BING COSTS MICROSOFT $5.5 BILLION

Microsoft has lost $5.5 billion, an average drain of $1 billion per quarter, on Bing since it introduced the search engine in 2009, CNNMoney reported on Wednesday. Despite the losses, Microsoft’s Bing reached a 30% share of the U.S. search engine market in April of this year, slowly narrowing the gap with Google, although comScore’s figures pin the search engine’s share at just 14.7%.

Despite the constant drain, Microsoft still has a plan for Bing. During the company’s financial analyst meeting in California recently, Microsoft’s president of online services Qi Lu said his company hopes to use Bing to “reorganize the web” to “change the game fundamentally” instead of taking on Google in a head-to-head dogfight.

“We are able to try things with much more flexibility,” Bing director Stefan Weitz said. “If we make a mistake, it’s not going to take down the company.” Analysts believe Microsoft will continue to lose money, however. “Bing will likely be better than Google over time, but even if it is, users and advertisers still need to go to them,” McAdams Wright Ragen analyst Sid Parakh told CNNMoney. “To be clear, this will take a long, long time to play out. This is something Microsoft will continue to lose money on.”

CHINA'S LEADING SEARCH ENGINE, BAIDU, TO PARTNER WITH BING FOR ENGLISH SEARCHES

A year and a half after Google pulled its popular search engine out of mainland China, partly over concerns about censorship, its rival Microsoft has struck a deal with the biggest Chinese search engine, Baidu.com, to offer Web search services in English.

Baidu, previously primarily a Chinese-language search engine, made the announcement Monday afternoon, saying Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, was expected to appear on Baidu’s Web pages by the end of this year.

Baidu, which dominates Chinese-language search services here with about 83 percent of the market, has been trying for years to improve its English-language search services because English searches on its site are as many as 10 million a day, the company said.

KAYAK TO PROVIDE TRAVEL INFO FOR BING

One of Microsoft Bing's strongest attributes is the travel section. Now, it has gotten even better. Kayak, a flight search engine, and Microsoft have announced Kayak will now be powering Bing Travel. According to Kayak, Bing will have access to "all" of Kayak's travel search services globally, and it looks as if the integration will be complete "in the coming weeks."

Kayak allows users to "compare hundreds of travel sites at once," in one location for free and they claim to be "the world's largest travel site."

NEW SEARCH ENGINE TO TAKE ON GOOGLE AND BING

Blekko is a new search engine that has launched in beta today.  The new engine will attempt to use human input to refine results. The Blekko.com site uses what the site calls "slashtags": a curated list of sites around a given topic. Users can create the sites, and also use them as a search modifier to only search within them.

"Bing and Google have hundreds of contractors that use web tools to refine this relevance data - classifying porn, spam, domain parks, ecommerce sites, fake 404's, markov-spam, official sites, and so on," Rich Skrenta, chief executive, wrote in a blog post. "As a 20-person startup, we asked ourselves how blekko could assemble this essential data," Skrenta added. "Hire contractors? Use Mechanical Turk? Elance? But - of course! - we know a much better way.... A way you can get orders of magnitude greater participation, while at the same time being very open about the process. Let the public in."

Slashtags filter out so-called "spammy" sites, Blekko said, but depend on the individual creators to edit them and add new sites that crop up. Users can "follow" other slashtags and use them as filters, and also apply to edit them. The site also has a "global chatter" page which auto-tracks updates to the sites and to slashtags, and can serve as a sort of communication medium of sorts.

Blekko's initial goal, the company said will be to identify the 50 best sites on the Web for the top 100,000 search categories. Over time, the site will "auto-slash" queries. [PC Mag]