Microsoft recently announced a revamped design for its search engine "Bing", apparently to expand its market share to challenge the world's most popular search engine Google.

According to market research firm ComScore, Microsoft's Bing accounted for just 15.3 per cent share of the US market in March, considerably down from Google's 66.4 per cent.

In March last year, Bing's market share was 13.9 per cent as compared with Google's 65.7 per cent.

Figures show that Microsoft's Bing has been gaining popularity since its launch in June 2009, but it lags far behind Google.

In a turn of sorts in the Google Oracle lawsuit, in which Google has been accused of illegal use of Sun Microsystems’ Java programming language for its Android mobile operating system, former Google software architect Dan Bornstein testified on April 25 that he took some Java code out of Android.

Giving the reason that updates are frequently released for software projects, Bornstein said that soon after Oracle filed its lawsuit against Google in 2010 after acquiring Sun Microsystems, he had removed part of the Java code from Google’s increasingly popular mobile OS.

According to a recently-published Kyodo News story, the Tokyo District Court has asked Internet search giant Google to delete certain terms from its autocomplete search feature; thus approving a last week-filed petition by a unidentified Japanese man who had complained about the mentioned feature.

The Google-led newly released ‘Get Mobile’ or ‘GetMo’ initiative in the UK now has a confirmed vendor – the mobile technology company, The MoBank Group. The initiative is chiefly dedicated to offering a helping hand to the UK businesses by offering them tools and resources for giving a more mobile-friendly edge to their websites.

According to a French agency called National Commission for Computing and Civil Liberties (or CNIL), a preliminary evaluation of the changes which Internet search giant Google is making to its privacy policy has revealed that the changes fall short in terms of their compliance with the data-protection standards in Europe.

In a move which brings along a number of minor improvements to Google’s Chrome web browser, the Internet search giant has recently released its Chrome version 17, which boasts a new feature that allows web address preloading, as well as notably better protection against malicious downloads.

Google's Android relished the biggest piece of the mobile OS pie during the last quarter in the US, market research firm ComScore said.

In the last quarter, Google's popular Android OS saw its market share rising to 47.3 per cent, up from 44.8 in the previous quarter.

Rival firm Apple's iOS also enjoyed an increase in its market share, from 27.4 per cent to 29.6 per cent, during the same period.