Is there anything more fun than sitting around, growing your hair, drinking a Bud while listening to Jethro Tull and pondering how to change the balance of power in the search world and unseat Google?

Would the top 1k most visited sites take a cool $US1mm each, plus a commitment from Microsoft or Yahoo to drive traffic through their search engines to more than make up for the lost Google Traffic.

Given the increasing power that Google wields, it’s an interesting thought. But that upfront bill that wouldn’t get past Microsoft’s stock holders, let alone the US government’s anti-competition watchdogs. Nice pot-stirring though, Mark. [Mark Cuban via The Register]

Wolfram Alpha will still live on as a standalone site, since Microsoft is just licensing their search API for Bing. And to be fair, this is what most people — including us — envisioned for Wolfram Alpha from the start:

I’m aware of the theoretical differences between the two, and I’m sure Wolfram Alpha’s creators’ blood would boil at the thought, but the engine’s most natural home might be as a direct complement to Google, as a tab on their homepage or as a replacement for their modest current nonsearch functions.

Well, uh, almost. Maybe this’ll be a good time to give Bing another shot? [CNET]

There’s something disarming, humanising even, about sitting Steve Ballmer in front of a webcam, sipping a giant iced coffee from Starbucks (which explains so much), talking about how Apple can only dominate “niche” categories, like media players, not something bigger.

He says that uberlarge categories—”non-niche” ones, like PCs and phones that sell over 300 million units a year—won’t be dominated by a single player. There’ll be multiple guys in the game, and he still thinks “the software that’s gonna be most popular in those phones is gonna be software that’s sold by somebody who doesn’t make their own phone”.

Yes, this is the same Steve Ballmer who admits Microsoft boned Windows Mobile hard and is about to come out with some Microsoft-branded phones for youngsters. That’s just a small of part of an interview that covers lots of ground and is definitely worth watching — it’s a view of Ballmer you probably haven’t seen before. [TechCrunch]

Except Visual search can’t really do anything of these things yet, because it’s just a small collection of search-tied photo albums, at least for now. Oh well! Give it a try anyway, right here. (Warning: You must be Silverlit). [Microsoft]

Not a major leap in logic, perhaps—it is a Microsoft device with a browser designed by the Internet Explorer team—but still new info on a player that we’ve come to learn a lot about recently, including likely pricing: 16GB ($US220), 32GB ($US290).

In the photo above you can see how the on-screen keyboard letters will bulge when pressed, and CNet also has pics of the browser showing favourites (bookmarks), and running Facebook in portrait mode. [CNet]

HandMarket App Store: Handmark’s mobile client for their ample Windows Mobile app market has left beta, and by all counts, it was ready to: Navigation is easy, there are a fair number of free apps, and they’ve snagged some big names, like Skyfire and EA games. Waiting for Microsoft’s official store is for chumps, I say.

Skyfire: Speaking of SkyFire (unnecessary abbreviation: “SkyFi”), they’ve updated their start page with new content. This may not sound like much, but anyone who’s used the browser can attest to the start page’s usefulness as a launch pad. Previously it featured Twitter, Facebook and others; now, there’s search history, Gmail—awesome—and Facebook album previews. Free.

Terrestrica: A crowd-sourced geotagging/tourism app, Terrestrica just got a fair bit more useful with the addition of direct, location-tagged Picasa uploading and Twitter integration. The user-contributed map data is still a little slim, though.

Google Maps Layers: If you like your map overlays a little more, shall we say, filled out, Google Maps has just updated their excellent WinMo app with support for user layers, just like the desktop version has. It’s had Latitude support, too, for a while now, which is more than can be said for, ahem, some other mobile platforms.

iDialer: I appreciate when my mobile apps have a sense of humour, and I can’t help but think iDialer does: At first glance, it looks like an iPhone dialer ripoff—the kind of pathetic app that makes Windows Mobile users cringe, and iPhone fanboys feel warm and smug inside. But there’s a minor detail that you shouldn’t overlook: it’s a seamless, easy to setup Google Voice client, too. Ha. It’s donationware, so be generous.

Windows Mobile 6.5 Emulator: It’s a stretch for an app roundup, but everyone seems pretty curious about what Windows Mobile 6.5 is going to be like, so here you go: If you’re not venturesome enough to install one of the many betas floating around to tubes onto your primary phone, have a go with Microsoft’s free desktop emulator. You’re in for a pleasant surprise, actually.

Office Communicator R2: Suits: Your preferred corporate communication app has been upgraded, and now you can log into your office’s private branch exchange from anywhere, VPN-style. Neat, right! No? Just click next.

Bing: Microsoft has released a full, dedicated mobile app for its Bing search engine, which brings fuller phone integration, map searches and easier local listings compared to the regular mobile web interface. It’s like all those Google search apps you’ve seen elsewhere, except decidedly Bingier.

Dorothy: WebKit has become the de facto mobile browser engine—it’s the heart of the iPhone, Android and Symbian browsers—but Windows Mobile has been sadly neglected. Iris browser works, strictly speaking, but it’s a little slow, and awkward to use (though development seems to have picked up as of late). Hopefully Dorothy, which is still in a closed private beta but looks fantastic, can fill the void.

This list is in no way definitive. If you’ve spotted a great app that hit the store this month, give us a heads up or let us know in the comments. Have a good rest of your weekend, everybody!

(Previously)

The game, named Page Hunt, presents users with a random Web page and then asks them to input the search terms that will put that page within a search engine’s top five search results. Depending on how close to the top of the rankings their queries put the Web page, players are awarded points. In order to sweeten the experience, the game adds animations, a top-score list, bonus points and other “gamelike” features.

It’s a good idea, and the game couldn’t be more simple. Is it fun? Well, that depends on how bored you are at work right now. At any rate, if you have been using Bing and you want to help to fine tune their algorithm, Page Hunt can help you kill a few minutes. [Page Hunt via eWeek via PCMag]

Abu-Hadba’s statement that “Most of what Google does is defensive” isn’t actually the tech world’s most hypocritical statement (when was the last time Microsoft created something that wasn’t a version of an already-successful product?). He means that everything Google does is designed to keep their core business, search and advertising, growing and dominant. The impetus behind Chrome OS, according to him, isn’t to encourage simpler and easier computing, but weirdly enough, to distract other companies from attacking its own cash cow.

This is an interesting conversation because Microsoft has been doing just that, attacking Google’s core, with Bing—yet Abu-Habda doesn’t see Bing as a similar distraction to stop others from attacking Microsoft’s core business, Windows. So why is Microsoft allowed to venture into new-for-them waters with projects like Xbox, Zune, Silverlight, Bing and more, while Google is an inherently defensive company for announcing a ballsy new project of their own?

Microsoft might just be a bit nervous about Chrome OS, which we don’t think is really warranted at this point. Microsoft’s got an outrageously dominant OS marketshare, and seeing as how we know just about nothing about Chrome OS, it’s quite a bit soon to be launching attacks at a product that may well not be a competitor at all. [Venture Beat via Crunchgear]

[CollegeHumor]