By Tom Dunlap

So after months of stern warnings from the Chinese government, a controversial Internet filter got an 11th-hour reprieve today.

As the BBC reported:

China is to delay a controversial plan requiring all new computers sold in the country to be equipped with an internet filtering software, state media says.

The filter, called Green Dam Youth Escort, was to have been required from Wednesday, but the industry ministry said computer makers needed more time.

Its planned rollout sparked widespread disapproval inside China, legal challenges and criticism from overseas.

Officials say it is designed to shield children from pornography and violence.

However, free speech activists have criticised the software plan as an attempt to tighten the Chinese government's already strict controls on internet usage.

A report by China's official Xinhua news agency gave no other details on the decision by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.

I'm pretty stunned that the Chinese apparently listened to the outpouring of complaints over the Green Dam, from computer makers, Internet users, security experts, and many others.  Maybe this is a step toward more Internet freedom for the world's biggest country (although India's population will surpass it at some point) but I doubt it.

The news sparked a ton of comments at Slashdot.org, many of them aimed at Sony, which is a popular whipping boy at the venerable online forum. Computer makers had said they needed more time for Green Dam, except Sony ...

who as reported earlier lacked the moral fiber to hold off installing the spyware, which reportedly is ridden [sic] with security holes and uses stolen code. Sony actually managed to ship ahead of the schedule.

Some of the other lively Slashdot comments included:

Well, Sony finally manages to get SOMETHING out on time. Too bad God of War 3 wasn't requested by an evil totalitarian regime to oppress its people.

And then there's this comment, which, as an editor for 20 years, warmed the cockles of my heart, and pretty much everywhere I have cockles, someone who has been known to actually pull out the big red Webster's New World, Third College Editon:

So I'm thinking of starting a fund to raise money and get Slashdot a dictionary. Who's in?

I'd be lying if I said I expected this, but...

After taking a medical leave of absence in January, Steve Jobs on Monday officially resumed his work as CEO of Apple.

"Steve is back to work," Apple spokesman Steve Dowling, told Bloomberg News. Jobs will be working at Apple headquarters in Cupertino, Calif., "a few days a week" and working from home on the rest, according to the report.

Jobs initially was said to be taking a break from work to focus on recuperating from a hormone imbalance. But in April he received a liver transplant from a hospital in Tennessee. Chief Operating Officer Tim Cook handled the day-to-day duties of running Apple in Jobs' absence. Meanwhile, Senior Vice President of Marketing Phil Schiller filled in for Jobs as keynote speaker at Apple's product events and, most recently, the Worldwide Developer Conference.

Given Jobs's disturbingly gaunt physical appearance early this year and Apple's questionable handling of information surrounding Jobs's illness, it was hard not to think the worst when it was announced in January that the Apple CEO was taking a medical leave of absence. I figured that merely was a prelude to a later announcement that Jobs would step down permanently. I'm glad I'm wrong, and I wish Jobs a full recovery and excellent health in the future.

If you're a big social networking user, chances are you're more vulnerable to being ripped off, according to a survey conducted by a Web security firm.

From the Boulder County Business Report:

A new study shows that social network users may be more vulnerable to financial loss, identity theft and virus or spyware infection.

Boulder-based Webroot Software Inc., an Internet security company, found 80 percent of the 1,100 survey respondents don't restrict any details in their profiles from search engines, 59 percent don't know who can see their profiles, 32 percent include at least three pieces of personally identifiable information.

Webroot has recorded an increase in attacks on social media in recent months. However, 78 percent of respondents expressed concern over their privacy.

Young adults, between 18 and 29 years old, are more likely to be at risk, according to the survey.

I'm trying to get my head around how 80 percent of respondents "don't restrict any details in their profiles from search engines" at the same time that "78 percent expressed concern over their privacy."

You see, there is no privacy. You're on the Internet. On the other hand, there's no reason to make it easy for everybody. And as usual, a little knowledge helps. Here's an article in TechJaws titled "Social Network Scams and Fakes." And security site ThreatChaos has a good article titled, "Ten Security Measures for Social Networking Sites."  

From Broadband Finder, June 24:

Research conducted by analysts at Nielsen Online revealed social networking and blogging portals are more popular than ever and the duration people will visit such online facilities is up on the same time last year.

It was noted the total minutes broadband users spend updating their accounts and communicating with others is up by 82 per cent on May 2008 - with the average period per person up by 67 per cent.

