IT Buoy

Two recent reports show Microsoft’s Bing advancing slightly in search rankings — but the surveys differ on who is losing out. Data from Hitwise today show Bing rising a bit to 9.7% of searches in February from 9.37% in January, while Google’s giant share fell from 71.49% to 70.95%. Yesterday’s report from ComScore also showed a boost for Bing — to 11.5% from 11.3% in January. But ComScore’s data showed that Bing was taking search business not from Google, but from Yahoo, which fell to 16.8% from 17% in January. Microsoft has been spending heavily for Bing. Jefferies & Company analyst Youssef Squali writes that Bing’s gains are “aided by the company’s aggressive marketing” but writes that its rise “is an indicator of sustainable traction.” He also writes that, with the Microsoft-Yahoo partnership this year, “Bing should become a viable competitor to Google.” But Henry Blodget at Silicon Alley Insider has another take, writing that “We think Bing is buying these share gains, which means that they won’t be building a profitable search business anytime soon.”

Here’s an interesting study, embedded below, of an “eye-tracking” survey by Web marketing firm OneUpWeb . It groks the effectiveness of the recent efforts of Google (GOOG), Microsoft (MSFT) and Yahoo (YHOO), all of which have jumped into integrating real-time data with search results. The OneUpWeb study only looks at how a small group of users–split into two sections called “consumers” and “foragers”–reacted to the Google real-time search results. Said the report: The launch of real-time results, back in December 2009, was followed by a wave of blog posts and articles. And for all the talk in the search world leading up to and just after the big launch of Google’s real-time results, there has been little more said about the end-user experience and benefit of real-time. So if businesses and marketers are going to be able to grasp the potential value and relevancy of real-time and what it means for the future direction of digital marketing–we need to address a few simple questions: Does the average internet user recognize and understand real-time results? Are consumers finding and clicking on real-time results? And simply, the bird’s eye view: what are the consumers saying about real-time results?

A lot of Web businesses struggle to boost their results in Google’s search rankings. Turns out that Google apparently does too. Google shows up below Yahoo in a search of “search.” Google gave itself a report card this week that shows the company “needs improvement” in several areas when it comes to getting results for its own products to show up properly in search. Silicon Alley Insider points out this ridiculous fact: “If you Google ’search engine,’ the first four results you get are Dogpile, AltaVista, Bing, and Ask.com. The fifth? Google CSE, a beta product.” Of course, if you’re Googling in the first place, perhaps you don’t need to find Google. But the company has plenty of other specific search sites and advanced options that it might want to highlight. Googling “local search,” something that Google has been touting recently , gives you localsearch.com, Yahoo and then Google maps

AT&T’s first-ever Android phone is coming soon. It just isn’t coming with Google. Getty Images The Motorola Backflip was displayed at the 2010 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. The Motorola Backflip, expected to start selling March 7, will use Yahoo as its default search engine instead of Google, even though the phone runs on the Google-backed Android operating system. The decision in part goes back to a 2008 deal that gave Yahoo a place as the default search on AT&T’s MEdia Net portal. But it isn’t all that hard to see signs of sharpening tension between AT&T and Google and a cooling partnership between Google and Motorola. An AT&T spokesman said the carrier had been involved in the decision, but declined to comment further. In an e-mailed statement, a Google spokeswoman said, “This is not a Google-branded product and, therefore, product inquiries should be directed to AT&T and Motorola.” Yahoo and Motorola spokespeople didn’t respond to requests for comment

New research from Nielsen reveals what types of entertainment people have paid for online, and what they’re willing to pay for. People have shown a willingness to pay for music, games and movies, but they’re less thrilled with the idea of paying for news. We can add this to the heap of indicators that the New York Times paywall plan might be a folly . The bigger picture here though is that the vast majority of people still don’t pay for entertainment like movies, music and news online. Read the rest of this story