“Microsoft and Yahoo!’s share of online paid search advertising queries in Australia was limited,” the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission said in its notice of approval. “In combining search engine platforms, Microsoft and Yahoo! may have been able to achieve the necessary scale to provide effective and sustainable competition to Google, which had a very large share of online paid search advertising queries.”

Great news for the two companies, whose plan to consolidate two of the search market’s three largest players is currently under review by antitrust regulators at the U.S. Justice Department. Should it be approved, Microsoft (MSFT) and Yahoo (YHOO) will together control nearly 30 percent of the U.S. search market, giving them a better chance to compete with Google (GOOG), which holds a roughly 65 percent market share.

“We continue to believe that this deal will create a true, competitive alternative in the marketplace that will benefit consumers, advertisers and publishers,” the companies said in a joint statement. “We remain hopeful that the agreement will close in early 2010.”

Why China and Brazil? Well, for one thing, they are developing markets. For another, Dell (DELL) already has partners there.

“Besides size (China Mobile has over 500 million subscribers, and Claro serves more than 42 million), we have existing telecom partnerships with them,” Dell blogger Lionel Menchaca said in a post. “Back in April, we were the first to embed China Mobile’s technology into our Mini 10 netbook. And if you’ve been watching, you know Dell has agreements with lots of other providers like Vodafone in Europe, Australia and New Zealand. We’ve partnered with AT&T and Verizon in the United States to offer mobile broadband on different products, and we have agreements with other carriers in Asia.”

Interesting. Presumably this means we’ll see the Mini rolled out in short order in these other countries as well. As you may recall, Dell was rumored to be building an Android handset for AT&T (T) in early October.

How nonexclusive is Microsoft’s deal with Twitter?

So nonexclusive that just hours after Microsoft (MSFT) announced it, rival Google (GOOG) lurched forward to say that it has entered into a similar partnership with the San Francisco-based microblogging service.

The search giant may be second to this party, but it’s not going to be late. But make no mistake–this is very clearly a rush job.

Some proof? Microsoft has code running. Google does not.

Twitter and Google announced the deal in posts to their respective company blogs.

“Our friends down in Mountain View want to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” Twitter co-founder Evan Williams wrote. “A fast growing amount of information is coursing through Twitter very quickly, and we want there to be many ways to access that information. As part of that effort, we’ve partnered with Google to index the entire world of public tweets as fast as possible and present them to their users in an organized and relevant fashion.”

Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice president of search, was similarly enthusiastic about the deal.

“We believe that our search results and user experience will greatly benefit from the inclusion of this up-to-the-minute data, and we look forward to having a product that showcases how tweets can make search better in the coming months,” Mayer wrote. “That way, the next time you search for something that can be aided by a real-time observation, say, snow conditions at your favorite ski resort, you’ll find tweets from other users who are there and sharing the latest and greatest information.”

Once Google gets around to indexing Twitter’s real-time data.

Lu also confirmed a similar deal with Facebook.

bing is bringing twitter search to you

October 21, 2009, 10:24 AM by Bing | 0 Comments
One of the most interesting things going on today on the Internet is the notion of the real time web. The idea of accessing data in real time has been an elusive goal in the world of search. Web indexes in search engines update at pretty amazing rates, given what it takes to crawl the entire web and index it for searching, but getting that to “real time” has been challenging.

The explosive popularity of Twitter is the best example of this opportunity. Twitter is producing millions of tweets every minute on every subject you can imagine. The power of those tweets as a form of data that can be surfaced in search is enormous. Innovative services like Twitter give us access to public opinion and thoughts in a way that has not before been possible. From important social and political issues to keeping friends up to date on the minute-by-minute of our daily lives, the web is getting more and more real time.

Search needs to keep up. Shortly after we launched Bing, we did an experiment with the team at Twitter, where we took a fairly small number of “celebrities” from Twitter and provided access to their tweets as part of the search result. Here is a great example.

But what if we take that to the next level? What if we indexed basically the whole public Twitter stream and made it available to customers?

