Did you know that just weeks after Microsoft announced the launch of Bing, its search engine with advertising and marketing blitz of $80 million in June, Google came out with its new operating system Chrome that is meant to cut on the dominance of Microsoft Windows.

This is the first time that Google is in for some serious challenge in the world of search engine. Microsoft has teamed up with Yahoo and if the deal rolls out effectively, then by next year the Microsoft-Yahoo duo will account for almost 28 percent of online searches.

The trade secret of the search engines is their unique algorithm. Just as Coca Cola has its own secret formula, in the similar way for search engines it is the complex set of instructions that holds the key to determine what and which will be shown in search results.

Microsoft’s Bing has been acclaimed critically as well. Bing is better described as Decision search engine and it has been designed with emphasis on four major categories of search-shopping, travel, health and local. It has been observed that the search results of Bing are displayed with two parts. The central part reflects the search results that Bing compartmentalize into logical categories while there is the navigation part on the left hand side that the user clicks on related searches. Bing also throws up a video preview that allows the user to hover the cursor over the video thumbnail and one can see video highlights automatically.

It is expected that the search results of travel by Bing will be the differentiating factor. If you do a Google search for inexpensive hotels in San Francisco or just want to get the best airfare deals, Google throws up lot of promotional sites and the outcome is close to useless. It is here that Bing will checkmate Google with Farecast technology.

What is Farecast Technology? Based on recent trends, it is designed to locate the cheapest hotels and flights. It will help to chart out the high and the lows of relevant room rates and airfares over a period of several months and can also put forth prediction as when the prices are expected to be low. The Farecast predictions have been recently audited by some independent companies and they have concluded that predictions are almost 75 percent accurate.

Google spokesperson have commented nothing in specific to Bing but said that the company takes every competitor seriously.

So why not Google Bing and see for yourself.

Here are some tips to optimize on Bing SEO (or DEO):

• If your website is around for some time, you are game with Bing SEO. Yes, the relatively new domains do not stand good chance with Bing SEO search results.  Additionally your sites should be content rich. Bing likes pages with text, at least minimum of 350 words.
• Outbound links to other sites that is simply no-no for Google have greater importance in Bing engines. So linking out is important and you will see smile in your faces with the search results in Bing.
• Title that correlates with the subject helps your website to rank in the top of Bing search results. So, Bing SEO puts preferences to those websites that have keywords in domain names.
• Bing is flash friendly so upload some jazzy videos with content-rich text and check out the difference in search results.

On a final note, I would like to share a link which is a unique one to see the best of Google and Bing:

Click here to Search with Bingle !  (Bing and Google), check out …

Google wave

Google wave is the project that Google team took up 2 years back, to revolutionize the way we communicate over web. This project code named as ‘Walkabout’ was revealed at Google I/O conference on May 27, 2009. It is a new real time, open source browser based communication tool that integrates on one single platform, all the ways in which we communicate now on web, like IMs, e-mail, social networking, blogs, wikis, project management. 

Wave : Its features and terminologies 

Waves are hosted XML documents that enable and synchronize a threaded conversation. We have to create a wave and add people to for a threaded conversation. The wave can be created for anything like conversation with a friend or for real time group editing of a document by any number of people or for both of them simultaneously. It offers a richly formatted text, photos, gadgets, and feeds from other sources on the web. Users can give a reply or edit the wave directly. You can add a contact to a wave at anytime by just dragging the person from the contact list to the wave. 

Key features: 

• Real Time: You can see what your friend (who is involved in the wave) is typing at the very moment. This holds true both for instant messaging and editing docs in collaboration. This feature can be disabled by writing your text in draft mode. We can know who is editing the doc (among the several users) by seeing their name outlined by a bright coloured box. 
• Open Source: Google wave will be an open source application so that developers can extend its functionality and make best use of it. 
• Play back: This feature empowers one to catch up with smallest details of what has been happening in the past in that particular wave. 
• Drag and drop file sharing: We just need to drag a file we want to attach and drop it in the wave.  
• Waves can be embedded on any application, blogs, sites etc. 
•  Spell check: It can autocorrect spelling and grammatical errors and also provides automated translation for 40 languages. 
• Wiki Functionality: All conversations and documents on a wave are shared. Hence we have the liberty to edit, append or comment on any information on the wave. If we want to have a private conversation with someone in the wave we can easily break off from the main league but we still stay in the flow of the wave. 

