Bing– Just when Apple’s brilliant and searing marketing schemes had convinced the world that there was nothing less sexy than Microsoft product, the software giant launched Bing – a bodacious, complex and visually stimulating search engine that users seem to like. The latest ComScore stats reveal Bing continuing to gain market share, at 10.3%. Bing continues to roll out a motherload of innoviative, addictive features such as Map Apps and Visual Search, and the Bing API. The company is also gradually releasing guidelines and information for Web publishers.

Google Personalized Search – After experimenting with Personalized Search for four years, the company made personalized search an opt-out service. Apart from the few who will opt-out of personalized search, no two people are experiencing Google Search in quite the same way. It remains to be seen how much this will change SEO strategies.

Real-Time Search – Rather than face the prospect of Twitter emerging as a major search engine competitor, Bing and Microsoft struck separate deals with the service to serve up real-time search results. In addition, both services struck a deal with Facebook to index portions of its service, prompting a surge of Facebook users adjusting their personal privacy settings.

Google PageRank Goes In-House – PageRank has long been at the core of Google’s complex ranking algorithm. The company went so far as to display PageRank scores for Web sites and display them prominently in its Google Tool Bar. Suddenly last year, the company changed course. It began telling Web publishers not to worry about PageRank, then made it impossible for Web publishers to use nofollow to determine how PageRank would be distributed. Finally the company stopped publishing PageRank in most of its toolbars altogether. Given the company’s push toward personalized search, it will be interesting to see whether the building blocks of PageRank stay intact behind the curtain.

News Industry Backlash – Both the Associated Press and Rupert Murdoch turned their back on Google this year, citing loopholes that allowed users to access paid content through the search engine and index content while contributing nothing in return. Murdoch is reportedly in negotiations for an exclusive deal with Bing. Exclusive content deals with the world’s major news industries might give Bing the advantage it needs to cut into Google’s market share.

Cross-Domain Canonical Tags – Canonical tags were developed as a way to for Web publishers to control which versions of content should be seen as the “original” version. This helped Google to determine which version to display prominently in search results. Now the tags have been modified to allow publishers with a single piece of content on multiple domains to use the tag as well. In some cases, Google is promoting use of the tags as a replacement for 301 redirects.

Death of the Traditional Search Engine – For years, Yahoo remained reasonably competitive with its aging keyword-based search engine, even as it watched Bay Area rival Google ratchet up both revenues and the complexity of its search algorithm. Even if Microsoft hadn’t acquired Yahoo this year – Bing is set to replace Yahoo’s back end in 2010 – the company has been bleeding market share all year. Given Yahoo Search’s lame-duck image, it will be interesting to see how long Bing waits to replace the front end as well.

As Web publishers have grown increasingly savvy about how PageRank works, Google has taken steps to counter actions that might be used to manipulate it. Earlier this year, Google put the kibosh on PageRank sculpting within Web sites by effectively “evaporating” the excess PageRank Web publishers used to channel from high ranking pages to lower ranking pages.

Today the company took another big step by removing PageRank information from its Webmaster tools. When asked about the removal, Google Employee Susan Moskwa cited an update to the company’s FAQ pages:

…Don’t bother thinking about it. We only update the PageRank displayed in Google Toolbar a few times a year; this is our respectful hint for you to worry less about PageRank, which is just one of over 200 signals that can affect how your site is crawled, indexed and ranked. PageRank is an easy metric to focus on, but just because it’s easy doesn’t mean it’s useful for you as a site owner. If you’re looking for metrics, we’d encourage you to check out Analytics, think about conversion rates, ROI (return on investment), relevancy, or other metrics that actually correlate to meaningful gains for your website or business.”

As of today, the PageRank indicator remains visible within the Google Toolbar.

In the past, Google allowed a page with a finite amount of PageRank to “dam up” the flow of the PageRank to other areas of a site, giving any excess PageRank retained on particular areas of a site an extra boost in importance. According to the transcript of Cutts’ talk at the SMX conference in Seattle, Google will not penalize SEOs for denying PageRank to certain pages, but it will also not credit other pages for retaining it. According to Cutts, Google will simply “evaporate” excess PageRank. This means that the myriad of other factors that play into an SEO strategy are now that much more important, chiefly architecture and quality of content.