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Future Tense news analyst Dwight Silverman has been putting Microsoft search engine Bing through its paces. He calls it "intriguing."

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Microsoft plans to spend up to $100 million to promote Bing, its re-named and revamped search engine that debuts June 3.

Guest: Abbey Klaassen, Advertising Age

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Today's topics:

1. Kumo
2. John Doe
3. MiFi

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Don't call WolframAlpha a search engine, says its creator, mathematician and physicist Steven Wolfram. Call it a "computational knowledge engine."

Guest: Frederic Lardinois, Read/Write Web

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Internet company Yahoo says it will anonymize some user data within 90 days of its collection. That includes information on the sites users visit, and advertisements they click on.

Meanwhile the Ponemon Institute, a research group that focuses on privacy issues, hasreleased its annual Most Trusted Companies survey. Google fell from its top 20 perch, partly because consumers expressed growing unease with Google's data collection and retention practices.

Guests: Jay Cline, Minnesota Privacy Consultants; Larry Ponemon, Ponemon Institute

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With data from social networks and search engines, cultural tipping points, as described by Malcolm Gladwell, can be spotted online, according to Bill Tancer of Hitwise.

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Microsoft this week launched another rewards program that pays people for using Live Search, which has failed to make much of a dent in the most popular search engine, Google. The new SearchPerks program - available only to Windows and Internet Explorer users - awards points for using Live Search, which can be redeemed for prizes like music downloads and video games.

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John McCain and Barack Obama are engaged in an advertising contest on the Internet, where both are buying up keywords from the likes of Google and Yahoo. Ads for the campaigns appear in results when surfers search on keywords and phrases like "Iraq war" and "bailout."

But McCain is besting Obama in search engine advertising, according to a story in Advertising Age magazine.