Data released by Experian Hitwise showed Bing climbing 4 per cent in the four weeks ending February 27, finishing the month with a 9.7 per cent share of the total US search market.

Google slipped slightly from 71.49 per cent to 70.95 per cent, but remains far and away the largest player in the search engine market.

There was no change for Yahoo, which remains in second place ahead of Bing with a 14.57 per cent share. Fourth placed Ask.com however managed to make the largest gain of all, increasing its percentage share from 2.64 to 2.84 – a jump of 8 per cent.

According to Experian, a further 73 search engines shared the remaining 1.94 per cent slice of the market between them.

The results will be welcome news for Bing, which launched a multi-million pound television advertising campaign in the UK on Wednesday. The firm is aggressively looking to build on its position and get its hands on Google’s lion’s share.

The Bing adverts will appear for the first time on Thursday night at 6pm, which will mark the first time ever the US company has sponsored a UK television show.

According to a report by The Telegraph, the adverts will appear on Channel 4 at the start, during and at the end of the Simpsons for the next three months. The American series, which features the now iconic characters of Homer and Bart Simpson, is celebrating its 20^th anniversary this year.

The latest adverts are part of a wider multi-million pound television advertising campaign in Britain which began last night during the football match between Manchester United and AC Milan.

News home

According to a report by the Associated Press, Schmidt told a press conference in Abu Dhabi on Wednesday that talks are underway, but refused to release more details.

He said: “I can’t really say anything other than that we’re in active negotiations with the Chinese government, and there is no specific timetable. Something will happen soon.”

Just a matter of days ago however, the Chinese said there had been no negotiations with Google over the US company’s threat to leave the country.

In January Google said it could cease its business operations in China, after Google email accounts belonging to Chinese human rights activists were hacked.

News home

According to data published by internet security firm SonicWALL, almost 300 top search terms were targeted over the past seven days. There were in excess of 6,600 malicious URLs linked to these search engine terms, pulling in unsuspecting users.

SonicWALL said criminals will seek out high ranking search terms, usually relating to major news events such as the recent earthquake in Haiti. They will then use search engine optimisation (SEO) techniques to boost their malicious websites up Google’s rankings in order to attract more traffic to the site.

Deepen Desai, the lead malware researcher at SonicWALL, said: “Cybercriminals use whatever is at their disposal to spread malware. In this instance they are launching attacks against Google’s top search terms that identify the most popular stories of the day.

“These criminals are now going after these top search terms using their knowledge to insert malware infected websites almost immediately after people show interest in a particular news site.”

Attempts to remove malicious websites from the search results are ongoing, but it can often be a number of hours before sites are discovered and taken down.

SonicWall says there are certain steps people can take to help prevent being caught by criminals, such as: making sure anti-virus software is up-to-date, not executing files sent by email attachment and most importantly remaining aware and looking at URLs before clicking on them.

News home

A prototype device was shown at the Cebit electronics show in Hanover, Germany, in early March.

It picks up signals from what is termed sub-vocal speech – the electrical signals generated by a person’s muscles when they are engaged in a conversation.

The new handset is claimed to be able to translate these pulses into synthesised speech which is then transmitted over the recipient’s mobile.

The device shown at Cebit relies on this technique, called electromyography, which is already commonly used to diagnose certain diseases, including those that involve nerve damage.

The prototype that is on display in Germany uses nine electrodes attached to a user’s face to pick up the signals.

The electrical pulses are then passed to a device which records and amplifies them before transmitting the signal via Bluetooth to a laptop.

There, software translates the signals into text, which can then be spoken by a synthesiser.

And while its developers acknowledge that this basic type of voice-formation technology is likely to be impractical for everyday use, they are hopeful that it can be adapted for use to offer instant speech translation.

Bought by its current owner, Escom, in 2006 for GBP9.3million (US$14million), it is being offered for sale as the company has defaulted on a loan it used to buy the property, according to a Reuters report.

Ahead of the sale, bids of more than $1million were being sought.

Among its former owners are the keeper of another very well known domain, Match.com, Gary Kremen, who founded the dating site in 1994. A book, The Sex.com Chronicles, has even been published charting its chequered history. This claimed that, at one stage, the domain was earning its owner more than $15,000 a day.

The sale of domain names is a huge, and growing, business. The highest amount paid so far for a single domain is GBP1.65million (US$2.5million), for www.pizza.com.

