Responding to privacy concerns from groups regarding the length of time and amount of information that search engines store on users, Microsoft announced that it will remove the IP addresses associated with Bing searches after six months.

User data from Bing searches had previously been saved by Microsoft for 18 months.

Microsoft has agreed to delete cookie IDs and cross-section IDs associated with search engine queries as well.

Microsoft’s decision to remove user search data comes as a result of privacy concerns expressed by the Article 29 Working Party, a European privacy group, regarding the length of time that search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing store people’s search information.

The Article 29 Working Party published privacy guidelines in the past for protecting search users’ personal information.

The group has specifically requested that search engine companies shorten the length of time that they save IP addresses and other search information.

[ Source: eWeek ]

Real-time search is getting bigger everyday with two search engine heavyweights Google and Bing vying for top dog in the fast-moving real-time search space.

Bing has launched a real-time search service that returns results based on Twitter and Facebook popularity.

Bing’s real-time search shows a search tag cloud which displays current popular search terms from Twitter as well as links to results from trending topics. People can also search for a topic to find out what the current real-time results are for those terms.

Google’s real-time search results will be powered by a number of social media and social network sites along with blogs and news sources as well. However, Google’s real-time search results are included on their regular search results pages whereas Bing has a separate page for their real-time results.

Unlike Bing’s real-time search, Google does not return real-time results for every search term entered into its search engine since there may not be relevant real-time results to a search for topics or people that aren’t a current topic or news item.

You will probably find more real-time results for search topics on Bing, however the real-time results may not always be very timely or relevant to your search.

The Google real-time search results are collected from over a dozen social networks and social media sites including: Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, FriendFeed, Jaiku and Identi.ca.

You can view a video of Google’s real-time search engine below:

To test search Bing’s beta real-time search engine you can visit Bing Real-Time Search.

Source: PC World

The real-time search wars are getting bigger each day –

Twitter is reportedly in separate negotiations with both Google and Microsoft to supply their social network’s huge amount of real-time tweet data to the two big search engines.

Sources state that the deals would include a license of Twitter’s complete tweet feed and using it for real-time search results in the Bing and Google search engines. The deals could involve millions of dollars in revenue for Twitter.

Twitter has a large and possibly lucrative collection of fresh, user-generated data that is the driving force behind real-time search results. The Twitter social network collects this constant stream of new information from its 54 million monthly users in the form of tweets.

Sources say the deals would be nonexclusive, since Twitter’s management wants to stay independent in the escalating search engine struggle between Google and Bing.

Source: Seattle PI

The rise of social networks like Facebook and Twitter, with their constant streams of fresh user updates have given rise to a new type of web search engine that is challenging Google’s dominance in the area of internet search – the real-time search engine.

According to a recent Wired.com article, the internet is changing rapidly thanks to the popularity of social networks and social media.

People are increasingly searching the web for fresh, up-to-the-minute information on timely topics like celebrity gossip, current news events, profile updates from family and friends, current political events ( ex. Iranian election protests ). Web metrics show that searches for these types of subjects is rising.

It is commonly called the “real-time” web.

The real-time web is shaking up the internet as we have experienced it in the past, and it’s a trend that Google needs to take seriously if it wants to compete in this new search engine arena.

For over a decade, Google has indexed the internet by determining which site had credibility. Google measures the popularity of sites in part by measuring the links that point to them, a big part in Google’s PageRank measurement.

Google checks to see whether a site grew in popularity naturally, which tends to show credibility. However, if a site gets a lot of inbound links overnight, it’s could be due to link spamming, a practice that is frowned upon by the Google search algorithm.

In contrast, real-time web search works the opposite. Real-time search is about “trending topics” and current news items — which can create a huge number of inbound links and comments in minutes. Real-time search engines can’t wait days to determine what is the most popular real-time news source or blog post.

People who search the real-time web want to know the source of trending topics immediately.

Real-time search engines like OneRiot, Tweetmeme, CrowdEye, Topsy, Scoopler, and Collecta are in the process of redefining what the rules that determine what makes a current piece of information on the web relevant.

The majority of these up and coming real-time search engines use Twitter data to drive their search results. Whenever an explosion of Twitter tweets on a particular topic or site links emerge, it’s considered a “signaling event” for trending topics on real-time search engines.

Collecta’s CTO Jack Moffitt says: “We want to be limited only by the speed of light.”

Search results on the real-time web is vastly different from those on a typical search engine. If you search for a celebrity on a traditional engine like Google, Yahoo or Bing, the majority of the search results stay constant from day to day.

Rankings change slowly on a traditional web search. However, real-time search engines serve fresh results by the minute.

Developers of real-time search engines say that their goal isn’t to answer questions like Google, Yahoo and Bing do, but rather to give people a fresh snapshot of current web buzz.

In a nutshell, Google is still top dog when it comes to topical research, but a new group of real-time search engines are better equipped to give you a front row seat at the global water cooler.

Source: Wired.com

The latest search engine statistics from StatCounter show Microsoft’s Bing search engine losing US market share to Google search. Bing dropped 1.17 percent to 8.47 percent in September from a peak 9.64 percent share that Bing had in August.

However, Google’s search engine market share in the US rose from 77.83 percent in August to 80.12 percent in September.

Bing’ search drop is interesting in light of the search engine’s steadily climbing performance since it launched along with the new features Bing added to internet search like indexed Twitter tweets.

Google recently announced nine new search options to help users find what they are searching for, including: searching fresh information by past hour, date range, commercial sites, visited and not yet visited sites, books search, blog search and news search options.

Source: Top News.