In the month of January, Microsoft's Bing search engine claimed 13.1 percent of the market, taking a full percentage point away from Google, which dropped from 66.6 percent in December to a still dominant 65.6 percent, according to data from comScore. Bing's 1.1 percent ascent is the search engine's biggest single-month gain since it debuted in June 2009.

The sultan of search (Google) is in a war of words with Redmond's software giant (Microsoft). Google called shenanigans on Microsoft's search team, claiming that Bing copies Google's search queries and the sites users select in order to provide more relevant results. But is Bing really cheating?

"We use over 1,000 different signals and features in our ranking algorithm," the Bing Team explained in a blog post. "A small piece of that is clickstream data we get from some of our customers, who opt-in to sharing anonymous data as they navigate the Web in order to help us improve the experience for all users.

"To be clear, we learn from all of our customers. What we saw in today's story was a spy-novelesque stunt to generate extreme outliers in tail query ranking. It was a creative tactic by a competitor, and we'll take it as a back-handed compliment. But it doesn't accurately portray how we use opt-in customer data as one of many inputs to help improve our user experience."

You can read more what the Bing Team had to say right here.

Microsoft and Facebook are now friends in the search game, as the two companies on Wednesday announced a partnership that will integrate the popular social network into Bing's search results. It's not a full-on gut punch to Google, but perhaps a solid sock to the arm.

"When you search for something on Bing or in Web results on Facebook (powered by Bing), you'll be able to see your friends' faces next to the webpages they've liked," Facebook stated in a blog post. "So, you can lean on friends to figure out the best websites for your search."

The collaboration also purports to improve people search results on Bing so that it's easier to find old friends or hook up with new ones. When you type in a search query, Bing tracks down and provides the results most relevant to you based on your Facebook connections. Type the name of someone, for example, and you can click to add them as a Friend or send them a message if they're already in your Facebook clan.

On the privacy front, Microsoft says "you will only see Facebook users who have enabled 'public search' in their Facebook profiles."

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