The survey also found Twitter was the fastest-growing web brand for last month and saw users increase by 1,448 percent year-on-year. Over the last 12 months, unique visits to the micro-blogging site went from 1.2 million per month to 18.2 million.

Internet Retailer, June 23:

The number of people who are using social networks such as Facebook, MySpace and Twitter has grown 59% in the last year to 43% from 27% a year ago, according to a new report by management association The Conference Board and consulting firm TNS. The report, based on a survey of 10,000 U.S. households, found that social network use spans generations as well as genders.

About 19% of online users age 55 and older visit social network sites, up from 6% a year ago, and, overall, 48% of women and 38% of men on the Internet use social networking sites.

SmartBrief:

Despite the hype surrounding social networking and collaboration tools for business use, just 18% of firms have implemented such offerings, according to Forrester Research, with 63% saying they are not interested in the segment.

It's hard for me to understand why businesses trying to gain an edge in an incredibly challenging economy won't even consider trying tools that could allow them to better leverage their intellectual assets and more effectively engage their customers. I'd say this aversion to social networking and collaboration tools in many organizations likely stems from 1) the traditional corporate need to control the flow of information, and 2) fears that use of these tools would diminish productivity.

Obviously that's just a theory, but whatever is behind the reticence of most businesses to use social networking and collaboration tools, it's self-defeating. The Internet and the digital work world will become increasingly interactive, is there really any doubt about that? To ignore this reality would be like arguing back in 1996 that your company never will need one of those "e-mail addresses" or "Web sites." Well, they didn't go away, and neither will social networking.

By Tom Dunlap

To amplify what my colleague Chris Nerney wrote in Monday's blog post, "The Race For Real-Time Search Results," next-generation search is definitely in the spotlight, and the way I can tell is by a quirky TV commercial I saw last night while watching The Bachelorette.

In the spot, two guys are walking down the street. Guy 1 asks a question, and Guy 2, or should I say Nerd 2, sporting a goofy tie, spouts off all sorts of unrelated or barely related answers. This happens several times, and for a while it was one of those annoying commercials where you don't know what they're trying to sell.

It turned out to be an ad for Microsoft's new search engine Bing, which the software giant is marketing as a "decision engine." It's designed to integrate searches to (allegedly)  bring surfers better results than Google or Yahoo. Bing offers related searches, instant-play video clips, and images in addition to targeted search results. Check out Bing's eye-popping home page, which features a new, color-soaked picture every day.

Bing recently launched, and reviews -- decidedly mixed reviews -- are coming in. Is this just another prettied-up search engine that the company has tried (dare I say lipstick on a pig?), along the lines of Live Search, Windows Live Search, and MSN Search? Or is it a huge leap forward into the semantic web and/or Web 3.0?

I'm still testing it, but I'm pretty impressed so far with some of Bing's bling, including excellent video search capabilities. I also like the little pieces of info that pop up next to the search results when you mouse-over the line to the right of the results.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt, as you might image, was less than impressed, as CNET News.com reported:

"It's not the first entry for Microsoft. They do this about once a year," Schmidt said in an interview with Fox Business Network. "I don't think Bing's arrival has changed what we're doing. We are about search, we're about making things enormously successful, by virtue of innovation."

Bing's TV ads, however, need some work. They remind me of all the lame commercials trying to sell Intel, CNET, Monster.com, Microsoft, and other sites and apps back in the 90s.

Thankfully, Microsoft has promised that future TV ads will focus more specifically on the areas where Bing hopes to differentiate itself -- tasks such as product search and travel. It's nice to hear, but will the TV spots really go beyond the company's other lame commercial attempts? Search me. 

Online search in recent months has become one of the most fascinating and exciting sectors of the Internet. The Semantic Web, Web 3.0, Wolfram Alpha, Google's Rich Snippets...a lot's happening.

What may be attracting the most buzz at the moment, though, is "real-time" search. Twitter was the first to demonstrate the user interest in (if not the business model for) getting search results of the very latest information posted online.

But there are others working on real-time search offerings. InternetNews.com's David Needle profiles several vendors, including Collecta, a real-time search service that launched late last week and drew a lot of coverage. According to Collecta's home page, the site provides real-time searches of news sites, popular blogs, social media and Flickr.

Then there's OneRiot, which focuses on "social networks, book-marking sites and its own online panel of volunteer contributors." Unlike Collecta, whose home page features a search box and a bit of explanatory language, OneRiot also has the latest information posted online. I was greeted on its home page a few minutes ago with news (from Twitter posters) that additional pictures from Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland would be coming soon and that Chris Brown has pleaded guilty to one count of felony assault on his girlfriend Rihanna.

