The security flaw came to light nine days ago as the website www.jailbreakme.com released code that Apple customers can use to modify the iOS operating system that runs those devices through a process known as “jail breaking.”

Some Apple customers choose to jail break their devices so they can download and run applications that are not approved by Apple or use iPhone phones on networks of carriers that are not approved by Apple.

Microsoft claims to have quadrupled the size of its index and improved its internal ranking algorithms, which the company says will improve your search results. It has also given the page some minor UI tweaks such as ditching the tab bar in favor of text links to the different search sections and changing the font for improved readability. In essence Live Search now much more closely mimics the look and feel of Google.

So how does it stack up against Google? I’ll confess I’ve never been a heavy user of Live Search so I’m not sure what it was like before, but the new version, while functional, failed to return the same quality of results I got from Google.

Of all the Live Search options, the traditional web search works best, but once you stray from there things go downhill quickly.

For instance, a search for Wired News on both sites returns the home page at the top of both results list and Live Search now mimics Google in providing sub-links to other sections of the site.

But move over to an image search for the same terms and the results become much less relevant; aside from some covers of the magazine, the results are in fact mostly irrelevant — an image of a Linksys router that happens to titled wired.jpg? Google on the other hand, manages to pull in a number of relevant images beyond the magazine covers.

By the time I got down to the map-based search Microsoft had lost the Wired thread completely and returned useless results — Google on the other hand, at least knows where our office is, though it too returns some pretty irrelevant information.

A few different search terms revealed similar results and even in those cases where Google stumbled, Live Search seemed to stumble just as much, if not more.

So no, Live Search isn’t much of a threat to Google, but for the 185 million people Microsoft claims use the service every month, the update and redesign will be welcome.

Note that the service is not quite live, you’ll need to tweak the URLs somewhat or enable cookies to see the new version.

We know what you’re thinking: Does the world need another confusingly-branded search engine? But horrible name and questionable graphics aside (Hot air balloons? Seriously?) Bing actually isn’t that bad of a search engine.

The problem is that Bing doesn’t really offer any compelling advantage over Google.

Bing is fast, offers a minimalist results page (which looks just like Google’s results, but with a bit more filtering/subsearch options in the left-hand sidebar), and acceptable, though not stellar, results. There’s not much more to it.

In general, Bing’s results were a bit outdated compared to similar searches preformed on Google, and Bing often lacks the helpful inner-page links that Google offers for large, popular websites.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has been trumpeting Bing as a better solution for shopping searches, trip planning, health care queries and finding a local business.

From our testing, while Bing is able to deliver acceptable results for most of those use cases, there is again, nothing major that sets it apart from Google.

There are some niceties. Like, when you’re searching for shopping results, Bing carries over Live.com’s cashback offers. The links now say, ‘Bing Cashback,” but are otherwise the same. Also, search results are accompanied by the standard short page descriptions we’ve come to expect, but if that’s not enough information for you, hover your mouse over the search result. You’ll see a small box pop up that provides even more in-depth info. The nice thing is that Bing gives you a preview of the content of the page itself, rather than just relying on the meta description. It’s not entirely new, but it’s a helpful feature.

Another place Bing offers you something you won’t find on Google is within video searches. Bing lets you watch short previews of videos (including results from Hulu). To see it in action just search for an episode of your favorite show using Bing Videos and then hover the mouse over any of the video thumbnails to watch a short clip. Beware though, the clips will auto-play and don’t always stop when you roll off them, which could make for some potentially awkward moments depending on what sort of video you’re searching for.

While Bing is definitely Microsoft’s most impressive search engine to date, it still lacks anything game-changing enough to make us switch away from Google.