Microsoft wants you to use its search engine Bing and is handing free Xbox Live Avatar t-shirts to help promote it.

All you have to do is search the magic phrase into the Bing search engine and voila, your free codes.

I don’t want mine, so here you go.

• • Male Shirt: PHT9P-KXR4Y-BB6BY-VFMPD-THT4T
• • Female Shirt: VFH6P-9FJKK-KKP9G-H4DRH-WTCFM

I’ve been using  Bing more and more recently, but Google will remain king, at least in my eyes.

Though dismissed at its origins, Twitter has become one of the most important ways to keep your finger on the pulse of the Internet. This was probably most apparent when Michael Jackson passed away earlier this year, singlehandedly bringing down AIM, slowing social networking sites to a crawl, and convincing Google that the hoards of people suddenly searching for “Michael Jackson” were apparently a DDoS attack.

Google saw the millions of people searching for the pop-artists name and assumed they had to of come from an automated source, either requiring them to perform a CAPATCHA or denying their request altogether. Realized they were missing a key market opportunity”"second to not inventing Twitter in the first place, of course”"Google and Bing have both reached agreements with Twitter and Facebook to start indexing peoples’ tweets and public status updates, respectively.

Bing’s Twitter search page is live now, as is Google’s Twitter incorporation. We tried a few searches that are trending right now (Ed: Are we really still talking about balloon boy?), and sure enough, both search engines displayed a few results. Bing also has a tag cloud with trending topics organized by how hot they are.

It will be interesting to see how well the two companies are and handling the intense amount of link and hashtag spam occurring and to see how successful they’ll be at keeping it from befuddling search results. Of course, now that Twitter has included adding spam links and non-relevant hanstags as violations to their terms of service, it looks like everyone is trying to keep a handle on the problem.

The most extensive Twitter search, set at search.twitter.com, only indexes two weeks worth of tweets, so it’ll be interesting to see how long Google keeps tweets in their indexes. Right now, there is no easy way to find a specific tweet that you sent in the past. That being said, it also doesn’t appear that the purpose of indexing these tweets is for long-term storage”"Google and Bing are probably only looking for a way to figure out what’s hot now.

Critics have also been dismissive of Twitter for a long time, pointing out that without ads, the company has no monetization strategy, and will never turn a profit. While making a profit is secondary when you have millions in venture funding coming in already, but licensing its API to Microsoft and Google is a great way to make money, and Twitter may have finally stumbled upon their key to monetary success.

Of course, to “google” something has become synonymous with the mere act of searching something on the Internet, but that hasn’t stopped other companies from developing their search programs. Last week, Microsoft rebranded their Live.com search engine as the curiously titled Bing. How does it hold up?

After a few matched test searches, Bing is a decent search engine; its results are relatively similar to Google’s for most searches. The site provides an auto-suggest before you search, terms to search within your results on the left bar, and related searches on the right side. Image and video searches are included when appropriate, though be careful what videos you’re searching for because the results auto-play when you mouse over them. If you mouse over the right side of a search result, a nifty summary box will pop-up. Also, the home page features a daily rotating wallpaper with related facts, which is certainly interesting if not entirely necessary. In essence, you could probably do worse than Bing.

As for real advantages to using Bing though, we found none. The subpage links that Google provided are certainly much more useful than Bing’s. A search for “iPhone” on Google turned up the Apple page, the Wikipedia page, shopping results, and video results. Bing’s results had images, but its suggested related searches were “iPhones software” and “iPhones accessories,” which basically made the results feel spammy and dirty, not to mention grammatically incorrect.

When I “binged” myself “" don’t you see how odd that sounds, Microsoft? “" we had to get to the fourth page before there was a web result related to me. Googling us turned up our Google profile on the front page. Google also found our Twitter before Bing did. Granted, we have a name that’s relatively common in the Western Hemisphere, and we haven’t really done anything to merit much Internet fame, so your mileage may vary. And yes, we know, searching for yourself isn’t the most necessary use for a search engine, but it is fun, and everyone does it anyway, so the search engine we use should do it right.

Overall, to us, Google wins on the sheer integration it has with all of its services. When one search turns up images, videos, a stock quote, a search within the site box, and considers my vast search history, searches my desktop and my email, all on top of good results from the Web at large, what use is there for another search engine? Google also has a decent partnership with many social networking sites that return results from those sites. With your Internet identity becoming almost as important as your real one, this is quite a boon.

Maybe Bing will prove useful one day when Google fails us or to those who don’t know how to reset their default search engine in Internet Explorer, but until then, we won’t hold our breath.