If you regularly check Techmeme tech news aggregator, you’d know that the biggest news today as it always been whenever things like this happen – is Google’s acquisition of mobile ad technology company AdMob.  But if you scroll through the Techmeme page, passing through the list of blogs covering the news, you’d see a small headline that says – “Microsoft Bing Gives WiFi Users Free Search”.

So, what was that all about? read more

Do you use some kind of information portal as your regular launchpad onto the web? There are certainly plenty of dedicated ones to choose from, as well as being able to choose any web page as your start page, of course.

Microsoft is hoping that it can increase the popularity of its MSN home page with a preview version of the new look just announced.

As you’d expect, the Bing search engine features prominently on the new site which, based on user feedback, is supposed to be less cluttered and easier to use than the current one. read more

We’ve already reported that Microsoft’s Bing search engine had started indexing prominent Twitter users’ tweets, but now Twitter has announced official support for indexing of tweet content by both Microsoft and Google.

Microsoft has announced that it now has access to the entire public Twitter feed and have launched a beta of Bing Twitter search (US only at present). read more

Search Engine Land reports that Yahoo have stopped supporting the meta keywords tag. It seems they did that months ago, which means that neither Google nor Yahoo or Bing supports it. Sounds good, let’s focus on the actual content in our search results instead…

I’m a bit surprised to see BingTweets, a marriage between Twitter and Microsoft’s search engine Bing, courtesy of Federated Media and Microsoft themselves. Why? This from the Bing blog:

How does partnering with Twitter make Bing a more effective decision engine? Many people share their thoughts on Twitter, and search engines don’t currently do a great job of capturing that real-time content. We designed Bing to help you make faster, more informed decisions, and, since people often turn to real-time content to help them make decisions, BingTweets was a logical next step.

Federated Media has a post up on it as well, not adding too much. I fail to be wowed by this though, it lacks the fine-tuning of projects like ExecTweets for example. This is just a ticker, some trending topics, and the option to search Bing and Twitter at the same time.

While Google may be looking into making Twitter searchable, Microsoft has already started implementing its own real-time search into Bing.

At present it’s a fairly limited offering, indexing “some of the more prominent and prolific Twitterers from a variety of spheres”.

It seems that you can only search for the latest tweets from certain people who have been indexed, using syntax such as “[name] Twitter” or “[name] Tweets” or “@[name]”.

As a concept, it’s a good start though I’m not interested in using any search engine to find anyone’s latest tweets — I use Twitter or one of its desktop clients for that. read more

It seems as if China is blocking Twitter as well as Microsoft’s new search engine Bing. Other blocked sites is WordPress.com, YouTube, Flickr, Hotmail and several others. Ryan McLaughlin blogs from China and thinks the block is due to the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre on June 4.

I can only predict the next few days will see more and more sites being blocked, hopefully with things returning to normal shortly after (though if past blocks are anything to go by, it could be weeks or months).

Hat tip: Mashable