Electrical fire at a data center Thursday night knocked out Verizon's DSL service; Authorize.net and Microsoft's Bing Travel site for as long as 36 hours.

Yesterday, Neowin reported that Microsoft had posted the first advertisement for Bing, despite the website only having been available for a very short time. Well, it appears that there isn't just one video to show off the new decision engine... there are already three. That's right, a YouTube account for Bing has been created and videos are already filling it up quite quickly. Since we're kind, we'll post them all here for you. The first one we have already posted on that aforementioned link, but we'll put it here anyway, in a higher resolution format.

You may have read the title and thought this was a joke but I kid you not, Microsoft has released a pack of 3 ring tones where people say the word bing in a rapid and alien-like fashion. The pack is available at Microsoft's download site. All 3 tones try to create a ring tone like sound but the word bing repeated over and over is slightly alien-like. Bing is Microsoft's latest search engine which has some fairly amusing and catchy adverts associated with it.

That's the message coming out of yesterday's annual company meeting at Microsoft. Several Microsoft employees tweeted that Microsoft's improvements to Bing maps is "exciting" with one going as far as to claim "BING 2.0 terrific !! watch out guys ! bing + silverlight in maps = amazing !! goodbye google". One Microsoft tweet-aholic claims that the company is set to release the update next week whilst others claim it will be ready at some stage in September.

Yahoo!

Since Microsoft officially announced their new search engine Bing on Thursday it seems to have impressed many critics and is showing definite improvements over its predecessor Live Search. But does Bing have what it takes to make an impact and claim a decent chunk of the market share? Here we will look at various aspects and issues that may contribute to Bing being either a success or another disappointment for Microsoft. Does it have a ring? So to start off, does the name have a ring to it?

Everybody knows about Microsoft's recent re-branding and re-engineering of Live Search, Bing, and how it has recently become available for the public to use. There was certainly a big fuss kicked up over this; there was an immense amount of speculation about 'Kumo' beforehand, and many people had their own ideas on what it could be. Now that everything is cleared up, the initial launch hype has died down a bit, and the rumors are gone, the question remains... how will Bing do against Google? Or, perhaps just as importantly... how do Google feel about it?

A company named Bing! Information Design in St. Louis is suing Microsoft for alleged trademark infringement of the name Bing. The company, a privately held information graphics and multimedia design company, has been using the Bing! trademark since the year 2000. According to the St.Louis Business Journal Bing! Information Design claims that the new search engine's name causes confusion and dilutes the value of its trademark.

When Neowin reported last week about Bing allowing users to watch porn videos and browse pornographic material using its search, businesses, schools and other large corporations complained that Bing maybe a gateway to free porn. Bing was blocked by some companies to prevent porn surfing during work hours, where Microsoft instantly became to form a solution to the problem.

Data from ComScore is showing that Microsoft's Bing search engine is taking market share away from Yahoo in the US market, reports IT Pro. The latest data shows that Microsoft captured 8.4% of US internet searches in June. That's up from 8% last month. Yahoo's market share fell to 19.6% in June, down from 20.1% in May. Google's market share remains at 65%. "Given all the publicity and advertising around Bing, we were expecting a month-on-month increase.", said Citi analyst Mark Mahaney. But he also cautions that it's too early to see whether there's a trend or not.