With Microsoft Advertising adCenter now providing all paid search results for Yahoo! Search and Bing in the US, and Bing supplying the organic search results for Yahoo! Search, they have just announced that this will be rolled out in select markets across europe and the UK in early 2011.

The european transition will begin with the UK, France and Ireland with all of europe expected to be completed by early 2012.

Current advice is to continue using adCenter as normal but to expect further information regarding the pending changes approximately 3 months prior to any changes taking place.

Google, the company behind the world’s most popular search engine, has today announced that it will be creating its own operating system to take on Microsoft Windows. The two technology companies have been at war for years, and with the recent release of Bing, Microsoft’s latest search engine, things have really started heating up.
 
Clearly challenging the software giant, Google said that it has been working on a lightweight operating system based on its Chrome web browser that it launched last year. The new system will be aimed at laptop and netbook users.
 
In a post on the company blog Google stated “Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code...and we'll soon be working with the open source community...”
 
“Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS. We're designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds. The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the web”
 
In an apparent dig at Microsoft the announcement also said “It's our attempt to re-think what operating systems should be…completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don't have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It should just work.”
 
Can Google successfully take on Microsoft in a market that they have dominated for well over a decade, or will they struggle just as the Apple and Linux systems have?
 
Google’s new operating system is due to be released in the second half of next year.

This week Microsoft has decided to do something about click fraud and has filed a lawsuit claiming $750,000 in damages. The defendants are a Canadian family who are alleged to have run a scam which led to a large number of false clicks being placed across the Microsoft Pay Per Click advertising network.

The fraud used automated programs which entered search terms onto the Microsoft search engine (formerly Live Search, now Bing). These programs then clicked on the highest paying ads so that the daily budgets were run down and the adverts would soon stop showing. This allowed the lower paying adverts (used by the fraudsters) to rise up to the top.

Whilst $750,000 is petty cash for a company the size of Microsoft, the software firm hopes that the lawsuit will make a statement and show the price of click fraud, warning off other would-be scammers.

In an interview with the New York Times, Tim Cranton, associate general counsel for Microsoft, said “We have decided to become more active in the commercial fraud area on the enforcement side. The theory is you can change the economics around crime or fraud by making it more expensive.”

The investigation started after Microsoft received several complaints from car insurance advertisers saying that they had seen unusual increases in traffic from their Pay Per Click ads. Keywords such as "auto insurance quote" were being searched far more frequently and the adverts were receiving much higher click through rates.

Microsoft claims that Eric Lam, one of the three people named in the lawsuit, had his own Pay Per Click advertising in place for the insurance keywords, directing traffic through to his site where he would collect a visitors info in order to sell it on to insurance companies. Microsoft believes that Lam made around $250,000 from the scam, while it had to refund $1.5m to advertisers that received the false clicks.

Other search engines that offer Pay Per Click advertising have also noticed problems with click fraud, and have often fought back. In 2004, Google filed a successful suit that won the company $75,000 from a webmaster who was using fake traffic to increase his Adsense earnings.