Bing Leapfrogs Yahoo Search … Again

New stats from monitoring service StatCounter suggest that for the second time since its launch, Microsoft's Bing has surpassed Yahoo Search as the second most used search engine in the United States. Shortly after publicly debuting the new service, Bing already jumped over Yahoo Search - if only for one day - which many attributed to the launch momentum. But Bing has proven to be a very solid product that many seem keen to try out even after a month. According to the new data, Bing took 12.9% of the US market like comScore had earlier measured. With the strong jump, Bing comes out ahead of Yahoo Search (10.15%), while Mountain View remains the undisputed king of the mountain with a US market share of 75%.

Lazyfeed Wakes Up — And We Have Invites

One of the startups launching today at the Real Time Stream CrunchUp is Lazyfeed, and it is also opening up its service a bit this morning. We have exclusive invites for the first 300 TechCrunch readers to sign up at the site with the promo code "lazytc". Lazyfeed is an interest feed for blog items. It indexes about 100,000 of the most popular blogs and organizes posts by topic. The hottest topics, as determined by related tags, pop up to the top. On the home page it shows you the hottest topics of the moment, which offers an easy entry point into the service.

Launching The TechCrunch Europe Top 100 Index

Today we launch the TechCrunch Europe Top 100. This is a new, constantly updated Index of the most innovative and highest-potential European tech companies, as compiled by our partner YouNoodle. As you'll see, the Index is focused on mobile and web companies, although cleantech and gadget companies will have a presence on the list, which covers the broad Europe, Middle East and Africa region (EMEA). So I bet you're wondering why we created this list? Well Europe, despite being a bigger market than the U.S., is spread across multiple countries, jurisdictions and languages. However, many companies themselves trade both across this complex matrix and internationally. So in order to throw some light onto the situation we wanted to do more that just cover the market in a traditional media manner (as we already do). We wanted to use a data-led approach to create a list which could start to throw up both the themes and the diversity of this rich marketplace. We hope the TechCrunch Europe Top 100 will help throw some light on the European companies that are generating strong, genuine progress.

Scribd Streamlines Embedded Docs With iPaper 2

Scribd, the popular document sharing service that's recently made moves into the Ebook market, has just launched the latest version of iPaper, the site's online document viewer. Scribd originally debuted iPaper in February 2008, after deciding that the existing Flash Paper viewer developed by Adobe didn't perform well enough or offer enough features to keep up with the quickly growing service. The old version was an improvement on Flash Paper, with a much smaller footprint and speedier browsing, but it still left quite a bit to be desired. For one, it was still clearly very Flash and not a native browser element. And the navigation bar at the top of the viewer was unnecessarily cluttered, making the widget seem bulky. Contrast that with Google's document reader, which uses HTML and image files, and it just didn't feel like a natural extension of the browser.

Flickr Follow-Up Project Has A Name, Tiny Speck. And They’re Hiring.

Back in June of last year, Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake, the husband/wife team that started Flickr, left Yahoo to pursue other interests. We already know what Fake's new project is, the just-launched Hunch. Now we know what Butterfield's new project is. Or, at least, what it's called: Tiny Speck. Butterfield sent out a tweet tonight announcing that the new company was hiring. The link he sent goes to a page on a site for the Tiny Speck project. Along the top of the jobs page it reads "We're a new company, founded by four core members of the original team behind Flickr." It's no secret that another of those four core team members is former Flickr head of engineering, Cal Henderson, who left Yahoo in April of this year. So what is Tiny Speck all about? That is still not entirely clear. The word on the street has been that it's some kind of new social gaming endeavor, but all they'll say on the site is "We are working on something huge and fun and we need help."