The major results were as the follows:

1. 37 percent users find television ads most influential.
2. 17 percent find newspaper ads helpful
3. 14 percent feel that search engine ads are helpful
4. Radio ads (3 percent) and Internet banner ads (1 percent) are not very helpful according to some people.
5. 28 percent say that ads never influence them in decision making and purchase.

The survey on what kind of ads people usually ignore brought out the following results:

1. 46 percent of people reported that they usually ignore Internet banner ads
2. 17 percent never paid attention to search ads
3. 13 percent are never influenced by TV ads
4. 9 percent of the users dislike radio ads
5. 6 percent dislike newspaper ads

About a tenth of the population reported that they did not particularly dislike any kind of ads. The interesting report was that the younger generation people found search ads less useful while there was relatively more number of older people depending upon them. This result is quite opposite to what was expected.

While the results were segmented according to age it was seen that 50% was the youth liked the newspaper ads. And they liked the internet banner ads the least (3%). 35% of the old people also liked newspaper ads. And they never looked through the internet banner ads. There were about 31% of old people who never looked through the ads too.

Bing is now showing Twitter results also in the Bing search results. They say that they are now incorporating the twitter results for about a thousand prominent Twitterers in the search results. The search result will show the person’s most recent tweets and links to more of his tweets. Danny Sullivan can be taken as an example. If a user gives a search about Danny Sullivan like ‘Danny Sullivan Twitter’, ‘Danny Sullivan Tweets’ or ‘@ Danny Sullivan’ then the Twitter information about him will be displayed.

The main thing to be noticed here is that there is no direct deal between Twitter and Bing. All the information that comes in Bing is from the Twitter API. Bing is also providing with other useful range of services. One among these is the new contest by Bing. The contest is to feature your picture in the Bing home page. The details have been posted in the blog post.

To add more twitter results to the search results one can add the Twitter Search Results on Bing add-on for Firefox. Twitter results can be added to Google too. It can also be put as an add-on in Firefox. The Bing feature for adding Twitter results is getting integrated now. So it is a possibility that the service would not be seen now. But waiting for some time will let you avail the feature.

Kayak says that the company is disturbed by the high similarity between the two travel searches because it would cause brand confusion. The similarity comparison is given not only in their own review about Bing, but also at various other sources. The TechCrunch’s review also showed that Kayak and Bing used the same airline data sources. But the difference is that Bing provided with lower rates for flights.

Microsoft spokesperson Whitney Burk gave the following response to the accusation:

“We are discussing the matter with Kayak,” Burk said in emailed statement to Wired. “Bing Travel is based on independent development by Microsoft and Farecast.com, which Microsoft acquired in 2008. Any contrary allegations are without merit.”

This does not end the problem because Kayak is accusing Bing Travel for copying their user interface, and not the technology. “Sliders” used by Bing is an example for this.

Now Kayak is not alone in accusing Bing. Hakia also claims that Bing copied the looks of hakia galleries. The search about Obama was given as an example.

Melek Pulatkonak, CEO of Hakia told:

“We were approached by Microsoft to show them how the hakia galleries worked, and we did, and now they have a similar feature — we showed them how to do it,” she said. “We were surprised that it is a featured part of and the most differentiated part of Bing.”

Microsoft has denied this claim too.

When the country specific filter existed, the tabs “Google search” and “I am feeling lucky” were given under the search box. Below these tabs there were two radio buttons. One was for searching “the web” as a whole. The other one was for the country specific search. The button was “pages from UK”. But now these radio buttons are missing. All the buttons remain the same as before. So the search will always give the results from the web. Barry has explained it here.

The SEO home blog also brought to notice that the change in the country specific search option is not always there. The change is seen only when the Google Chrome version is used. While using Google Chrome also the country specific filter can be obtained. Only thing is that it is not a direct process. The user has to go to the search results page and then scroll down to the bottom of the page. At the bottom a link show only result for United Kingdom is given. If the user goes for that link, then he or she would get the search results just for UK.

This facility is more complicated than the older way. And so, not all users are liking the new way. Most people who have noticed the change are of the opinion that the link should be given from the first page itself so that time can be saved. But Google is going forward with the idea of test-dropping the link.

As per the Google spokesperson Thursday there was an outpouring of searches about Jackson. The range of queries was diverse like “michael jackson died” to “michael jackson hoax”. The traffic was so intense that it was first interpreted as an attack. It resulted in Google showing an error page for about 25 minutes. But finally the company is happy that people do rely on the company for information.

Yahoo had a record breaking day too following the news release “Michael Jackson rushed to hospital”. In about ten minutes there were about 800,000 clicks. There was a record set with 16.4 million visitors. Yahoo took special care to send reporters to Los Angeles to report the news live. Flickr also saw a large number of Michael Jackson photo uploads.

Bing also gave special attention to the day. There was a special team of engineering, product management and marketing working on the day. But the data was not sufficient. So the results from Bing were not very satisfactory. The search always first led to the images of the Pop king and then only at the end of the page was the link to the news given.

