Today Bing announced a new feature to their search service, called Adaptive Search.

With Adaptive Search, Bing will take a look at your previous search habits and learn from them to understand the context in which you are searching.

So if you are constantly searching about such things as computer programming, computer issues, and other computer related subjects, odds are most searches are going to be about – you guessed it – computers. I suppose an example in which searches could differ is when searching for ‘Java,’ where I would expect to see results relating to Java the programming language, a coffee addict would expect to see coffee.

If you follow the search business at all, this may be sounding somewhat familiar – and it should, because Google’s been doing this for awhile. It’s called Google Personalized Search, which appeared as early as 2004 and then finally became part of Google Search in 2009.

While adapting search based on previous search habits is good, it can have its own set of issues. Just because I am searching about computers quite a bit, it doesn’t always mean I am. Due to this, “The differences are generally quite subtle, but the more confidence we have about what your intent is, the more personalized the results will become,” according to the blog post. “We certainly don’t want to make any assumptions that prevent you from seeing a diverse set of results and lock you into a ‘filter bubble’, so the results that correspond to differing intents (e.g. travel to Australia) will still be available to you on the page.”

For those wondering, you can turn off the Adaptive Search feature, but only if you clear and/or turn off your search history.

While Google still remains king of search in the U.S., Bing continues to gain ground on Google according to the latest data from Experian Hitwise for the month of August 2011.

For the month of July, Google commanded 66.05% of the search market while Bing powered searches only accounted for 28.05% of all searches done in the U.S. (12.98% from bing.com and 15.07% from search.yahoo.com). Google’s search market share dropped nearly a whole percentage point to 65.09%, while Bing powered searches grew nearly a whole percentage point to 28.99% (13.10% from bing.com and 15.89% from search.yahoo.com).

So Bing’s growth is still continuing and it would seem as there are no signs that this growth will stop in the near future. While Bing does continue to slowly nibble away at Google’s market share, it would take about 18 months – assuming their growth remains constant – for Bing to be tied with Google’s market share. Will that happen? I guess we will have to wait and see, won’t we?

Yahoo’s troubles have yet to end, especially with the recent firing of CEO (well, now ex-CEO) Carol Bartz – over the phone.

Carol Bartz wasn’t very happy, in part due to the fact that Roy Bostick (chairman of the board) read from a script. After he finished reading, Bartz asked, "Why don’t you have the balls to tell me yourself?"

Reasons for firing Carol Bartz include such things as, well, Yahoo’s financials haven’t been getting any better. While they certainly have cut costs thanks to the Microsoft search deal, Yahoo is still struggling to keep up and figure out what they want to do when they are "all grown up."

The board of directors probably feel like idiots now – or as Bartz said, doofuses – after they rejected Microsoft’s $44.6 billion bid a couple years back. As of this writing Yahoo’s market cap is around $17.5 billion.

It also appears that the board of directors may now be open to a sale, but they aren’t likely to get any bids from Microsoft. For the most part, Microsoft’s bid was to gain more traction in the search and advertising market. While the entire purchase of the company fell through, their search pact still got them what they wanted: to power Yahoo’s search engine.

As the saying goes, why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free – or at least at a significantly reduced price and risk.

Yahoo! Search has gained 0.2 percentage points (from 15.9% to 16.1%) search market share for the month of July 2011, but Google dropped 0.4 percentage points (from 65.5% down to 65.1%) during the same time period according to the latest data from comScore. However Bing remained stagnant at 14.4%.

This means that Bing now commands 30.5% of the search market, compared to Google’s 65.1%.

If you are wondering where the rest of of 0.2 percentage points went, 0.1 went to AOL – but the remaining 0.1 must have been lost to a rounding error.

While Google may have lost some market share – again – they didn’t lose in overall search volume. In this case Google gained 2% in overall search volume (going from 10.948 billion to 11.158 billion), along with Yahoo! gaining 4% (2.65 billion to 2.764 billion) and Bing gaining 3% in search volume (2.405 billion to 2.473 billion).

Today at E3 Microsoft announced some new, and welcomed, features to the Xbox 360, which will be coming soon to an Xbox near you. We were already aware that Microsoft was going to have some big announcements surrounding entertainment, so some of these announcements were not all that surprising. However, there were a few that did come by surprise.

For starters, Don Mattrick of Microsoft said that YouTube will be coming to Xbox, but not much information was given on this new feature. They did not demonstrate this functionality, either.

However, Microsoft did demonstrate Bing on the Xbox, showing off voice search. With voice search, users can search “Netflix, Hulu Plus and ESPN, as well as music, video and Xbox LIVE Marketplace” all in one place. It seems as though there is a new saying to go along with this future release: “You say it, Xbox finds it.”

The Xbox is starting to turn into a great alternative to traditional television services, now that users can watch Netflix, Hulu Plus, ESPN, along with videos in the Xbox LIVE Marketplace. But that’s not all. Microsoft also announced Live TV, which will allow consumers to watch “news, sports and their favorite local channels.” Microsoft has partnered with Sky TV in the UK, FOXTEL in Australia, and Canal+ in France for television services in the respective areas, but Microsoft “announced its commitment to expand access to live television programming on Xbox 360 to more providers in the United States and around the world during the upcoming year.”

There was no word on what “leading” networks in the US would be available, but the demonstration did show off The Castle, which is an ABC production. Microsoft will likely divulge more information about this Live TV service as we get closer to the release of this new Dashboard update. Keep in mind that this new service Microsoft will be providing is not on-demand, but will be just like a television, where users would “change channels” to see what’s on. With the best of both worlds, users could watch a show they missed on Netflix or Hulu Plus, but hop on over the Live TV to watch new shows at the same time as regular television. Looks like Microsoft is giving Apple TV, Roku, and Boxee a run for their money.

Don Mattrick also announced that Xbox would be increasing their partnerships by a “factor of 10,” along with turning their catalog from hundreds of thousands to millions of available content to consume.

Finally, Microsoft also unveiled a new look for the Xbox Dashboard, which ought to look rather familiar.

The Xbox Dashboard will now take on characteristics of Metro, which is currently used by the Zune HD, Windows Phone 7, and soon: Windows 8. It makes sense that Microsoft is slowly merging all their platforms into a similar “look and feel” so users always feel at home, even when using a new device.

Don Mattrick thanked all Xbox users for making last year Xbox’s biggest ever, finishing off the conference by saying, “this year, Xbox 360 will go from the number one selling console in North America, to the number one selling console globally.”