About five months ago Microsoft launched their new search engine called Bing (bing.com).  Before that time it was Microsoft’s “Live” search.

Within a week of Bing’s launch “Computer World” reported that it overtook Yahoo.com as the #2 search engine behind Google.  Rumors are still out there that it will soon take over the #1 position but right now that isn’t happening.  As of the end of July, StatCounter.com, a site that keeps stats on most things cyber, says that Bing had 9.41% of the search market; however, Google is still way in front with 77.54%.  Combined Yahoo and Bing earned about 20% of the market.  These percentages vary depending on whom you believe but the order remains the same.

The amount of money varies but I have seen varying reports with $1 billion per one  percent of the search market per year.  Regardless the major search engines make a bunch of money.

At the end of July Microsoft finished its merger deal with Yahoo that started in 2008.  Now they will definitely be the #2 search engine.  There are many details in the deal that you can Google/Bing for online.

Bing.com itself is impressive.

Their main page always has a picture of someplace that most people have most likely never seen.  Today it appears to be a market in Bangladesh which looks much better than it did in the early ’70’s when George Harrison sang about it.

If you hover your mouse around the pictures links will appear.  You can click these links and they will tell you about the location of the places, their economy, life of the people, etc.  This is better than Google’s simple launch page but Google intentionally built their page to be simple.

The main attraction for me is that the links on Bing are active.  After you search, you may hover to the right of any search link and a small box will appear.  This box gives you details about the link with other related links in it.  It is sort of like a preview of the page.  This feature also works when searching for pictures.  When you hover over a picture it enlarges slightly and gives you a little info about the graphic.  Videos searches, when hovered, actually start playing for a short period with full sound.  These previews are good.

The search page keeps a list of related links on the left side of the page with your current browser search history under them.  That allows for more interaction than with other search engines.

As far as accuracy – who knows?  I have read that each is more accurate than the other depending on the hour of the day.  I suggest you try it out if you haven’t already and see if it is better for you than your current search engine.  I currently move back and forth between the top two.

Before I start this week’s column I want to say, “Thanks!” to those of you who wrote in reaction to the last column.  Many of you wanted the latest version of Internet Explorer but have slow internet connections.  This kept you from completing the large download.  The $5 CD for IE turned out to be a great “workaround” for you.  I have even gotten one email from a reader who has already received their CD via first class mail.  That was quick since I just wrote about it last week.  I make every effort to help you as much as possible with “Double Click” and will keep at it.

Today I have an important announcement that may save money for you all of you college students and/or their parents.  I know the college year has already started for many but hopefully you have not purchased Microsoft Ultimate Office 2007 yet.

For at least the last 15 years (as long as I can remember) Microsoft has had a special deal for students with regard to MS Office.  The best I recall was when Office sold for a little over $169 and had a student discount to about $99.  This serves two purposes.  One is to help students defray some of the high costs of education.  The second is a little more self-serving on their part.  When those students graduate and become the business leaders of tomorrow they will incorporate the MS products from college into their business.  This yields more profits for MS.

Right now if you go to TheUltimateSteal.com and you are a college/university student at a “Registered” and “Approved” school you can get MS Office for $59.95.  MS says that this is 91% of the regular price.  Now that would mean it costs over $650; however, you have been able to find it much cheaper than that for quite a while.  Still, that price is excellent.

This version has not been shortchanged either.  According to the site this version includes all of the normal Office products plus InfoPath, Groove, Publisher and OneNote.  You must have either a school email address of other required documentation to prove the “Studentship” of the purchaser.  You can find out all of the pertinent details on the site.

Also, note that MS has changed their requirements a bit.  In the olden days (5-10 years ago) you could also purchase the “Student” edition if you were a higher school teacher, administrator or high school student so those features have changed.

I believe that one reason it has been this significantly discounted is that Office 2010 will obviously be available next year.  Next year you can do it all again and hopefully I will find out about this a little sooner in the school year.

This week I have one upgrade and a couple of updates I want to recommend.

