In its first government complaint against a rival, Microsoft has accused Google of antitrust behavior in Europe. The European Commission is investigating the search giant after smaller websites alleged that Google was unfairly burying them in search results.
Microsoft has definitively denied that its Bing search engine takes its cues from its rival. Nonetheless, the Google allegations highlights the challenges Microsoft faces in addressing the "long tail" market in search, or the obscure searches that collectively account for a huge portion of search traffic.
In a blog post on Friday, Google made its most direct warning that it would be tweaking search algorithms to punish "content farms" -- cheap producers of Web content that either copied or scraped information from other publishers. Demand Media could suffer in particular.
Here comes a faster Google. The search giant announced today a new enhancement called Google Instant that's designed to shave two to five seconds off a typical search query.
Google's headaches in China just won't go away. Chinese news agency Xinhua has teamed up with the country's largest telecom carrier, China Mobile, to create a new search and international media company.