The provider of the loan which is now in default, DOM Partners, said that Escom has been in arrears with payments for more than a year.

But Richard Maltz, an auctioneer at Maltz Auctions who is running the sale, said on Monday there was considerable interest in it.

“We don’t know who’s serious and who’s not, but prospective bidders need a $1 million certified cheque. It should be interesting,” he told Reuters.

Five months after the first sneak previews appeared, the new look previewed boasts a much more stripped-back appearance, with white replacing the previous blue background.

The choice of content on the homepage takes most of its cues from structured Bing data, which among other things, will inform the choice of local news which appears.

About 45 per cent of Bing’s traffic is estimated to come through the MSN homepage, so it is hardly surprising that the new site ‘front door’ includes many pointers to it.

MSN joins a raft of major new homepage roll-outs in recent months, which have included Yahoo!, AOL and, in the UK, TalkTalk, the new identity of the former Tiscali ISP.

The MSN creation contains a number of options to create a personalised front page, including ‘My Cities’, which lets users customise MSN Local Edition and at the same time save details of up to three other locations to follow; Hyper-local Tweets, which highlights posts on the Microblogging site again relevant to the user’s home areas; and TrendWatch, again a ‘Twitter-watching’ application which flags up the day’s top trends and biggest movers.

The team behind the new site, named ‘Inside the M60’ after the motorway which encircles the city, say they believe there is a need for it because of the “failures of local journalism”.

It is the work of freelance journalists Nigel Barlow and Louise Bolotin and will cover news stories and events from Manchester and the surrounding area.

Nigel spent 20 years as an accountant before deciding upon a career change while Louise is a former editor of commodities newsletter The Public Ledger and has contributed to a wide variety of publications including UK national newspaper the Guardian – which has its roots in Manchester – and women’s magazines.

Last year, MEN Media, the publisher of the daily city newspaper the Manchester Evening News and 20 other weekly titles covering towns around the city and farther afield into Lancashire, closed its regional offices and moved all its journalists, advertising and production staff into offices in Manchester city centre.

Since then, the lease has expired on those premises, and the staff are once again being moved, to premises in Oldham, a town seven miles north-east of the centre of Manchester.

Announcing Inside the M60, Nigel Barlow told press news website Hold The Front Page: “It isn’t just going to be blog and we are looking at other platforms beside digital, but initially it will be on a hosted WordPress site.

Nigel commented: “Inside the M60 will be…..giving a voice to the opinions of the disenfranchised community.

“We aim to launch in time to cover the local and national elections in Manchester (which are likely to take place in May). It will use a range of income generation streams of which advertising will be one.”

Nigel has announced details of the site on his own blog

On it, he said: ”Inside the M60 will fill a niche created by the failures of local journalism, taking advantage of the low entry and running costs of today’s media platforms and fully utilising the tools of modern journalism.

“It will address the issues of concern to the general population of the city, scrutinising the policies of local government and other public and private bodies within the city but also unafraid to tackle even the smallest issues that affect the population of Greater Manchester.”

He described Manchester as a city where “the poorest communities live almost within shouting distance of the bright lights and investment of the city centre and yet have little or nothing in common with it.

“At the same time, technology has become alien to them and they are in danger of being on the wrong side of an increasing digital divide.”

The new medium is designed to be more official than a standard e-mail, yet be simple and secure.

Deutsche Post is also stipulating that such communications must include the sender’s name, but is promising that they will not be able to be edited by third parties.

The service will also be available to people who do not have access to Deutsche Post’s internet portal. In these instances, the postal service will print out the letter and deliver a ‘hard’ copy of it as normal.

PostandParcel reports that July 2010 is the expected introduction date of the new service, which for the first time, will allow the distribution of legal correspondence, contracts and invoices.

One major feature of the ‘Letter im Internet’ service is that senders will not be allowed to remain anonymous. Both senders and recipients should also be confident that, thanks to the use of the latest encryption technology, their correspondence cannot be seen by any third party.

The first customers for the ‘internet letter’ include German automobile association ADAC, LOTTO Hessen, DekaBank, two insurance companies BIG Direktkrankenversicherung and Zurich Versicherung as well as the Kommunale Rechenzentrum Minden-Ravensberg/Lippe (krz) which handles correspondence for numerous local councils in Germany’s most populous state, North Rhine Westphalia.

These organisations jointly have millions of customers, including ADAC with 17 million members alone. Talks are under way with other large companies and organisations, Deutsche Post reported.