The Bing team tweeted last night that a new MSN Toolbar is now available at toolbar.msn.com. The new toolbar is supposedly now powered by Bing, Microsoft’s new search engine.

I am not exactly sure what all the new features are but as you can see, the MSN butterfly is now being placed inline with the Bing logo:

It appears that Bing is overriding the default search provider set by users of Internet Explorer 6. Several IE6 users have complained that since Bing launched, the search provided went from Google (which they set manually) to Bing. To makes things even worse, when the user tries to set the search provider back from Bing to Google, it doesn’t allow them.

To be fair to Microsoft, IE6 is very old and Microsoft is already up to version 8. I emailed Microsoft about the issue and they confirmed the bug. A Microsoft representative sent me the following statement:

We’re aware of the issue with IE6 and Bing and are investigating a solution. This issue is not impacting IE7 or IE8 users. We respect user choice on search providers in IE and all browsers, and designed IE to enable that choice. We will provide an update soon on this issue, and we apologize for any inconvenience it has caused. In the meantime, we encourage customers to upgrade to IE8 here. Alternatively, Firefox users can install the add-in for Bing here.

Controlling the browser is a big deal for influencing search market share. So this bug is fairly serious, being that many novice internet users still use IE6.

Postscript: Microsoft emailed me again at 2:45am on June 3, 2009 to inform me the issue is now resolved with IE6. The issue was server side, so the fix was able to be pushed out remotely to all infected browsers.

Microsoft’s Live Search still isn’t built into Firefox, but you can add it to your Firefox search box manually. Now, a new add-on from Live Search does this complete with the ability for the search box to auto-suggest terms you might be searching for. For more, see the Live Search blog.

My favorite search browser plugin, Inquisitor, is now available for Firefox and Internet Explorer.

Inquisitor was Apple Safari’s only solid third-party search browser plugin back in the day. Yahoo acquired them back in May and then provided an upgrade in mid-August. Now, Yahoo has announced they have made this plugin available for Firefox and IE.

If you are running Firefox 2 or 3, you can download the addon over here. If you are running IE 7 or 8, you can download the plugin over here. I highly recommend you give it a try and check out some of the customizations I deployed on Inquisitor years ago.

“Semantic web” is one of those phrases that’s tossed around loosely these days, used to describe just about anything that goes beyond basic keyword search to surface relevant content on the web. But true semantic web applications, those that enable people to share content beyond the boundaries of applications or web sites, are still relatively few and far between.

That’s what makes Headup, a new Firefox plugin from the aptly named SemantiNet, so intriguing. Headup monitors your web activity, and based on what you’re viewing can seamlessly and contextually “understand” how dispersed data across the Web is related to what you’re viewing. Then it provides snippets or links to that information without the need to search for it.

Even more intriguing, Headup has seemingly leapfrogged most current approaches to building out the semantic web that require web sites and applications to add layers of metadata conforming to a rigorous set of standards. Instead, Headup uses Microsoft’s new Silverlight platform to analyze content in real-time, without requiring any additional information from web sites.

How does this work?

According to Tal Keinan, Founder & CEO SemantiNet, Headup uses a sort of meta database—a graph that describes which sources can provide which types of information about certain things. It also taps into your social networks to leverage the information your friends have left scattered about the web. Then, as you’re surfing the web, Headup constantly compares what you’re looking at with this meta database and your friends’ knowledge to offer you additional information when it’s available. And it’s unobtrusive, displaying a ‘+’ symbol next to the relevant content. Clicking on this symbol brings up a separate window with related links and other information.

For example, say you’re browsing a music CD on Amazon. Headup recognizes that you’re reading about music, so it goes to work and shows you things like:

• How many of your Facebook friends like this band
• A link to hear the band’s latest music streamed via Pandora
• Links to let you see band pictures on Flickr
• How to find tickets for a concert by the band in your city via Zvents
• How many of your friends are using Twitter or Friendfeed to discuss the upcoming concert
• What restaurants near the concert hall are top-rated by Yelp

Currently, Headup is limited to pulling in information from the services mentioned above, and a few others including Digg, Gmail, Google, Yahoo and Wikipedia. Keinan says SemantiNet is working to add many other sources, but wanted to start out with this smallish set to get feedback from users. Eventually, he said he expects Headup to work with a huge number of web sites.

