Yesterday, amid all the hubbub about Google calling Microsoft “cheaters”, and Microsoft firing right back, came a Bing sponsored conference in San Francisco held by BigThink.com.  The four hour conference was supposed to be a discussion about the future of search, but obviously the topics of conversation took a little turn after Google’s accusations.

BigThink.com has just posted the first bits of the days events (after streaming it live, which we missed, unfortunately).  Hosting the panel is Vivek Wadwha, a senior research associate with the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School, an executive in residence/adjunct professor at the Pratt School of Engineering at Duke University, and a visiting scholar at the School of Information at University of California at Berkeley.  He recently wrote a post (admittedly after “a little bit to drink” on New Year’s Eve) titled “Why We Desperately Need a New (and Better) Google”, which caused a bit of a commotion itself, calling attention to the mass of spam results now seen on search engines.

BigThink.com – Google vs. Bing

Also on the panel are Matt Cutts from Google, Harry Shum from Microsoft, and Rich Skrenta of blekko.  We’ll have more comment later but wanted to get this up in case you missed it, as we did.

Microsoft seems to be enjoying its time in the sun with the controversy stirred up by Google, and today fired off another blog post, this time by Corporate Vice President Yusuf Mehdi.  Bing sought out to change the conversation about search, and if nothing else, with this weeks events, seemed to have done just that, thanks to help from Google.