Microsoft has thrown the gauntlet down to Google on the announcement of its forthcoming Bing search engine, with UK search lead Paul Stoddart telling TechRadar that its rival has ‘backed itself into a beautiful corner’. Bing will arrive in Beta form in the UK on 3 June, offering a very different search option to the traditional Google. Microsoft’s Paul Stoddart believes that the company’s relatively small market share through its current Live search engine means that it can afford to take the kind of risks to innovate that Google cannot. A

Browser apps are going to get the same capabilities as native Windows and Mac applications. That’s what was promised by Google’s VP of developer relations Vic Gundotra at the Google IO conference this week. Chrome Product Manager Ian Fette went even further, claiming that "the browser is the OS for the web app." Some of the new features Google is putting into its own browser (and supporting for inclusion in the proposed HTML 5 standard) could give web apps the same power as native applications – but they could bring some of the same complexity too. HTML

Google has given a sneak peek of its latest project – Google Wave. Wave is designed to be a ground-up reinvention of the way we communicate and collaborate. Think instant messaging, but with the open platform potential for plugging in Twitter and other methods of communication, too. For the moment, Google Wave isn’t a public launch – that’ll be later in the year – but it will be made available to a small number of developers at the Google I/O conference in San Francisco, taking place today. Read on for more pictures, as well as videos behind the scenes of

Google has shown off the next iteration of its Android OS – codenamed Donut – at the recent Google I/O conference. The next version will build on the search functionality of the device (which is hardly a shock given Google’s backing) and has taken the ‘anything you can do, we can do better’ approach to Apple’s iPhone 3.0 update by bringing its own version of Spotlight. In the next version, users will be able to search both locally on the phone and online at the same time, as well as being able to pore through calendars, music and other

At the All Things Digital D7 conference, Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz defended the ailing search giant and suggested that it still outperforms Google in key areas. "They’re very good in search, very good in maps", said Bartz, as reported by ATD. "But they don’t have the positioning and reach that we have." "Google is a place people go to to search. We are a place people come to be informed. We want to be more personal than Google." Yahoo currently accounts for about 20 per cent of internet searches. Does Ballmer have a

Symbian Foundation leadership team member Tim Holbrow has questioned Google’s purpose behind pursuing its own Android mobile platform, calling its strategy "weird." In an exclusive interview with TechRadar before his speech at Wireless and Mobile 09 in London yesterday, Holbrow questioned whether Google’s bullish attitude to Android could be an issue of control. "Android’s a very interesting one," he said. "A question I’ve asked lots of people – and not had a good answer to yet – is, I can understand the

Search engines can seem like magic. You type what you’re looking for into a text box, and – ping! – it appears mere milliseconds later. Of course, we all know that Google relies on more than a magic wand to produce relevant search results; but what exactly does it use instead? Well, any search engine has three distinct phases: spidering the web to find and read web pages, indexing the web pages found and responding to user queries to produce a set of ranked results. In this article we’re not going to talk at all about the spidering activities, but you can

Last week, Google stopped working. This morning, Google UK was having issues – which were probably our broadband connection’s fault – and our 3G phone signal went on the fritz yet again. Anybody else feeling a sense of déjà vu? In the 1990s, it was the dreaded blue screen of death: you’d be halfway through doing something or downloading something important and your PC would go on strike. You’d swear, reboot, swear, reboot, swear and do a bit more swearing, and eventually it would work again. Now, it’s the dreaded outage:

Google has added automatic ‘message translation’ to GMail – allowing users to communicate and read replies in ‘whatever language they choose.’ Although Google translate has been around for some time, the prospect of applying it across the company’s webmail product is obviously appealing. Blooming heck The search and advertising giant points out that it could help keep those holiday romances alive adding: "We hope they give you enough common ground to keep that holiday romance blooming a little longer." The

Google’s Larry Page has admitted that his company has done a ‘relatively poor job’ in making the most of real-time trends, praising the way in which Twitter has cornered the market in breaking news. The Google co-founder conceded that the company was not the leader on real-time trends, with Twitter’s trending topics giving a much more current snapshot of what people were talking about. "People really want to do stuff real time and I think they [Twitter] have done a great job about it," said Page at Google’s Zeitgeist