This was not the case with just the popular search engines like Bing, Yahoo and Google. Wikipedia page also showed large changes in page views related to Michael Jackson.

The focus group that was studied had consisted of 12 people in New York who had been using Google as their default search engine and had never used Bing before. These people were asked to conduct a “hotel search” and a “shopping search for digital cameras”. The search was conducted on both sites. Users conducted search on one site and then went to the next one. The order of using the search engine was reversed to avoid bias effects. Interviews about the experience as well as eye tracking data were collected.

The results were the following:

1. Most users thought that the visual design of Bing was better and that it was slightly better when it comes to organization and filtering options.
2. The users thought that despite Bing being better in some ways, both search engines produced equally good search results. Finally majority of the users concluded they would continue using Google over Bing and were not likely to switch.
3. For the camera search, Bing attracted 150% more user viewing time on account of the ad space at the top of the search results.

When the results are compared Google wins 8 as opposite to 4 for Bing on account of the following features:

1. Familiarity in usage
2. Benefits of Google applications
3. Enhancement in Bing not sufficient enough to switch

But overall the users like the features and interface features with Bing.

There is a website that can generate story on anybody being dead and this is also believed to be done by that website. There are blogs now saying that the website generates a false news like that once in a year or so automatically.

The story about Jeff Goldblum’s story is shown in Google News too. This misleads the people who try to check on the truth about the news. The story does not open, because the website is probably crushed due to the sudden attention. The news is some what like the following:

“Today is a dismal day for bad news. There is NO online confirmation but New Zealand Police are reporting that Jeff Goldblum has fallen to his death on the set of his new movie according to Mediafetcher.com.

I am unable to find any confirmation on any major news sites. He apparently died at 4:30am after falling 60 feet while shooting his new film. Jeff starred in the classic remake of the Fly, Jurassic Park and MANY other hit films. RIP Jeff Goldblum.”

Even though the news papers are behind internet in getting news, none has come forward to confirm the news. In relation to all this death news it can be noted that Yahoo and Google has put Michael Jackson’s death as the top search results, but in Bing it did not happen. And it was Twitter which posted the news in the first place among “real time” channels. This is because other channels did not want to put up news without confirmation. The same twitter did spread the rumor about Jeff Goldblum too along with Google.

Finally now it has been confirmed that the news is not true and Jeff Goldblum is perfectly alright.

The most attractive part of the feature is that Google City tours not just gives details about great and famous places like New York, Las Vegas, and San Francisco. It will also give you the details of beautiful places you are not very likely to visit just because they are not as famous as the others. One very good example of this type is Kennewick, Washington. Google has got a three day trip for this place too.

May be in a few days time we can see all the tour guides across U.S. leave their current jobs and look for new ones. But all this will not happen very soon. The reason is that the City Tours is still in the lab project period. It has to be improved in many ways and there is quite a lot of time required for that.

The other factor to be noted is that the itinerary is not a very comfortable one. The Kennewick trip includes a 148 minutes walk per day too. Now that is not a comfortable in a small town in U.S. May be they will work in the big cities. Despite all these the feature is looked upon with great expectations.

There are three ways in which the spotlight feature can be accessed. First way is to scroll the screens from right to left till the home screen is moved to the right. Or else clicking the home button twice will activate the feature.

Once the feature is activated the phone will display a white search box and a keyboard. The user can type in the query to obtain categorized results. Some of the categories under which the search results are listed are the following:

Applications: by the first, last or company name

Messages: by from, to or the subject line

Calendar items: by event, locations, invitees etc.

Clicking on the application will open them in their original application. It is also possible to customize the search. The applications to be searched and the order in which to be searched can be set. You can go to “Settings”. In that go to “General” and then “Home”. Scrolling down will take you to “Search Results”. Here the applications can be reordered or unchecked. To reorder the application list you just have to place a finger on the right horizontal bars and scroll them up.

The fact that such a large patch was not seen in Google earth was very disappointing. And this is after the company having made a great announcement with Google Ocean in the beginning of this year. They claimed that this is a way to view the major part of our earth which is water covered. Google Earth is supposed to be good when it comes to viewing under the ocean. If so why is it that this pile of garbage on the surface can’t be seen?

When contacted, the Google Ocean product manager Steve Miller was ready to give an explanation. He said that the company has not found very nice sources of data for most of the open ocean. Satellite imagery for ocean surface is limited, but where ever it is possible, the results are preserved in the recent versions of Google Earth. The satellite view is stored in Google Maps. A good example is that you can see the vessels in Southeast Asia. Imagery has lots of applications, ranging from finding ships to locating illegal fishing vessels to locating off-shore oil platforms.

According to Steve Miller, the patch does not appear in satellite imagery. This is a major challenge. The reason for this is that the plastic is a little below the surface of water and is in particulate nature. There are groups now trying to collect data about the patch by sampling process and other expeditions. He expressed hopes that these expeditions would help Google Earth obtain maps.