Meanwhile, VentureBeat published an article listing what it calls the 11 contenders vying for supremacy (or at least an upper slot) in the real-time search market. It includes the three mentioned above and eight others, many of which focus exclusively on searching Twitter content.

Which, in a way, leads back to Google. The search giant has been rumored to be interested in either buying Twitter or striking a deal with the microblogging service to access its content.

It'll be fascinating to see how the sector shakes out and what ideas will win out with users. I'm hoping to find time to try out all of the real-time search vendors in the articles I've linked to. If I do, I'll post my impressions here.

As we all know, one of the biggest challenges in this Web 2.0 world is finding a business model that works. Hard to do when so much is offered for free, which is one of the reasons that Twitter -- which has no visible revenue strategy to speak of -- has drawn numerous skeptics.

Enter enterprise social networking platform vendor Socialcast, whose latest version of its software as a service includes a mix of free and paid. It's the latest example of "freemium," a business model in which a basic version of a service or application is offered for free, along with more full-featured versions that cost money.

From InternetNews.com:

"Now companies have the option to deploy an on-premise solution behind the firewall under their control," Socialcast CEO Tim Young told InternetNews.com. "We feel the majority will stay with SaaS, but there are companies that place a very high value on their [intellectual property] and security and this lets them hook up to single sign on and LDAP if they choose."

Socialcast already offered its service for free to the first ten users in a company and the incremental cost was fairly modest for every user beyond ten -- $1, per user, per month. 

Young said the free version is a complete microblogging service à la Twitter, designed for the enterprise that includes administration tools and basic site customization.

New features in version 6 include what Socialcast is claiming is an industry first, a true, real-time track feature that lets users customize activity streams based on subjects, people, groups and topics. There is also enhanced e-mail integration.

Later this summer, Socialcast plans to introduce a business intelligence suite that it will charge for. Socialcast's Young says the company has trademarked the name "Social Business Intelligence."

The optional BI system will provide social analytics within a company to give managers a better idea of how and where information is moving within the organization.

Expect the freemium bandwagon to grow as customers realize there are services worth paying for above and beyond the basics.

By Tom Dunlap

China continues to crank up its attempts to censor what its citizens can see online.

The latest news is that China's Internet watchdogs have fired another salvo at the Chinese-language of version of Google, saying the site disseminates "pornographic and vulgar information."

This latest warning is yet another indicator that the Communist Party is working overtime to stifle dissent in a year of important anniversaries, which included the pro-democracy Tiananmen Square protest in 1989.

According to Reuters today:

The China Internet Illegal Information Reporting Center said it had complained twice to Google about the "vulgar links" available through its search engine at www.google.cn.

"Google China has not conducted the oversight required according to China's laws and regulations, and a large volume of foreign internet pornographic information has entered our borders through this Web site," the center said.

It urged Google to conduct a "thorough clean-up" of its Web pages and also urged authorities to step in and punish the company.

Google and other major Web sites have previously been given a public dressing down for not being quick enough to wipe out targeted content.

Before this latest salvo, the Chinese government went even further, ordering all new personal computers to carry Internet filtering software. Yesterday, there were reports that China was relaxing that plan, but that turned out to be bogus, The New York Times reported today:

American computer makers say the Chinese government has not backed down from a requirement that Internet censorship software be installed on all computers sold in China after July 1, despite reports this week that the rule had been relaxed.

In a further sign that Chinese officials are trying to assert more control over the Internet, the city of Beijing wants to recruit 10,000 volunteers by the end of the summer to monitor Internet content, said an employee of the Beijing government's Spiritual Civilization Office.

... Many people say the software, called Green Dam-Youth Escort, will be used to block Web sites with politically unacceptable content even though officials insist the software will be used primarily to censor pornography.

Computer experts also discovered severe weaknesses in the software that would allow hackers to hijack the computers of people using Green Dam.

Meanwhile, the anti-censorship crowd is fired up and getting more organized all the time, as we saw with the incredible events surrounding the Iranian election. Some reports say that Iranian protesters got a lot of help from Chinese dissidents. It'll be fascinating to see how the censorship fight amps up in the world's fastest-growing economy. 

By Tom Dunlap

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- For Yahoo, it's the Year of the Monkey.