We’re glad you asked that. Because today at Web 2.0 we announced that working with those clever birds over at Twitter, we now have access to the entire public Twitter feed and have a beta of Bing Twitter search for you to play with (in the US, for now). Try it out. The Bing and Twitter teams want to know what you think.

How does this all work?

Were you as fascinated by the 6-year-old boy floating away in a balloon as we were? Was it a hoax? We know that people are going to twitter more and more for information surrounding all the latest chatter.

You can now search for what people are saying all over the web about breaking news topics, your favorite celebrity, hometown sports team, and anything else you use Twitter to stay on top of today.

If you want to keep an eye on this topic, you can just watch the Tweets roll in. Or, click on “See more Tweets about…” to go to a page full of Tweets. On that page, you can change the ordering to “Best Match.” Here we arrange Tweets differently. If someone has a lot of followers, his/her Tweet may get ranked higher. If a tweet is exactly the same as other Tweets, it will get ranked lower. For example, I saw a Tweet from ABC News ranked pretty high in the Best Match mode during the “boy in the balloon” fiasco. By the way, you won’t see any of your tweets if you protected or deleted them, and tweets don’t last more than 7 days in our index.

Are you a Taylor Swift fan? Just think of all the links that are shared on twitter that have to do with Taylor. To help you find these links we sift through and find the most interesting and hot trending links that other search engines usually don’t pick up on. Below you can see a couple of interesting links shared by Twitter users–some news and some gossip.

Instead of the usual captions that are used for links, we decided to give you a “social caption” and show you what people are saying about these links.

Our team has been using this product internally, below are some situations where it came in handy:

Sean Suchter (my boss) and I avoided a closed freeway on a rainy Seattle day and made our flight home.
Eric Scheel (principle program manager on the team) a photo-gear junkie, keeps up on early product reviews and owners’ tweets, which helped him decide on his next purchase.

My wife thinks I am almost cool because I know stuff about Taylor Swift.

We’d love to hear some stories from you about how this may have helped you. Of course, we also want to hear your ideas about how to keep improving this product.

Paul Yiu and the Bing Social Search Team

“[A partnership with Apple] is something that’s likely to come over time,” Hastings said. “But nothing in the short term. [With] movie watching, we are not focused on mobile yet, but on the TV, on Blu-ray and on the video game consoles. We will get to mobile eventually, including the iPhone.”

Of course, bringing a Netflix (NFLX) streaming-video app to the iPhone will no doubt take some doing–and a few concessions. Certainly, it seems unlikely that AT&T (T) would be thrilled to have Netflix streaming movies over its wireless cellphone network. So at the very least, the company would have to agree make its app Wi-Fi-only.

“This is the one that stuns me, that people haven’t figured it out,” Ballmer said of investor response to the “boatloads of value” the deal will supposedly bring to Yahoo. “It’s sort of, like, unbelievable.”

As Kara quipped earlier this morning, “Believe it, Steve, especially since everyone thinks Microsoft pulled a fast one on Yahoo.”

And so, to convince them otherwise, Microsoft (MSFT) and Yahoo (YHOO) have fired up the “Choice. Value. Innovation.” propaganda machine to reassure us all that this is exactly what the their partnership will bring. Below, the first broadsides to issue from that machine, which Microsoft has confirmed are authentic: What Experts are Saying About the Microsoft-Yahoo! Deal and The Yahoo!-Microsoft Search Deal: Benefits to Consumers, Customers and the Internet.

The Yahoo_-Microsoft Search Deal – Benefits to Consumers_ Customers and the Internet

What Experts are Saying about Microsoft-Yahoo Deal

Now, according to a regulatory filing, Google (GOOG) has gone and sold its share back to Time Warner (TWX) for $283 million, about a quarter of what it originally paid. Which means that in four years, AOL’s value has declined from an estimated $20 billion to an estimated $5.7 billion.

What an amazing loss of value.