The upgrade would be to ask all of my readers, if you use it, to dump Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 6 (MSIE 6).  It is extremely hard to write code for (you can help developers to create better sites for you) and it is old…really old.  MSIE 6 was released to the public on August 27, 2001.  You have to admit that over eight years is prehistoric in the life span of software.

Depending on which report you read in the news over the last week or two about MSIE 6 usage you will find that approximately 30% of browsers used on the net are MSIE 6.  The actual percentage varies since any site is visited by many users with many different types of browsers; therefore, no one of them is absolutely accurate.  The lower end of the range was reported as, “15 to 25 percent” by CNN.

There have been newer versions out since October, 2006, the first being MSIE 7.  The newest is MSIE 8 which premiered March, 2009.  I know that some of you have a slow internet connection and it may take many hours to download something that large.  Hopefully, once you spend that long at it you will get the entire file properly downloaded but that is sometimes iffy with such large files and slow connections.  Therefore, Microsoft also provides a CD ($5.00 to cover shipping) which they snail-mail to you.  You really don’t have much of an excuse not to upgrade.  You can check out your options at Microsoft.

You also do not have to use MSIE as there are many other good browsers out there.  My favorite is Firefox.  Others good ones are Google Chrome, Opera and Safari to name a few.  Search for others if you are interested and keep in mind that they should all be free.

I won’t talk long about this next item, but you need to make sure your operating system is updated often.  Windows pushes the large majority of their system updates on the second or fourth Tuesday of the month.  If you don’t run automatic updates on your system, check them twice a month a day after those Tuesdays.

Next, I recommend you update your antivirus software at least weekly.  If you have the software update itself that is good.   You should occasionally run the update manually to make sure it is getting the latest data files.  There are good paid and free versions of antivirus software but none of them are any good to you if they are not often and consistently updated.

I have mentioned some of this before.   However, with the number of questions I have received from readers recently regarding these types of things I felt I needed to point them out again.

Today’s column may sound like a movie or TV show review but it isn’t.

A month or so ago I heard about a TV show that I would like to have seen.  The show is titled, “Warehouse 13“, and sounded like a mixture of “Indiana Jones“, “National Treasure“, “Moonlighting“, etc.  The only problem was that it was already into its third or fourth episode and it was on the SyFy channel.  I used to like to take an occasional look at the SyFy (yes, it was Sci-Fi until recently) but since I have cut back my cable subscription, I haven’t seen it lately.

There are many places that you can get rebroadcasts of TV shows and movies online.  The obvious place for this one is at www.syfy.com, which is where I first found it.  When I was talking to a friend about it they suggested a site named, “Hulu” where you can get many shows, movies and other media.  I remembered the site and found that I had joined it a year or so ago when it was just starting and didn’t have much to offer.

Now all of you geeks out there don’t have to blast me about other, better sites as I know there are many similar sites out there.  However, I think this is a good place for the newbie to online TV to start exploring.  If you want to offer a friendly tip that is fine with me.

First you don’t have to be a member, although it is free.  With membership it can keep up with what you have watched in the past, make suggestions about what you may want to take a look at, etc.  If you download the Hulu desktop player as a member, it will keep track of where you left off.  For example, I was watching a show one evening, fell asleep and shutdown the application and my computer then went to bed.  When I came back to the Hulu desktop a day or so later it remembered where I was in the show and started playing from there.  This is almost as good my DVD player and may be better.

They do run advertisements during the shows.  The majority of the ads are from 15 to 30 seconds long and you usually get one at each break.  If you see an ad that interests you, click a link and go to the advertiser’s website and check it out.  You may then return to the show/movie and go back to the ad afterward.  You can also check the advertiser’s site out in full and with another click or two, return to your movie.

Some of the people I have talked to about Hulu seem to think that they will start charging to use this service.  However, I believe that if people click some ads and buy some products it may continue to be free.  If anyone from Hulu happens to read this and can comment let me know.

For now this is a great way to watch a show you missed last week or have never seen in HD.  I’ve hooked my notebook to my wide-screen, HD digital TV and it looks and sounds great.  Let me know what you think if you try this or a similar site.