What’s with the mashup of Firefox and Microsoft’s Silverlight? SemantiNet says Silverlight offers user privacy capabilities that far exceed Flash and also allows Headup to work as a cross-platform PC/Mac product.

Headup is similar to Adaptive Blue’s Blueorganizer plugin for Firefox, which adds a button to your toolbar with a menu containing contextual shortcuts for books, music, movies, wines, recipes, stocks and other types of info. But Headup appears to go much deeper, with a broader array of content types.

Headup launched today in a limited beta release, so I’m going to wait to take a deep dive into the technology until it becomes more widely available. But I’m impressed with what I’ve seen so far, and the tool looks like it’s well on the way to becoming an invaluable part of my searching toolkit.

More information:

• Headup’s website
• SemantiNet’s website (try signing up for the limited beta here)
• The Semantic Web, by Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler and Ora Lassila—one of the best introductions to the topic, by the creator of the original world wide web.

Google announced that the Firefox 5.0 Google Toolbar is now available for download. The toolbar adds many of the features and improvements Google added to 5.0 for IE several months ago including:

• Custom buttons with gadget support
• Synchronized Toolbar settings
• Google Notebook integration
• Suggestions for navigation errors
• Improved AutoFill
• AutoLink
• Web History
• and more…

To learn more about the Google Toolbar for Firefox, see over here.

TechCrunch reports Google has extended a deal to be the default search engine in Firefox for an additional three years, to 2011. The news comes the day after Microsoft released a beta of IE8.

The deal is somewhat ironic in that Google has lobbied to to prevent Microsoft from making itself the default search engine in Internet Explorer but has no qualms about buying itself defaul rights in Firefox. Hey Firefox – Let Us Pick Our Own Search Engine! from Danny Sullivan has more about that.

So Firefox 3 has a new release candidate making news, suggesting that the browser is nearly done. May I suggest that the browser is nowhere near being done until the Mozilla Foundation drops its favoritism to Google and allow users to pick their own default search engine? And that Microsoft ought to be among those choices?

Seriously, the entire Firefox+Google love fest is a joke. Let’s revisit a little history here. Google fought and fought to pressure Microsoft so that no search provider was the default in Internet Explorer 7, arguing this was the best for consumer choice:

"The market favors open choice for search, and companies should compete for users based on the quality of their search services," said Marissa Mayer, the vice president for search products at Google. "We don’t think it’s right for Microsoft to just set the default to MSN. We believe users should choose."

Google got what it wanted. Internet Explorer has no default search engine. If you upgraded to it, IE used whatever search choice was already established on your computer. If you did a fresh install of XP or Vista, then you had to choose your search provider. The choice was only made for you in cases where the computer maker itself cut a deal (see these here).

If Google’s all for choice, as I’ve said before, then Google should be pressuring Firefox to ensure there’s consumer choice in that browser, as well.

Instead, Google’s been quite happy to buy out the idea of consumer choice. As the New York Times pointed out toward the end of last year, 85 percent of Mozilla’s revenue comes from Google. In return for that, Google’s what you get as your search provider for most versions of Firefox.

Let’s talk specifics. If you download a fresh copy of Firefox, by default it will be Google search that you’ll use if you search using Firefox’s built-in search box. Using a drop-down option (as shown in the screenshot at the top of this article), you can then access these resources:

• Google (default)
• Yahoo
• Amazon
• Answers.com
• Creative Commons
• eBay
• Wikipedia (in Firefox 3, not Firefox 2)

It makes sense for Google to be among the options. It’s the world’s most popular search engine, well used and well respected. Similarly, Yahoo is an excellent Google alternative that should be included. And similarly, Microsoft Live Search is an excellent alternative — but it doesn’t make the list.