According to the filing, AOL, which will be spun off by Time Warner later this year, made $678 million of the $2 billion in advertising revenue it collected in 2008 from its search advertising partnership with Google. Quite a chunk. AOL CEO Tim Armstrong best hope he’s able to renew that partnership when it expires at the end of 2010.

Amazon (AMZN) hasn’t yet commented on the settlement beyond the filing, which offers little more information than that it was “unanticipated” and will be charged to “other operating expense” in the second quarter.

Reports claim that Microsoft Live Search, once known as Windows Live Search and, prior to that as MSN Search, will henceforth be known as…

Bing.

Which is pretty much what we’ve expected all along. Just what form Bing will take is another matter entirely. Will it simply be Live Search updated and recast? Or will it involve something more? Like perhaps that long-rumored deal with Yahoo (YHOO) BoomTown’s been talking about? Or what if, ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley speculates, “Microsoft and Yahoo announce some kind of jointly-managed company that will trade ad sales for search engine placement. This ‘MicroHoo’ won’t be a merged Microsoft-Yahoo. Instead it will be some kind of ad/search entity.” What if, indeed. We may find out later this week.

UPDATE: Interesting. ZDNet’s Larry Dignan points to a report from Jeffries analyst Katherine Egbert that suggests Microsoft is indeed preparing for some sort of joint venture or acquisition. A quick excerpt:

“It’s also possible that Microsoft could debut a partnership or make an acquisition of some type that will bolster its online search presence. The software giant registered an LLC Corp. in Delaware last week, a move often made in advance of acquisitions or joint ventures. The registration gave rise to widespread speculation that Microsoft would acquire Citrix since the name of the LLC is somewhat similar to Microsoft’s code name for Citrix. While that’s possible, the timing of the registration and recent debt raise indicate that it might be more likely Microsoft uses the LLC to form a partnership that will boost the amount of traffic flowing through its search engine, perhaps through a partnership with Yahoo! or others.”

Google abandoned [its deal with Yahoo] not because pressing ahead with it ‘risked’ a protracted legal battle, but because it guaranteed one.”

I wrote that on Nov. 6, following the official dissolution of Google’s (GOOG) proposed advertising partnership with Yahoo (YHOO). Turns out the guarantee to which I referred was an ironclad one. Sanford Litvack, the attorney who would have been lead counsel in the event of a government antitrust case against Google, tells American Lawyer Daily that the Department of Justice was literally hours away from suing the company when it bailed on the deal. “We were going to file the complaint at a certain time during the day,” he explains. “We told them we were going to file the complaint at that time of day. Three hours before, they told us they were abandoning the agreement.”

Had Google not turned tail, the DOJ would have charged it with violating Sections 1 and 2 of the Sherman Act. Said Litvack, “It would have ended up also alleging that Google had a monopoly and that [the advertising pact] would have furthered their monopoly.”

As I wrote back in November, “Internet search advertising and Internet search syndication are natural monopoly businesses. And, according to the DOJ, Google is their presiding monopolist.” Truer words, eh?

We see little to stop Google from reaching 70 percent market share eventually; the question, really, comes down to, ‘How long could it take?’”

– RBC Capital Markets analyst Jordan Rohan, March 2006.

No wonder the Department of Justice was going to file suit to prevent Google’s (GOOG) proposed advertising partnership with Yahoo: The company controls nearly three quarters of the search market. Research outfit Hitwise reports that Google’s share of the U.S. Internet search market rose to 71.7 percent in October from 71.16 percent in September. A nice little jump from the 64.49 share it claimed a year ago.

And what of Yahoo (YHOO) and Microsoft (MSFT)? Well, they fared about as you would expect. Yahoo’s share fell to 17.74 percent in October from 18.06 percent in September and 21.65 percent a year ago. In contrast, Microsoft’s share rose slightly to 5.4 percent, up from 5.36 percent in September.

Sadly, that’s a decline of about two percentage points year-over-year. Not even a respectable showing for an also-ran. ‘Course, that will all change if Microsoft ever gets around to acquiring Yahoo–or, at least, its search business. Together the two companies would control almost, but not quite, a quarter of the search market.