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Bing may be catching on as a new search engine, but it has yet to generate growth in ad dollars for Microsoft, according to a report released Tuesday.

Microsoft's share of search engine ad spending for the second quarter stayed flat at less than 6 percent, according to the report by research firm SearchIgnite. That's the same level it's been for the past several years.

"Microsoft appears to be focusing its efforts on driving consumer interest and capturing increased search query share," said Roger Barnette, president of SearchIgnite. "We have not yet seen this translate into more paid search advertising dollars for Microsoft, although typically consumer adoption precedes advertiser adoption."

Meanwhile, Microsoft's one-time acquisition target Yahoo lost ground in the second quarter, with only 17 percent of the market. But top dog Google continued to rise, grabbing a 77 percent market share for search engine ad spending.

(Credit: SearchIgnite)

However, don't count out Bing just yet. The report noted that research groups have tracked Bing's share of the search query market growing since its launch last month. Ad spending typically lags behind search queries. If consumer interest continues, Bing could enjoy a boost in ad dollars for the third quarter.

Overall, the market for search engine ad spending flourished in the second quarter. The report noted that retail firms spent 36 percent more on paid search engines than in 2008's second quarter. Spending just for the month of June shot up 55 percent from June 2008.

(Credit: SearchIgnite)

"We've seen very strong paid search spend from retailers for the last several quarters," said Barnette, "a trend that can be attributed to an increase in retailers' promotional activity as they turn to heavy discounting and sales to drive purchases."

For this latest report, SearchIgnite tracked 500 marketers using Google, Yahoo, and MSN/Bing for the quarter ended June 30.

Mobile voice search company Vlingo on Wednesday released Vlingo 3.0 for BlackBerry. Like Vlingo 2.0 before it, Vlingo 3.0 uses your voice commands to text other Vlingo BlackBerry users, search the Web, dial a number, create a note, update Facebook and Twitter, and open other applications. New to Vlingo 3.0 is a robotic voice that reads back your actions (like, "calling Home"), plus two premium features. One lets you text any contact (not just others using Vlingo's BlackBerry service), and the other creates, replies, and forwards e-mails based on your dictation. These two services, packaged into Vlingo Plus, cost $17.99 for a one-time fee.

Since Vlingo 2.0 allowed for e-mail dictation in version 2, it's disappointing that the premium set-up in version 3 yanks back a core feature. The benefit is having Vlingo read back the contents of your message rather than having you view it yourself. This makes the move to audio a move to hands-free composition as well, which is useful if moving your lips is the only motion you can spare. However, as Vlingo 2.0 won't expire, those who want to continue dictating e-mail for free and who are uninterested in the application's other enhancements should consider skipping the upgrade.

In addition to the technological add-ons, Vlingo 3.0 officially plays nice with some Bluetooth and all wired headsets. So long as you pair the devices and press the side button, you can rattle off voice prompts through the headset without lifting the BlackBerry to your mouth. If you're driving while calling a number or dictating an e-mail or note, the new setup, along with the just-debuted audio playback feature, helps keep your eyes focused on the road.

(Credit: Vlingo)

As a final addition, Vlingo 3.0 becomes compatible with the BlackBerry Storm, Bold, Curve 8900, and Peal Flip phones, and adds some tweaks to make Vlingo work seamlessly on many more phones tied to corporate policies. (Company admins will still have the final say, however, on any programs they choose to lock out.)

The hands-on test
As with Vlingo 2.0, setting up Vlingo 3.0 takes about five minutes. Following the setup wizard, you'll first configure a hardware convenience key on the phone that activates Vlingo when you push it. This literal side door into the app obviates the need to launch it from the phone's start screen. After that, you'll also be shown a quick tutorial and will need to wait while the app indexes your address book. Figure in a few more minutes to set up your Twitter and Facebook credentials the first time you update your status messages with each social service.

How did the app actually do? Very well, although still not perfectly. My Facebook status update message, "Testing Vlingo 3.0" retrieved "testing Vlingo tree Plato," and did not always capitalize the 't' in testing, which for an editor is a serious offense. Luckily, Vlingo lets you view a message before sending it on its way, or reads it back to you, if you're a premium user.

The robotic read-back was also accurate in our tests, and is optional. In the settings are adjustments for volume, the voice's gender, and length of the message--it's here you can also silence the speech. Yet with this voice playback, headset support, and the new premium e-mail and texting services, Vlingo is by far the strongest voice service offering for BlackBerry, and is poised to make a buck to boot.

Related story: Vlingo one-ups Google with a better voice-powered iPhone app

AdSense for mobile search lets others use Google's search engine, sharing the branding and the ad revenue.

(Credit: Google)

Continuing its effort to stake out turf in a fast-growing area, Google on Tuesday announced the ability of mobile phones to show Google-supplied advertisements through a program called AdSense for mobile search.

Google sells ads next to its own search results through a service called AdWords, but the newer development involves a separate service called AdSense that lets publishers show Google-administered ads on their own sites. Google launched AdSense for mobile phones in 2007, but now it's seeking testers for a hybrid offering that involves others using Google's own search engine.

With it, mobile phone makers or mobile network operators can use Google's search engine and search results, sharing in revenue that comes from the accompanying search ads, Yury Pinsky, product manager of Google's mobile team, said in a blog post Tuesday.

The search can be co-branded with others' Web sites, Google said, implying the company is willing to share but not to let its brand vanish altogether.

