The speculation is over. Microsoft’s search engine officially has a new name, Bing. The name, along with some new features, opens the latest chapter in Microsoft’s quest to best Google in the search engine wars.

If you’re expecting Bing to be a Google-killer, reset your expectations. The most dramatic change, in my view, remains the name itself. I can’t say that Bing is the best of names, but neither is it the worst. It’s certainly better than the “Live Search” moniker that’s resonated with few, including even those at Microsoft itself.

The new name, along with $80 million in marketing that Microsoft is unleashing, will undoubtedly attract brand new visitors to Microsoft’s search engine plus get some who had previously given up on Live Search to take another look. What they’ll find is a search engine with solid relevancy plus some new features that might hook a few of them into staying.

Read the full story over at Search Engine Land.

Yes you’ve read that right - A TV series based on Twitter is being developed.

According to BBC News, the show will use the social networking site as the basis for interactive competitions, involving celebrities and Twitter users.  The unscripted series is currently being developed by two production companies in the USA.

“It captures what’s best about Twitter,” Reveille Productions’ Noah Oppenheim said, “and it’s a compelling TV show in its own right.”

The ‘micro-blogging’ service, which allows users to post ‘tweets’ of up to 140 characters, was launched in 2006.

It’s now one of the fastest-growing social networking sites, and numbers celebrities Ashton Kutcher, Jonathan Ross and Stephen Fry as regular users.

An article on the BBC News website talks of a new optical recording method could pave the way for data discs with 300 times the storage capacity of standard DVDs, according to Nature journal.

Traditional DVDs and Blu-ray disks store data in two dimensions, and there’s been a recent push to increase their capacity by creating multi-layered disks that store data across three dimensions. But, asks James Chon at the Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia, why stop there?

Chon and his colleagues are stepping into hyperspace, by encoding information in two new dimensions — the wavelength and polarization of the laser light used to write the data. The key for his team was to find a material for the disk that could store this extra information. “When my colleague Min Gu first suggested the idea, he had no idea if such a material existed,” says Chon. “Luckily, my background is nanoparticles, and I knew of the perfect fit.”

That ideal material contains gold, rod-shaped nanoparticles of different sizes and orientations. When polarized light, such as that emitted from a laser, is fired onto this material, it ‘melts’ only the rods whose orientation matches the direction of polarization, causing them to become spherical. “Polarized light only ’sees’ and records on a subset of the nanorods,” explains Chon. “Change the polarization and you can record on the same volume as though it is a whole new recording medium.”

Gold nanorods are also sensitive to the colour of the laser. Different wavelengths melt rods with particular length-to-width ratios. “Depending on the number of polarizations and colours of light you use, you have a number of different channels to record on,” says Chon. His team have demonstrated that using two polarizations and three colours, you can pack around 140 gigabytes of information into each cubic centimetre of disk space. That allows a DVD-sized disk to hold 1.6 terabytes of data. A Blu-ray, by comparison, can store around 50 gigabytes. Adding an extra dimension by using another polarization could ramp that up further to 7.2 terabytes.

Exploiting added dimensions will also provide a new way to encrypt data, says Chon. “You can store, say, ten different patterns on the same volume of disk, and only the people who know the correct wavelength and polarization will be able to pick out the right pattern to read.”

“The work is unique and highly innovative,” says Hisayuki Yamatsu, at the Advanced Optical Systems Laboratory near Tokyo, Japan. “It shows a new approach to realize optical memory with much higher recording density than that of the current optical disks.”

Heather Dougherty, director of research at Hitwise, recently blogged about how organic search referrals are on the rise.

Heather writes “For the majority of categories measured at Hitwise, search is the top source of traffic referrals and the share has increased year-over-year. Overall, search is increasing as a traffic driver. Among the parent categories that received less than 25% of traffic from search in April 2008, all except News & Media received a higher share of search referrals last month. This data suggests that the best growth opportunities for search are among the laggard categories where adoption has been slower as a referral tool.”

“Overall, visits to search engines increased 8% on April 2009 as compared to the previous year, implying that those visits will result in the searcher going somewhere afterwards. In order to translate the impact of search referrals upon traffic, I also took the size of the category into account and calculated the market share of visits that were search driven for the same year-over-year comparison. In this analysis, when translated into visits, the largest categories received more visits from search, regardless if overall traffic was up or down.”

Read the full story in her blog post.

On Tuesday, Google announced Search Options, which are a collection of tools that let you slice and dice your results and generate different views to find what you need faster and easier.

The Search Options panel also gives you the ability to view your results in new ways. One view gives you more information about each result, including images as well as text, while others let you explore and iterate your search in different ways.

They have today blogged about how it was all put together, you can read more about it on their latest blog post.