Ad Age takes a first-look at Microsoft's ad campaign for its new search engine, Bing, which depicts the Google search experience as causing "search overload" compared to Bing, which is a more simplistic and relevant "decision engine." The voice-over for the new 60-second spot begins as follows: "While everyone was searching, there was bailing; while everyone was lost in the links, there was collapsing...We don't need queries and keywords if they bring back questions and confusion. From this moment on, search overload is officially over." Gayle Troberman, general manager for advertising and customer engagement at Microsoft, tells …

Peter Kafka reports on the changes at Jason Calacanis's search engine, Mahalo, which is overhauling its visual layout and adding a new feature that pays users for maintaining search results pages. The latter is a big change for the so-called "human-powered search engine", offering users the chance to "own" a results page and split any ad revenue with Mahalo. Calacanis will pay users with "Mahalo bucks" which Kafka notes cash out at 75 cents on the dollar. This means users would really keep 37.5 percent of each dollar their page generates, he says. The Mahalo founder and …

Paid digital media services are the future for media giants like News Corp., News Corp's chief digital officer Jonathan Miller declared at an industry event on Tuesday. He added that the company is pushing to develop new business models that will work for the industry overall. "We will see a return to multiple revenue streams...Free versus pay is one of the really big issues out there," Miller said, but this time, the industry is ready to find answers. So just how would this work, exactly? "What works for consumers, I think -- and this has to be …

Google's Web browser will soon enable users to do something the search giant can't be too happy about, says the Los Angeles Times' Mark Milian: block online ads. Google, which makes 99.9% of its revenue from online advertising, recently made an API available to third party developers in the hope that they would create powerful extensions to Chrome. Adsweep, which hides advertising on Web pages, is one such extension. Asked for a comment, Google replied with a statement: "We are designing Google Chrome's extensions to be flexible enough to support all different types of features, and we are …

Yahoo is finally shuttering its Yahoo 360 social networking site after promising to do so nearly two years ago, Bloomberg reports. The Web giant is closing the social network next month due to competition from rivals and a slowdown in ad spending. After July 12, users will be unable to access their information, says a posting on the Yahoo 360 Web site. The closure of Yahoo 360 leaves Yahoo with no presence whatsoever in social networking, as it also shut down its Mash social network last fall. Yahoo has also closed other underperforming sites in recent months, such …

A study from the Harvard Business Review finds that 10% of Twitter users account for more than 90% of the messages sent over the microblogging service. Silicon Alley Insider's Nicholas Carlson points out that that's an even more lopsided ratio than Wikipedia, where 15% of the editors account for 90% of all edits. Carlson says the HBR study implies that Twitter is "more of a one-way, one-to-many publishing service than a two-way, peer-to-peer communication network." Indeed, according to the study, half of all Twitter users tweet less than once every 74 days, and "the median number of …

Microsoft unveiled a new motion sensor controller and download store for its Xbox 360 console at the Electronics Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles on Tuesday. Silicon Alley Insider's Dan Frommer says the latter could be "the biggest game changer," because it allows users to download full retail games for the console from your living room. "If this takes off, it's going to change a lot of the videogame industry," Frommer says. "Discs won't die immediately, but they will eventually. And while that's good news for Microsoft -- more revenue, maybe less piracy -- it's bad news for …