No, not by the Asian calendar (what year is this anyway?), and no, Yahoo doesn't (yet) have a room full of simians writing code.

We're talking SearchMonkey, Yahoo's groundbreaking, semantic web-focused, open-developer application platform that launched in May 2008. Yahoo's platform isn't that widely known by those outside the semantic zoo, but it truly is important for the semantic web movement when a player of Yahoo's magnitude supports things like the RDF standard (a key semweb underpinning).

Here's an excellent primer on SearchMonkey from the Yahoo Developer Network.

I attended Yahoo's presentation today called, "Year of the Monkey: Lessons from the First Year of SearchMonkey," at the SemTech 2009 Conference here. The presentation was part of the conference's "Search Day," a day so chock full of search news and views that even those who go all a-quiver by the words "search results" grew tired of hearing about queries, relevancy, structured AND unstructured data, microformats, relational databases, or how "semanticized" a particular search engine was.

Unfortunately, (or fortunately, as it turned out) when I walked into the SearchMonkey presentation, I started thinking about the Year of the Monkey. Then, from deep in my cerebral cortex, a song from my youth re-appeared and wouldn't leave. Yes, I'm talking Al Stewart's 1976 hit, "The Year of the Cat." It stayed in my head during the whole presentation. (If you like 70s hair, check the Cat video on YouTube.)

I've always said that, after email, looking up lyrics is the Web's true killer app. That, and looking up movie reviews and times. I'd hoped that, by keeping my ears on the Yahoo presenter, I could find the song's lyrics and then somehow fit them with my SearchMonkey theme. But even I couldn't get Stewart's words to bend that far.

It all turned out for the best, because even though SearchMonkey is cool and cutting edge, the presentation was REALLY boring. The speaker was too soft spoken for the late-afternoon, eyes-beginning-to-droop crowd, and the writing on the slides was too small. I was able to glean that some 15,000 developers have signed up in the past year to work on SearchMonkey.

Oh well, "the drum-beat strains of the night remain" and I'm on to the next presentation.

Nearly two-thirds of residential Internet connections in the United States are high speed, according to the latest survey from Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project.

From eWeek.com:

Despite the recession, U.S. residential broadband penetration jumped significantly last year, Pew reported. April's 63 percent level of high-speed home connections represents a 15 percent increase from a year ago.

Well, what do you expect with the price of high speed connections dropping and all. Oh, wait...

Over the past year, according to Pew's numbers released June 17, the price of residential broadband increased 13 percent, from a monthly $34.50 a year ago to $39 at the end of April. Broadband users with the choice of one provider reported an average monthly bill of $44.70 while those with the choice of two broadband providers reported monthly bills of $38.30.

Let's hear it for competition. That difference of $6.40 may seem negligible, but it'd cover most of an $8.99 basic unlimited monthly plan from Netflix. In fact, you could take that money and upgrade to the $13.99, two DVDs out at a time plan and still have some pocket change left over.

Sadly, I have only one provider where I live, and thus am at their mercy. For those of you who have your choice of providers, I urge you to ruthlessly play them off against each other. Make them squirm. Do it for me and the rest of us who have no high-speed options.

 

A couple of news items about the war of strategy between Google and Twitter caught my eye today. First, from InternetNews.com's West Coast bureau chief, David Needle:

Google searches reference works, blogs, news sites, images, videos and much, much more. And since the company's stated mission is to "organize the world's information" can tapping into popular microblogging services like Twitter be far behind?

Apparently not, at least according to the unofficial blog Google Operating System. In a weekend post, GOS said Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) is readying a service that would search and index Twitter feeds. Google already offers separate search services focused on News and Blogs, and GOS says a microblogging search along these lines is in the works that would search results by relevancy and could also be integrated with Google's Web search engine.

While Twitter itself offers search, results are sorted by date. Also, Google's search service would include other microblogging services such as, in theory, FriendFeed. Google had no comment directly on the blog post.

Comment or no comment, it's painfully obvious that Google would be planning a move like this, even if should go ahead and buys Twitter, as is constantly rumored. A bunch of smaller third-party companies already offer some kind of Twitter search service. Why would the world's top online search vendor stay on the sidelines of such a hot market?

Then there's this InternetNews.com article by Alex Goldman:

Can Twitter one day beat Google in driving traffic to Web sites?

It's a radical notion, but to venture capitalist Fred Wilson, it's not an impossibility.

