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Microsoft’s onslaught to persuade us Brits to try out a different flavour of search to Google has kicked off, with the first TV commercial for Bing hitting goggleboxes across Blighty.

The advert – the first of the three – can be seen across a slew of commercial channels such as ITV, Channel 4, Five, Sky Media plus IDS digital channels including Bravo, Dave, GOLD, Living TV and Good Food.

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Google has announced a new feature in search which it believes will make it easier for users to mark and rediscover their favourite web content.

The new feature lets punters mark any search result or map with a star – and this will then appear in a special list at the top of any future relevant search results.

The feature is currently being rolled out for all users over the forthcoming days, so expect to see it soon (it wasn’t appearing for us in the UK yet).

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Google’s ever-grasping tentacles have reached out to ensnare Aardvark, a technology company that, “lets you quickly and easily tap into the knowledge and experience of your friends and extended network of contacts. Aardvark analyses questions to determine what they’re about and then matches each question to people with relevant knowledge and interests to give you an answer quickly.”

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Set to air in the coveted advertising spot in the third quarter of the Superbowl in the US is a très romantique advert from Google which manages to play out an entire love story in their search box.

We’re impressed: it gets across Google’s strength as a search engine in a subtle and powerful way and does an excellent job of what ghastly marketing types would call “reinforcing brand values.”

Nice one Google!
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Google’s futuristic mobile image recognition  feature — Google Goggles — has been demoed on the Sony Ericsson’s Xperia X10.

Although the Xperia is yet to be released, you can see the impressive technology in action, with the phone’s camera being used to scan an object and return search results based on what it can ’see.’

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For reasons best kept to himself, the former ice-cool frontman of the seminal 60s band the Velvet Underground has released the $1.99  ‘Lou Zoom’ app.

It doesn’t do an awful lot – the app basically turns your iPhone into the equivalent of those big phones for old people with huge numbers on – although it does offer a marginal improvement to searching for contacts.

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Google are slamming out the treats in a veritably festive flurry at the moment with an exciting new application called Google Goggles being released for the Android mobile platform.

The app is designed to let you search Google using the camera on your Android phone.

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Microsoft’s daftly named rival to Google has now officially launched in the UK after five months in beta.

Featuring a simple, photo-dominated homepage, the page shows a rather pleasing photo of Avebury stone circle at dawn, accompanied by the cheesy strappy line: “A new dawn begins”.

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Yell have announced the availability of their Yell.com iPhone application.

The free app lets iPhone-toting users snappily locate the two million+ UK local businesses available on Yell.com.

It works pretty much as you might expect, with iPhone users able to choose a particular area to search, or let the phone find where they are via the built in GPS and then be served up results local to that area.

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Straight out of their labs and strictly in beta, Fast Flip is one of Google’s wilder experiments, designed to let you access news articles quickly.

Here’s how they big it up:

One problem with reading news online today is that browsing can be really slow. A media-rich page loads dozens of files and can take as much as 10 seconds to load over broadband, which can be frustrating. What we need instead is a way to flip through articles really fast without unnatural delays, just as we can in print. The flow should feel seamless and let you rapidly flip forward to the content you like, without the constant wait for things to load. Imagine taking 10 seconds to turn the page of a print magazine!
Google blog

It looks quite fun but the problem is that all the pages are presented as images – meaning they take longer to download and you can’t copy and paste any of the content.

We think it’s fun, but a bit daft. Have a play here and tell us what you think!