Google dominates search for computers, but the company and rivals such as Microsoft and Google are scrambling to stake claims in the mobile market, where increasingly sophisticated phones and networks now permit correspondingly better Web browsing. It's a major new area of growth for advertising companies.

Article edited at 2/10/09 at 8:00 PM to clarify the history of OneSearch for mobile.

(Credit: Yahoo Inc.)

Yahoo on Monday released an update to its voice-activated mobile search app, Yahoo OneSearch, that gets a handful of new capabilities for both its full-fledged app and OneSearch shortcut, plus new support for the Windows Mobile operating system. The OneSearch shortcut is a plug-in that lets you search by typing or speaking search terms into a search bar located on the home screen of your mobile phone.

After releasing a voice-enabled version of its OneSearch plug-in to a few Nokia phones last August, Yahoo has been slowly expanding the application's capabilities, as well as expanding the application itself, to the remaining mobile platforms. Considering the California company's latest string of woes, its slower rate of production compared to competing mobile search apps, namely Google, isn't too surprising.

What the OneSearch update offers is essentially good, but it isn't anything new to the field of voice search, either. Among the additions is a location feature that uses cell tower signal to mark your approximate whereabouts. After placing you, your search results will list local businesses by default. It's a necessary feature to win mindshare among mobile searchers, but Yahoo is playing catch-up among its peers. Microsoft integrated its version of location triangulation into Windows Live Search for mobile last month, and location awareness has been a big part of Google's mobile map client for well over a year.

Yahoo's OneSearch application and shortcut also receive some nice enhancements in the suggested search department. As you type a query, Yahoo's search app breaks its predictive offerings into two. The first block of suggestions is populated with a list of your previous search terms. The second block pulls in matches from an internal dictionary that include the first letters you've already typed. Although assisted search is by now a comfortably worn theme in browser and mobile search, it's welcome in Yahoo OneSearch as a timesaver all the same.

Yahoo's final feature is brand-new support for its voice search plug-in for Windows Mobile phones--but only in the U.S. Yahoo's OneSearch apps, however, have expanded onto some cell phone models in Australia, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.

On Tuesday, Microsoft released version 4.0 of Windows Live Search Mobile, its downloadable search and map app for Windows Mobile 5 and 6, which the company demoed last week at CES.

With this release, Microsoft is finally starting to catch up to other free clients doing mobile voice and text search on other platforms--Google Mobile App, Yahoo Go, and Vlingo among them.

From left to right: bird's eye view, query auto-suggest, and directions.

(Credit: Microsoft)

Taking a page from Google's book, perhaps, the new Locate Me feature in Windows Live Search Mobile can work on non-GPS phones to zero in on your approximate location. If that fails, you can easily add your location manually instead.

Predictive text is also new--when you type a query into the search box, the app will suggest a search term in order to save your fingers some typing. The app did better remembering past queries than it did predicting new ones, and it did not begin suggesting new search terms until we were almost done typing them.

In addition, the search box will now accept mixed queries; for instance, if you speak or type a business name and city into the search box, you'll see results for the business in that second location, without changing your master location. Hunting down a Dunkin' Donuts in Boston when you're living in San Francisco is one example.

Bird's Eye View is the splashiest of the added features, adding a third mode to map-viewing that's akin to Google's Street View. The landmarks we saw were clear, but the view is limited to "select urban areas" and grays out if the one you want isn't part of it. We hope the selection will expand soon.

These additions enhance Windows Live Search's otherwise well-integrated features--click-to-call, SMS, driving directions, and search modules that focus on traffic, movies, gas stations, and weather in your area.

Microsoft is preparing to announce Wednesday it has been selected as the search provider for Verizon mobile phones, beating out archrival Google and Yahoo, according to a Reuters report.

Yahoo shares spiked during mid-day trading as news surfaced that Verizon had chosen a mobile search provider, but then fell back to earth after the Microsoft disclosure.

There has been much speculation over the past year about who would sign the coveted search deal with Verizon, which is expected to overtake AT&T as the No. 1 U.S. carrier after Verizon closes on its purchase of Alltel, Reuters said. Increasingly, consumers and businesses are turning to their mobile phones as a means to interact with the Internet and advertisers are well aware of the trend.

Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg, revealed the carrier's search choice during a presentation at an investment conference, noting Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer is expected to make a similar announcement at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

Although Seidenberg did not delve into further details about the deal, it is expected to generate between $550 million to $650 million in guaranteed revenue a year.

For Yahoo and Google, the announcement is a blow to their mobile efforts.

Yahoo in November announced a deal with T-Mobile USA to power its search and mobile Web portal. And although Yahoo recently was able to extend its relationship with Verizon to provide its Web portal to computer users, it fell short in doing the same for Verizon's mobile customers.

Safari's built-in search box now shows iPhone-optimized search results for Google.

(Credit: Google)

After revamping the iPhone's presentation of Google search results last month, the Internet giant has spread the change more broadly on the Apple device.

Previously, the new Google search results were available only when people typed Google.com into the phone's browser, then performed the search. Now the results also appear when using Safari's built-in search box, which, given that it's one fewer slow-loading page away from results, is how I use the service.

Google announced the change on its Google Mobile blog. The new results also appear on the T-Mobile G1, which uses Google's Android operating system. In addition to being better-suited to the devices' screen size, the mobile-formatted pages load more quickly, Google said.

iPhone customers can change their default search provider to Yahoo, if desired.

(Via Search Engine Watch.)