Speaking [in New York] today at the 140 Characters conference, Wilson discussed the ways in which Twitter could make money -- the same way that Google does, by driving traffic to Web sites.

"Google is powerful because it drives more traffic to more places than anywhere else," Wilson explained. "It is the source for 40 to 60 percent -- sometimes 80 percent -- of the traffic for sites I'm involved in."

But, he said, he's seen Twitter -- and another social site that's rocketing to fame, Facebook -- growing faster than Google.

"Six months ago, I started noticing Twitter in the referrals on my blog. We invest in about 25 Web sites and they are willing to share analytics with us on a confidential basis. I compared the trend line for Twitter and Facebook to Google," he said. "Google is still dominant but it is growing at only about 1 percent per month. Facebook and Twitter are coming on hard. Traffic is growing at 30 to 40 percent per month from a small base."

I've seen similar percentages and trends. And while I'm a big Twitter fan, the service is a long way from challenging Google as a traffic referrer for most sites. This mostly is due to overall usage and familiarity. You'd be hard-pressed to find any Internet user who can't explain Google and how it works (at least generally). But try asking some relatives or people in your local coffee shop about Twitter and you'll get a range of responses from "I've been using it for a year" to "Is that the thing where you tell people what you had for lunch? It sounds stupid."

I think we'll have a much better idea of whether Twitter poses a threat to Google in a year or so.

By Tom Dunlap and Jennifer Zaino

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- The fifth annual SemTech 2009 Conference kicked off here yesterday, with a slew of companies set to make announcements at the five-day show.

The conference is off to a good start, judging by the sheer number of companies and people crowding the halls and the lunch tables at the spacious Fairmont Hotel. Many product announcements or upgrades are due this week, and Wednesday's Search Day is a much-buzzed-about portion of the conference.

Also on Wednesday, a last-minute panel was added, featuring two of the biggest applications in the semantic web: Twine's Nova Spivack will interview Wolfram Alpha's business development guru, Russell Foltz-Smith. They'll discuss the recent launch, what Wolfram Alpha is (and isn't), and where the project is headed from here.

Unlike other semantic web conferences, "here we have everyone," said Sally Khudairi, who heads up communications for SemTech 2009. "We have the academics, the researchers, the entrepreneurs, the technologists, the evangelists, and the venture capitalists. They're all here. It's nice we can do that."

Among the announcements so far is news from Thomson Reuters, which has upgraded its OpenCalais service. The list of new features in 4.1 includes "The Recession Pack of Facts & Events" -- a catchy name for tuning that has been done to extract a new set of facts and events related to company performance and company actions in a down economy, including accounting changes, labor issues, layoffs, earnings restatements, delayed filings and more.

"It's the bad news pack," says Thomas Tague, Calais Initiative lead, Thomson Reuters. "Hopefully people won't need that one too long."

What they should need for the long-term is one of the most significant features of the upgrade, Social Tags. The service has used heavy-duty natural language processing to generate tags and now adds the ability to go beyond news categories to include more "human-like" tags to mix and match with semantic ones. Imagine, for example, OpenCalais extracting from an article about Porsche and BMW and a race between two makes of these cars, and perhaps the location of the race.

"But from a consumption point of view, what do I really want to tag that--sports cars or racing, or a human-like tag," he says. "Social tags give you back those human-like tags to mix and match with semantic tags as well." What's exciting about this is where this can take things in the future: Today it can leverage knowledge bases such as Wikipedia to this end, but Thomson Reuters has access to very large database of other types of content, such as all the patent filings ever and reams of scientific information. "We're starting with open data assets but will branch out in the future to include others," he says, bringing on board domain-specific social tagging that would expand OpenCalais' reach into richer publishing domains such as life sciences.
 
The service now also supports Spanish entity extraction, opening up its use to about 500 million more people. It's also been engineered for greater reliability and scalability.

Other briefings at the conference this week will come from Top Quadrant, Collibra, Expert System, hakia, iQuest Analytics, Metatomix, Ontotext, Saltlux, STI International, SYSTAP, and zAgile.

Tune in to SemanticWeb.com and InternetNews for full coverage.

Tom Dunlap reported from San Jose. Jennifer Zaino reported from Long Island.

Over at SemanticWeb.com, we recently scored the services of freelance writer Ron Miller of Amherst, Mass., who has a great blog on his own plus a passion for the semantic web and Web 3.0.

