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Research reported by StatCounter says that Microsoft's new Bing search engine has taken over Yahoo for the second place slot in search market share. Clearly, it's getting a lot of attention since it just launched, so let's keep this in context.

Facebook's employees may soon get a special payday that goes well beyond the normal end-of-the-week routine.  A new report indicates the company is raising $150 million in order to buy out workers' shares and effectively give them a pre-IPO reward. 

The ten most heavily used Web brands in the UK have it pretty good.  Insanely good, as a matter of fact.  A new report from Nielsen Online indicates that these ten brands (which were looked at along with 7,625 others) account for 45 percent of all UK Internet time.

Wakoopa has been collecting information related to social networks and applications on the web, and they have a new report that reveals some interesting findings. For one, Twitter continues to grow rapidly. This isn't news to anyone, but as its growth continued through the entire first quarter, it saw a particularly big jump in March. As far as apps, Tweetdeck ranked first among users who posted updates to Twitter via desktop with Twhirl a close second.

Mobile advertising platform AdMob has released its Mobile Metrics Report looking at statistics for the month of March. It highlights some interesting trends in smartphone applications. AdMob serves ads for over 6,000 web sites and 1,000 apps and stores and analyzes the data from each ad request, impression, and click. The report is intended to provide insight into trends in the mobile ecosystem.

Analysts and investors were ready for just about anything this afternoon, with predictions of what Google's first quarter would look like ranging from complete failure to yet another blow-'em-out-of-the-water success.  The real numbers landed somewhere in between, but - to most people's relief - rather more on positive side. 

Microsoft's new search brand should be announced sooner rather than later, and when that day comes, it looks like the corporation is going to make sure people notice.  According to a new report, Microsoft intends to spend as much as $100 million on an advertising campaign.

CMS Watch, which evaluates and reports on content-related technologies, has issued a report saying that Yahoo Web Analytics (formerly IndexTools) is better than Google Analytics in a number of key areas.