Microsoft continues to tweak its fledgling Bing search engine, which debuted in June. Today it announced a series of enhancements, many involving Bing Maps, designed to provide a better search experience and hopefully lure people away from Google, which dominates the search market.

Many of the new tools, including map upgrades, are still in beta. You can try them out for yourself. For starters, Bing's new Streetside feature borrows a page from Google Maps by providing street-level views of specific locations. As with Google Street View, you can move in several directions to get a better sense of the local scene:

As the end of 2009 creeps up upon us, the search engines are starting to release some interesting data. Google, AOL, and Yahoo all recently revealed Michael Jackson to be the top search term of 2009. Other hot search commodities for the year included "Facebook," "Twitter," and -- thank you, fellow gentlemen -- "Megan Fox."

Now, thanks to a newly released list by Ask.com, we're getting even more entertaining insights. Ask has just published its top search questions of 2009, taking into account all the actual queries typed into that little white box.

Without saying why, AT&T dropped a lawsuit against Verizon Wireless that claimed the competitor's advertisements on 3G coverage were misleading.

Verizon won't change its “There's a Map for That” ads, which highlight AT&T's lack of nationwide 3G coverage while knocking Apple's “There's an App for That” iPhone tagline. AT&T had thrown Verizon's “Misfit Toys” ad into the lawsuit as well, so we should keep seeing that iPhone-bashing commercial throughout the holiday season. Verizon also dropped a lawsuit it had filed against AT&T, but neither company commented to Reuters, which picked up the story.

There was a time, I suspect, when this news would've been a very big deal: Sprint turned over customers' GPS whereabouts to law enforcement 8 million times over the last year. But today, very few people seem concerned about the revelation.

Facebook was built as a powerful social connector, allowing users to befriend others with similar interests, locations, schools, and more. But as privacy concerns mount and users demand more protection, the social networking site's philosophy has started to go down the toilet. Now that Facebook is eliminating regional networks -- or groupings of people based on where they live -- it's becoming apparent that proclivities lean towards building fences rather than crossing them.

Jack Dorsey, one of the brains behind popular micro-blogging site Twitter, is selling a new product called Square that turns your iPhone into a credit card payment system.

Unlike similar iPhone applications, Square includes not only the payment software, but a magnetic card reader that allows you to swipe cards instead of manually inputting credit card numbers. The payment system is designed for any type of business owner including storefront owners, street vendors, and even part-time flea market salespeople.

In a bid to appease publishers, Google has updated its search programs, allowing publishers who charge for their content to limit users to only five free page views per day.

Acer may be the first manufacturer out of the gate with a Google Chrome OS netbook in the second half of next year, according to the latest Internet rumors. JT Wang, the computer manufacturer's chairman recently told DigiTimes that he was confident his company would be "the first vendor to launch [a] Chrome-based netbook" by next year.

Acer's interest in bringing a Chrome-based network to market quickly isn't surprising, given that Acer also wanted to be the first manufacturer to bring a Google Android netbook to market.

Google's ever-expanding presence could mean trouble for Hulu and iTunes, as YouTube may one day let you buy streaming TV shows the day after they air. If a report by All Things D's Peter Kafka is correct, Apple and Hulu should worry because Google is well-positioned to be a network TV streaming powerhouse, and this time it's no joke.

There's often a chasm between what people say they want, and what they really want. TV viewers may tell researchers they want more educational, PBS-style programming, but they'll tune into lightweight reality shows when no one's watching.

That's what's so fascinating about Top 10 lists from major search engines. Simply put, the lists don't lie. They reveal what we really want, what we're thinking about, what fascinates us. The major search sites--Google, Yahoo, Bing, and AOL--have just released their Top Search lists for 2009. What do the results say about us? My Top 8 first impressions:

Move over, BSOD: There's a new screen of death in town. The frightful-sounding "black screen of death" is striking Windows machines worldwide, if recent media reports are to be believed, and Microsoft itself is the one who unleashed the beast.

It sure sounds dramatic, doesn't it? Even I got under my desk and hid for a few minutes (I ate a sandwich while I was down there -- it was delicious). It turns out, though, the "black screen of death" debacle may be more sensationalized than severe -- and, what's more, Microsoft's security updates likely have nothing to do with it whatsoever.

Led by the late Michael Jackson and the vampire-driven "Twilight" series, Yahoo's Top 10 Searches for 2009 show that penny-pinching consumers are escaping to the Web "to pursue news and their guilty pleasures," according to a Yahoo search trend analyst.