Miller has been freelance technology writing wince 1988, is a contributing editor to EContent Magazine, co-founder of Soc Media 101: Social Media Tips and How-To's for Beginners, and runs an award-winning technology blog. He's also the winner of the Apex Award for Publication Excellence/Feature  Writing, 2006-2008.

Check out his first article for us, Google Wave is Impressive, But is it Semantic Technology? Here's a snippet:

With the announcement of Google Wave at the recent Google I/O conference in San Francisco, there has been a lot of speculation about what this technology means. Some have suggested that it's semantic technology at work, but is it? Experts we asked don't believe it is in its initial form, but it has the potential to be depending on how people end up using the programmatic hooks into Google Wave.

Google Wave is a unified communications platform. Think of it as a container where you can have email, instant messaging, photos, video and live document sharing in a single place, but the beauty of it is that Waves (collections of interactions, documents and rich media) are not confined to the platform, so you could embed Wave technology in a blog or web site and have the same functionality as inside the program interface. What's more, you could see those interactions as part of the Google Wave interface, or you might never have to open the program, depending on how you implement it.

Check back soon for more coverage from this experienced writer.

Maybe this (via InternetNews.com) isn't a shocker to some industry observers, but the timing is debatable:

Just days after launching the Palm Pre on Saturday, Palm has named Jon Rubinstein as its new chairman and CEO, replacing Ed Colligan in a move that continues efforts by the handset maker to try to capitalize on what it sees as a new era in its history.

The news isn't too surprising. While Colligan appeared to be well respected in the industry, he's still charged with being at the helm during Palm's downward spiral during his 16 years of leadership.

Two years ago, Elevation Partners, backed by venture capitalist Roger McNamee and U2's Bono, bought a 25 percent controlling interest in Palm and brought in Rubinstein as the company's executive chairman -- a move aimed at turning the beleaguered handset maker around. Palm also said in a statement that Rubinstein, a former senior executive at Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) "joined Palm ... to help bring innovation back to the company."

Palm's new chief will be charged with nothing less than resurrecting Palm as a viable challenger in the fiercely competitive smartphone market while overseeing the roll out of a new ecosystem built around the Pre and webOS, the device's operating system.

Let's think it through (which I'm sure Palm already has). Your company has just launched a major product designed to spearhead its turnaround. It's getting good reviews and buzz, though still facing an uphill struggle against more popular competitors (the iPhone and BlackBerry). Then you announce you're dumping the CEO.

So what are the media and customers talking about now? The new product or the changes in upper management? And do those changes instill confidence in consumers, or just the opposite? Do consumers see a company determined to rebound or an organization in turmoil? Maybe they see neither and are interested only in the product. But how do you separate your opinion of the product (and support) from your assessment of the company's health?

It'd make a fascinating case study for a business school. You can argue the merits of each option that Palm no doubt considered: 1) Making the CEO change well before the launch 2) Making it well after the launch, when the Pre hype has faded, or 3) Doing what the company just did.

Gartner analyst Ken Dulaney is quoted as praising Rubenstein, but doesn't address the timing issue. If it were my call, I would have gone with option No. 1. That way you get the management change and media fallout behind you, then focus on the Pre launch. Then it really looks like the new guy is leading the company into a new era. But for some reason Palm neglected to consult me on this. I hate when companies do that.

I'd be curious to see what readers think. Feel free to weigh in with a comment below.

Like almost everyone, I rely on Google first and foremost for finding information online. Yet I'm not comfortable with Google's commanding lead in the search market. It's not healthy, just as Microsoft's years-long domination of operating systems wasn't healthy.

So I consider this (via InternetNews.com) to be good news:

Microsoft's Live Search replacement, Bing, had a solid first day last week, according to one Web metrics firm. Now, a second firm says its research has found that Bing has had a solid first week.

According to a statement by tracking firm comScore, in its first week, Bing increased Microsoft's (NASDAQ: MSFT) search engine market penetration from 13.8 percent in a five-day period in May to 15.5 percent in the period of June 2 through 6, an increase of 1.7 percent.

Last Thursday, Bing was the second-place search engine worldwide, according to net metrics tracking firm StatCounter, which claims to monitor "in excess of ten billion page loads per month [globally]."

Would I prefer it to be someone other than Microsoft? I'm not going to lie. The answer is yes. But Microsoft never will take over the search market. However, what it can do -- and this would be a positive thing -- is provide a bit more competition for Google.

And while the jump from a 13.8% share to a 15.5% share isn't seismic (and could reverse itself), it's good that searchers are at least exploring options beyond Google.