So Microsoft has partnered with Yahoo!, and Bing will now provide the heavy lifting when it comes to search. When I read the news this morning, I immediately thought of all the Yahoo bloatware I've seen over the years on certain OEM systems - I won't single out anyone like HP for this.

Live (and now Bing) would have been the default search engine on all these systems, were it not for the Yahoo! bundle. Now, after years of this and Y! Messenger sneaking the Yahoo! toolbar onto the machines of my click-first-and-read-later customers, it looks like Microsoft is going to win back all that search juice.

And the default search engine swap to Yahoo! was perpetrated by more than their own software. Loads of applications - like the non-slim version of CCleaner - come bundled with the toolbar. It all adds up to a big time win for Bing on the desktop.

All without end users lifting a finger to make their own choices. That's important, because many of them weren't paying attention the first time around.

Microsoft has been working on a new search engine, code-named Kumo, for months. According to the Wall Street Journal, Microsoft will finally show the search engine to the public at the D: All Things Digital conference next week.

As far as we can tell from early screenshots, Kumo features a clean, streamlined look with filters for search results in the left-hand navigation. You can sort search results by categories such as images, songs, lyrics, music, videos. You know, kind of like you can do with the new search filters that Google rolled out last week.

Kumo will also reportedly feature improvements to its video and image search engines. Because really, the most important thing isn't how nice a search engine looks, but how good it is at providing the information you're looking for.

Sure, Google, Yahoo!, and other mainstream search engines are great if you actually want to get quick and accurate search results. But we're suckers for new approaches to old problems, like trying to find what you're looking for on the internet. Even if they're a bit rough around the edges.

Galaxy It certainly fits the bill. While most search engines plot your results in a list that runs from the top of the page to the bottom, Galaxy It arranges results in a series of boxes. At the center of the screen is a box showing your current search term. It' surrounded by text, images, or videos representing pages that match your search query.

In classic mode, you can click on any box to visit the corresponding page. Or if you want to refine your search, you can click the top of a result box and drag it to the center to start a new search. The problem is that the new search term might not have as much in common with your original request as you think. For example, when we searched for "Eee PC," one of the initial results was "Eee PC reviews." When dragged that box to the center, our new search turned out to be just "reviews," so we wound up with reviews for a ton of unrelated products.

Sure, Google and other search engines are great if you're looking for information about most things. But sometimes you've got a question that's so obscure that it's nearly impossible to find a good answer on Google. Or your search might be so general that you actually get too many results to make sense of them all.

Enter Can't Find On Google. At its most basic level, this is a website where you can enter all the things Google hasn't done for you lately. Just click the "New Entry" button and rant away. You're helping to contribute to a mostly amusing list of unanswered questions.

But users can also leave comments, which means that your question might actually not remain unanswered for long. For example, a recent commenter was looking for a better way to rename folders, and someone responded with a software recommendation. Or another person was looking for WWE star Trish Stratus's cellphone number, and several helpful commenters pointed out that he was some sort of a sick stalker.

Theoretically, Can't Find On Google could be a great resource for Google or any other search engine looking holes in their product. In practice, it's a fun distraction that you can get lost in for literally seconds.

StumbleUpon is moving beyond the browser toolbar. The social ranking service lets users give web sites a thumbs up or down, write reviews, and find random popular websites by clicking a "Stumble!" button.

Now StumbleUpon is launching a SearchReviews feature that will allow users to see StumbleUpon member reviews next to search results from Google, Yahoo!, Ask, Wikipedia, Flickr, and YouTube. If you've got the StumbleUpon toolbar installed, you may already be seeing the little green SU box next to selected search results. If not, click Tools, then Toolbar Options. Next click the configuration tag and check the box that says "Highly recommended search results."

Because millions StumbleUpon users have been ranking pages for the past few years, the system already has a pretty good list of rankings for many of the web sites, images, and videos you're likely to find during your daily searches. So if you trust the wisdom of crowds and only click on links with positive ratings, SearchReviews could make search engines a lot more useful.

On the other hand, since StumbleUpon is really just overlaying their data on top of Google and other pages in your search browser, the service has no control over what pages you find when using popular search engines. For example, the most popular page among StumbleUpon users for a particular topic might be buried on Google's 5th page of search results, in which case you'll never find it using SearchReviews.

The StumbleUpon Toolbar works with Firefox and Internet Explorer.

With Google turning 9 today and still being the search engine for most everyone on the planet, it's only natural the other big dogs are going to try to bump them off and take-over. The newest bid in this effort is Microsoft and the overhaul of their Live Search site, www.live.com.

Live is hyping its search results as a "blended search" where Microsoft attempts to anticipate what its users want. An example used is the search term 'digital camera' with the first results being a sort of product guide of camera models and their reviews taken from the usual suspects Amazon.com and PriceGrabber.com. These show up in the sponsored sites category which most everyone immediately ignores, much like the advertisement pages in magazines that are layed out to look like real articles.

The links that follow the sponsored results look like what you would find at Google. Almost exactly. See the screenshots below.





Sure the presentation and look is different, but that's probably not going to sway users to switch from their favorite Google giant. Apparently, however Microsoft is going to use this "blended search" model for searches associated with products, local businesses, health information and entertainment in the coming month. Wow. That is not very exciting.

As James Carville might put it, "It's about the search results, stupid." If anyone is going to take aim at Google, they are going to have to do better than stabs at incremental innovation.

Mahalo on the other hand, has something new and different. See Mahalo's screenshot below of the search term 'digital camera.' Note there is no suggested sponsor link box - a nice and welcome nod to our intelligence. And they make the results so easy to sift through so we can find exactly what we want. Not to mention the layout is significantly different and completely intuitive. So, which search engine would you rather use? Take our poll.





Update: As you can see from this review, I was surprised that a "new site" looked so blah and boring. Two of our readers (Thanks Craig and Ervanesque!) noticed that the screenshot was of the old site. The reason the site looks old and dry to me is because it is! It's the same site, The new Live.com hasn't been loading most of the time. So depending on when you go to the site, sometimes the new one will load, sometimes the old. Kind of like a moving target. Yes, it's still in beta, but c'mon!

Anyway, here's a screenshot of the New site. Yes, it's different, but it's still not very good.




At the time of writing this update, clicking on one of the camera links gets you an error message.



So, in sum, the new overhaul has some kinks and bugs to work out before it's ready for prime time.



[via the New York Times]