Microsoft's Bing search engine now ranks second behind Google. According to statistics released on Wednesday by comScore Inc., Bing and Microsoft's other websites fielded 2.75 billion search requests in the U.S. during December, beating Yahoo for the first time. Bing's December search volume translated into a 15.1% share of U.S. search traffic, while Yahoo had 2.65 billion search requests, which amounted to a 14.5% share.

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The latest statistics fom Nielsen have revealed the ever growing strength of the online video industry in the US. According to the research firm's latest findings, there were 166.9 million unique U.S. video viewers, who streamed almost 22 billion videos in the month of November. Furthermore, each viewer spent an average of 5 hours watching online video.

According to Nielsen's findings, YouTube had the most amount of unique viewers, totaling 130.78 million. It was followed by VEVO with 42.73 million, Yahoo with 34,383 and Facebook with 30,255. Hulu was the leading paid-for over the top (OTT) service, with 20.83 million viewers.

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According to ComScore, Microsoft's Bing has reached 15 percent market share at the expense of Google and Yahoo. Bing's share rose from 14.8% in October to 15% through November, while Google dipped from 65.6% in October to 65.4% in November. Bing's increasing market share may is probably not a cause for concern for Google, who has consistently maintained 64% -66% market share.

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According to a recent study by ComScore, Google's U.S. search share hit 65.6% in October, making it slightly higher than its September share of 65.3% . Google's popularity had been declining in recent months, with its share dipping to 64.8% in August, which was its lowest since September 2009.

A stunning pie-chart from Business Insider reveals interesting data; only five companies control 64 per cent of all online advertising spending! Google gets almost half of the total online ad spending worth $29 billion, which makes up 46 per cent of all online ad spend. Yahoo! controls $6 billion, Microsoft $2.2 billion, Facebook $1.9 billion and AOL $1.3 billion. The remaining $23 billion of total online spending on advertising is goes to everyone else.

Facebook now ranks as the third largest video site on the Web in terms of unique viewers according to comScore, with an estimated 51.5 million people on Facebook watching a video during the month of July. 

The month before it was No. 6. It passed Microsoft, Yahoo, and Viacom. Only Vevo (with 62 million monthly viewers) and YouTube (158 million) are bigger. It is only a matter of time before Facebook passes Vevo, but can it ever take the crown from Google or Youtube?

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There’s now an option for Google+ users to upload address books to find and invite more friends to join the company’s brand new social networking service. As Vic Gundotra added shortly thereafter, this is a fairly big deal.

We heard the address book importing feature was coming, but it looks like it was just added a few hours ago. Look for a link that says “Upload address book” (because why complicate things) here.

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