Why not? Again, Google has the deal to be the default search provider in most markets where Firefox is distributed, except for in some Asian markets, where Yahoo has a similar deal. It’s not clear if such deals also prevent Microsoft from being listed at all or if this happens because of the Firefox-Internet Explorer rivalry.

I don’t care in either case — Microsoft is a good search engine that searchers should have access to directly from that search bar. By not offering it, Firefox is failing its users out of either financial reasons or spite.

Yes, there’s an option to add other search engines. At the end of the drop-down box, there’s a Manage Search Engines choice that eventually leads you to this page. There, you can find Live Search among the other 23 choices. But as there aren’t that many choices, why not add them all to the search box? Firefox could learn a lesson here from Groowe. My long-time browsing companion, it lets me search from any of the major search engines or specialty search engines, with them easily grouped into categories.

Let’s go back to those other search choices. If you can’t include them all, why not list the more popular ones? Do that many people do Creative Commons searches that it needs to be right in the search box itself? And is Amazon there only because Firefox probably earns off of affiliate searches? Is that the same for eBay? If you go by download popularity, the choices would look more like this:

• Ask.com
• Google
• Live Search
• Yahoo
• Answers.com
• Flickr
• Creative Commons
• Merriam-Webster
• IMDB
• Wikipedia
• Weather Channel
• Amazon
• eBay

I submit that search is an important part of the browser development process that shouldn’t be left as a choice made based on how much money Mozilla can earn. It should be done in a way that best benefits the user. That means:

• Let the user make the initial search choice
• Provide a variety of search tools right within the box

Fix it, Firefox. And Google, help them fix it by ensuring that any provisions of the secret contract between you and Firefox are altered to allow for the consumer choice you’re so happy to espouse should happen in Internet Explorer.

Will Success, or All That Money From Google, Spoil Firefox? from the New York Times asks if all the money Google is feeding Firefox going to hurt the browser and the community behind the browser in the future, by aligning the browser too closely with Google and its war against Microsoft.

Of the $66 million in revenue reported by Mozilla, 85 percent of that came from Google. But Mozilla said they made sure Google “understood the separation between a search relationship and the rest of our activities.” That may suggest that Mozilla is aware of why Google may want them to overtake Microsoft’s claim over the browser market.

See Google: As Open As It Wants To Be (i.e., When It’s Convenient) for some links and background on Google’s deal to be the default in Firefox in most countries (in several Asia countries, it’s Yahoo).

One very important factor in executing successful linkbaiting campaigns is to have power accounts on the various social news sites. Having a power account increases the chances of hitting the popular pages for the content you submit. Building up a power account takes a lot of time and one of the more difficult aspects of it is continually submitting content that the community will find valuable.

Enter Social Media for FireFox, a new browser extension that helps you easily find quality stories to submit. It saves you time by showing in your browser window if a story has already been submitted to Digg, Delicious, Reddit, and StumbleUpon. So as you’re out there looking for content you won’t be wasting valuable time trying to submit stories that have already been submitted. You will only be submitting fresh content.

That’s not all though; there’s one other super useful feature on this extension. When browsing Digg, Delicious, Reddit, or StumbleUpon you will see icons next to each submission. The little icons will actually show you if you that story has been submitted to the other social news sites as well. For example, you can visit the Reddit homepage and quickly scan all stories to see if they’ve been submitted to other social news sites. If they haven’t then you can be the first, because often what becomes popular on one social news site has a great chance of becoming popular on another. This isn’t always the case—each community has its own unique audience and they don’t always enjoy the same content. But it never hurts to try, and this tool makes it easy and painless.

If you’re having trouble finding good content to submit to social news sites then you should definitely check out this Firefox extension. Even if you already are a power user this will help you save time and easily find more good content to submit.

Cameron Olthuis is director of marketing and design for ACS and writes regularly on social media issues through the company’s blog, Pronet Advertising. The Let’s Get Social column appears Tuesdays at Search Engine Land.