up 0.1% and Ask is down that same number; AOL shows no change at all. The press release states that "the September 2010 qSearch figures reflect the impact of Google Instant Search".

In the wake of the Bing-Facebook press event, major announcements have been made by the companies; some that will be going into effect almost immediately and some that will start to happen in the coming weeks and months. The idea behind this search and social networking partnership is to make searching more social and more personal. The two groups want to make it about more than conducting a query, getting your answer and leaving the site,

Looking for a little traction in China, Microsoft has partnered with the country's largest online retailer, Taobao.com )whose parent company is Alibaba Group, owners of Yahoo China(. The site, Etao, has launched in a public beta version and is a shopping search engine that will display results on a range of categories and will be powered by Bing. Since Microsoft already has a Chinese version of Bing,

Yesterday Sony held a press event to unveil their new line up of Google TV products. As has been previously mentioned these Internet ready devices will be powered by Google's open source browser, Chrome and will allow for search through your DVR, TV and the web. The Sony models will be available for the holiday season; they are currently available for pre-order on SonyStyle.com , they'll be in Sony Style stores by the weekend, and at Best Buys soon after that.

In the wake of Yahoo's announcement that they would be releasing new search enhancement features in the coming weeks, today and yesterday they announced on their blog they expanded on two of the enhanced featured. First up is web search for mobile phones. Honing in on the most pertinent information for mobile web users, i.e. local business listings, entertainment, videos, stock information and images, the new Yahoo mobile search experience is a more streamlined approach.