The Jargons in Google Wave: 

• Wavelet: A wavelet is a subset of a wave. For Example if we consider a history of conversation, considering one IMs conversation from that will be analogous to considering wavelet in a wave. 
• Blip: Blip is an individual message in a conversation. Blips can have sub blips called children associated with them.  
• Document: The characters, words and files in a blip are called a document. 
• Embedded wave: This is the wave that is embedded to another website or blog. 
• Extensions: Extensions are the applications we can use in our wave. Two types of extensions are : 

1. Gadgets: A gadget is an application that users might use for different purposes similar to  the face book applications we use. 
2. Robots: They are automated users which are basically used to gather more information from different source and assist users in different actions.

Google wave consists of three layers namely: 

1. Google Wave product: The HTML5 web application, built on Google Web toolkit is the product users are going to use to access and edit waves. 
2. Google Wave Platform: This platform provides rich APIs used to build applications that work in a wave and embed waves in other web services. 
3. Google Wave Protocol: This is the format of storing and sharing waves which includes live concurrency control. 

The people who are making this happen:  

It was Jens Rasmussen, to whom this concept clicked for the first time and the team that is working in Google’s Sydney office to make it happen includes Lars Rasmussen and project manager Stephanie Hannon (The same team is responsible for developing Google maps also). 

The reason of this web application being named as Google Wave has its roots in the frequent reference to the popular T.V. Series ‘Firefly’ in which ‘Wave’ is an electronic communication. 

This phenomenal application is open for developers to have a hands-on and give a review. On September 30, this year, Google Wave will be made accessible to 1, 00,000 users who register on http://wave.google.com and later this year it is expected to hit the markets.

P.S. : For all WordPress lovers, there is a new plugin available to try out Google Wave called ‘Wavr’ , though at beta stage. Chill out !

Google launches Chrome based operating system  

The tussle between Microsoft Corp and Google Inc, the giant powerhouses of technology is always behind the veil with sugar-coated news releases without inviting much of disdain. However, this time Google Inc is expected to pose a competition to Microsoft’s core competency in the area of operating system.  

Top executives of Google Inc is of the opinion that Microsoft Windows operating system that dominates market and has changed the face of personal computing experience often rigs its system and limits the choice of consumers. Second, there are issues of viruses and security lapses as well in Microsoft operating System.  

Google is aiming to usher in a new area in the world of netbook computing. Netbooks are the latest buzzword in the industry and these lap tops are low cost, user-friendly and less powerful. Netbooks will be perfect choice for budget-conscious consumers who would enjoy web surfing with a difference. Yes, its here that Google feels that a new operating system based on its 9 month old Google Chrome web browser will definitely serve purpose with greater efficacy.  

However, it needs to be admitted that it’s not easy to topple an established market leader. For example, in case of Google chrome web browser, Google claims that 30 million people are using Chrome web browser that is only a fraction of the people that relies on Microsoft Internet Explorer.  

Again Google has greater market dominance in terms of search engine market. Microsoft is on its way to thwart this dominance of Google by investing in internet search and advertising methods. With Bing, Microsoft is aiming for a greater makeover in the world of search engine market by investing $100 million in terms of marketing campaigns and advertisements. Google on the other hand have rankled Microsoft as they have lured some top-notch people from Microsoft who have helped design online computer programs that would pose competition to Microsoft’s calendar application, word processing and spreadsheet.  

Google has already made its name in the field of operating system with Android. Now this chrome based operating system that Google feels will be best for netbooks will be designed on top of a Linux Kernel and in a new windowing system.  

Come the second half of 2010, and we expect to see some great changes in the world of computing experience. We will wait and watch whether Google Chrome becomes the killer for Windows OS.