Microsoft Corp almost overtook Yahoo! Inc. for the second spot in the U.S. Internet search market in November after Microsoft’s Bing service recorded gains on other sites, according to ComScore Inc.

ComScore said Microsoft accounted for 15 % of U.S. Internet queries for the month of November, up from 14.8 % the previous month. Yahoo! Inc., on the other hand, had 15.1 %, lowering from 15.2 %. Search engine giant, Google’s share also dropped to 65.4 % from 65.6 %.

In its effort for bringing about closer competition with Google, Microsoft has been adding new features which include- integration with Facebook Inc. to provide friends’ input on the best query results, to Bing.

According to EMarketer Inc. in New York, Google, may command 76 % of the U.S. market for search-based advertisements for 2011. Yahoo may follow at 7.9 % and Microsoft with 8 %.

Type in “do a barrel roll” in Google search and you will be surprised to see what follows next. The search term will manipulate the layout of its results page and the image in your browser will do a barrel roll!

iPhone users had discovered a similar phenomenon earlier this year in April when they entered “tilt” on Google on their iPhones, using Safari or Google’s app. The image on the screen’s display actually tilted a bit and when googled “ascii art,” the company logo appeared in the same art form on the results page.

Besides news organizations and celebrities, even aviation enthusiast sites have been taken aback by this. The fun feature has taken over microblogging site Twitter by storm where it’s a trending topic with numerous feeds. “Google responds in something of a Siri-like fashion,” tweeted New York Times Bits Blog.

In its explanation to ABC News, says Google, “Today’s fun query, ‘do a barrel roll,’ was created by a Google software engineer with the primary goal of entertaining users — while showcasing the power of CSS3, a presentation feature of modern browsers. The ‘do a barrel roll’ query, which causes the search page to spin, will remain in place for a while.” One may not see the effect in older browsers though.

It is like the search giant’s take on Apple’s iPhones and iPads which have built-in accelerometers and according to KnowYourMeme.com, it’s a reference to the 1997 videogame Nintendo’s Star Fox 64.

Facebook has come up with another interesting feature that helps you get to your Facebook account in case if you forget your password. The novel feature is named ‘Trusted Friends’ that lets you log back by allowing you to take help from your friends on Facebook.

The process starts with your choosing trusted five friends from security settings page. You can arrange the settings in such way so that if you log out and later forget your password those friends will get a code.

“You’ll only need 3 codes to get back into your account, but we recommend picking 5 trusted friends so you have back-up. Your trusted friends should be people you can easily call and who are likely to respond to you quickly.” Facebook said in its help center.

Facebook presents it as “giving a house key to your friends when you go on vacation” and has apparently taken the initiative in honor of National Cybersecurity Awareness Month.

It has also introduced app-specific passwords to help you when you log into third-party apps through your Facebook account.

Seasoned entrepreneur Bill Gross and owner of UberMedia of Pasadena is introducing a social media platform named  Chime.in to attract more users by centering itself around particular fields instead of the wider potpourri of topics that come on Facebook or Twitter. Gross had launched UberMedia as TweetUp Inc. in April 2010 as a medium to generate money from the stream of tweets and tweeters. It was later renamed as PostUp at one point of time and third-party Twitter apps Echofon, Twidroyd (now called UberSocial for Android) and UberTwitter were also purchased. “I’ve been completely smitten with social media over the last few years. I think it’s a global phenomenon that is world changing,” marked Gross a recent interview.

The Chime.in mobile app was accidentally released into the iTunes app store Monday although he had decided to launch the media platform’s beta version today at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. In the beginning of 2011, UberMedia pitched in to buy TweetDeck but lost the deal when Twitter submitted a larger bid. But it is, however, designed to perform with Twitter, Facebook and Google+ while making special networks based on specific subjects.

“We’re calling it an interest network. It’s not really competing with Facebook and Twitter,” chimed Gross.

Scott McNealy, ex Sun Microsystems chief executive also started a similar venture like Gross this month in Denver and christened his platform Wayin. With Wayin, that is available as a free iPhone and Android app, McNealy aims to pave a way for users where they can express their opinions about live events instantly.

Whereas Gross’ Chime.in is more of a mixture of Twitter and Facebook, that is armed with a more graphical interface that appears like Facebook’s new Timeline user profiles and comment boxes known as “chimes” that resembles tweets. Profile users can upload and share photos, video and links. They can even start their own polls. “Chimeline” (that is like Twitter stream / Facebook wall), that can be grouped by topics, popularity or the time of the posts, will be at one’s disposal as a Web browser application and as iPhone, Android and BlackBerry apps.

But Gross hopes to have an edge over the others with the fact that his company assures to give content creators total advertising revenues for its Chime.in pages if they sell the ads themselves and half of it if they allow UberMedia handle ad sales. It has already drawn interest from the likes of E Entertainment Television, Universal Pictures, Bravo TV and the Walt Disney Co, and Gross believes the platform will let big companies as well as the small ones to have good audiences.

“The whole world is shifting to social. Every transaction online is going to have social embedded in it. The monetization of social media is going to be a huge opportunity in the future,” said Gross.

Facebook said on Wednesay that the cookies error, which could have been used to track the users after they had logged out of the social-networking site, has been remedied. The cookies error was revealed by Australian blogger Nik Cubrilovic in a blog post earlier in the week.

“Like every site on the internet that personalises content and tries to provide a secure experience for users, we place cookies on the computer of the user,” the company said in a statement. “Three of these cookies on some users’ computers inadvertently included unique identifiers when the user had logged out of Facebook.”

“We fixed the cookies so that they won’t include unique information in the future when people log out,” it added.

In a follow up blog post Nik Cubrilovic wrote “My goal was to both identify bugs in the logout process and see that they are fixed, and to communicate with Facebook in getting some of the unanswered questions answered so that the Facebook using public can be informed of how cookies are used on the site – especially with regard to third-party requests.

In summary, Facebook has made changes to the logout process and they have explained each part of the process and the cookies that the site uses in detail.”